CURMUDGUCATION: Hillary's Teacher PAC, Part II

CURMUDGUCATION: Hillary's Teacher PAC, Part II:

CURMUDGUCATION: Hillary's Teacher PAC, Part II

 You may recall that back at the beginning of the summer, a group calling themselves America's Teachers cropped up as a PAC supporting Hillary Clinton. I did a little websurfing to see what I could find and wrote about the results.


The brain behind the PAC is a young man named Naveed Amalfard, who is the PAC's national chairman, a 2014 graduate of Emory University, and a Teach for America guy about to start his second year as a math teacher in DC. My piece about America's Teachers did not makes his day, and the drubbing some folks tried to give him on twitter made his day even less, and so he reached out to me, and this afternoon, we both took a break from beginning-of-year preparations to have a phone chat.

And so I'm prepared to answer the question-- is America's Teachers more nefarious dark money political shenanigans, or something else?

Amalfard seems like a pleasant guy, and I opened by giving him the chance to respond to the piece I wrote. He said that they (he used the word "we" throughout) were surprised to see an attack on their organization, and were particularly unhappy to find themselves linked to DFER and CAP and other Naught Persons and generally marked as negative for reasons they don't feel are merited. This prompted them to want to start a dialogue, and I readily admit that their impulse seems healthier than, say, an impulse to simply assassinate my character in their own space.

Amalfard has fine-tuned his message and mission. From the five points originally listed, AT now stands heavily for universal pre-school, college affordability, and post-secondary schooling for Dreamers. Amalfard circled back around to these three points many times. This is what they want.

I allowed as how since their original appearance, I had had trouble deciding whether they were a skullduggerous front for More Big Money or just one guy with a dream. Amalfard allowed as how CURMUDGUCATION: Hillary's Teacher PAC, Part II: