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For all general inquiries about YDS, contact:
Erik Rosenberg
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75 Maiden Lane, Suite 505
New York City, NY 10038
Phone: 212 727 8610 ext. 4
erik@dsausa.org
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please i will need a newsletter if there is any,cos’ i will love an ac tivist.
thanks
Two things: 1) I would like a link to my blog (my blog links to both The Activist & Democracy Now) and 2) How do I go about submitting an article? To see a sample of my thinking & writing, go to seamusobannion.blogspot.com. Thank you for your time.SOB.
If you feel young people should see this please circulate. Thanks.
I am veteran teacher from Houston seeking a dialogue with current and past Teach for America teachers regarding a pattern of TFA leaders and alumni in leadership positions promoting conservative ideas and profiting from close relationships with reactionary corporations while presumptuously claiming to be the new civil rights movement. I first became aware of this when a former local TFA Director, now a school board member, recently proposed to fire teachers based on test scores and opposed allowing us to vote to have a single union. Having won school board positions in several cities around the country, former-TFA personnel are apparently pursuing these sorts of policies as an agenda.
The conservative-TFA nexus began when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp’s initial efforts to create Teach for America. Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize it’s responsibility.
Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved in financial hard times by their managerial assistance. The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools run by elected school boards with for-profit, corporate-run schools. Ms. Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, was an Edison executive before taking over as CEO of the KIPP’s national foundation, where he has sought to decertify its New York City unions.
In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was pivotal for Bush, since as Governor had no genuine educational achievements of his own These charter schools do great service, but they start with families that are committed to education. They claim to be improving public schools by offering competition in the market-place, but they take the best and leave the rest. It’s not a level playing field.
Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s prescription for improving D.C. Schools is two-fold: close them rather than improve them—and fire teachers rather than inspire them.
TFA teachers do great work. But better schools are only part of the solution. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed our schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It’s not the other way around. Economic inequality and insecurity produces ineffective public schools. Its not the other way around.
Blaming teachers, public schools and our unions keeps the corporate money rolling into TFA coffers, but this approach provides big business with more ammunition in its war against the public sector.. Corporate domination of politics, and the weakness of counter-balancing forces like unions, are the obstacles to national health insurance, generous college funding and revitalized unionism.
Ms. Kopp claims the civil rights mantle, but Martin Luther King fought for redistributing power from powerful groups to the powerless, not the other way around. He was the voice for unions on strike, not the other way around. His last book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, argued for modifying American capitalism to include some measure of wealth distribution, because opportunity in a survival of the fittest society would not be enough to overcome under-privilege for most people.
Your hard work as a TFA teacher gives TFA executives credibility. You are the platform from which they speak. It’s not the other way around. I would like a dialogue about what I have written here with TFA teachers. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.