A remarkable meeting took place in the Manhattan offices of Teach for America.

 

TFA leadership sat down with leaders of United Students Against Sweatshops, a group that has visited campuses to warn students against joining TFA.

 

This article that appears in “In These Times” describes the meeting. To see the links and read the article in full, open it.

 

It begins:

 

Dani Lea, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University, believes that Teach for America (TFA) teachers in her high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, were detrimental to her learning experience and for those around her.

 

Upon hearing this, TFA co-CEO Matthew Kramer said, “That’s not our lived experience.” Lea responded, “That was my lived experience.”

 

The volley took place during an unusual open meeting at TFA’s midtown Manhattan headquarters November 13 between United Students Against Sweatshop (USAS) activists and TFA’s top leadership, which offered the meeting after a widespread USAS campaign against the organization that includes visiting college campuses to question the education organization’s projected image as crusading do-gooders in American public education.

 

USAS is the country’s largest student labor organization, which has emerged in recent years as a serious force to be reckoned on labor issues ranging from sweatshop apparel production to campus union drives. The group’s main gripes with TFA and its Peace Corps-like model for American education, bringing college students—most from elite universities—to teach for a short period of time in some of the country’s poorest school districts, are that it is inadequately training teachers and promoting a for-profit, anti-union education reform agenda.

 

The Nation also recently released TFA documents regarding its response to critical press, adding to TFA’s recent headaches. USAS is demanding that TFA increase teacher training well beyond five-weeks and sever ties with anti-union corporations such as Walmart; USAS groups at universities like Harvard have demands their schools sever ties with TFA.

 

After offering an olive branch praising the intentions of TFA teachers across the country, USAS activists argued that the organization acts as a convenient staffing organization for municipalities looking to purge their career, unionized teaching staff and switch to a cheaper model based on high turnover.

 

Eastern Michigan University graduate student Will Daniels said his father, a career teacher in Detroit, was laid off in 2011 as a result of the city’s financial crisis, and said he saw the austerity-minded school authorities forming a marriage of convenience with TFA. The district could hire “three TFA members for the price of my dad,” Daniels said.

 

Kramer, who along with his co-CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard, patiently and calmly listened to the students, denied that the organization aims to get rid of existing teachers. “We only place people in open positions,” he said. “We do not force people out of a job.”

 

Beard also rejected the idea that TFA provides a pool of short-term teachers, saying 60 percent of TFA trained teachers stay for a third year and that while surely many young people think of it is a placeholder position before graduate school or some other endeavor, 67 percent stay in education.

 

But Harvard USAS activist Hannah McShea countered that in some school districts, teacher layoffs are so massive that veterans are laid off along with the rookies and unsatisfactory teachers. “TFA provides a solution of synthetic teachers,” she said. “It is complicit in austerity.”