Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

education:

Teach for America criticized nationally over political leanings

Teach for America

Mona Shield Payne

Clark County School District Trustee Deanna Wright asks questions of eighth-grade students Nehrun Baskin and Antonio Ocampo, right, while teaching about the Holocaust in English Literature class during Teach For America Week at Dell H. Robison Middle School in Las Vegas Tuesday, April 30, 2013.

Teach for America

Clark County School District Trustee Deanna Wright goes over the day's lesson plan about the Holocaust with eighth-grade teacher Matt Angelo prior to the start of English Literature class during Teach For America Week at Dell H. Robison Middle School in Las Vegas Tuesday, April 30, 2013. Launch slideshow »

Over its 24-year history, Teach for America has won accolades for taking top college graduates and putting them to work in some of America’s toughest schools, creating what it regards as a national model of nonpartisan service in education.

In Las Vegas, for example, the city council last month unanimously approved a two-year funding agreement that will put an additional 25 Teach for America teachers in schools in the city’s urban core.

The agreement includes $62,500 to help cover a fraction of the costs Teach for America spends to train and develop its teachers, who are recent college graduates who agree to work in high-need, at-risk schools for a minimum of two years. The national nonprofit currently has 270 teachers working at 56 Clark County schools.

The teachers funded in part by the city will be placed in math, science and special education classrooms.

Although support for the program continues to be strong in Southern Nevada, former participants and academics, among others, in other parts of the nation have recently accused the Peace Corps-like organization of taking sides in education policy wars. They criticize the nonprofit for aligning too closely with its largest private donors and high-profile alumni who have gone into politics. They say the group has diverged too far from a core mission: addressing a teacher shortage with top college grads primed to inject energy and success into low-income, urban campuses.

The key backers of Teach for America include foundations that support efforts to expand charter schools, limit teacher job protections, weaken union clout and evaluate instructors by using student test scores.

The Walton Family Foundation, for example, recently donated $20 million to Teach for America. Funded by the family that began Wal-Mart, the foundation supports both charter schools and government vouchers to subsidize private school tuition for low-income families.

New York-based Teach for America asserts that its financial supporters do not influence its direction. Although the Walton foundation has given more money — $100 million — than any other, its contributions still made up only 4.6 percent of the education organization’s national budget last year. Government funding accounted for about 30 percent of the nonprofit’s revenue.

Critics, however, are unswayed.

“I don’t know that it’s causation or correlation, but there is so much alignment,” said Rigel Massaro, a Teach for America alumna who works as a public interest attorney in San Francisco.

Like other critics, she said she was troubled by the group’s five-week crash course in teaching and the fact that its presence in a community allows school districts “to hire teachers who are cheaper and who are pushed to make incredible gains for their students by working seven days a week and then leaving after two years.”

As evidence of Teach for America’s political bent — intentional or not — critics cite developments in California, Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana and other states.

In Los Angeles, nonunion charter schools have grown in number, and so has their hiring of Teach for America instructors, even as enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District has shrunk, leading to teacher layoffs. In Los Angeles, 94 percent of last year’s recruits went into charters.

In South Los Angeles, one charter group, ICEF Public Schools, hired two dozen Teach for America instructors last year. Parker Hudnut, who heads the 12 campuses, said the young teachers “bring a tremendous amount of energy, a lot of innate intelligence” to his schools.

Among his hires: Anthony Edholm, 24, who was president of the pre-med society at Creighton University. He’s teaching physics and coaching track.

“My biggest thing is I wanted to take a kid at a critical point in his life and help him transition from high school into college, into becoming an adult,” Edholm said.

Apart from making a difference in the classroom, however, the organization has always had another goal for its alumni: to become leaders who care about education regardless of the field they enter.

“We exist because the education system in America was not meeting the needs of young people growing up in low-income communities,” said Teach for America Co-CEO Matt Kramer. “School districts are finding great people through TFA.”

Members of the program receive support while they teach, and Kramer noted that many remain in the classroom well beyond their two-year commitments.

Teach for America also has taken on the role of providing a labor pool for districts that want more competition for jobs or need to restaff a school whose teachers were fired or removed.

One example is Huntsville, Ala., where the school district last year hired 30 instructors from Teach for America and has committed to at least 30 more this year, Superintendent Casey Wardynski said.

That was not because of a lack of available teachers: The district had 19,000 applicants this year for 200 openings. Wardynski said he chose the Teach for America instructors over other qualified candidates to use as “special forces” capable of turning a school’s dysfunctional culture around.

Philip Kovacs, an associate professor of education at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, along with others in schools of education, said resorting to Teach for America can exacerbate faculty turnover. Such instability harms students needlessly when permanent teachers are available, he said.

“I have students with a master’s degree who ... are phenomenal, who could teach me about teaching, and can’t get jobs,” he said.

In North Carolina, the Legislature phased out a student loan-forgiveness program for top-tier undergraduates who became teachers for at least four years. At the same time, it increased its annual contribution to Teach for America from $900,000 to $6 million.

The state’s lawmakers also voted this summer to end teacher tenure and pay boosts for instructors with advanced degrees and to approve tuition subsidies for low-income families to pay for private school.

The governor’s senior education adviser, Eric Guckian, once headed Teach for America in North Carolina. Guckian said he does not endorse all the new measures and would like more done to encourage teacher stability. But altogether, he said, the package “creates a foundation for future beneficial reforms for students and teachers.”

Former Teach for America instructors hold senior education positions in Louisiana, where they continue the most aggressive school reform policies in the nation. When the state fired nearly every New Orleans teacher in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and converted most schools to nonunion charters, Teach for America provided a share of the replacements.

“I don’t think this could have happened without TFA,” said assistant professor Kristen Buras, a New Orleans historian at Georgia State University. “You need these on-the-ground organizations that are going to assist the state with these reforms.”

And it was Teach for America alumna Michelle Rhee — former head of the Washington, D.C., school system — who established StudentsFirst as a counterweight to teacher unions.

Rhee’s views were showcased during a high-profile panel at Teach for America’s 20th anniversary summit. The discussion before an audience of 11,000 featured Rhee and like-minded participants such as former New York City schools Superintendent Joel Klein and Los Angeles schools Superintendent John Deasy.

The overriding message was a call to social activism, with teacher unions cast as status quo forces that needed to be overcome. Ditto for many policies that unions support, such as tenure protections.

Kramer said he regretted the impression left by the panel. His organization, he said, embraces all views.

Information from Sun reporter Conor Shine was used in this report.

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