Why Professors Who Support Unions Should Bar Teach for America From Their Classes

If you are a professor, and allow Teach for America to recruit in your classroom, you are complicit with a stealth attack on the American Labor Movement.

Here's why:

In Chicago and Philadelphia, TFA has made sweetheart deals to have their Corps members hired in charter schools after hundreds of veteran union teachers have been fired when public schools have been closed. In other cities around the nation,  like Buffalo,  where this is no teacher shortage, TFA has tried to cut
the same deal.  An organization founded to address a teacher shortage in low income communities, is now, when 
no such shortage exists, actively encouraging municipalities to close public schools and replace them with charter schools so its Corps members can find jobs.

 The Teach for America leadership, whose largest single contributor is the fiercely anti-labor Walton Family Foundation, has allowed TFA to  become a replacement labor agency.

 While there are other features of Teach for America-- from its test driven pedagogy, to its refusal to extend the time commitment of its Corps members to more than two years- that are highly questionable and undermine the teaching profession, its venture into union busting and strike breaking truly places it beyond the pale.