Teach for America Apostates: a Primer of Alumni Resistance
By Owen Davis, Truthout | Article
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout )Brianna stands beside the conductor's podium in the band hall of Chicago's Uplift High School. An engrossed audience is packed on the risers. Mirrored sunglasses obscure her expression, and her only sign of nervousness is in the movement of her hands, clasping and unclasping before her.Brianna was a public school student in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. In the wake of the flood, whole neighborhoods were destroyed. Approximately 1,300 people had died and hundreds of thousands were yet to return. Amid all this, she had faith her schools would weather the storm.
Instead, she found that her school was one of the many consolidated into charter schools, which draw public funds but are privately managed. Thousands of school employees had been fired (a move later ruled illegal), and many of the replacements were young, lightly trained recruits from Teach for America. By 2007, nearly half of the city's teachers were in their first three years of teaching. TFA became embeddedin the fabric of the district, and one in three New Orleans students can now call a TFA recruit their teacher.
Brianna was vexed by her young new teachers, who were adversarial and fixated on data. "Everything was taken away," Brianna said. "And then the teachers don't even care about you."
Complicating matters, many of the new teachers in the majority-black district were