12 Comments
SWS members
Earlier today, Student-Worker Solidarity brought a letter to President Bollinger asking that the University cut its ties with Teach for America. SWS has joined together with organizations from other universities in an effort to remove TFA’s presence on campuses across the country until it reforms its practices in three major ways, which SWS outlined in their press release.
You can read both the Press Release and letter sent to President Bollinger below:
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12 Comments
@Demian Yes, attrition is a bigger issue for TFA recruits and since they place in low incomes more, this impacts poor kids more.
Moreover, TFA has shown itself to be a willing partner in displacing veteran teachers in many urban areas (not just Chicago): refer to https://reconsideringtfa.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/tfa-capitalizing-on-school-closings-financial-crisis/.
Yes, TFA should restrict itself to areas where there are shortages. But states and districts facing shortages should be leary of using TFA for anything more than a short term stopgap. If there are really shortages, then address the root causes: high cost of college (for prospective teachers) and poor working conditions especially in poor schools. TFA is actually a costly solution as their high attrition is very expensive to districts and districts also have to pay a “finders fee” to TFA of ~$5K/recruit/year.
@Anonymous Except for the fact that veteran Chicago teachers perennially hold a gun to the mayor’s head.
@I don't think you read my post above. And how do you think these low-performing schools hire teachers without TFA? They do the same thing as anyone else, with postings, job fairs, and all the like, competing with higher-paying charter schools and more successful suburban schools. It’s monetarily cheaper (and I’d argue not by much), but very expensive in terms of time (i.e., they usually don’t fill the positions). TFA mandates that its new members accept the first offer they receive, and that is driven by the fact that these schools are often undesirable to most other teachers.
And I’m sure both sides, TFA supporters and detractors alike, agree that the cost of college is too high and that the overall physical and environmental conditions of schools in low-income areas are poor. But unless you think TFA is single-handedly stopping federal and state governments from adjusting their budgets so that more money goes to education, you’re misplacing the blame and misunderstanding what alternative certification programs are meant to do.
@lol tfa has more diversity than this group…
@Some more thoughts... 1. Columbia is getting too predictable. The Daily Beast could make up headlines and we’d eventually just back into them (example: Concerned Columbia Students think Greek life is Disrespectful to Actual Greeks During Period of Financial Uncertainty blah blah blah).
2. The best teachers have made the biggest difference in my life – perhaps just a bit ahead of the contributions of my own parents. I think it’s fair to say that TFA probably not so inadvertently finds great, lifelong teachers in every year/cadre.
3. How about rallying to support fellow students like disadvantaged GSers who, despite their demonstrated financial need, are asked to pay full freight? Let’s get us right before we save the rest of the world.
@Liberty Thought No. 1: Maybe instead of protesting against Teach for America, the ignorant dumb assess will actually teach disadvantaged kids themselves. Go ahead, leave your liberal pseudo intellectual existance at Columbia and move to a native american reservation in New Mexico to teach. Don’t shop at Walmart — even if you’re making $15,000/year. After all, your daddy is paying full boat at Columbia. Thought No. 2. Why don’t the dumb assess let each person decide for herself whether she wants to be recruited by Teach for Americare. Thought No 3: Aren’t there greater injustices in this world to fight against than Teach for America? Thought No. 4: Is the United Federation of Teachers underwriting the Students Worker Solidarity club?
@Amen .
@lol It’s delusional for you to think that an a recent grad with little to NO teaching experience can take a 5-week crash course and effectively teach in a classroom- more importantly, teaching shouldn’t just be treated as some 2-year stint resume-booster, it should be valued like all other professions. TFA takes jobs away from real teachers with experience. Instead of having a community of teachers that know students well and have been at a school for years, it churns in and out college grads so quickly that students can’t even form a relationship with them.
@Anonymous Several points I want to make in regards to both comments above:
For the original post “Liberty,” I want to say it’s not very helpful to attack the SWS students for being privileged “brats” and questioning their commitment to the issues. There are various ways to push for change, and protest is definitely one of them.
For the post titled “lol:” These oft-cited criticisms are valid but I want to add that more complicated questions about TFA need to be asked and need to be addressed.
Yes, Attrition is definitely a problem for TFA, but it’s also a problem overall too. Nearly half of all (yes, all) teachers leave the profession within five years. It’s worse in low-performing schools. Does TFA contribute to the churn, or is the profession/the school district/the STATE as a whole not giving teachers the resources and respect that they need? I think the better question to ask is the latter.
As for the claim that TFA takes away “real” teachers’ jobs, you need to remember that TFA is huge and is in LOTS of different cities/school districts. So yes, the claim is probably correct when you look at Chicago, which laid off 500 veteran teachers but instated 350 or so TFA teachers the same year because the city’s school district had a contract with TFA. But you can also point to high-need areas (often rural and often in the South) where TFA corps members are filling spaces that simply cannot be filled with a traditional cadre of teachers. Plain and simple, recent college grads from all over want to be in Chicago or New York/the Northeast, not the Mississippi Valley or Eastern North Carolina.
Finally, re: the most-cited grievance: TFA provides a crash-course “how-to-teach” training program in the summer and throws their members into high-needs classrooms the next fall. To cite this implies that any certification program, whether one obtained through a bachelors degree or through a masters can adequately prepare a person for the challenges of a low-performing school. You can read all the texts and do all the research but the best training is in the classroom. So yes, the new teacher coming from a bachelors education program that required student teaching will probably out-perform the TFA recruit. But not all bachelors programs have that requirement, and not all states require student teaching for certification.
I’m not a TFA apostle, but as someone who’s very interested in public policy and education specifically, I have to admit TFA has–to use the annoying tech term–“disrupted” education. Universities had a cartel on certifying teachers. Now there are other alternative teaching programs like NYC Teaching Fellows that allow young grads to pursue a career in teaching and education. These programs aren’t perfect, however, so we need to ask them to change. But to plaster them up as THE roadblock to a better education system doesn’t make sense to me.
TLDR: TFA definitely has its problems, but making it the bogeyman of education is short-sighted and detrimental to productive policy discussions.
@but still no daily beast coverage?
@Anonymous Yesss I want a bwog post about it so we can have a discussion and know who’s actually commenting from campus versus who is just trying to bombard the comments after being linked from an outside board/site (which is what happened to the spec op ed).
@Anonymous Doesn’t fit with bwogs “all men are evil rapists” narrative that they’ve worked so hard in constructing