Teach for America: Conservative movement or civil rights crusade?

April 11, 11:39 AMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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Boosted by KIPP founders' support.

The following is a guest post by Jesse Alred, a 14-year veteran teacher in Houston public schools who made contact via a comment posted on the www.sfschools.org blog. I thought his commentary and question deserved wider circulation.  I haven't fact-checked or edited Alred's commentary.

By Jesse Alred

I am a veteran teacher from Houston seeking a dialogue with current and  past Teach for America teachers regarding what appears to be a pattern of TFA leaders and alumni in school district leadership positions espousing conservative ideas and profiting from close relationships with reactionary corporations, while self-righteously proclaiming they
are the new civil rights movement. I first became aware of this when a former local TFA director, now a school board member, recently proposed to fire teachers based on test scores and opposed allowing us to vote to have a single union.

The conservative-TFA nexus began at the beginning, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp's initial efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide's negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize taking responsibility for the event. Not only did Union Carbide provide financial support for Ms. Kopp, it provided her with other corporate contacts and office space for her and her staff.

A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project [later renamed Edison Schools Inc., now again renamed EdisonLearning] and was all but saved by their managerial assistance. [Note from Caroline: KOPP Is married to Richard Barth, a  former top Edison Schools executive who is now president and CEO of the KIPP Foundation.] The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools run by elected school boards with for-profit, corporate-run schools.

In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni [Michael Feinberg and David Levin], the founders of KIPP Academy, then joined the Bushes at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was vital to Bush, since as Texas governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican. And everyone knows about Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's prescription for improving education: Close schools rather than improving them, and fire teachers rather than inspiring them.

Wendy Kopp's idea for Teach for America was a good one. TFA teachers do great work. But its leaders often seem to blame teachers, public schools and teachers' organizations for the achievement gap. By blaming teachers for some deep-seated social problems this nation has, they are not only providing an inaccurate critique; they also feed conservatives more ammunition to use in their 28-year war against using government as a problem solver.

Our achievement gap mirrors our country's level of economic inequality, the greatest among affluent nations. Better schools are only part of the solution. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed our schools by permitting the middle class to shrink.(It's not the other way around.) As more people are starting to recognize, we need national health care, a stronger union movement, long-term unemployment benefits, generous college funding, immigration reform, trade policy, freedom for alternative lifestyles and reductions in military spending to bolster the middle class.

Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor People's March—even when it pissed off powerful people. His final speech, the night of his assassination, was on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. In his last book, he argued for modifying American capitalism to include some measure of wealth distribution.

I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com. You as an individual TFA teacher have a responsibility here because your work alone gives TFA leaders credibility (it's not the other way around).