Teach for America, may have started as a stop-gap to supply
teachers for school districts that could not find enough licensed teachers, but
they quickly became nothing more than the vanguard of the corporate reformers. TFA Corp members and alumni are actively promoting the corporate neoliberal "reforms" that are designed to privatize our system of public education while trying to lend them credibility by identifying themselves as “teachers.”
It was announced three years ago that Minneapolis was going
to hire TFA teachers for hard-to-staff positions. Despite many licensed teachers in Minnesota
looking for a job, TFAers without a license were put into classrooms across the
District. A group of TFA Corp members in
Minneapolis have joined the teachers’ union and have simultaneously worked to dismantle core union
rights, mainly seniority and tenure. These hard-earned rights empower teachers to speak up and do
what is best for all students.
At one school in Minneapolis, a TFA Corp member became the union
steward. He also co-authored a commentary for the Minneapolis Star Tribune with other TFAers who spoke at legislative hearings to argue for the end of seniority rights.
What may surprise some people is that you don’t need to just
look to the classrooms to find Teach for America. Recent TFA alumni, most only a few years out
of college, are being hired as district administrators, building leaders, and
we could soon end up with a TFA alum as a Minneapolis School Board member.
Minneapolis is building a teacher evaluation system and
attempting to implement what they call “Focused Instruction” across the District
(other school districts in the country know it as “Managed Instruction"). It is essentially the local equivalent of the
National Common Core State Standards. It is,
no doubt, laying the groundwork for implementing the Common Core and a new
testing regime that will be used for the teacher evaluations (more on this in a
later post).
Two people leading the
implementation of these changes in Minneapolis Public Schools are recent TFA alumni.
The Executive
Director of Teacher and Learning
graduated from college in 2006 and worked as a TFA teacher for 3 years. He then work for a couple years at McKinsey
and Company (another global corporation that is looking to get its hands on
some of the billions that go into public education) before being hired by MPS
to implement Focused Instruction and the evaluations of experienced, licensed teachers.
While the information
available on the web is sparse, it appears the Director of Instructional
Leadership also spent 2 years in the classroom as a TFA corp member. She then worked another 2 years for TFA, but
it is unclear if she was actually working in a classroom.
They have a combined 5
to 7 years of teaching experience between them. They work directly under our Chief Academic Officer
who has 4 years of classroom experience (Not with TFA).
The average teacher in Minneapolis has been in the classroom at least as
long as the three of these individuals combined. TFA alumni will be
overseeing the evaluations that will assess the quality of all Minneapolis teachers and
imposing a one-size-fits-all curriculum with more standardized tests.
We need teachers who
go into the profession with a commitment for the long-term. Professional,
licensed teachers, committed to teaching as a career, need to be
respected, supported, and empowered, not micromanaged. Teaching, working with children, is a career,
not a stepping-stone to law school, a corporate job, school administration, or
a political career. Two years in the classroom with minimal training does not make someone an educational expert.
Posted by: Robert Panning-Miller
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