This post was written for EduShyster by guest blogger Owen Davis, a former corps member of Teach for America.

 

It is firmly tongue-in-cheek. He advises members of TFA headed for Newark not to back down.

 

So what that Cami Anderson, one-time leader of TFA-New York, plans to lay off 1,000 experienced teachers–most of whom will be black–and replace many of them with TFA?

 

He writes:

 

Your ability to shrug off the naysayers is what really astonishes me. So what if TFA is on average whiter than the teachers it will replace? What does it matter that TFA is a necessary ingredient in the charter stew that drowns traditional public schools – and that Newark’s current layoff plans stem directly from the diverting of district funds to charters? Who cares that 60% of NJ TFAers end up in that same charter sector, whose teachers are only 74% as likely to be black and half as likely to be Hispanic as in district schools? And the fact that half of TFA’s current teachers in Newark’s district schools landed in “renew schools,” where existing staff had to reapply en masse and where hundreds of educators were displaced?

 

He adds:

 

The Newark situation can’t help but stir recollections of your stalwart march into New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina, when the number of TFA first- and second-years shot up from 85 to over 400, while the proportion of African-American educators dropped from 73% to 49%. Or in Chicago, where your corps size grew by a third while fifty schools were closed and a thousand positions were cut – and where previous mass layoffs hit black and Latino teachers hardest. It’s in these dire circumstances that “doing nothing is not an option.”

 

The post is loaded with links. Read it and follow the links. Owen Davis’s advice to TFA: Don’t back down. Go right ahead and replace those experienced black teachers and see yourself as civil rights leaders.

 

Life is filled with ironies, is it not?