Teacher Bashing - a Two-Sided Coin

It seems that the low hanging fruit in the education discourse these days is Teach for America.  An organization which was founded to help reduce the teacher shortages in the 1990s and has persisted through the last two decades as a controversial alternative certification program.

What I find problematic is not Teach for America in and of itself, but rather the discourse surrounding Teach for America, or rather Teach for A minute as some have dubbed the organization.  Rethinking Schools has devoted a significant amount of ink its latest issue to the subject of “Resisting Teach for America.”  Let me be clear, I am not a proponent nor opponent of TFA.  I am a proponent of being able to utter the name of an organization that is in the business of educating educators who enter hundreds, if not thousands of classrooms annually, in a respectful manner.  While I agree that TFA is problematic (more on that in a moment), I find the discourse surrounding its existence and practices even more disconcerting.

One of the articles in RS highlights the type of ironic, hypocritical discourse I am speaking of.  A quote, which is highlighted in bold print in the text, argues that “we are all victims – the students, the parents, the communities and the TFA teachers themselves…”  This type of deficit thinking (e.g. we are all victims) is exactly the opposite of my experiences with TFA teachers. As a Small Schools Coordinator in a persistently dangerous and underperforming high school in South Central LA, our school was inundated with TFA teachers each fall.  Rather than be embraced by the general faculty, they were dismissed outright as “only being there for a moment” or “not knowing anything about anything” and worse. [For a better articulation of TFA experiences at my former school see Donna Foote’s excellent book Relentless Pursuit] 

Rookie pitcher carrying Hello Kitty Backpack

Sorry to go here again, but to use a sports analogy, you do not ride the rookies so much that they want to leave as soon as their first contract is up.  You want to make sure that they become an integral part of the team.  Thus, we can do two things at once - criticize TFA as an organization, and uplift those new teachers who are our colleagues in our buildings.  What is even more egregious, when I have made this statement in other forums, the response of too many veteran teachers is that Teach for America corps members are “not teachers to begin with.”  My how quickly the crabs in the barrel try to pull others down, and how quickly people forget their own first few years in the classroom.

My personal journey towards the classroom began around 1999 or so. I went into the Chicago Public Schools district office to get a form to become a substitute teacher.  Remember back then, there was no NCLB and one did not have to be “highly qualified.” Rather than being treated with respect and encouragement, I was summarily dismissed by the staff and handed a form.  I left with a bad taste in my mouth, but still a desire to teach.

Fast forward a few years, after years in politics, public relations and working with students outside the classroom and occasionally substitute teaching, I applied to Teach for America.  In the early months of 2003, after submitting a written application, I was called into an office building in downtown Chicago for an interview which consisted of a focus group discussion, a one-on-one interview and a 5 minute classroom presentation of a lesson.  At the same time I was going through the application process with TFA, I also applied to another alternative certification program, The New Teacher Project, specifically the Los Angeles Teaching Fellows (LATF).  I was also called into LATF to perform a similar job presentation, this time in Los Angeles.  I flew out with what few funds I had, with visions of entering the classroom as a history teacher. 

I was subsequently rejected from TFA and was hired into the 6-week induction program for LATF.  While I cannot concretely point to the reasons I was rejected from TFA, yet hired by a similar program, I believe that I was too “old” having been 33 years old when I interviewed rather than the norm of around 23 for Teach for America corps members and, according to a new article, perhaps too Black – see: A Racio-Economic Analysis of Teach for America.  Nonetheless, what is problematic a decade later is not that both organizations are still around (not LATF, but NTTP), but rather why does Teach for America bear the brunt of the criticism while The New Teacher Project (TNTP) gets off scot free?  It is because it is easier to critique “neophyte” young people who are straight out of college, even if they are graduating from top institutions and at or near the top of their classes , versus second or third career “veterans” who have experience in the professional world, albeit not in the formal classroom?

Many of my peers from LATF are still in the classroom a decade later.  The six-week training we experienced was as intense, perhaps more so, than any teacher education program I have encountered.  The question is, it a matter of paying “dues” through years accrued in an undergraduate teacher program, or learning the skills necessary to perform well in the classroom?  I argue, as does Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, that teacher education programs are not doing as good of a job as they can in training teachers either. 

Perhaps we need to reevaluate the “we are all victims” mantra that has permeated the discourse in public education and flip the script to we are all heroes.  Or maybe we are all learners.  Or we are all in this together.  If we do not begin to become proactive towards a positive goal, as opposed to simply being “against” an organization, educational policy, specific politician, etc…then we are going to be doomed to a continued level of educational inequity and lack of social justice we all wish to achieve.  The time for band-aid’s passing as policy reform has long since passed.  It is now time to begin to marshal our forces towards positive change by being more positive.

Quality is Job One

Back when I was growing up in Chicago, I used to describe what my mom did for a living as "teaching teachers how to teach."  Little did I, or she for that matter, know that she was also teaching her son how to teach.  Hearing story upon story of her drive up and down the length of Chicago (usually avoiding such high traffic areas such as the Kennedy or Dan Ryan) on Western Avenue or Halsted Avenue visiting her student teachers and recent graduates, I was privy to a daily report of the problems, inequities, successes and failures of 1970s-80s Chicago Public Schools from not just one side of town, but from the entire city. Hearing about such a diverse array of neighborhoods and schools was something that only in retrospect I realize was unique.  Most people only have experiences with their local schools directly, or on the peripheral, the larger system as a whole.  There are many in urban areas who have zero experience with public schools. With that background, coupled with my own practice in the classroom both in Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as my research and doctoral work in Philadelphia I should merit standing to be able to make the assertions I am about to make in this blog.  I'm sure, for some of you, my experiences will only count as an outlier or aberration.  For that, let me only say, in the words of Lonnie Rashid Lynn (aka Common), one day it'll all make sense.

I recently heard a piece on WBEZ (http://tinyurl.com/pupl9dt) about the push for teacher quality in the state of Illinois and how an unintended consequence of raising the entrance test scores on the Test of Academic Proficiency (TAP) has created a racial gap among new teachers.  Let me first say that for the past ten years I have noticed, perhaps because I've frequently been one of the few Blacks let alone males in the room, this phenomenon up close and personal.  It is an imperfect storm.  As teachers from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the same ones my mom used to mentor and teach, retire, the incoming mix of teachers has becoming increasingly monolithic.  One of the negatives (and yes, we can argue there are many more) about Teach for America is that they have contributed greatly to the "whitening" of the teaching population.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2010 (the latest numbers), the teaching population is only 7% Black. Further, even more problematic is that out of the approximately 235,000 Black teachers in the country, only 58,000 are male.  No wonder I was one of only the few in the room.  According to the documentary (which I HIGHLY recommend, American Teacher), the numbers are even more depressing.  In 1970, 34% of the teaching population was male.  In 2002, that number was 22% and today, it sits at an alarmingly low 16%. In fact, statistics such as these are the reason why it was so difficult for me to leave the classroom and start my PhD program. I didn't want to leave my students of color behind.  I came to the realization that having a PhD, and doing the type of research I intend to do will hopefully multiply myself 10 fold.

LAUSD Pay Grid

The WBEZ piece noted that in the past over 60% of Blacks passed the TAP exam.  Today that number is 17%.  As a qualitative person, I want to go beyond the numbers and try to understand what that really means.  Does it mean that there was an over-inflation of Black folk passing the test previously, and now this is a leveling out? Or does it mean that the colleges and universities are grade inflating and those wishing to enter the profession aren't as prepared as previously thought?  Is it a combination of both, neither, something else?  Those are tough questions to isolate.  What is known is that there is a problem.

In Illinois, and elsewhere, the population of white teachers has hovered between 82-85% for decades.  At the same time, we know the population of public school students, particularly in urban areas has becoming increasingly students of color (I would no longer use the word "minority" since they are clearly the majority of the school aged population).  So what can we as educators, activists and politicians do?

I strongly believe that we need a minority equivalent to Teach for America.  I also believe that we need to cease this us versus them mentality when it comes to veteran educators versus first year teachers.  I also feel that, much in the same way as there is a dearth of Black baseball players, some argue, because of the minor league system, some students of color feel as if the road to becoming a teacher is too long for the amount of pay on the front end.  Thus a program like TFA would serve as an alternative route, and of course tackling the challenge of teacher pay would be another.  Scholars such as Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond and others have also recommended a review of teacher pay.  We can no longer simply live by an outdated model of the current grid structure (see above LAUSD grid as an example).


As the Black teaching population continues to age out of the profession, I think having an honest, serious discussion of what, in the 21st century, does it mean for teachers of color to teach students of color.  In addition, let me be clear. I, by no means am disparaging white teachers who continue to serve students of color with honor and high expectations. In fact, my own schooling is littered with many such examples. Perhaps it is an expectations problem. In too many cases, for too long we have had low expectations of our teachers, and they, in turn, have had low expectations regarding their students.  When we examine good schools, two things are always present, high expectations and trust.  Let's trust that as we raise the bar for teachers, they will in turn raise the bar for their students.