What's the Difference Between Teach For America and a Scab Temp Agency?

[Teamster Jeff]

>>>
If you're a public school parent or student, there's none. If you're an educator or other school employee or a friend or relative of any school employee, there's none. If you live in a community where the local public school is one of the last hopeful possibilities that might bind a neighborhood together, there's none.

If you're a school CEO or administrator trying to hollow out your public schools to justify their closing and privatzation, or a mayor trying to justify those campaign contributions, there's no difference at all, either. If you're a hedge fund investor, like the charter school sugar daddies who contribute billions to Barack Obama and a host of black and white politicians in state and local government across the country; there's still no difference.

You have to be a taxpayer --- and let's understand that corporate elites and the wealthy have largely shed the burden of taxation onto the backs of the middle class and the poor in this the era of neoliberalism, to begin to see a little difference.... The Grapes of Wrath era scabs were generally not trained, transported or paid with tax-exempt foundation money.

Teach For America is a big recipient of corporate philanthropy – no surprise about that either, as nonprofit organizations and the deep corporate pockets that sustain them have played indispensable roles in the drive to privatize public education from the beginning. It's only logical that with the elevation of Barack Obama, the first president to emerge from the bowels of the foundation sector, the influence of these outfits has been omnipresent. Consultant tentacles of the Gates, Joyce, Boeing, Broad, Bradley, Walton Foundations, to name just a few of the top players, have been allowed to write federal program guidelines, to define criteria for assessing individual schools and entire districts, to invent their own instant-principal programs, with all salaries, overhead and expenses paid for by tax-exempt donations. Bosses during the last Great Depression usually had to pay for their own scabs, there was no way they could unload that on all the rest of us.

The other big difference between the scenarios that greeted auto and steel workers and fruit pickers 75 years ago is that back then, management usually waited for workers to go on strike before trying to replace them. Now they just lay off real teachers every year and hire TFA scabs.
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http://www.blackagendareport.com/tfa-scab

[leftstreet]

1. DURec

[DonRedwood]

10. +1

[Nye Bevan]

2. Seems like the UFT is OK with it.

http://www.uft.org/teaching/hot-topics/pathways-to-teaching

[Igel]

7. Indeed.

It's not as bad as all that, or wasn't.

Good points:
*It gets young, idealistic, talented college graduates into teaching.
*It focuses on getting precisely those grads into those schools that established teachers typically avoid--low achieving and/or rural.

Bad points:
*They provide crappy training and a weak skill set, but you need your skills in peak form in low-achieving schools. They have a high wash-out rate.
*Right now in some states teachers are being laid off. But TFA churns out a fairly constant number of newbies right on schedule every year.
*Schools contract to accept them, in exchange for something or other. If you're laying off teachers, you still get your TFA newbies.
... and what motivates schools to contract for them, in addition to any perks? They're *cheap*. They're not yet certified but in training, TFA is an "alternate certification program" (ACP).

Note that the last bit is fairly common with ACPs--they're cheap and with a high washout rate because they're not trained usually in the classroom.

Then the screwball points
*TFA newbies are trained in the latest and greatest methodologies. They are "change agents." If you're a biologist, you're know that most mutations--changes--are bad. That's just how it works. So most of the latest-and-greatest techniques are utter crap. Or old techniques with a new layer of crap on them to make them look innovative.
*TFA folk often bring with them extensive and cloying monitoring. To help enforce the change that others want them to be.

[DonRedwood]

13. As a licensed teacher I MUST have a masters for my job. How can a 2 week training by TFA

be held in high enough regard to be hired instead of teachers.

I wanted to be a teacher so the state makes me get a masters to do it. TFA's wanted to be something else and got their degree in something else, but get to teach with no training.

How in the heck is that a better system?

[Egalitarian Thug]

3. K&R Taxpayer subsidies. n/t

[MaineBlueDog]

4. "Scab" is an offensive derogatory term

[Teamster Jeff]

5. Yes it is

[awoke_in_2003]

8. "offensive derogatory term"...

that aptly suits the offenders.

[DonRedwood]

9. A well-earned one!

[Starry Messenger]

11. It's meant to be.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

6. What's the difference? Teamsters.

And particularly teamsters that will speak up.

[woo me with science]

12. Hmm.

I will have to get back to you on that...