Truth For America: New alum testimonials about @TeachForAmerica
I received this open letter to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) from a Teach For America alum. She was assigned to teach special education in California for 2014. Teach For America has about 80 new TFA teachers in LAUSD. They recently received mid-year LAUSD board approval for a 31% increase in the size of their corps specifically to “teach” special education. TFA spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on their marketing and recruitment. They have also expertly placed their alums (who are everywhere but the classroom) in positions of power to convince you that sending untrained teachers to teach our most vulnerable students is an acceptable— even brilliant idea. However, do you really want to know how unprepared Teach America’s teachers are? Read and watch the testimonials from Sonya and Rebecca about teaching special education as #TeachForAmerica corps members…
Dear LAUSD Board,As you move forward with your plan to hire more Teach For America special Education corps members, I would like to urge you to think very critically about the effects of putting these teachers in classrooms.As a ’14 Special Education corps member, I am well aware of the ineffective training that TFA and LMU provides, and how that deeply affects our students in the classroom. I am ashamed of my naivety in thinking that five weeks would be enough time to even remotely prepare me for my position as a special educator.I understand the need for teachers, especially special educators and know that this is a nationwide crisis that needs to be addressed, but Teach For America is not the answer. They are a Band-Aid fix that is quick to fall off, leaving our young people even more vulnerable and underserved. Teach For America places unprepared, untrained, and overwhelmed teachers into special education classrooms and the only thing it causes is more harm and a larger education gap.The education we received during summer institute around actually working with and providing services for diverse learners was sub-par at best. We didn’t even see an IEP until the last week of institute, let alone receive instruction on how to write these legal documents. In a district where special education students are already underserved, what does it look like to send someone with four to five weeks of teacher “training” into the classroom? How can we truly believe that we are providing adequate support for our special education students?On my first day in the classroom I was provided with copies of all 30 (above the legal limit) of my students’ IEPs and was expected to coordinate with their general education teaches how we would work together to provide them with all of the services they had a legal right to as per their IEPs. How was I to work on reading comprehension goals with students when I hadn’t learned proper intervention Truth For America: New alum testimonials about @TeachForAmerica | Cloaking Inequity: