Teach For Canada: Teacher Concerns

1. Teach For Canada: Teacher Concerns Richard Beaudry LTA 1st Vice-President January 20, 2014 tml:usw2009:leu#35

2. Looking at Teach for America • Name: Teach for America • Founded in 1989 • Mission: “Eliminate educational inequity by enlisting high-achieving recent college graduates and professionals to teach”. • Timeframe for teacher recruits: 2 years • Where: in low-income communities throughout the US.

3. Teach for America – Recruits and Financing • 1989 – 500 new recruits in 6 regions in the US • 2012 – 5,800 new recruits in 46 regions in the US • Funding in 2003 - $29.8 Million • Funding in 2012 - $244 million • TFA’s total assets topped $350 million, including $100,000,000 in support from the Broad, Walton and Gates Foundations who are leading bankrollers of school privatization and standardized testing across the US.

4. Two recent examples of high numbers of TFA teachers being hired • Chicago, where 850 public school teachers were laid off and replaced by 350 TFA teachers • New Orleans, where the district laid off 7,500 school staff, converted most of its schools to charter schools and expanded its TFA teaching staff from 85 to 375.

5. Costing TFA Teachers • Districts in the US pay thousands of dollars in fees to the TFA as well as pay for teacher salaries, at the expense of regular public school teachers who see their numbers diminish.

6. Impact of TFA • The program replaces experienced teachers with brand-new employees who have had only five weeks of training during the summer and are brought in at beginners' salary levels. • Since 2009, union leaders have seen an increase in school systems across the US lay off teachers and then hire Teach For America college grads due to a contract they signed. • Teach For America brings in "the least-prepared and the least-experienced teachers" into low-income schools and makes them "the teacher of record.

7. Teacher Concerns • Implicit in Teach for America's approach is the insidious assumption that anyone who knows a subject and is willing to be with kids can teach – with little training. • There is an elitist overtone to the structure of TFA, a belief that the best and the brightest can make a difference in the lives of children who are less fortunate, even when they are not professionally prepared to do so.

8. TFA Teacher Concerns • Members and alumni have raised grave concerns about the quality of their training program and the lack of a support network. • There are concerns with the TFA diversity training sessions - the majority of TFA corps members are white while 90%of their students are racial minority students.

9. Biggest Issue • TFA enjoys a cozy relationship with the corporate-driven “education reform” movement, which advocates standardization, privatization, “school choice,” charter schools and merit pay as solutions to what ails inner-city schools. • These deep-pocketed “reformers” oppose teacher unions, painting them as the root of all problems in education, and tend to ignore or downplay un-glamorous but important structural issues like poverty and racism.

10. Introducing Teach for Canada • Founded in 2013 • Co-founded by Adam Goldenberg (BA Harvard) and Kyle Hill (PhD Oxford). • Mission: Together, we can make Canadian education more equal. • Solution: Offer a program that would send university graduates (from any degree program) to work as schoolteachers for two years in aboriginal communities.

11. TFC trying to separate itself from TFA • TFC insists it is not “just Teach for America in Canada.” • TFC’s own focus is on rural and Aboriginal communities. • TFC notes its training program lasts “an entire summer,” compared to TFA’s five weeks.

12. Teach for Canada compared to Teach for America • The main thrust of TFC and TFA – sending inexperienced but inexpensive teachers into the toughest classrooms – is the same. • TFC purports to address a problem with teacher supply in rural and Aboriginal communities, the real problem in these communities is teacher attrition. • TFC co-founder Kyle Hill’s employer, the Boston Consulting Group, is a firm with its fingers in school corporatization initiatives all over the US.

13. TFC and the lack of educational expertise • Noticeably absent from the TFC board is anyone with any expertise in the field of education. • None of the directors has ever been a teacher, nor has any degree from a faculty of education. • Hill and co-director Christie Kneteman list “volunteer” summer teaching on their resumes, in Jamaica/Ukraine and Ghana respectively.

14. TFC’s desire to work in Aboriginal communities is of particular concern • It’s true that there are inequalities between education on reserves and in urban centres in Canada. • The idea that the solution is to parachute inexperienced, mostly non-Indigenous people into schools in these communities ignores the fact that Aboriginal communities have been leading the fight for decades to take their children’s education into their own hands.

15. Aboriginal Concerns • Governments have responded to Aboriginal people’s demands for control over education with inertia and paternalism. • Per-student funding for students on reserve remains lower than students in provincial schools; a gap which is increasing.

16. The Canadian Government and the First Nations Education Act • The federal government’s recent First Nations Education Act has been criticized for not allocating sufficient funding to allow for meaningful local control over education. • Native leaders argue that the proposed legislation doesn’t go far enough – tackling neither inadequate funding nor the relevancy of the curriculum.

17. Teacher Concerns • Teach For Canada currently is working with universities (the same ones that accredit teachers) and provincial Ministries of Education to find ways to get accreditation for TFC recruits, or to allow graduates without teaching degrees to replace certified teachers. • Teach For Canada’s directors are slick marketers and apparently well-connected. • The TFC launch was attended by Peter Mansbridge and Indigo CEO Heather Reisman.

18. What is needed • Slick marketing isn’t what’s needed to fix educational inequities in Canada. • What is required is adequate funding for public education, a commitment to Aboriginal-led education on reserves, and the addressing of systemic issues such as racism, poverty and inequality.