Education Week - December 10, 2014 - 20

COMMENTARY
Why Protesting TFA
Is Woefully Misguided
By Howard Fuller
H
E
istorically, the group
United Students
Against Sweatshops
has organized campus
demonstrations around
everything from the
working conditions behind
the making of college
apparel to the treatment of food-service
workers. Frankly, were I in college today, I
might have joined some of their demonstrations.
But now, with the financial backing of
the American Federation of Teachers, these
activists have chosen education as their newest
cause and placed Teach For America in
their cross hairs. By their logic, TfA, an organization
that inspires people to fight educational
inequity, sits at the heart of it.
Most onlookers have quickly recognized
usAs' campaign as misguided or misinformed.
But the very fact of it calls our attention to
a larger issue. For years now, groups like
this one have sought to undermine TfA and
other efforts aimed at addressing one of the
most urgent issues facing our country-the
problem of educational inequity. For those of
us on the front lines of this work, these antiTfA
agendas have ranged from annoying to
irrelevant. But given the state of education
for children living in low-income communities,
most of whom are African-American and
Latino, we simply can't stand for this misinformation
any longer. If we do, we're as guilty
as the usAs members are.
For anyone who follows education news, the
arguments put forth by usAs will sound familiar.
The usAs activists call TfA corps members
white, elite Ivy Leaguers out of touch with the
needs of communities. They say TfA recruits
steal jobs from veteran educators, and they
take issue with the way TfA members are
trained. They say the two-year commitment
that corps members make isn't enough. They
do all this in shameful, purposeful defiance
of the facts about Teach For America and the
challenges it exists to combat.
These claims run blatantly counter to the
realities of the organization that I've been
engaged with in various ways since its inception.
Now in its 25th year, Teach For America
trains a significant number of African-American
and Latino teachers. A third of its corps
members graduated from college as the first
in their families to do so. Members of TfA
meet tremendous demand for talent from
traditional school districts, charter schools,
and innovative district formations, and they
stay in low-income schools at higher rates
than first-year teachers in general. Along
the way, they lead their students to outcomes
that have earned the program recognition as
being among the most effective trainers of
teachers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and
Louisiana.
None of this qualifies Teach For America
as perfect, and its leaders are the first to say
so. But to characterize TfA in the way that
United Students Against Sweatshops does
is just wrong and undermines the goal that I
am sure usAs supports, which is to make sure
that every student has a committed, caring
teacher with the capacity to ensure that he
or she gets a high-quality education.
The fact is that far too many of our schools
and school systems are failing to educate our
"
Our nation's failure to
educate our young people
isn't circumstantial.
It's not coincidental.
It's criminal."
children, and that disproportionately the
children being failed are low-income children
of color. To change this reality, we must be
willing to radically reimagine the way we
approach education for these children. We
need people who are willing to do whatever
it takes to ensure that these children get an
education that will give them at least the
possibility of living the American dream.
Teach For America corps members and
alumni are among those striving to do just
this. And while the blogosphere buzzes with
the latest theory as to how they get it wrong,
these individuals stand in classrooms and
communities that rank low on our national
priorities, where they inspire students, sit
down with parents, and endeavor to imagine
change at scale. Again, they are not perfect-
no one is-but I am inspired by the work I
have seen members of this organization do all
over the country.
Our nation's failure to educate our young
people isn't circumstantial. It's not coincidental.
It's criminal. In light of this, I find
myself impatient with groups like usAs advocating
to move us backwards-whatever
their intentions. Judging from United Students
Against Sweatshops' latest campaign,
these student activists want fewer talented
people streaming into our lowest-performing
schools. They want to stick with a decades-old
training model that prioritizes pedagogy over
practice, student outcomes notwithstanding.
They want to position the systemic injustice
of our schools as media hype. Like the 47,000
individuals working on the front lines for educational
equity through Teach For America,
I want something different.
Today, our country sits at a perilous moment-one
in which doubt, self-interest,
and fear threaten to slam the brakes on a
movement toward possibility taking hold in
schools nationwide. At this decision point, I
hope we'll choose optimism and actual hard
work for real change over efforts that will
Crossing the Border to Kindergarten
By Annalisa Nash Fernandez
nglish-language learners represent
nearly one in 10 public school
students nationwide. There is no
question that Ell programs can
strain limited school resources,
but these children do learn English.
And as early language learners,
they also enjoy a wide range
of cognitive benefits. Benefits that I wanted my
own children to take advantage of because they do
not live in a Spanish-speaking household.
So each morning, I cross the "border" into a foreign
country to take my daughter to kindergarten.
At least, that's how I describe it. Passing by a vendor's
colorful cart of Mexican pastries, I say hola
to the other mothers and make it to the classroom
in time for a quick buenos días to the teacher. Elsa
drops her homework into the basket. This week,
it's the letter "d," so she has colored in a dinosaurio
and dedo. I kiss her goodbye, and she joins the
circle on the carpet to sing, "Hola, amigos ... " No
English is used in the classroom, even for teaching
academic subjects.
My daughter doesn't attend a fancy international
school or even an immersion program in a diverse
metropolis. And we don't live in a border state. We
live in Wisconsin. I take my daughter across town
to the Spanish barrio, where Spanish is the first
language, and many of the elementary schools
make it their mission to preserve the language and
culture of the community. The same goes for the
20 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 10, 2014 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
"
Now that my
daughter is
bilingual, my
heart swells
with pride when
her dolls 'speak'
to each other in
Spanish."
area's day-care centers, although none touts itself
as bilingual. Spanish and English are simply
the languages of the families they serve.
This education strategy is not for the faint of
heart. We have a freeway commute to school,
test scores are abysmal compared with those of
our neighborhood public school, and we aren't
part of the community by any cultural or socioeconomic
definition. But the 5-year-old kids are
still clean slates, and the teacher is part sage,
part saint. Now that my daughter is bilingual,
my heart swells with pride when her dolls
"speak" to each other in Spanish as she plays.
One day at Costco, we sat in the food court next
to a Spanish-speaking family. She turned her
back to us gringos and asked them in perfect
Spanish how they liked their food.
You doubt that such an option exists in your city?
So do my neighbors in our tony Milwaukee suburb
of Whitefish Bay. There is a Spanish barrio everywhere,
mis amigos. My daughter attends a charter
school within the Milwaukee school district. An
interdistrict-transfer program to encourage diversity
allows her to attend school in the city, in much
the way a minority student in an urban district can
"transfer" to a suburban campus.
I, too, would probably have no idea that such
an option exists, but I have become an expert,
unwittingly, in seeking out bilingual education.
It began with my older son in the course of our
family's corporate move to Mexico City in 2002.
I was obsessing over the research on the early
window of opportunity in childhood for language
exposure. To my surprise, all the preschools were
bilingual or English-immersion. We were in the
largest Spanish-speaking city in the world, and
I could not find a Spanish-speaking preschool.
I extended my search into the foothills of the
Federal District, on the western edge of Mexico
City. Bilingual education had not yet reached
Cuajimalpa, a small town about an hour's
drive from downtown. I enrolled my firstborn.
He learned Spanish quickly, even transposing
Spanish verbs onto English: "He pegged me at
recess" from the Spanish verb pegar, to hit, with
an English past-tense ending.
We moved from Mexico to Miami two years
later. (Milwaukee was still in the future.) Miami
was full of bilingual schools, and, in turn, I was
full of hope for preserving Spanish for my son
and his younger brother. Until I met all the playground
moms. From a cultural perspective, they
were fascinating to me. Mostly Cuban and Venezuelan,
they were effortlessly bilingual. They
spoke in perfect Spanish to their kids, who answered
back in perfect English.
These Latina moms lamented the fact that
once their kids started school, they stopped responding
in Spanish. Even those who attended
the bilingual schools. "But they understand everything,"
they insisted. I heard this story over
and over. And I didn't want it to be mine.
Again, I searched for a preschool taught purely in
Spanish, stocked with kids from Spanish-speaking
homes so that English wouldn't be an option. In
Miami, I didn't have to look as far as in Mexico.
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Education Week - December 10, 2014

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