Comment Rescue: Seattle Watch Out! It's aLIVE!

Frederika Jenner has left a new comment on your post "Seattle Public Schools Community Blog Looks at TFA...":


Seattle needs to watch out. We already know what it takes to get TFA into Delaware schools. It happened to Red Clay. Here's what I posted on the Seattle blog:

"Just in time for halloween: It..is..aLIVE! It wants to suck your blood! Let's get our butts down to the school board meeting on Wednesday. Bring the garlic, mirrors and the sunlight of rationality."

This is perfect, and I and other local union leaders wish that we had known that TFA was making in-roads into Delaware before they got their fangs into our legislators and the former Red Clay superintendent signed a contract for a three-year gig with TFA. We would have been down there lobbying our legislature not to pass changes in the teacher licensing laws that then allowed TFA into our schools. By the end of next school year, Red Clay will have paid an additional $240,000 for the privilege of hiring a total of twelve TFA corps members to work in our schools. The Wilmington NJ continues to cast TFA corps members as volunteers in our schools when nothing could be further from the truth. Meanwhile the TFAers each get a full teacher salary and full teacher benefits, as well as a free masters degree in educational leadership--NOT A TEACHING DEGREE--and a handy $8500 stipend at the end of their two years to further their educations. And, what do we get? We get twelve inexperienced, untrained, uncertified, unqualified college graduates to teach our students when we don't even have a teacher shortage. Plus, we get 12 out-of-work or newly graduated trained teachers who do not get a job, and our PROFESSION takes another hit. I am profoundly concerned about the deprofessionalization of teaching--my own 38-year career-choice and profession. Teaching is not a job that can be done well by just anyone.

We got snookered. Do not let it happen to your schools.