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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Will San Francisco cancel TFA?: Alum letter to Board details threats, depression, and debt | Cloaking Inequity

Will San Francisco cancel TFA?: Alum letter to Board details threats, depression, and debt | Cloaking Inequity:



Will San Francisco cancel TFA?: Alum letter to Board details threats, depression, and debt

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Teach For America is facing headwind. Several states have cut back funding and they have reported they are short of their lofty recruiting goals that they set when they received $50 million from Arne Duncan a few years ago. (See all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on Teach For America here). Today I was contacted by two different individuals from the Bay Area about Teach For America. Jose Luis Pavon contacted me to relay that the San Francisco school board is reconsidering Teach For America. I will begin the post with his letter. Later in the day, I received a phone call from a TFA corp member who relayed a tell-all. I will conclude with her letter. (See also Tell-All From A TFA and KIPP Teacher: Unprepared, Isolation, Shame, and Burnout and “I felt Strange and Guilty”: Annie Tan @TeachForAmerica alum speaks) Jose Luis Pavon’s letter:
Dear Parents, Educators and Allies,
I am writing to inform you about a very important decision being made by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) school board that will impact Everett Middle School. On April 14, 2015 the SFUSD school board made a motion to terminate the school district contract with Teach for America and a final decision will be made soon.
Administrators at Everett have failed to inform parents and the public about the detrimental activities of Teach for America at Everett and SFUSD. Teach for America (TFA) is a large scale corporate non-profit (www.teachforamerica.org). TFA is national non-traditional teacher training program that claims to support education equity. They offer college students with a bachelor’s degree money to pay off loans, a five week training program and a full time teaching intern position for two years at a public school where they are given permission to teach a class room, without attaining a credential or doing a student teaching internship. After two years the TFA teaching interns have the option to pursue a teaching credential or quit teaching and pursue a separate career. The individual teaching interns and credentialed TFA alumni put their hearts and hard labor into their work as educators with good intentions, the teachers are not the problem. It is the TFA leadership, management methods, policy agenda, and corporate funders such as Walmart that must be scrutinized because of the damage they can do potentially to SFUSD. TFA has a track record nationally of scapegoating teachers, supporting high stakes testing, attacking teachers unions, and privatizing public schools by dismantling them into corporate charter schools. TFA is funded by corporations like Walmart and Monsanto, consequently TFA supports running schools like a business (https://www.teachforamerica.org/sites/default/files/150217_annualletter_financialsfinal.pdf).
Public Schools are not private for profit businesses, they are publicly owned institutions with an essential mission to provide high quality education to the public and insure a strong democracy. We must support and defend high quality public education. There is a national movement of parents, educators, scholars, public officials and labor leaders opposing TFA and defending public education. a. (A Force for Real Education Reform Emerges. October 9th, 2013. By Jeff Bryant, Education Opportunity Network. http://www.otlcampaign.org/node/3274) b. (http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/)
There is a growing list of serious concerns among teachers, parents, administrators, public officials and community members regarding the activities of TFA at Everett and other SFUSD schools. 
  • Sending novice teachers to teach classrooms of high need students such as low performing students of color, low income students, students with IEPs, English language learners and high risk students. Allowing teaching interns to train on the job managing a classroom instead of apprenticing under a credentialed teacher lowers the quality of education for high need students and sets up TFA teaching interns as well as students to fail.
  • TFA is practicing unconventional education reform policy experiments on students with out informing parents or public officials.
  • Everett administrators have a high rate of suspensions and police contact with high risk students and is not efficiently utilizing its resources to implement racially equitable restorative practices.
  • Enlgish Langauge Learners are being assigned TFA intern teachers or teachers with minimal Will San Francisco cancel TFA?: Alum letter to Board details threats, depression, and debt | Cloaking Inequity: