Category Archives: Students

BC school district adopts anti-homophobia policy #bcpoli #bced #yteubc #ubced

ABOUT A THIRD OF ALL BC SCHOOL DISTRICTS HAVE A SIMILAR POLICY IN PLACE

Renee Bernard, News1130, November 15, 2013– The largest school district in the province will become the latest to adopt an anti-homophobia policy.

Surrey school board trustees have voted unanimously to embrace the new anti-discrimination code.

Gioia Breda of the Surrey Teachers Association worked on the document and says it’s an important philosophical statement to support students facing homophobic bullying.

“You can compare students who experience racism, for example. When they go home, those students have parents who are often supportive and sympathize, whereas LGBTQ youth may not have come out to their parents,” she explains.

She calls it a pro-active code.

“It offers a positive and inclusive curriculum, more sexual health education for LGBTQ youth, and education for administrators, staff and counsellors about LGBTQ issues.”

She says the policy is designed to protect both students and staff.

Just over a decade ago, the school board made national headlines in its fight to ban books featuring same-sex couples, a policy it eventually changed.

The board’s anti-bullying code was adopted with relative ease, compared to the situation in Burnaby a few years ago, when that school board encountered protests from parents.

About a third of all BC school districts have anti-homophobic bullying policies in place.

Read More: News1130

Students say “We’re young, not stupid:” Keep big oil out of our schools #bced #yteubc #bcpoli #DavidSuzuki #occupyeducation

pump jack writes curriculum

This is what you call genuine pro-activism. Barely a month into its launch of Energy IQ (yes, “IQ”), Canadian Geographic is sheepishly back-pedalling and having to answer to students. Energy IQ is to be The Energy Curriculum for the entire nation. The first hint that something was suspect about this was the photo gallery in the June Canadian Geographic Magazine that featured and introduced the new Energy IQ curriculum. As if the author of the curriculum, the proud Pump Jack, “iconic symbol of the West,” dominates. Is this is a curriculum about, for, and from BIG power?

That’s the question students in Vancouver are asking as they join forces with Power Shift, a green grass roots environmental movement. “We’re young, not stupid,” they say, “Keep big oil out of our schools.” The students’ Open Letter and petition are generating international interest and momentum. Dear CAPP, the students write: “The Energy IQ program is of serious concern to us as current high school students, specifically because of its inherent corporate bias and the ideals it will promote…. Propaganda has no place in our schools.” The high school activists currently have over 600 supporters signed on to the petition and were featured by the CBC (tv and radio) on 14 November.

The two student-activists at the front of the protest, Sophia and Sydney, note that “We just believe we should not have corporations in our public classrooms” “It’s just not saying the full truth and we really believe that it shouldn’t be used in the classrooms.”

And this pro-activism is excellent timing, as the new Pump Jack curriculum begins to make its way into the schools. Just as oil and gas dominate clean energy in Canada, the students are asking why Pump Jack is behind the Energy IQ Curriculum.

Yes, teachers and students can criticize the curriculum and politically remix it, but prior questions are those the students are asking, whether Pump Jack ought to be authoring and issuing curriculum for the schools. Or why is Canadian Geographic joined with Pump Jack?

Or what in the world is going on with the Geography curriculum? The Pump Jack curriculum is linked to the Canadian National Standards for Geography, but the energy and economics Standards within might as well have been written by Pump Jack itself. The word “capitalism,” Pump Jack’s child and daddy (go figure) economic system for a century, does not appear in the Standards. For the Environment and Society standard, students can “Speculate on the environmental consequences of a major long-lasting energy crisis (e.g., high/low crude oil prices),” and maybe speculating is enough. Surely, documenting and acting on climate change need not be a standard. Of course, “climate change” does not appear in the Standards either.

Invented in Oil City (it’s true) in 1913, Pump Jack is celebrating its 100th birthday this year so maybe it is appropriate that it authors and teaches the global Energy IQ curriculum. Happy Birthday Pump Jack! Remember the combination: 40-31-24-5.

BC gov wasted $66-million over 12 years on failed aboriginal child services #bcpoli #bced #yteubc #idlenomore

Lindsay Kines, Victoria Times Colonist, November 6, 2013– The B.C. government’s failed attempt to reform the aboriginal child welfare system during the past 12 years has wasted nearly $66 million without helping a single child, the province’s child watchdog says in a new report.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond accuses the government and aboriginal organizations of blowing money on consultants, pointless research projects and endless meetings that go nowhere and deliver no tangible results.

“To be blunt, a significant amount of money has gone to people who provide no program or service to directly benefit children,” she writes in her 86-page report, When Talk Trumped Service.

More than half the money was spent on a failed effort to set up Regional Aboriginal Authorities, while the rest went to self-governance initiatives in the Ministry of Children and Family Development that bled money away from front-line services, the report says.

Turpel-Lafond said the “colossal failure of public policy” took place at a time when many aboriginal children have no safe place to live and no help coping with violence, abuse, mental illness and learning disabilities.

“Children and youth deserve better, and the best contrition for this rather shameful debacle would be a real effort to improve the outcomes for those children by actually knowing what they require and what works to support them — to stop directing the money into the big theoretical fixes, and instead shore up the front lines of the system, especially in those places where the paved roads end in B.C.,” the report says.

Turpel-Lafond spares no one in her report, noting that aboriginal organizations — particularly political groups — have been willing participants in the fiasco.

“Whether this is because they have been so overburdened by so many agendas . . . or if they believe that they are actually making progress, the representative is unsure,” the report says.

The report urges the Ministry of Children and Family Development to refocus its energy on delivering front-line services to children and leave discussions about a self-government to the Attorney General.

Turpel-Lafond said Children’s Minister Stephanie Cadieux has indicated that she was unaware of the problems.

Cadieux, who is slated to speak with reporters this afternoon, issued a statement in which she said the ministry agrees with Turpel-Lafond’s findings and recommendations.

“We know our focus needs to be on providing direct services to aboriginal children and families,” the statement said. “That’s why, two years ago, the newly appointed deputy minister began the process of shifting the focus of contracts from governance to service delivery.”

All aboriginal contractors have been told that future contracts will focus on direct services, Cadieux said.

She denied, however, that the money spent over the past decade was wasted. “Our efforts to build relationships with First Nations communities have established a solid foundation for government as it continues to move forward on the development of government structures.”

Read More: Victoria Times Colonist

All forms of hands-on play banned at BC kindergarten #NoMoreTag #bced #yteubc #occupyeducation

One might find a ban on “all forms of hands-on play… This includes tag, holding hands, and any and all imaginary fighting games,” in no Funcouver, especially if the Sedin brothers are on a penalty kill (some Canucks fans will assess a 5 minute major to me here), but who’d thunk it on a kindergarten playground in Aldergrove? That’s correct, no more tag on this playground. No holding hands either.

Here’s the letter from administrators at Coghlan Elementary sent home in the children’s backpacks:

Coghlan Fundamental Elementary SCHOOL (SD35)

November 1, 2013
Dear Kindergarten Families,

Over the past couple of weeks during outside play time, we have had a number of injuries as a result of various games and types of hands-on play. This has impacted the safety of all the children outside.

Consequently, we have unfortunately had to ban all forms of hands-on play for the immediate future. This includes tag, holding hands, and any and all imaginary fighting games. “Star Wars” games have been particularly difficult for the Kindergarten children to remember to keep their hands to themselves. We will have a zero-tolerance policy with regards to hands-on play, resulting in the missing of playtime and trips to the office for those who are unable to follow the rules.

If you could please help to remind your child about keeping his or her hands to themselves, and reinforce other imaginary games (rather than fighting games) it would really help us to get the message across.

 We really appreciate your cooperation and support in this matter.

 

Read More: CBC

BC elementary school bans touching at recess #NoMoreTag #bced #yteubc #occupyeducation

Letter to parents: Aldergrove school says policy prompted by playground injuries

Gordon McIntyre & Ian Austin, The Province, November 5, 2013– You’ve heard the Alice Cooper lyrics “no more pencils, no more books … .” For kindergarten kids at Coghlan Fundamental Elementary School, tucked away in a remote rural area of Aldergrove, it’s no more tag, no holding hands, or you’ll get teacher’s dirty looks.

A letter went out to Coghlan kindergarten students’ parents on Friday, one of those types that often sit in backpack over a weekend or are put aside to be read later and somehow never are.

Julie Chen found the letter, explaining a new no-touch policy for kindergarten students, on Monday morning as she was packing lunch for her five-year-old daughter.

It reads, in part: “We have unfortunately had to ban all forms of handson play for the immediate future … we will have a zero-tolerance policy.”

Penalties for making physical contact with a schoolmate include being grounded during play time and/or a trip to the office “for those who are unable to follow the rules.”

“I read the letter, it said there had been quite a few injuries, I said, ‘OK,’ and kept reading,” Chen said. “When I saw no hands-on would be allowed, I just got mad, I got so upset.

“What is happening in our society when our kids aren’t even allowed to be kids any more? “Kids get hurt all the time. What are we going to do next, put them in a bubble to go to school?” Chen said she talked to other moms on Monday and most hadn’t read the letter. Based on what Chen told them, she said, they were appalled.

“I’m not going to tell my daughter she can’t push her friends on the swing,” Chen said. “Do we expect our kids to be robots? How can they possibly do this? They’re five-yearolds – you can’t stop them from running around and having physical contact.”

Read More: The Province

Some still consider social justice in schools to be “indoctrination” #bced #yteubc #occupyeducation

Perhaps not too surprising all things considered in BC, the Social Justice 12 course continues to be dismissed as indoctrination. One one hand, it’s not surprising given the swing right over the past dozen years in the province. On the other, any subject or course that is not one of the official nine (i.e., art, careers, applied skills, language, math, music, physical education, science, socials) is nearly doomed to skepticism or marginalization. In the Surrey Leader, Tom Fletcher belittles the course as  “student indoctrination” and curriculum activities endorsed by the BCTF as “one-sided caricatures:”

Their buzzword is “social justice,” which is portrayed by leftists as superior to plain old justice, in ways that are seldom defined. So what exactly are the goals of this “social change”? Here’s some of what I’ve gleaned.

Parents may recall the 2008 introduction of an elective high school course called Social Justice 12. This was mainly the result of intense protest by a couple of gay activist teachers, and the ministry curriculum describes its emphasis on inclusion of racial, cultural and sexual differences…. BCTF bosses love to talk about the importance of “critical thinking.” These one-sided caricatures of Nike, Enbridge and other familiar villains seem designed to produce the opposite.

Today’s follow-up response to the column reiterates the conservative, anti-union politics at hand:

Great column. I consider this one as one of the most important ones that Tom Fletcher has written, alongside the one about “science gives way to superstition”.

If the B.C. Teachers’ Federation advocates a collectivist ideology such as socialism, the chances of saving our children from the influence of dangerous, very militant, egalitarian philosophy are slim.

Like it or not, the BCTF is one of the most astute, successful labor unions in the country and Social Justice 12 stands as the single-most progressive curriculum innovation in BC over the past 25 years. Given its origins in the passionate commitments to education by a courageous, gay couple, tenuous existence and tests in and out of courts for almost a decade, conservative challenges to deny enrolment in certain districts, and a challenge to the official curriculum, the course triumphed. This was against nearly all odds. Social Justice 12 is that important– not as content per se but as an example and precedent that curriculum can be transformative and transformed.

And the lesson is this simple: Through its professionalism, insights, and yes, politics, BCTF finds the way, opens the doors, and welcomes these necessary additions to an overly officious curriculum. In that way, the BCTF’s social justice politics and the course are refreshing for a change in this province.

The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: new issue of Workplace #occupyeducation #bced #yteubc

The Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES) is extremely pleased to announce the launch of Workplace Issue #22, “The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students” (Guest Editors Bradley J. Porfilio, Julie A. Gorlewski & Shelley Pineo-Jensen).

 The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students

Articles:

  • The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: Introduction to the Special Issue (Brad Porfilio, Julie Gorlewski, Shelley Pineo-Jensen)
  • Dismissing Academic Surplus: How Discursive Support for the Neoliberal Self Silences New Faculty (Julie Gorlewski)
  • Academia and the American Worker: Right to Work in an Era of Disaster Capitalism? (Paul Thomas)
  • Survival Guide Advice and the Spirit of Academic Entrepreneurship: Why Graduate Students Will Never Just Take Your Word for It (Paul Cook)
  • Standing Against Future Contingency: Activist Mentoring in Composition Studies (Casie Fedukovich)
  • From the New Deal to the Raw Deal: 21st Century Poetics and Academic Labor (Virginia Konchan)
  • How to Survive a Graduate Career (Roger Whitson)
  • In Every Way I’m Hustlin’: The Post-Graduate School Intersectional Experiences of Activist-Oriented Adjunct and Independent Scholars (Naomi Reed, Amy Brown)
  • Ivory Tower Graduates in the Red: The Role of Debt in Higher Education (Nicholas Hartlep, Lucille T. Eckrich)
  • Lines of Flight: the New Ph.D. as Migrant (Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim)

The scope and depth of scholarship within this Special Issue has direct and immediate relevance for graduate students and new and senior scholars alike. We encourage you to review the Table of Contents and articles of interest.

Our blogs and links to our Facebook timelines and Twitter stream can be found at https://blogs.ubc.ca/workplace/ and https://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/

Thank you for your ongoing support of Workplace,

Sandra Mathison, Stephen Petrina & E. Wayne Ross, co-Directors
Institute for Critical Education Studies
Critical Education

Quebec teachers’ group calls Charter of Values extremist #bced

CTVNews, September 4, 2013– An organization of Quebec teachers is calling the Parti Quebecois’ so-called “Quebec Values” charter extremist, warning it could hinder some teachers’ right to work if they aren’t permitted to wear such religious garb as hijabs, kippas, turbans or crosses.

The Federation Autonome de L’Enseignment, or FAE, denounced the proposed charter on Wednesday, saying they support secular values but that individuals have the right to religious expression.

“The right of our members to work is at stake,” FAE president Sylvain Mallette told a news conference.

Quebec has come under fire from a number of rights groups over the proposed charter, which would seek to restrict public employees from wearing religious symbols in the workplace, including in schools, daycares and hospitals.

Premier Pauline Marois is expected to announce the legislation early next week.

Mallette says the FAE — a 32,000-strong organization of eight public teachers’ unions — supports secular values such as removing prayer from schools and regulating religious holidays. But she added the legislation slated to be tabled by the Parti Quebecois is something else altogether.

“It is hypocritical to legislate a charter of secular values beneath a religious icon,” said Mallette, calling on the provincial government to remove the crucifix that has been hanging in National Assembly since 1936.

Mallette also called for the provincial government to remove subsidies for religious schools, which make up half of the private schools in Quebec.

“The right to believe does not translate to unequal treatment and preferential rights,” Mallette said.

The FAE is only the latest group to chime in against the proposed charter.

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne both spoke out against the proposal earlier this week.

Nenshi said that residents of all faiths are welcome in his city, while Wynne said that diversity is the key to Ontario’s strength.

Read more: CTVNews

The final “Year of Teacher Education” in BC as we know it #bced #bcpoli #bced #education #yteubc

The most recent indicator that this will be the final “Year of Teacher Education” in BC as we know it is of course the news that brought the 2012-13 school year to an end, inaugurated the summer, and launches the new term. The news rocking the education nation is the Ontario Liberal government’s statement on Modernizing Teacher Education, released on June 5, 2013:

The new Ontario government and the Ontario College of Teachers are modernizing teacher education in the province beginning September 2015. In addition to expanding the program to two years, admissions will be reduced by 50 per cent starting in 2015. This will help address an oversupply of graduates, enabling Ontario’s qualified teachers to find jobs in their chosen field. [see Minister of Education Liz Sandals’ remarks]

For all the new teachers-to-be out there, “this will help address an oversupply of graduates” and enable “qualified teachers to find jobs.” Let’s do the math here…

Depending on your politics, Modernizing Teacher Education is either welcome and overdue, or an attack on young teachers. As Andrew Langille countered on the Youth and Work blogModernizing Teacher Education amounts to a “massive policy blunder:”

The Government of Ontario cynically decided to let universities peddle the impossible dream of becoming a teacher to thousands of students. This is how we arrived at this morning’s announcement – sustained inaction combined with frankly stupid advice from senior bureaucrats in multiple ministries over a decade – with young workers taking a hit due to the rank incompetence of their elders and leaders.

The same processes have underwritten teacher education in BC for over a decade, with admission totals simply defaulted to a quota for tuition dollars and promises of a job market demand for teachers that never materializes, as more and more graduates queue up for substitute, “teacher on call” (TOC) jobs dependent on 5:30 am phone rings to put a meager amount of bread on the next morning’s table.

The same policy blunders seem to apply in the throes of a tanking economy in BC as well, with recurrent cuts to education funding, incentives to privatize or fuel competition between public and independent or private schools, measures to erode, limit, or cut salaries and wages of public sector employees, disintegration of respect for public sector employee bargaining rights, and a sustained degradation of respect for teachers as professionals and intellectuals and as members of an effective union.

The same reactions among teacher education administrators seem to apply again, but now there is an admission that the era of denial of surplus or glut of teachers in BC is over. Following the Ontario Liberals’ announcement of 5 June, SFU Dean Kris Magnusson acknowledged: “I’d be surprised if there is a specific agenda to make some changes [in BC] but I think there’s a will to explore that supply-demand equation.”

It’s acknowledgments like this and changes like those in Ontario that point to significant changes in teacher education in BC as we know it. Although at UBC, we’ve not yet heard a candid acknowledgement of policy blunders and we are still insistent that this remains the era of “Showcasing the very best of what we do in the Faculty of Education for teacher education!

Nonetheless, this is Vancouver and time for a little rain on the UBC Faculty of Education’s parade and crashing the party. It is time to acknowledge that the teacher surplus is no longer a conversation piece removed from the Teacher Education Office’s dialogue on what it means to be or become a teacher.

Teach for America Apostates: A Primer of Alumni Resistance

Owen Davis, Truthout, August 2, 2013– Brianna stands beside the conductor’s podium in the band hall of Chicago’s Uplift High School. An engrossed audience is packed on the risers. Mirrored sunglasses obscure her expression, and her only sign of nervousness is in the movement of her hands, clasping and unclasping before her.

Brianna was a public school student in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. In the wake of the flood, whole neighborhoods were destroyed. Approximately 1,300 people had died and hundreds of thousands were yet to return. Amid all this, she had faith her schools would weather the storm.

Instead, she found that her school was one of the many consolidated into charter schools, which draw public funds but are privately managed. Thousands of school employees had been fired (a move later ruled illegal), and many of the replacements were young, lightly trained recruits from Teach for America. By 2007, nearly half of the city’s teachers were in their first three years of teaching. TFA became embedded in the fabric of the district, and one in three New Orleans students can now call a TFA recruit their teacher.

Brianna was vexed by her young new teachers, who were adversarial and fixated on data. “Everything was taken away,” Brianna said. “And then the teachers don’t even care about you.”

Complicating matters, many of the new teachers in the majority-black district were white and unfamiliar with the community. Indeed, the replacement of veteran teachers has decreased by one-third the percentage of black teachers in the district. In the novice classrooms, Brianna saw “a power dynamic type of thing,” in which bald racial hierarchies arose where classroom management failed. The teachers focused less on building relationships, more on “numbers, numbers, numbers.”

The students returned the teachers’ animus. Disciplinary actions spiked. Brianna tells of students being cuffed by police and pulled from classrooms, of classes dwindling and incarceration rising. Today, the Recovery School District boasts an out-of-school suspension rate that’s four times the national average.

Who was this corps of new teachers, so combative in their approach? Why their obsession with numbers? Whence the startling admission, “I’m here for two years, then I’m out”?

Only later would Brianna learn that they were recruited through Teach for America, a nonprofit that places thousands of new teachers in high-needs schools every year. They come armed with five weeks of summer training, committed to two years in the classroom. Founded by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp in 1989, TFA now has some 28,000 alumni throughout the country.

“Organizing Resistance to Teach for America and its Role in Privatization”
Now, some of those alumni are denouncing the organization. They make up part of the group squeezed into a high school band hall to hear Brianna denounce their ilk. It’s the first time many of them have heard this perspective.

The event, called “Organizing Resistance to Teach for America and its Role in Privatization,” took place during the Free Minds, Free People conference from July 11-14, in Chicago. It aimed “to help attendees identify the resources they have as activists and educators to advocate for real, just reform in their communities.” Namely, resisting TFA.

The summit didn’t drop from the sky fully formed. A group of New Orleans-based parent-activists, former students, non-TFA teachers and TFA alumni collaborated for months to arrange it.

Complementing their critique is a small but growing group of TFA dissidents and apostates who’ve taken their concerns to the press. Even as TFA marches into more and more classrooms throughout the country and world, a burgeoning group of heretics is nailing its theses to the door. But why are they speaking up just now?

Altruist-Turned-Skeptic Gary Rubenstein
When Gary Rubinstein joined TFA in 1991, he was motivated largely by the fact that it was “a big thing to do.” Altruism played a part – “I’m a nice person, I do care,” he says – but the novelty of it enthralled him. It was “partly like going to another country.”
In his case, that great unknown was Houston. At the time, there existed a genuine teacher shortage in Houston, as in other cities. Class sizes were enormous, and students saw strings of long-term substitutes instead of full-time teachers. TFA’s foot soldiers were greeted warmly.

A wry double-major in math and philosophy with a predilection for “David Sedaris-style” writing, Rubinstein assumed his enthusiasm and subject knowledge would translate to successful teaching. Instead, his classes were unruly and his teaching haphazard. He recalls a particular lesson in which he gave students measuring tape and told them “go measure stuff,” only to find them measuring, “let’s just say, parts of their own anatomy.”

Rubinstein found that without classroom management, it didn’t matter “how much you knew or how much you cared about the kids.” So he became a martinet. He considers himself one of the first “no excuses” teachers, subscribing to a brand of unwavering discipline many charter schools now espouse.

He recorded his observations on classroom management (now a book), and decided to put together a guide for incoming corps members he considered underprepared. He asked Wendy Kopp in an elevator for her blessing, which she granted. (They’re no longer on such amicable terms.)

Rubinstein has questioned TFA’s training model, a five-week training course called Institute, for two decades. In 1995, by then a veteran teacher by TFA standards, he began leading a workshop on classroom management, partly an excuse to splash cold water on the faces of the dewy-eyed idealists. “TFA is not giving you the real story,” he’d tell the recruits. “They’re trying to shield you from reality.” He delivered that pep talk for 11 years.

Until relatively recently, Rubinstein’s criticisms were relegated to the training he considers so inadequate, “it’s offensive.” Otherwise, he admired the thrust of TFA’s mission. He even recruited for TFA at his alma mater, Tufts. But after attending the 20-year TFA anniversary summit in 2010, his critique deepened. It wasn’t long before he wrote the blog post that made his name and initiated a genre: “Why I Did TFA, and why you shouldn’t.”

“Scrap the Map” Teacher Activist Jesse Hagopian “Did” Teach for America
It’s not common knowledge that Jesse Hagopian “did” Teach for America. “I don’t always divulge that,” he admits. The TFA badge is notoriously useful in landing jobs at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, but it lends little cred among activists. Hagopian is of the latter camp.

He’s better known for helping to organize the successful “Scrap the MAP” campaign at Garfield High School, in Seattle, where he teaches history and advises the Black Student Union. With the support of students and parents, the teachers there boycotted the state standardized test, faced down sanctions and eventually secured the right to forgo the test. Hagopian still glows when he talks about it.

He graduated from Macalester College in 2001 after studying radical antiracist theory. “I just spent the last years analyzing these problems,” he remembers thinking. “What do I do with this?”
Hagopian, admittedly “politically unsophisticated” at the time, was attracted by TFA’s social justice language. During his five-week training in the Bronx, though, he quickly surmised that it “wasn’t the emancipatory project” that he’d hoped.

His friend and dorm-mate was a fellow black radical who “began raising all kinds of questions” about race within TFA’s pedagogy. TFA put him on an “improvement plan,” a set of sanctions that requires corps members to complete supplemental work on top of grueling Institute assignments. According to TFA:

In certain instances, a corps member may act in ways that interfere with the learning and progress of students, behaving in such a way as to give rise to concerns that s/he is not demonstrating our core values….

“We saw him as being targeted,” Hagopian says. The plan was “almost impossible to fulfill.” His friend was soon dismissed.
Hagopian soldiered on. “The bigger conversations about the purpose of it get lost,” he said, “because you’re trying to become a teacher in five weeks.”

When he entered a high-poverty school in Washington, D.C., he realized how truly unprepared he was. An innocuous show-and-tell turned into a litany of tragedies as students presented their mementos of male family members who were dead or in jail. Hagopian felt “overwhelming sorrow and panic,” unequipped to heal that grief or to help students grasp “why this happened to their families.”

At the same time, the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) illuminated TFA’s politics. He saw TFA “fall in lockstep” with NCLB, especially its reliance on standardized testing and the sanctions it forced on “failing schools.” Hagopian taught in a school reconstituted under NCLB guidelines. Its staff had been laid off and replaced. The new faculty might have been fresh-faced, but they were dreadfully unfamiliar with the community and its needs. TFA provided no means to address this gap; it had far more to say about data and assessments than race and inequality.

Hagopian puts it in stark terms: “there was nothing on standardized tests about how to end mass incarceration.”

Over the years, he cultivated a full critique of TFA, conveyed in part in his 2010 Seattle Times op-ed agitating against bringing TFA to Seattle. He feels that TFA “fits very nicely into an overall strategy” of privatizing education and diminishing critical thinking. Meanwhile, the organization glosses over intractable issues of race and inequality at the heart of American educational system.

Read More: Truthout