Seattle TFA Alum Speaks

A Seattle teacher, and TFA Alum wrote this last November. In it he urges caution in hiring TFA teachers instead of licensed, teachers.

Seattle Public Schools should avoid 'Teach for Awhile' program

The Seattle School Board is considering whether to bring the Teach for America program to Seattle. Guest columnist Jesse Hagopian, a former TFA teacher, cautions the board to invest in experienced teachers rather than recruits from a program that has become known as "Teach for Awhile."

By Jesse Hagopian

FROM 2001 to 2003, I "taught for America."

After graduating from college, I headed for the Bronx, N.Y., where I underwent Teach for America's (TFA) "teacher boot camp." With just five sleepless weeks of on-the-job training teaching summer school to fourth-graders, team meetings and night classes, I was given the stamp of approval and shipped off to Washington, D.C.

The Seattle School Board is expected to vote Wednesday whether to bring TFA to our school district, and before they decide, they should consider the lessons of my experience.

At 21, I found myself in a public elementary school in the ghetto of South East Washington, D.C. — in a classroom with a hole in the ceiling that caused my room to flood, destroying the first American history project I ever assigned the students.

One lasting memory came on my third day of teaching sixth grade.

I had asked the students to bring a meaningful object from home for a show-and-tell activity. We gathered in a circle and the kids sat eagerly waiting to share their mementos. One after another, each and every hand came out of those crumpled brown lunch sacks, clutching a photo of a close family member — usually a dad or an uncle — who was either dead or in jail.

By the time it was my turn, all I could do was stare stupidly at the baseball I pulled out and pick nervously at the red stitches.

Working in the "other America" was a personally powerful experience and made me decide to dedicate my life to finding a solution to transform public education and the broader society that would allow such neglect to occur.

But while TFA allowed me this window into the problems of our country, it didn't prepare me to address these challenges. With only five weeks of training, it wasn't just that I was not equipped to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of students with a wide range of ability levels, create portfolios that accurately assessed student progress, or cultivate qualities of civic courage — it was that I didn't even know that these things were indispensable components of an effective education.

As well, TFA often overemphasizes the importance of test scores, driving corps members to narrow the curriculum to what's on the test to prove that they are effective teachers. Yet even by this measure, TFA-ers don't make the grade.

Consider a six-year study of TFA out of Stanford University that looked at more than 4,000 teachers and 132,000 students on six different tests and found not one case where TFA educators performed as well as certified teachers.

Moreover, TFA's own statistics show that a mere 33 percent continue teaching after their two-year commitment — creating high turnover in the very schools that most need the continuity and stability.

Seattle has an abundance of teachers with teaching certificates and master's degrees struggling to get a teaching position in the local public schools — West Seattle Elementary School, a target school for TFA, had some 800 applicants for a single job. Why bring in undertrained TFA recruits when we have so many young teachers in Seattle who have spent years developing their skills?

TFA is being presented as a solution to the problems in our public schools. But the reality is, in this era of cash-strapped school districts, officials are lured not by the quality of TFA-ers but by the fact that young teachers who leave the district and make room for more young teachers provide an inexpensive alternative to investing in more experienced teachers who will earn a higher salary.

Yet, if the Seattle school district truly wants "excellence for all," it will need highly trained teachers who have a lasting commitment to the profession — not the revolving door that has come to be known as "Teach for Awhile."

Jesse Hagopian teaches history at Garfield High School and is a founding member of the Social Equality Educators (SEE).

Crisis for Seattle Teachers

Seattle Public Schools have seen some hard times this past year...here's an article, Do We Respect Seattle Teachers?, which lists some of the issues. It starts with...

Seattle’s public schools sure have been through a lot in the 2010-2011 school year. On top of the multimillion dollar scandals and the firing of superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, we saw funding cuts from the legislature that has decimated our classroom teachers and classroom supports and caused serious overcrowding at Garfield High School and other schools, which meant that some students had to go without teachers or classrooms for part of the year. At Lowell, overcrowding has brought a need for more classrooms, and I have heard that the district plans to take away space from developmental preschool and toileting facilities.

There's a school in the district in which students had to go "part of the year" without teachers or classrooms? This is how the public -- in the form of the legislature -- supports public education? Are there public funds going to charters or private schools? If so, why is money being funded away from the public schools if they need it? This is just flat out wrong, in my opinion. Why aren't the people up in arms?

Here are some other things which have happened in Seattle this year:

• Ex-superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson tried to ram through a proposal to tie teacher evaluations to the results of standardized tests – a measure that would increase “teaching to the test.”
• The state legislature tried to pass law after law that would erode seniority, even though teachers improve greatly over the first five years of teaching, and most especially in their first year.
• The district laid off teachers, even though we will see an increase in enrollment next year.
• The district also signed a deal with Teach for America to bring in teachers with five weeks of training to address “shortages,” despite the fact that there were 18,668 applications for 766 positions last year.

Yes...they're laying off teachers in Seattle and then filling classrooms with TFA bodies.

When the public schools "fail" because the state has "failed" to support them who will get blamed? Are the legislators interested in the students, or just crushing public education and public educators?

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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Teachers work with what we give them...

Andrew Heller wrote this last week...a great message in defense of teachers. As usual, though, the comments are where the 'action is.' I'm continually amazed at how it is so easy to blame "the system," "whining teachers," "total failure," and "public sector unions." I'm dismayed at the number of people who buy into the corporate reform line that 1) American schools are awful (read this) and 2) it's all the fault of teachers and their unions (read this and this).

In the meantime, read on and feel good about this entry.

We can't blame teachers for what ails us

We’ve badgered them, pink-slipped them, scolded them, shrunk their pay, cut their benefits and angrily blamed them for all of American society’s ills, with the possible exceptions of foot odor and reality TV.

Don’t you think it’s high time we got off the backs of teachers?

I’ve never in my life seen a class of workers demonized the way teachers have been the past 10 years. And the irony is that we’ve done it while saying, “But we love teachers! Teachers are important! Yay, teachers!”

If I were a teacher, my response would be, “Yeah, well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it.” 

I don’t know when our national obsession with “bad” teachers as the cause of bad schools and aimless kids began. But it doesn’t jibe with my experience. Yours, too, I’ll bet.

I have three kids at all stages of their public school careers. With one possible exception, I’ve had no problem with how their teachers have done their job. Many, in fact, were good to outstanding.

Before you make the obvious criticism, yes, my kids are lucky. We live in a nice, comfortable suburb with good schools.

But ask any teacher anywhere — in districts great and small, rich and poor, urban or rural — if they’ve felt singled out as a profession, and I’ll bet the answer is yes.

That’s not self-pity. You can’t open a paper the past 10 years without seeing a story about how test scores are down, kids are dumber and America is falling behind the rest of the world.

And it’s all teachers’ fault.

They’re not trained well. They’re not dedicated. They don’t work long enough or hard enough. (Gosh, they only work nine months a year! And for full pay — can you imagine!)

You seldom read a word about bad school administrators, inept school board leadership or lack of financial support by the community or the state.

Nor do you ever hear a word about the true source of America’s educational woes: Parents. Or the lack thereof.

There’s an old saying, “Garbage in, garbage out,” and while that’s a crude way of describing what’s happening to American education, it’s still largely true nonetheless.

Teachers work with what we give them. “Miracle” districts notwithstanding, we send them hungry, tired, sick, ill-behaved children who weren’t read to when they were young, nor taught to value hard work and discipline, and then we say, “Hey, why didn’t you fix all that?”

Then, if that weren’t enough, we pile on by dragging them and their work into the middle of what are essentially political, not educational, fights involving charter schools, unions and tenure.

Could you blame teachers for feeling unappreciated? Likewise, could you blame the best and brightest college students for saying, “Become a teacher? Um, I don’t think so.”

Yes, there are bad teachers. But I’ll bet they’re in relatively equal proportion to the number of bad employees in other professions.

Blame the decline of the nuclear family for our supposed educational decline. Blame the end of shame. Blame whomever and whatever you want. But it’s high time we stopped blaming teachers for not turning sows’ ears into silk purses.

Let me be the lone radical voice on this issue: I think most teachers are doing just fine, and as a class of employees they deserve a word of thanks and a national apology rather than further demonization.

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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Teachers Need to Lead

Should teachers forego politics? Do either of the two major political parties represent the interests of public education?

Bob Sikes has an interesting take on the direction public education is going.

Teachers Need to Take the Lead and Not Yield the Future of Education to Either Political Party

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Bob Sikes

The following is a Facebook post I made yesterday. Its titled, Understanding What You are Really Choosing in Market Based Reform. Some additional comments follow.

"My conservative friends who believe in market-based education reform need to understand what they are choosing. The privatization movement will effectively change the teaching profession from one of public service to one not unlike that of a door-to-door salesman. For over 200 years, America’s teachers have patiently applied their efforts and time to any child without prejudice to their socio-economic status. Market-based reform changes that dynamic. Strict adherence to a pay-for-performance plan will force a teacher to themselves choose where and whom they will be teaching. Like a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman, teachers will need to reach their quota if they will want to maintain a livelihood in the profession. Worse, the system forces teachers to change their motivations. It will be all about the child passing a test and no longer about the unprecedented nurturing thats been happening in our nations classrooms since well before the Civil War."

During the current four pronged assault on teachers by Florida’s Republican legislators, conservatives don’t want to consider what the consequences of the current path. We are witnessing what I characterize as “Teacher derangement Syndrome,” of which we are not blameless. The hyper-partisan nature of the NEA and AFT over the last decade has changed our image from one of a serious profession to one who is simply an operative arm of the Democrat party. Satirically I wrote a few days ago that many say we are not to be listened to any longer. We’re in a union.

Still this doesn’t excuse away Republican hyper-partisanship either. Extremism begets extremism. [It's] easy to illustrate a parallel between the manner Democrats legislated during the first two years of the Obama presidency [and] the current Wisconsin-Florida GOP thuggery.

Its time for teachers to take the high road and to move toward separating ourselves from blood sport politics like this. Neither political party is able to get beyond acting in their own self interest. We need to be the shepherds of our schools and the protectors of the teacher-student relationship.

Do we rise above or do we continue to try to influence politics in America?

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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