The Chicago Teachers Strike: A Turning Point

It has been an amazing couple of weeks here in Chicago.   For once, the topic of education was part of the national-no international-conversation.  And not told by Michelle Rhee.

Some of the debate has been incredibly encouraging, practically unthinkable just months ago.  I especially liked this MSNBC Up With Chris Hayes segment (Monologue starts around 4:32 but please watch all the segments regarding the strike.)  I literally was jumping up and down in my living room very early on a Sunday morning when they aired this-I couldn't believe they were finally asking the right questions, having the right conversation.  (They mentioned poverty!  They talked about underfunding!  Woo-hoo!!)  Or take this piece by Eugene Robinson entitled Standing Up for Teachers.  Wow, the press is actually taking teachers' side. We're not in Education Nation anymore.

I was elated as my friends, and passionate education activists, took to the airwaves and big news outlets.  Teachers and parents were finally being given a platform to speak truth.  Xian Barrett a CPS high school teacher at Gage Park High School, Wendy Katten a CPS parent and member of Raise You Hand, Phillip Cantor-a high school teacher at North Grand, Jen Johnson-CPS high school teacher at Lincoln Park High School, Adam Heenan-teacher at Curie High School, Matt Farmer-CPS parent, and so many more enlightened us with their knowledge and experience.  And of course my friends and collegues in the union itself spoke truth to power!

At the most recent rally last Saturday, I quipped with my activist friend, CPS elementary school teacher Michelle Gunderson, that I missed my rally and marching buddy after not seeing her in the crowd.  We had become friends after meeting at multiple education events over the past year.  She replied, "it's not just the same twenty of us at these rallies anymore."

No, it is not indeed.  And the movement is growing.

There was solidarity from friends and strangers across the country and the globe.  I was getting messages on facebook and twitter from old friends and acquaintances from New York, Seattle, LA, Indiana, as well as Japan, Germany, Australia, and more.  The whole world had its eyes on Chicago with the understanding that something major was taking place in this town.  

And yet, many in the media didn't report it that way.  A large part of the conversation out in the media and bloggosphere has been around the call for collaboration and trust. Many seem to think that if Rahm had simply been less aggressive, and if the union had been less rigid, they could have collaborately come to an amicable agreement.  This argument might have made sense if the fight were really about pay raises or benefits.

But anyone who actually listened to teachers knows this was about so much more.  This fight is not about compromise on a contract, it is about power and oppression. When up against oppressors, there is a clear right and wrong. Pundits need to admit that Rahm is wrong. As Karen Lewis said, this fight is about the very soul of public education.

Teachers were speaking up for their students, for their learning conditions, speaking against the savage inequalities of school funding and school reform.  About what really hurts our students.  This strike was about pushing back on the powerful who would sell our schools to the gods of privatization and competition. 

To call for "compromise" is to side with the oppressors. It says that "a little abuse" is acceptable all in the name of warm fuzzies and "just getting along".  It tells that battered wife that she shouldn't fight back against her abuser, 'cause the conflict might confuse the children.

No, there is a time to fight.  And in education that time is now.

Others made this yet another labor struggle. No, this is not about labor, or rather not just about labor.  Some have labeled this strike as the next Wisconsin. In some ways, certainly, this is about collective bargaining and the right to strike.  But to me, this fight was about a union which chose to fight in a social justice movement.  It was about redefining the role of what a union could be.  The CTU is a fighting union!  And the fight it took on was the fight against harmful corporate education reforms, the reforms of the elite, reforms that hurt children and their schools.  It is a fight for justice.

And I will admit it, it felt good to fight.  As I wrote on Anthony Cody's blog last week, there was jubilation on the streets of Chicago.  Finally someone was standing up to these cruel policies.

Before the strike, I had written off the entire press corps, especially the so-called "progressive" journalists, as 100% sold on the corporate education reform movement.  No one seemed willing to do the hard journalism to expose the truths behind corporate ed.  Perhaps their friends were reform-minded.  Maybe it was all those New York cocktail parties where teacher-bashing was becoming common-place.  I don't know.  They weren't reporting on the realities of our schools, just sound bites from Duncan, Rhee, Kopp, Klein, Bloomberg, and all the other Deformers.

Now that there are at least some journalists reporting the broader story of poverty, of inequality, of the profit-motive, of the damage of school reform on classroom practices, the others cannot simply ignore it anymore.  This strike represents a turning point.  Like the moment when reporters called out big tobacco on its intentionally suppressed deadly health risks, you can never go back to the time before the connection was made.  

Us public school advocates are no longer protesting with a small handful of other like-minded folk.  We are now part of a full-fledged civil rights movement calling for educational justice.  I thank the CTU for the long, hard, upward battle it has fought to reach this point. I thank them for building bridges to communities, to educating, to mobilizing its members into collective action.

That action made a difference.  The battle rages on, but one thing is sure, things will never be the same.

Arne's Bus Tour: A Call To Action

Dear friends, colleagues, activists, and supporters of public education:

Arne Duncan is coming soon, to a city near you (by near you, I mean no where near places like Chicago, where tens of thousands of teachers have taken to the streets to protest his policies!) but to other important towns and cities across the nation.

Here is the route.

This tour is a great opportunity to remind Arne, AGAIN, that his policies are misplaced and harmful.  Will you organize a grassroots groups of teachers, parents, students, and community members to have a rally as his bus comes through? 

Maybe you can wear red in solidarity with the CTU to remind him that his hometown, where he started all these terrible policies like closing down schools, firing teachers, and vastly increasing the high-stakes tests in our schools, is rejecting his legacy! 

And remind Obama too.  Don't let him keep ignoring us!

So who will organize?  I can already imagine the great signs and slogans all you wonderful activists out there will create. 

Let's keep Duncan on his toes.  He cannot actively destroy our schools and hurt our students without a massive outcry from all of us! 

In Solidarity,
Ms. Katie

Reformers Just Don't Know....

In the endless back and forth in education debates, a favorite line echoed by Teach for America, the Gates Foundation, KIPP, and all the powerful ed reformers out there is "Poverty is Not Destiny."  The idea is that schools don't have to wait for poverty to be fixed outside school, but rather schools can help fix poverty through great education.  And that great education is provided primarily by "great" teachers.  It is interesting that these ed reform proponents, while talking up how important in-school factors are since "that is something we can change NOW" (urgency! they are full of righteous anger-fueled urgency), almost never bring up the issue of inequity and gross underfunding in the schools suffering the worst effects of poverty.  But that is the spiel they have chosen.

People like me, on the other hand, say that schools absolutely should be improved, but that that improvement rests largely on providing more resources and opportunity, not on firing the "bad" teachers and hiring only the "effective" teachers.  But, even if we decided tomorrow to flip the funding formulas between affluent and low-income schools, or if state legislators suddenly got serious about "failing schools" and decided to double, triple, even quadruple the funding, just improving what happens inside schools will never be enough.

I am beginning to realize that many ed reformers may have never seen the worst effects of poverty on kids.  Many of the folks coming through TFA are being placed in charters, people who work at KIPP only see the least-damaged students, and the politicians and non-profit workers have, for the most part, never done more than a photo op with children from low-income backgrounds, usually at a charter school.  And as someone who has worked closely with the kids from the charters, I know those kids are much better off than many other children. 

Most ed reformers have never seen what I see everyday.

As anyone who has ever read my blog knows, I work as a teacher on an inpatient psychiatric unit for children and adolescents in Chicago.  I work with kids who are so sick, that they had to be hospitalized in order to keep them and those around them safe.  On our unit, children and adolescents may not even have pencils unsupervised or paper clips for fear of harm.

And through my job I have seen, real and personal, the effects that poverty can have on our young people.  I have seen children, with a history of abuse, placed in the foster care system, who are so sad that they bang their heads against walls, scratch their faces, and scream "I want to die."  I have seen children who get so angry-who have so little frustration tolerance due to living in unpredictable situations where they had to be in a constant "fight or flight" state to keep themselves safe on the streets-who will beat another child just for looking at them the wrong way.  I have seen countless children who were exposed to substances in utero and now their brains do not work the same as their typically developing peers.  These children get angry, throw chairs, scream in frustration when their needs are not met, and lash out to hurt anyone around them.  I have seen these same children struggle to learn even basic letters and counting, thanks to the cognitive impairments they have. I have seen children who were homeless for most of their life, whose brains were forever damaged by the stress of their early childhood experience, who now require one to one assistance just to be able to function with a group of children.  I have seen young girls, so severely depressed about growing up in our lawless inner-cities with parents overcome with drug addiction and gang affiliations, grab a bottle of cleaning fluid and try to kill themselves.  I have seen child after child exposed to greater trauma on the streets of Chicago, than our soldiers in Kabul face!  I have spoken with countless children who feel hopeless, who feel abandoned, whose lives are forever altered due to the rampant poverty we let them be exposed to.

Now there are things we can do to help these kids.  And believe me, people like me are doing our best every day to help repair the damage done to these fragile children.  The proper interventions are expensive, time-consuming, and will not work for every child.  But those of us in the mental health field do what we can with the few resources we are given.

But I ask you, why do we as a society LET these beautiful children become so damaged in the first place?  It is as if we are sitting back and letting a child be beaten again and again by an abusive parent, and then looking the other way.  The education reformers out there are saying "sorry you got beat, here are some chants and gimmicks that will help you catch up academically".  We tell the kids to "work hard, be nice" as if that were enough.  And if some kids can't just "get over" the massive abuse done to them, then they clearly are at fault and don't deserve quality education.  God forbid kids, after being exposed to all types of trauma and then coming to an understanding of the savage inequalities of their lives, don't want to just "be nice". 

As poverty in this country deepens, we are seeing more and more kids with even more debilitating disabilities.  Insurance agencies are shortening the amount of time these kids are allowed to heal in hospitals like mine.  Add to that cuts in mental health services, child and protective services, and the schools that serve these children, and these kids are being doubly abused. 

For too many of these children, if their families had not been battling the weight of deep poverty, they would not be sick.  Let me say that again, if these kids had not been born into extreme poverty, they would not be screaming, gouging their skin, threatening harm, crying every night, and put into a hospital.  It is unconscionable to allow these children to continue to be put in harm's way.  Every penny we have should be thrown into prevention, not just in helping after the abuse has already happened.

Ed reformers, go and get educated.  You clearly do not know the realities of what growing up in poverty can do to a child.  It is a reality that every public school teacher of low-income students knows and experiences daily.  It is why we fight, tooth and nail, your disgusting insistence that "poverty is not destiny".  That excuse has been used for far too long to allow us to ignore the growing mental health crisis affecting all aspects of children's lives including school.  If you did know the realities, and still continued to chant "poverty is not destiny", then you are complicit in nothing short of child abuse.

Well ed reformers, you have been told about the real effects of poverty.  Now what are you going to do about it?

So You Say You Like Parent Empowerment? Careful What You Wish For...

All the hype around the coming release of a heart-wrenching, pro-privatization film "Won't Back Down" has got me thinking.  I completely agree with all the bloggers and activists calling out the false premise of the film as well as exposing the true agendas (See Jersey Jazzman's here, Rita Solnet via Valerie Strauss here, and Diane Ravitch here among others.)

An activist friend of mine recently tweeted:

Mark Friedman ‏@mfriedman10

@KatieOsgood_ Recognize: When/if parents+teachers organize real progressive community control struggles Corp WBD folks-"not what we meant!" 

Ah-ha!  All this talk about parent empowerment is a fantastic chance to seize the moment away from the corporate reformers and speak to real reform efforts.  Afterall, parents' and teachers' motivations are very closely aligned: quality, equitable, learning conditions meeting all children's needs.  Let the reformers with their big glossy Hollywood films get the people riled up and then educate folks so that they push for true democratic reforms which give actual voice to parents and push for policies which actually help children.  

Perhaps we can set up discussion groups after showings of the movie giving parents, community members, and interested persons a chance to speak about their vision of great public education. Of course we would be sure to present the actual facts behind the movie as well but also open the door to true collaboration.  This terrible movie would certainly open the door to more conversations.

I also think we need to start a letter/twitter/facebook campaign petitioning Michael Moore to make a documentary exposing education reform.  Enough of these Hollywood blockbusters like Waiting for Superman and WBD, let's get some REAL info out there!

At the end of the day, any way we can twist this twisted tale back into true grassroots possibility seems like a good idea to me! Instead of demanding charter schools and turnarounds, what if parents stormed the Boards and statehouses demanding true equitable funding?  What if enough parents were riled up that they held sit-ins until a library was placed in every school (like the parents at Whittier did)? What if hundreds of thousands were so inspired they took to the streets alongside all the people already out there?  And what about students getting so mad they all held sit-ins (like the students at Social Justice High School recently did) and walk-outs until we force actual change.

Any other ideas on how we could turn this propaganda into momentum?

Choosing Solidarity not "Choice"

I've been reading UIC professor Pauline Lipman's book The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism,Race, and the Right to the City. I have long been a fan of Dr. Lipman and have seen her at multiple education events around Chicago. She is a fantastic example of an academic/activist: someone who uses her research and expert knowledge to affect change through real grassroots movements.

In her chapter on "Choice and Empowerment" she does a great job of framing the reasons many progressive teachers and parents are drawn to charter schools. The truth is that many neighborhood schools, primarily schools in low-income neighborhoods of color, have been historically and chronically disinvested in. Add to that over a decade of top-down "accountability" measures which have effectively removed autonomy, creativity, and passion from teaching. She calls the choice of some progressive teachers to move to charters a "moral crisis" (p. 130) where they understand they contribute to a larger problem but still feel they have no other options: 

Some teachers working in social justice oriented charters also talk about a "moral dilemma."  They know charter schools are part of the neoliberal restructuring of public education which undermines the public interest and produces educational inequalities. They feel complicit in this process yet guard the space for teaching that they believe in a and a context of ideological support and collaboration of like-minded colleagues.  As one teacher put it, "I know charter schools are bad for public education, but I could never teach like this in CPS." (p. 131-132)

Parents which she interviewed also speak to the desire for better resources like smaller classes, more arts (in some select charters), more technology.  These parents "did not claim ideological allegiance to school markets or privatization.  Their choice of a charter school was tactical, pragmatic" (p. 135)  Parents, rightfully-so, want the best for their children.

The truth is that both the teacher's desire for autonomy and flexibility and the parents desire for greater educational opportunities afforded by greater resources are all possible in traditional public schools.  So this begs the question, "why not allow ALL schools this type of autonomy coupled with full-funding?"  Here is where the resistance to corporate education reform is coming to a head.

If education reformers are going to promote "choice" off the claim that the "status quo" is insufficient (which in low-income communities, no one is disagreeing) then they must first give the full resources and autonomy granted to charters to the neighborhood schools.  This purposeful starving of neighborhood schools and strangling of creative best teaching practices has become too obvious to ignore, even by the most "pro-choice" advocates.

The obvious "choice" to fund charters, selective-enrollment, and magnet schools over neighborhood schools in the current CPS budget is exactly why so many parents, teachers, and activists came out to actively call-out CPS during these school budget hearings.  It is not fair.  Not to the teachers, the parents, and certainly not to the kids.  Parents and activists planned a large-scale protest for the scheduled Facilities Task Force meeting where CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard was scheduled to speak. I, along with countless others, had planned to attend until the event was unexpectedly canceled due to "security concerns".  Our city's leader of the school system is literally afraid of the growing voice of resistance to CPS' corporate-dominated plan to expand charters while underfunding neighborhood schools.

In my opinion, this growing tide of resistance must continue to demand equal access and freedom to create community-centered, democratically-run neighborhood schools.  They must continue to demand the funds to implement a community's school vision.  But we need more support, especially from the charters and turnarounds which CPS and the Mayor are using as hammers to smash neighborhood schools around the city.  Members of the charters and turnarounds should join in this fight so as not to be complicit in the destruction of opportunity for many children and families in disenfranchised communities everywhere.  Charters must no longer be used to divide us in our shared struggle.

 I call on parents, teachers, and students in the charters to stand in solidarity with your neighborhood school counterparts.   I ask for teachers in the charter schools to actively write, speak publicly (when possible-I know most are not protected by union protections), and advocate for the types of services, resources, and autonomy which supports great teaching.  I also urge them to speak out about the corporate practices and cost-cutting measures in too many school which undermine teaching and learning. It is important that we remain a united front committed to getting funding and flexibility in ALL schools for ALL kids while pushing for freedom of dissent and fair-work practices for all.

This need for solidarity and acknowledgement of the greater unfair politics behind the charter movement will become increasing important as CPS and the CTU move towards a possible strike.  Charter school teachers, parents, and students will you be willing to support your brothers and sisters if they are forced to walk the picket line?  Will you speak to the media when the first headlines come out saying you agree in their need to strike if CPS does not address the major inequities in the system?  Will you resist the ways CPS and Mayor Emanuel will point to your schools as examples while they never acknowledge policies which undermine the neighborhood schools?  Will you do all that is in your power to support public education in our city and our country?

In a time where we are taught to be consumers first, to aggressively go and "get yours" before looking at your neighbor, I call on all of us who fight for quality, equitable education to change the discourse.  Let all educators stand united-brother and sister-in the fight for great schools for every child.  Acknowledge that is it access to resources and autonomy which draws many to the charters and then fight for that for all teachers.  Meanwhile, the unionized teachers of Chicago will fight for YOU to have protections from arbitrary firings and for workplaces which do not demand unsustainable work loads and additional duties due to cost-cutting or corporate greed.  And surely all parents can unite in the battle for quality, fully-funded schools with low class sizes, comprehensive curricula filled with music, art, gym, and world language, recess, and creative, fun, responsive teaching not centered around standardized tests and threats of punishment.

I have been hard on charter schools and alternative certification programs like Teach for America on this blog.  But I promise, if you come and support public education with me and my colleagues around the country, I don't care if you come from a charter or TFA or wherever.  (Be assured, I will keep pushing back on you if your claim your organizations are better or ignore the unfair differences teaching in different settings thanks to current neoliberal education policies.)  But if you march with me, rally with me, speak out about the true causes for struggling schools (poverty, deliberate inequality, racism and NOT "bad teachers" or their unions) then we are united. 

I highly recommend Dr. Lipman's book.  I also applaud her for being both an academic and an activist.  She is an example to all who fight for social justice.  Will you join the fight alongside people like her? 

Do Parents Know What They Are Choosing With "School Choice"?

The other day, I was speaking with the administrative assistant for my floor at the psychiatric hospital where I work.  She happens to be a charter school parent. I've never really spoken to her about my views on charters, since I understand that the neighborhood schools in her area are woefully underresourced and under attack.

Still, a few months ago, I saw that her child's school was in the news.  Apparently, the charter school where her 12-year old daughter attends, is not performing well.  So, in true ed reform fashion, the charter school board decided to change charter management operators (again) and to perform a "turnaround" on the four failing schools (See this Tribune article  and also, former charter school teacher Seth Lavin breaks it down here saying "My point is that we, the reformers, are a disaster as a movement if we’re radically changing our own radical changes months after they start and, in the process, tossing students from school regime to school regime like an airline rebooking someone’s flight.")  When I questioned my colleague about this big change, she answered, "Oh my daughter had mentioned that many of her teachers were being laid off.  I told her to stop telling lies.  Why would a school tell the kids about lay-offs like that?  But I guess she was right.  I'm going to have to apologize to her when I get home."

This parent had no knowledge about the happenings at her child's school.  And this woman is an excellent parent, both she and her husband are very involved in their children's lives.  But the school obviously did a horrible job keeping parents informed and engaged.

I went on to ask if her daughter had ever had an uncertified teacher. My colleague looked shocked saying, "I thought all teachers are certified."  I explained that schools like her daughters often use teachers from alternative certification programs like Teach for America, and that it's possible her child's teacher was not only uncertified, but had never worked with children in any capacity before entering that classroom.  She was horrified.  "Well, I am going to ask about her teacher next year. I had no idea."

If we live in an educational world where "choice" is prized above all else, surely parents have a right to fully understand exactly what "choice" they are making.  I find it unconscionable that organizations like Teach for America went to Congress to lobby for their untrained novices to be labeled as "highly-qualified".  Parents should at least be notified that their child's teacher has not completed a training program.  Frankly, if TFA is so confident in their novices' abilities, a simple letter home stating they have not completed their training should not be an issue.  Yet they spend their money lobbying to hide their recruits' certification status.  And when it comes to something as major as a school "turnaround" shouldn't parents have some sort of input or voice?  It's possible there were such events, but if an involved parent like the one I work with didn't know anything about it, and had to read about the changes in a Tribune article, then the school is not doing a good job of communicating.
 
It seems to me that charter proponents spend a lot more time and energy on the promotional/marketing side than on actually creating great schools.  "Looking good" becomes more important than actually "being good".   The current parent trigger fiascoes also demonstrate the idea of "looking good"--saying nice words like "parent empowerment" and "parent voice"--while actually turning schools into places with far less parent and public input.  Corporate-run schools like the charter in Chicago can do whatever they darn well please.  And my colleague's only way to "voice" her displeasure would be to remove her child from the school. 

These charter school parents are being given a false promise.  Like all parents, they want what's best for their kids.  And when all the resources and media-hype are being showered on the charters, I fully understand why a parent would choose to send their child to one of these schools.  Still, parents should know about the shortcuts the school takes.  They should know if their child's teacher is certified.  They should have input in whether or not a school is closed or gets "turned around".  At least in Chicago's neighborhood schools, parents can sit on Local School Councils.  Although far from a perfect system--especially since any school "on probation" has far fewer rights--at least, in theory, elected parent representatives can vote on budgets and principal hirings/firings.   And, not that it means much to an appointed school board, but at least--by law--CPS has to allow parent/community input before voting on major school actions like turnarounds or school closures.  But charter school parents do not get to share in any of the hard-won rights resulting from decades of struggle here in Chicago.

This exchange with my co-worker left me once again convinced that we need to fight for transparency in the truths behind corporate school reform.  One of the greatest forms of activism is simply to expose practices and ulterior motives of the pro-privatization crowd.  Behind the civil-rights rhetoric is something scary and wrong.  So let's continue to speak truth to power.

Seeing Teach for America Through Different Eyes

I started this post with something much different in mind, but it veered into a very personal story of why it matters to me what happens in Teach for America and other corporate education reforms.  It's long, but please read to the end and give me your feedback.  

My last post was admittedly controversial.  I mused about TFA's rather unsettling similarities to a cult, acknowledging that it was an imperfect analogy.  But the conversation that followed really got me thinking.  As expected, some supporters of TFA responded with personal attacks and calling me "ignorant".  Others insisted that we "all need to work together" insinuating that my post was just "mean".

It seems my message didn't get through.... 

So let's step into each others' shoes for a moment.  I imagine myself as a TFA recruit.  If I had joined right out of college, the 22-year old me would have been extremely moved by the TFA rhetoric of educational equality and closing the achievement gap.  I imagine myself immersed in the TFA culture, eating up every word at Institute, working my butt off in whatever placement I was in, and making life-long connections and friends through the people I met along the way.  I see myself, naive with little experience outside my affluent upper-middle class world, getting culture shock in a place very unlike the one in which I grew up.  In college, I was heavily involved in a campus christian group and I feel like TFA would have been a similar experience of camaraderie, sacrifice, risk, and life-changing emotional moments only centered around the mission of educational equity instead of religion.  And I get how attached I would feel to the work I did and the close friends I made.  I get why my posts on TFA would cause people to feel defensive and upset.

But let's turn to the other side and pretend to be one of those TFA critics for a moment.  I invite you all to imagine you are me.  Imagine you had lived abroad teaching English in Japan for many years after college and understood all too well the amount of expertise it takes to be an effective teacher.  You learned so much from watching your highly-respected Japanese colleagues, but also acknowledge that you have a long way yet to go to improve your practice.  So you return to America, enroll in a Dual Certification (Special and Elementary Education) Masters Degree Program at a Chicago university with a focus on urban education.  You put yourself through grad school by working as a mental health counselor on a child/adolescent psychiatric unit at a local children's hospital.  You work nights, weekends and do whatever it takes stay afloat financially.  Through this job, you begin to learn about the enormous barriers that prevent too many children from reaching their potential.  You meet kids who are abused, homeless, neglected, traumatized, aggressive, suffer from debilitating mental health conditions like depression or even psychosis, or have cognitive disabilities.  You begin to see the system-wide societal failures affecting these kids' lives.

Thanks to your degree program, you are able to observe in many inner-city schools, in many classrooms of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities.   You meet hard-working teachers across the city sharing the same stories over and over about terrible working conditions and little support.   You go into classrooms full of gang members and then go to work that night to meet kids from that very same class in the hospital.  You even meet one boy who had newspapered his windows over and refused to leave his house because he was terrified of the violence.  Every day, you meet kids with stories of violence and abuse, things we as a society should have protected the kids from.  Those years in grad school were tough, you lived in a shoebox and went deep into debt, but you believe your future students are worth that.

Once you finally get your degree (with honors), you get yourself hired into an elementary school on Chicago's highly-segregated southside, 99% low-income and 100% African-American.  You work as a special education teacher but you find yourself under a cruel, vindictive principal who you later learn has targeted the veteran teachers and smashed countless careers.  You and your colleagues work 16 hour days, give up all your free time, your social life, your money, all for your students because there just aren't enough staff or resources to get it done if you didn't.   You administer test after test to your special education students and think, "this is wrong, this is cruel".  You watch powerful, amazing experienced educators perform their craft, but it is never enough. You whisper with colleagues in corners out of fear that the administration is listening, and quietly plan amazing unscripted units which you give to your students in secret.  But still your kids struggle, and you feel the shame of failure in a broken system. 

You learn firsthand about the need for tenure when you, a first year teacher, speak out about the unacceptable, unjust conditions for special education students in the school.  And you feel the wrath that a principal can inflict on his staff as he comes into your classroom and escorts you from the building with a letter saying you must report the next day for psychiatric evaluation.  You are forced to jump through hoop after hoop all because an evil man wanted to get even.  You come back to the school after all has been cleared, but you never speak directly to your principal again.  You continue to work hard, day in and day out, for your students.  But you end the year beaten, abused, and demoralized.

Still, teaching is your calling.  So you pick yourself up, and find a position outside the school system as a teacher at a psychiatric hospital.  And you start to hear murmurs from friends and colleagues still in the schools about a fight taking place to make the schools better. You learn the truth that your school struggled so grotesquely because it was located in a part of the city which had been targeted for gentrification.  You finally understand that your school was starved of resources on purpose long before you ever got there. Schools are not "failing", they are being sabotaged.  You learn that many nearby schools had already succumbed to closure and had been callously handed over to private management like charters or turnarounds.  You see that the district had discovered a much faster way to rid schools of those dreaded veteran teachers--who had been your lifeline at your school--by firing the whole staff in one, quick chop.  You watch in horror a video of a brutal beating and murder of a boy at a Chicago school which was directly connected to these school actions.   You look around and see your district decide to ONLY invest in those new schools and openly admits it won't put money in a school which may close down in a few years.  And you learn that there are many who stand to profit from these policies.

In your new job at the hospital, you meet students who had known the young man who died, and hear other multiple examples of how the violence directly impacts these kids' lives.  You hear how school closures and the charters that replaced them created chaos at many schools as children from all parts of the city were forced to cross gang boundaries and attend schools together causing the massive spikes in youth violence.  You hear countless tales from your colleagues in the neighborhood schools of 60+ students in a class, old, tattered textbooks, leaky roofs, and an increase in police presence in the schools.  Your students at the hospital confirm all these stories with new horror stories of their own. They tell you how sad and angry they are.  They say things like "there weren't even enough desks or books, why would I stay?" when you ask why they dropped out of school after 8th grade.  They tell you about the violence on the streets, "it was too hard to concentrate in class."  One young woman in the hospital for aggressive behavior tells you that "the kids that fight" were all removed after a school turnaround and that "I'm probably next."  You see the hopelessness in the eyes of the young people in your classroom who clearly understand our society's message to these amazing kids is that "you don't matter."

Meanwhile, your profession gets an onslaught in the media like never before.  You see Waiting for Superman and want to cry because they got it so ridiculously wrong.  They blame all the problems on "bad teachers" with "low expectations"and their unions who "protect them", when you have seen directly that that rhetoric is bald-faced lie.  In fact, the fighting union in your city is one of the greatest engines of social justice demanding the types of reforms your students need.  The airwaves are filled with people with no knowledge of what actually happens in our schools.   And you finally understand that a large part of what is happening to education is intentional--that there are influential powerful people who want public schools to fail.

And so you join organizations that fight the racist, unequal policies undermining whole communities.  You see the connections to the labor movement, the fight for strong unions and a strong middle class, that could pull people of struggling communities out of the poverty which cripples them.  You start to fight on multiple fronts going to rallies, marches, and talks about inequalities in the prison system, about police brutality, about unfair housing practices.  It is all the same fight.  You fight alongside union brothers and sisters, even though you had never once thought about the need for unions before entering teaching.  You connect the dots, and no matter what nonsense politicians or education reformers say, you understand on a deep, basic level that poverty, inequality, and straight-out racism are at the heart of your fight.

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And then--somewhere in all this--you notice Teach for America.  You always knew it was there, but had never paid it much attention.  But then you start to realize that many of the powers that be, which you are fighting tooth and nail, had beginnings in this organization.  Members of Stand for Children, Congressional aides, charter school leaders, state/district superintendents, and of course the big names like Rhee, White, and Andersen all hail from TFA.  And so you begin to research this puzzling program.

You wonder how they make claims like "poverty is not destiny" as you look over at the kids you work with everyday.  And you think, "most of my students wouldn't be sick and in the hospital if it weren't for poverty and its effects.  How dare they!"  Then you remember how much your little criminally under-resourced school struggled and how they received far less money for a population of kids which required far more.  Poverty will always be destiny if we don't put in a vast amount of resources to counter it.

You cannot comprehend how TFA justifies putting these untrained workers in our nation's most struggling schools in the name of "educational equality".  One of the greatest inequalities in education IS the disporportionate numbers of uncertified, untrained, and inexperienced teachers in low-income schools.  Another is the amount of churn in schools, the high teacher turnover rate, which contributes to a poor, uneven school culture with little social capital built up over the years.  TFA does little more than exacerbate an already existing problem in the inequity of our schools.

You shake your head as you hear TFA's claim that their untrained workforce is better than the veteran teachers you know have been sacrificing their very souls for their kids.  You read blog posts which say things like "how can these kids' teachers sleep at night knowing how they've failed the kids".  You hear people who don't even know enough about your city to know where it is safe to walk at night, claim they are there to make "transformational change".  You look through that binder they get at Institute and are shocked by how regimented and testing-oriented the training is.  And you can't believe that's all they get.  Your friends in summer school programs who have had TFA trainees thrown into their class tell you horror stories of ignorance and arrogance. "Why do they get to use my summer school students as guinea pigs?' one teacher laments.

You already know that the struggles our kids experience have nothing to do with "expectations" or "believing".  No, it never was the "soft bigotry of low expectations", but rather the hard bigotry of racism and inequality.  Who do these people think they are?  They say they never bash teachers, and yet every claim they make belittles the hard work you put into your preparation and all you and your colleagues do in your classrooms.  But TFAers hide behind empty words like "I never bashed teachers" when their very presence in a school is a slap in the face to every experienced educator there.  Veteran teachers give up their time and energy, often unpaid, in order to help these poor, struggling teachers year after year.  Then TFA turns around and says, "look at the success of our teachers!"--success built off the hard work of the educators who have dedicated their lives to their profession.  You know that TFA's "success" is all a huge marketing lie.

You continue your research and see the strong connection of TFA with the charter school movement.  You listen to person after person in TFA rave about how wonderful charters are--and how their teachers are "closing the achievement gap"--all the while thinking that your school was being strangled in order to make room for more of them.  And in your job on the psych unit, it was ridiculous how many kids you'd met who had been kicked out of those schools.  Any child with significant behavioral problems or mental health issues was being thrown to the curb by the charters.  How can they claim success while wounding so many kids?  And part of your job was to pick those kids up and remind them they were worth something. Did these charter school teachers really not know the impact of their schools on the surrounding schools?  Did they not care that their brand-new fancy charter, with glossy advertising campaigns, and catchy names like"Chicago Bulls Charter" were of course going to entice students away from the withering neighborhood school down the street?  Do they not see how the district stacks the deck in favor of charters?  How can they not see that non-unionized charters are being used to weaken and ultimately destroy teachers unions everywhere? Do they really claim they don't push kids out despite the obvious facts which show they do? Do they not understand how pushing kids out hurts?  It is not miraculous to work with an easier population of kids with more resources.  And when those "better" learning environments come at the expense of other children's educational opportunity, then it is not only not a success, but a resounding failure in equity.

And you cannot believe how TFA can claim they are not taking jobs from veteran teachers.  In your city, you see the dozens of schools being closed or turned around each year.  You meet a number of veteran teachers displaced from closures or turnarounds who say they will retire early, because who would ever hire someone their age?  You see reports which show Chicago's teaching force is becoming overwhelmingly younger (and whiter.) Your district stopped even holding open jobs fairs and only opens fairs to the hundreds of displaced teachers.  But even at those fairs, TFA novices get hiring priority over the experienced quality educators looking for work.  Meanwhile, new charters are going up left and right, and TFA is helping staff them. 

When you hear TFA say, "principals like TFA", you shake your head thinking, "I'm sure they do."  You are sure your principal thought he was hiring an ignorant newbie in you.  But because you had worked for years with children with disabilities and learned the legal requirements for students with IEPs in your degree program, you knew exactly what types of services they were entitled to by law.  And tenure be damned, you were not going to stand there and contribute to the injustices. You can be sure your principal wished he'd hired someone who would work hard and never knew to question him.  

And then the TFA folks boast about that hard-work, never understanding that their willingness to be exploited, short-term labor is part of why every teacher today struggles like never before.  All those hard-won rights from labor struggles past are being eroded by these naive young people.  If the system worked, no one would HAVE to work 16 hour days. Instead, the district would hire more staff and get more resources to share the workload.  But what does that matter for anyone in TFA?  For a majority of the TFA folks, those 2-3 years of intense labor give them the reward of boomeranging them to a prestigious administrative, policy-making, or other professional career.  And they can feel good about their "volunteer" service to the poor, without ever having to invest in the communities or their long-term struggles for justice.  Meanwhile, all the career teachers are left with the expectation to also work 16 hours days--a feat impossible to do long-term, especially if they have families--with no boomerang in sight.  You cry for your colleagues as they are being forced to do more with less--with larger class sizes, more paperwork, less support than ever before all with the shadow of new "accountability" requirements and evaluations tied to test scores.  Teachers' marriages are failing, their health is suffering, and many are throwing in the towel and leaving their beloved profession.  Many are feeling as demoralized and tired as you did.  And this is terrible for kids who already are being denied so much.

Lastly, you look at your own journey of enlightenment, coming to understand the complex history, politics, and legacies of racism and injustice as well as the long history of struggle and activism in the affected communities.  And you wonder, "why can't the people in TFA see what I do?  Don't they see the people in the communities where they work taking to the streets to fight these educational policies?  Don't they notice the massive battle against the corporate interests taking place from Wall Street, to Oakland, to Egypt, Greece, and beyond?"  But still TFA partners with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Bank of America with no acknowledgement of the massive contradictions of joining a "social justice" program with the 1%.  And they continue to push the neoliberal, Milton Friedman-style free-market ideologies, which are playing out in cities across the country and the world. 

Now imagine all those TFA people attacking you, calling you names, chiding your tone, saying you are ridiculous when you push back on an organization you believe is doing so much harm.  You shake your head one last time and whisper, "hubris".

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I cannot fathom how TFA can continue to justify what it does.  And the only explanation I have is that something must happen in the TFA training process which blinds people to the real struggle.  And then it makes sense to me that so many from TFA join the education reform movement.  Then in that context, I understand why I have yet to meet even one person from TFA fighting out there with me on the streets.  Why they are much more likely to be the ones I fight against in groups like Stand for Children or Democrats for Education Reform.  Then the robotic arguments TFAers makes over and over again which minimize the effects of poverty and glorify the effects of individual teachers and leaders start to make sense.  I think to myself, it must be some sort of brainwashing because those conclusions do not even come close to what I experienced out there in the schools and working with the kids.  I would rather believe that most TFA people just didn't know any better rather than the more nefarious alternative that they understand all too well the negative impact of corporate reform and just don't care.

I wish you all could see TFA, charters, and education reform through my eyes.  Maybe the education debate would look much different if you did.