“One day all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” – TFA mission

Alex Scrivner | Contributing Writer

You are about to graduate from a university and nothing is more appealing than finally being able to put into practice the accredited reserve of knowledge you have gained. You could say that you are “objectively” smart and hard-working due to your earned soon-to-be-graduate social status. Another scenario is it’s been years since you were engrossed in college life and are now earning a steady income. You have started your own business, or you clock in at your desk job every day and through the routine you consider yourself a “good person.”

In 1989, Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp proposed in her Princeton senior thesis that the intersectionality of these lives could be used to eradicate systemic inequalities in the education system.

Since then, an increasing amount of individuals sift through the options and choose to apply to be a corps member of Teach for America, going against the odds of being selected as one of the 10,000-11,000 of an average 100,000 applicants selected per year. Once chosen, he or she then dedicates two years to the TFA movement, to theoretically alleviate what TFA calls a “solvable problem.” Part of the problem, however, is that most people who enter the corps has little experience or previous knowledge of how deeply embedded this problem is and has been throughout the nation, so concrete yet unseen like cracks in the sidewalks we walk on daily.

On March 21, 2014, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released its first comprehensive analysis of every public school in the country in 15 years. The Civil Rights Data Collection represents 49 million students in the U.S., and the numbers make the reality of the problem transparent.

The key findings in this study show higher rates of suspension among black and Latino students in comparison with their white peers, beginning as early on as preschool (if a public preschool is even accessible in the student’s district).

40 percent of public school districts do not offer preschool. Of the districts that do, barely half are available to all of the students of the district. Black students represented 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent were suspended once and 48 percent suspended more than once. 81 percent of Asian-American high school students and 71 percent of white high school students attend schools where a full range of math and science courses are offered (i.e., Algebra I, geometry, Algebra II, calculus, biology, chemistry, physics) and less than half of American Indian and Native-Alaskan students have access to a full range of math and science courses offered. Black students (57 percent), Latino students (67 percent), students with disabilities (63 percent) and English Language Learner students (65 percent) have less access to this full curriculum. One in five high schools lack a school counselor.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement to the study that “it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed.” Critics and those in the education system would say it has been clear, and many outside voices would won- der what and who have actually been working to meet this American goal. The praxis and methodology of TFA can often earn honorable mention in arguments of what inhibits education reform and what needs to be reformed overall due to their increasing initiatives to work with charter schools and majority selection of corps members coming from privileged and predominantly white schools (the founder did graduate from Princeton).

In the recent years, headlines have read “I Quit TFA,” “The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders,” and so forth. Normally, the arguments against TFA seem to stay standing if and when challenged. Concerning TFA’s financial resources, Reuters found that one of its biggest grant donors is the Walton family, the beneficiaries of a corporation credited with keeping millions in poverty due to treatment of its Walmart workers. Reuters also found that the fact that TFA receives a portion of its funding from public money that “could be better spent at a time when schools are laying off teachers and cutting academic programs” is especially a concern for union and community leaders. Many analyses also decry TFA for pushing a model of privatization and slowly scraping away any hopes of strengthening the public education system.

These arguments illuminate a contradiction that exists between TFA’s mission and the system in which it operates. However, with the recent shifts made in TFA’s recruitment and placement of corps members, it could be doing exactly what it proclaims to do for students, just not by traditional or previously expected standards and terms.

The Corps Member

Veronica Varela, B.A. liberal studies of APU 2012, will soon be completing her first year with TFA in Los Angeles, Calif. Varela, from Yucaipa, Calif., is not the negatively stereotyped corps member, since she has been committed to becoming a teacher since she was 5 years old and identifies as non-white. Her presence in TFA defies the stereotype given that all corps members of the program are white students from wealthy back- grounds and use TFA to boost their credentials. Varela, like many new corps members, was placed in a charter school; the school is called Hybrid High, located directly in downtown. She doesn’t see her role as strengthening the public education system but instead seeks to re-innovate how the system operates in or- der to best meet the needs of “her kids.”

She sees charter schools as the answer.

“At this charter school these people are desperately committed to doing what they can to change the lives of these kids, and we’re persistently changing our model and changing how we do things,” said Varela. “When I think about the public education system and the bureaucracy of LAUSD, [it] does not do that.”

Charter schools, though still publicly funded, operate as a businesses and are privately managed. With public funds, many charter schools are still serving the students who would be taken in by the public school sys- tem. At Hybrid High, 68 percent of the student body is Hispanic, 24 percent African-American, 5 percent identify as Other and 3 percent Caucasian. Of the student body, 94 percent receive free lunches which denotes that their family’s economic status is below the federal poverty line.

At this school a model of “hybrid learning” has been established that emulates a model where students spend half of the time in an instructional lecture and the other half independently on an online learning module. Even the classrooms are set up differently than a typical class so as to facilitate individual learning preferences for the students. The rooms are sectioned according to whether a student wants to be working in a group with other students, by oneself, or with the teacher’s guidance.

As for what TFA does to counter- balance racial inequality in the education system, Varela confirms TFA’s 2015 growth plan “to place a particular priority on recruiting and developing individuals who share the racial and economic backgrounds of our students.”

“I wouldn’t be a part of this if it wasn’t the case,” said Varela.

Solidarity

Conversations facilitated by TFA in bi-monthly regional meetings typically focus on issues of systemic racism and critical pedagogy—dialogue which is already articulated daily through interactions with fellow school staff, with students and with the hurdles the teachers slam up against when working on improvement and change for a student’s education.

“I think I have spent a lot of time around white people who don’t recognize their privilege and once they do recognize their privilege, they get stuck in guilt, but guilt is not the end of the story,” said Varela. “The people I have met through TFA are slowly moving towards solidarity so that it’s not, ‘I feel bad about this or feel bad for you,’ but, ‘I am in solidarity with you.’”

The number of TFA corps members dispersed throughout the country has exponentially grown since its founding, and has the intent of growing further. Varela, however, along with her other staff members hope that individuals such as themselves won’t be the ones to educate the communities TFA operates in for the next generations to come. The hope is that their students now, through the help of TFA, will be the ones who return to be the educators within their own communities.

“They can have my job, I don’t belong here, I’m the outsider,” said Varela, “I don’t belong in this school because the people from their com- munity belong in this school—these kids can equip their own communities.”

One should be critical of TFA, just as the corps members who embody it are while in the program. However, if one follows the rabbit trail long enough, the name “Teach for America” turns into faces like Veronica Varela who couldn’t wait for an organization or government program to come along in order for there to be a “better” way to work towards education reform. TFA is the only organization of its kind on a national level that is active in low-income schools in the way it is, and on a national level, the kids can’t wait.