Let’s talk Teach for America, education, and labor

I am the first to say I have no solution for the state of our educational system. What I do know is inconsistency in low-income schools with teachers with short-term commitments is dangerous and shorts the students. Non-union professionals in union professions undercuts the unions and the benefits of unions for their membership. Finally, short stints in schools does not provide skills or experience employers look for at least according to the people I know who have done it. Although, they do provide access to alumni networks. Additionally, low pay and high burn out has a devastating impact on those participating in these programs.

The American Prospect broke an article by James Cersonsky, on the troubles of Teach for America. The AtlanticWire also did a piece, written by Zach Schonfeld. Teach for America (TFA) is a long running program, 24 years and counting. However, there are complaints from the corps members themselves:

• The five week training program is too short to prepare the recruits, particularly to teach in low-income under-served communities.
• The brief commitment of two years for corps members.
• It undermines the teaching profession.
• It undercuts teachers unions.
• The TFA’s non-profit spin-off, Leadership for Education Equity, is leading the push to close “failing” school, expand charter schools, and tie teachers’ jobs to the standardized test scores of their students. 

These are serious allegations. And despite the ongoing allegations, which aren’t new, there hasn’t been a coordinated effort to overhaul or stop the program. However, the annual Free Minds/Free People education conference in Chicago (of all places) was the first to do so when a group of alumni and corps members organized. The summit was billed as “Organizing Resistance Against Teach for American and its Role in Privatization” organized by scholars, parents, activists, and corps members. The mission being “to challenge the organization’s centrality in the corporate-backed, market-driven, testing-oriented movement in urban education.”

The organizers didn’t have preset goals, but the possible outcomes range from a push for school districts not to contract with TFA to counter-recruitment strategies. The organization’s assets for the 2011 fiscal year topped $350 million, which includes support from the Broad, Walter, and Gates Foundations. However, TFA is growing too. It has more than 10,000 corps members in 48 regions, and more than 32,000 alumni. The districts have thousands in fees to TFA for each corps member in addition to the salaries, which is at the expense of existing teachers. For example, Chicago is laying off 850 teachers and closing 48 schools while welcoming 350 corps members. It is worth noting too that Chicago has a serious violence problem and without proper educational and cultural training the corps members are in a real physical danger without any vested interest in the community to fall back on.

Obviously, fast tracked, inexperienced teachers are attractive to distracts for charter school and public schools with unionized labor. As TFA continued to grow, they have begun pushing charter schools with their non-profit Leadership for Education Equity. At the 20-year anniversary summit of TFA, the alumni heard from Harlam Children’s Zone CEO Geoffry Canada and StudentsFirst CEO Michelle Rhee to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Colorado State Senator Michael Johnston.

The Chicago summit builds on student, teacher, and community resistance to TFA-aligned reform and the TFA itself. Governors have vetoed funding for the organization, teacher accreditation agencies are tightening restrictions making it more difficult the corps members, etc.  

The former corps members note the challenges of going into low-income communities. Derek Roguski, a 2008 corps member and summit organizer says, “That [lack of preparation for dealing with students dealing with trauma] really made a lot of us pretty incompetent. Without that training, we though the best thing was to create conversations in our community and the people who we worked with in New Orleans.”

Of course, TFA emphasizes individual responsibility which is counter to the community solidarity approach. Terrenda White, a 2002 corps member interviewed alumni as part of her doctoral research at Columbia’s Teachers College, says, “You’re not thinking collaboratively about what are we doing in these communities. I just felt like I had severed this sense of continuity. Notions of community just didn’t fit with the way in which we were churned in and out.”

“Churned in and out,” is a pretty strong statement that I’m inclined to agree with. A five week training program and a two year commitment creates what I imagine are assembly line teachers. The summit intends not only to call out TFA for inadequately training teachers, but to create a space to push back against the privatization of education that TFA pushes.

TFA does admit that there are short-comings in the five week training approach. Heather Harding, a 1992 corps member who is now TFA’s senior vice president for community partnerships, special initiatives, research, and engagement, says, “TFA hasn’t always been willing to grapple with critical race issues but I have witnessed a significant shift in our actions over the last three years.” She adds, “[The summit is] an important step in having alumni ‘talk back’ to TFA leadership.” In a statement to The American Prospect, Harding said, “I hope that they produce a paper or presentation that makes constructive suggestions to the organization so we can be held accountable to those dissenting voices in our community. I believe in the big tent approach and I know many of my colleagues do, too.”

Summit organizers would be happy if TFA engages with them, but that their purpose is to provide a space for elevating dissenting voices. Schonfeld notes “The irony, she [a teacher] said, is that many of the dissenting TFA alumni, or at least those quoted in The American Prospect’s piece, don’t actually seem to be working as teachers themselves. As one reader commenter remarked, ‘We need our best in the classrooms.’”

Neither articles really spoke to the damaging effects on the students or the teachers when the corps members come through. I’m not sure if I know anyone who works as a corps member. I do however know two people who did short stints in low-income schools for programs. KK was placed in a low-income school where she worked with high school students on hunger and LGBTQ issues. She routinely bumped up against administration who equated LGBTA issues and safe sex materials with promoting sex and LGBTQ experiences among the students. Neither of which is true. On top of this KK had to deal with some pretty offensive notions of what I call poverty tourism and long hours. The program KK participated in encouraged their members to apply for SNAP to understand what life is like for their students, and in order to qualify for such benefits the program underpaid the volunteers. That is some Wal-Mart like shit, right there. Additionally, a year or two of SNAP doesn’t show you what it is like to grow up in poverty, and white college age kids with ETC cards are seen as completely different than women of color with children. The stipend was not a livable wage, the use of benefits put in place to help the neediest by creating more needy individuals offends every aspect of my being, and overworking volunteers is reprehensible. There were weeks when KK would work 60+ hours for little to no pay only for administration to push back against her initiatives with at risk, vulnerable, and marginalized students. I’m amazed KK lasted as long as she did in the program. I can only describe her efforts as heroic.

Additionally, a friend of mine wanted to be a teacher in Cleveland, we’ll call him LK. He specifically wanted to teach low-income students and provide these students with a good education. LK is pro teachers unions, even converted my friend M on the subject and unions at large. LK was completing his teaching certificate and placed in a low-income east Cleveland school to work with junior high school students. I believe out in Collinwood, but I could be wrong. Collinwood, a neighborhood too dangerous to film a movie about the neighborhood in, but it is experiencing a renaissance now with gentrification and the influx of hipsters looking for cheap rent.  I also maintain middle schoolers are far more dangerous than any other age group. By high school the kids who are going to drop out have and grade schoolers can be physically overpowered if necessary, but at this point they are looking for a way out, undergoing growth spurts, and so young the police have limited resources. A middle school near my house in Slavic Village terrorized the neighborhood for months/maybe years before the city shut it down, and I do mean terrorized. LK routinely went into classes where students were hungry (though Cleveland provides all students with breakfast and lunch now, but no food over the weekends), angry (grow up in these neighborhoods and being anything but angry), and at times violent [aside, my sister M was in the third grade when her public school teacher locked a student in the closet for attacking her with scissors, that was Cleveland’s public schools in the early 90s]. LK is a white man and was seen as the enemy or worse some do-gooder who wants to save everyone, which is paternalistic and offensive. I’m not saying LK was in fact these things, but that’s what he looked like to these kids. You know those scenes in movies and television where the young idealistic teacher comes close to quitting because of the disrespectful students, but then at the last minute find some way to build a relationship with them? That doesn’t happen in real life. I’m pretty sure LK quit teaching around the time he finished his teaching certificate and made more money tending bar while he figured things out. I can’t imagine what it would be like to walk in and face that kind of disgust every day. And he was actually getting training to be a teacher, not a five week program.

It is a worthy cause to want help low-income communities. I however, believe supporting teachers unions and leaving teaching and social work to the professionals is the most effective way. Something needs to be done with the educational system, and privatization isn’t the way to go. The schools become more like prisons every day with the police presence, and the last thing we need are the problems in private prisons to pop up in charter schools. Additionally, the more I think about it the more I disagree with the notion anyone can be a teacher, especially after a few weeks of training. I think that notion comes from the lack of respect teachers get in our society. Any fresh out of college kid we send into these places need to know and understand what they are walking into, and even then knowing and understanding is different than experiencing it.