Take Me To Church [On TFA, #BlackLivesMatter, and Education]
Whenever conservative pundit Michelle Malkin’s name comes up, you know it’s going to be a bloodbath of lies and obfuscation.
Her latest article, reposted by the diabolical folks at that news rag, poses Teach for America (TFA) as a once-well meaning do-gooder organization who’ve let the inmates run the asylum (yes, I know what I did there). She said:
“Teach For America has transformed itself into a recruiting center for militants bent on occupying themselves with anything other than imparting knowledge and academic excellence to children in the classroom. When a government-funded outfit abandons education as its mission in favor of social agitation, it’s time to cut off the taxpayer pipeline.”
This reflexive libertarian response to the surging resistance within TFA made me look at TFAers (and by extension, TFA) with another, more righteous lens. As someone who was baptized in the church of pro-public school, pro-whole child (i.e. anti-high stakes testing), I often see TFA as a neo-liberal Peace Corps, one that often pals around with the very folk that also support Michelle Malkin. We can’t ignore the years of no-bid contracts in major cities, two-year teaching commitments that drove out hundreds of experienced (and usually Black and Latino) educators, monopolistic relationships with Native American reservations and nations, and the droves of government officials making education policy on limited classroom knowledge as the narrative that TFA wrote for themselves.
Teach for America still gives their candidates pamphlets that suggest they have “alumni” who work in other places, as if teaching is not itself a profession, as if what I do daily is another notch on one’s belt.
Yet, as someone who also came through an alternative certification program (NYC Teaching Fellows), I see the need to support and offer different pathways to folks who came through this program and have the best intentions, especially those who did not fully understand their complicity in TFA’s neoliberal legacy. The folks I’ve gotten to know through the program, including one who was mentioned in the NY Post article, seem to have their proverbial “eyes on the prize,” namely equity for all students, and training others to take on the social justice mantle in a meaningful way. Plenty of other edu-activists who were once alt-cert either have worked within the system to make change or outside of it (you’d be surprised!), and both Take Me To Church [On TFA, #BlackLivesMatter, and Education] | The Jose Vilson: