Seattelites, get your popcorn, gird your loins, pack your nautical themed Pashmina Afghan. The big fat debate over whether the Seattle school district should bring Teach for America to our city goes live at 6 p.m.
For the uninitiated, Teach for America is the elite teacher training program which sends its recruits to high-poverty schools, where they teach for two years before deciding whether they want to pursue it as a career.
If you think it’s too wet to make that trip to the school board meeting at John Stanford Center, you can watch it on Channel 26 or online. The board is expected to vote today on whether the superintendent should sign a contract (.pdf) to allow TFA recruits to apply for jobs at Seattle Public Schools.
While the contract, if approved, would not guarantee TFA corp members an interview or a position at SPS, it is still a huge controversy in a city where so many qualified teachers are currently out of a job. Seattle teachers union vice president Jonathan Knapp pointed at West Seattle Elementary School—a target school for TFA members—which he said had received 800 applications for a single job. “We do not have a teaching shortage,” he said.
The teachers union is livid that the district will have to dish out a $4,000 “headhunter’s fee” for each TFA member it recruits. The district has promised that the fee would come from private donors, and if that falls through, no district funds would be used. Additionally, the district has sought to alleviate qualms about student privacy by promising not to allow TFA to release student data to third parties. It did, however, amend sections on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in the contract so that it could release the data to TFA (.pdf).
Although the district’s Chief Academic Officer Susan Enfield was not available for comment today, she has stressed in the past that TFA members would create a more diverse applicant pool. But other than that, and providing glowing reviews of TFA’s mission, there’s little else from the district about why it should contract with TFA. A last-minute proposed amendment (.pdf) to the contract says that TFA’s contract will not be renewed without the superintendent providing a report to the school board detailing teacher evaluations, education background, and longevity.
More Teach for America wars after the jump
But all this has done nothing to calm the union and parents who have little faith in TFA’s abilities. My inbox has been flooding with anti-TFA emails—some are calling it Teach for Awhile, a dig at the fact that TFA recruits are only required to commit two years inside a classroom.
TFA’s opponents argue that a five-week training program and conditional certification does not equip teachers with the kind of skills necessary to handle low-performing classrooms. They point to a study carried out by Stanford University which said that TFA members did not perform as well as certified teachers. An email from 34th District state representatives Eileen Cody and Sharon Nelson just popped up in my inbox which warns the school board that while TFA serves the need of teacher shortages in areas with extreme urban and rural poverty, “it does not meet the needs of students in SPS.”
The school board has been split on whether to support TFA from the very start—so if you are lucky, there might be some fireworks tonight.
Good thing Ian already graduated …
All I’m going to say is the one thing that’s been true of Seattle since before I lived here – mess with the public schools north of the Ship Canal and the reaction will be fast and furious.
FERPA is a federal law. The District can’t amend it. Please doublecheck to make sure that somebody actually said that.
Hey, if a TFA candidate is not qualified or too expensive, then by all means don’t hire him. But the union is asking that their competition be removed from the race before it starts — they want a monopoly on the teaching market.
In the past, the school district has mostly looked around for ways to spend more money. If the school district is going to look around to see if can get better workers for less money, I’m thrilled!
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/arc…
also at the school board meeting some wingnut will present a petition to ban a book
@4 in Seattle?
I think you mean the Eastside …
@ 2, hi, a SPS spokesperson said that the district “deleted sections [in the contract] that would have allowed TFA to re-release data to third parties. While that release would have been permissible under FERPA, we took it out because some people were unhappy with it.”
Since when did Seattle become a high-poverty rural area that people were reluctant to relocate to?
“For the uninitiated, Teach for America is the elite teacher training program…”
Not sure how TFA is “elite” — except that their teachers have (recently earned) university degrees. Isn’t a degree also a requirement of the school district? It does have its problems, including the retention of teachers, but there are also some who have stayed on where they did TFA, as well as some who did a better job for two years than what was on the table. If there is an abundance of qualified teachers who are looking for jobs already in Washington, there are better places to send TFA recruits.
Black Teachers in Chicago won a discrimination lawsuit against Arne Duncan’s Mass Firings.
I believe this will happen in Seattle if the TFA people begin to replace certificated teachers.
There are ageism, sexism, racism and a bundle of other isms that could be fought in the court of law.
On another note, I hear many saying ‘Teach for America’ teachers would be better because they are the best and the brightest having come from “Ivy League” colleges. Well, ” It’s not where a man is, but the obstacles he has overcome and risen above that is the true measure of the man – or woman for that matter.
Many people who are now graduating from Ivy League colleges had wealth and privilege on their sides. Many, but not all, went right from a home life of privilege to an Ivy League college with their parents pulling strings to get them there. Does a life of privilege prepare one to work in the inner city? Maybe, but; I would think that someone who has had to surmount many obstacles such as poverty, single parenthood, family sickness would be better at helping poor students in the inner cities. These people have walked the path and succeeded. They know how to show children how to rise above their circumstances.
In addition, if the powerful would snatch jobs from those who have faced such obstacles only to hand them on a platter to the wealthy, what’s going to happen to our inner city kids when they work hard in school and don’t have the strings or connections to get into a Yale or a Harvard? What will happen to them if they work hard to become ‘teachers’ only to have their jobs snatched away by the wealthy and powerful?
Finally, how can we get our children to respect education, when they witness jobs being snatched from their teachers who they know attended many years of college and jumped through many hoops to get where they are?
@9 Again, you mention kids in TFA from “‘Ivy League’ colleges.” TFA kids come from all sorts of colleges and universities. To assume that they are somehow “racist” or “ageist” or elitist is incorrect, in my experience. It sounds like there are better places for TFA recruits to go than Seattle, but there is no need to harp on some imagined elitism of the program.
“…better workers for less money” – can you not read? We have to pay $4k EXTRA for each teacher (plus overhead and mentor teacher work costs).
In response to carniverous chichen. I believe it is extremely unfair to require that hopeful teachers go to college for several years and amass mega debt, than go back to school to get a Pro Cert or pass National Boards tests only to have their jobs given to people who only receive a few months of teacher training. I believe America to be a fair and just country and; I believe that this is extremely unfair and therefore unjust. As Martin Luther King said ‘ There are just and unjust laws’. He also said that Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Think about it.