Teach for America teachers: an open letter to you

Jesse Alred

Houston Education Reform Examiner

http://www.examiner.com/x-16144-Houston-Education-Reform-Examiner~y2009m7d18-Teach-for-America-teachers-an-open-letter-to-you

July 18, 9:29 PM

I am a veteran teacher from Houston seeking a dialogue with current and past Teach for America teachers regarding what appears to be a pattern of TFA leaders and alumni in school district leadership positions espousing status quo ideas and profiting from close relationships with plutocratic corporations while self-righteously proclaiming they are the new civil rights movement.

I first became aware of this when a former local TFA director, now a school board member, recently proposed to fire teachers based on test scores and opposed allowing us to vote to have a single union.

The conservative-TFA nexus began at the beginning, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp's initial efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide's negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India.

The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize taking responsibility for the event. Not only did Union Carbide provide financial support for Ms. Kopp, it provided her with other corporate contacts and office space for her and her staff.

Ms. Kopp has never expressed the least bit of odd feeling Teach for America's birth in the polluted womb of Union Carbide.

A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project and was all but saved by their managerial assistance.

The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools run by elected school boards with for-profit, corporate-run schools.

In 2000, two TFA alumni, Michael Feinberg and David Levin, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bushes at the Republican National Convention in 2000.

This was vital to Bush, since as Texas governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican.

Feinberg and Levin placed the African-American and Hispanic kids in their charge on that 2000 Republican stage with them. Was it worth it for KIPP? Did any of their graduates fight or die in Iraq? Or the fathers, uncles or cousins of their students?

In Washington D.C., TFA alum and Chancellor Michelle Rhee has fired 1000 teachers and has only minor improvements to show for it in terms of student improvements. She says we need "a different breed of teachers."

Rhee falls into the trap of other TFA alums, underestimating the power of inequality and behavior in student outcomes and therefore laying all the blame at the feet of teachers who are not from her socioeconomic background. Her misconceptions must have caused some significant portion of the 1000 people she put out of work.

Wendy Kopp's idea for Teach for America was a good one. TFA teachers do great work. But its leaders often seem to blame teachers, public schools and teachers' organizations for the achievement gap. By blaming teachers for some deep-seated social problems this nation has, they are not only providing an inaccurate critique; they also feed conservatives more ammunition to use in their 28-year campaign against employing government as a problem solver.

Our achievement gap mirrors our country's level of economic inequality, the greatest among affluent nations. Better schools are only part of the solution. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed our schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It's not the other way around.

The obstacle in schools serving low-income kids is not teacher or principal quality, but student buy in. Too many kids do not see schools as relevant to their lives and act accordingly when forced to be there.

As more people are starting to recognize, we need national health care, a stronger union movement, higher wages, redistributive tax policy, generous college funding, immigration reform, trade policy, and dimunition of military spending to defend and expand the middle class. In public education, we need to experiment with new models making schools more appealing to kids not planning for college. Magnet schools and charters like Kipp works for a select group of kids whose families envision college in their futures, but we need models relevant to the others.

Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor People's March—even when it alienated corporate funders. His final speech, the night of his assassination, was on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. In his last book, Where do we go from here, he argued for modifying American capitalism to include some measure of wealth distribution.

I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. You as an individual TFA teacher have a responsibility here because your work alone gives TFA leaders credibility It's not the other way around. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.