Does TFA (Illegally) Take A Side On Recent Teacher Strikes?
When teachers in a school district decide to go on strike, Teach For America corps members who teach in public schools in that district have a decision to make. This happened in the 2012 Chicago strike, the recent Los Angeles strike, and the upcoming Denver strike.
Teach For America says, and they have to as a non-profit, that they cannot take a position, one way or the other, on the strike. They can neither encourage nor discourage their corps members from participating in these strikes, by law.
So it seems, then, to be a pretty easy decision for corps member. Considering that they would be risking becoming pariahs in their own schools after the few days of the strike, it would not be worth it to cross the picket line. But there is another caveat — Teach For America corps members are also part of something called AmeriCorps, which provides them additional money, I think $10,000 over the two years. Now AmeriCorps has some additional rules and one of them says that you cannot participate in a strike when you are getting credit for AmeriCorps hours.
In 2012, during the Chicago teacher strike, Teach For America made it very clear that corps members who strike would not be penalized in their AmeriCorps grant because the number of hours that they teach is so far beyond what is required by AmeriCorps that they CONTINUE READING: Does TFA (Illegally) Take A Side On Recent Teacher Strikes? | Gary Rubinstein's Blog