Students to Teach for America CEOs: You Are ‘Complicit’ in Attacks on Public Education
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17362/students_to_teach_for_america_ceos_you_are_complicit_in_corporate_education
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. Lea claimed that her principal didn't even know which teachers were members of TFA and which weren't.
Upon hearing this, TFA co-CEO Matthew Kramer said, Thats not our lived experience. Lea responded, That was my lived experience.
The volley took place during an unusual open meeting at TFAs midtown Manhattan headquarters November 13 between United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) activists and TFAs top leadership, which offered the meeting after a widespread USAS campaign against the organization that includes visiting college campuses to question the education organizations projected image as crusading do-gooders in American public education.
USAS is the countrys 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 groups main gripes with TFA and its Peace Corps-like model for American education, bringing college studentsmost from elite universitiesto teach for a short period of time in some of the countrys poorest school districts, are that it is inadequately training teachers and promoting a for-profit, anti-union education reform agenda.