Teach For Canada: Teacher Concerns
Richard Beaudry
LTA 1st Vice-President
January 20, 2014
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Looking at Teach for America
• Name: Teach for America
• Founded in 1989
• Mission: “Eliminate educational inequity by
enlisting high-achieving recent college
graduates and professionals to teach”.
• Timeframe for teacher recruits: 2 years
• Where: in low-income communities
throughout the US.
Teach for America – Recruits and Financing
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1989 – 500 new recruits in 6 regions in the US
2012 – 5,800 new recruits in 46 regions in the US
Funding in 2003 - $29.8 Million
Funding in 2012 - $244 million
TFA’s total assets topped $350 million, including
$100,000,000 in support from the Broad, Walton
and Gates Foundations who are leading
bankrollers of school privatization and
standardized testing across the US.
Two recent examples of high numbers
of TFA teachers being hired
• Chicago, where 850 public school teachers
were laid off and replaced by 350 TFA teachers
• New Orleans, where the district laid off 7,500
school staff, converted most of its schools to
charter schools and expanded its TFA teaching
staff from 85 to 375.
Costing TFA Teachers
• Districts in the US pay thousands of dollars in
fees to the TFA as well as pay for teacher
salaries, at the expense of regular public
school teachers who see their numbers
diminish.
Impact of TFA
• The program replaces experienced teachers with
brand-new employees who have had only five weeks of
training during the summer and are brought in at
beginners' salary levels.
• Since 2009, union leaders have seen an increase in
school systems across the US lay off teachers and then
hire Teach For America college grads due to a contract
they signed.
• Teach For America brings in "the least-prepared and
the least-experienced teachers" into low-income
schools and makes them "the teacher of record.
Teacher Concerns
• Implicit in Teach for America's approach is the
insidious assumption that anyone who knows
a subject and is willing to be with kids can
teach – with little training.
• There is an elitist overtone to the structure of
TFA, a belief that the best and the brightest
can make a difference in the lives of children
who are less fortunate, even when they are
not professionally prepared to do so.
TFA Teacher Concerns
• Members and alumni have raised grave
concerns about the quality of their training
program and the lack of a support network.
• There are concerns with the TFA diversity
training sessions - the majority of TFA corps
members are white while 90%of their
students are racial minority students.
Biggest Issue
• TFA enjoys a cozy relationship with the corporatedriven “education reform” movement, which
advocates standardization, privatization, “school
choice,” charter schools and merit pay as
solutions to what ails inner-city schools.
• These deep-pocketed “reformers” oppose
teacher unions, painting them as the root of all
problems in education, and tend to ignore or
downplay un-glamorous but important structural
issues like poverty and racism.
Introducing Teach for Canada
• Founded in 2013
• Co-founded by Adam Goldenberg (BA
Harvard) and Kyle Hill (PhD Oxford).
• Mission: Together, we can make Canadian
education more equal.
• Solution: Offer a program that would send
university graduates (from any degree
program) to work as schoolteachers for two
years in aboriginal communities.
TFC trying to separate itself from TFA
• TFC insists it is not “just Teach for America in
Canada.”
• TFC’s own focus is on rural and Aboriginal
communities.
• TFC notes its training program lasts “an entire
summer,” compared to TFA’s five weeks.
Teach for Canada compared to Teach
for America
• The main thrust of TFC and TFA – sending
inexperienced but inexpensive teachers into the
toughest classrooms – is the same.
• TFC purports to address a problem with
teacher supply in rural and Aboriginal communities,
the real problem in these communities is
teacher attrition.
• TFC co-founder Kyle Hill’s employer, the Boston
Consulting Group, is a firm with its fingers in school
corporatization initiatives all over the US.
TFC and the lack of educational expertise
• Noticeably absent from the TFC board is anyone
with any expertise in the field of education.
• None of the directors has ever been a teacher,
nor has any degree from a faculty of education.
• Hill and co-director Christie Kneteman list
“volunteer” summer teaching on their resumes,
in Jamaica/Ukraine and Ghana respectively.
TFC’s desire to work in Aboriginal
communities is of particular concern
• It’s true that there are inequalities between
education on reserves and in urban centres in
Canada.
• The idea that the solution is to parachute
inexperienced, mostly non-Indigenous people
into schools in these communities ignores the
fact that Aboriginal communities have been
leading the fight for decades to take their
children’s education into their own hands.
Aboriginal Concerns
• Governments have responded to Aboriginal
people’s demands for control over education
with inertia and paternalism.
• Per-student funding for students on reserve
remains lower than students in provincial
schools; a gap which is increasing.
The Canadian Government and the
First Nations Education Act
• The federal government’s recent First Nations
Education Act has been criticized for not
allocating sufficient funding to allow for
meaningful local control over education.
• Native leaders argue that the proposed
legislation doesn’t go far enough – tackling
neither inadequate funding nor the relevancy
of the curriculum.
Teacher Concerns
• Teach For Canada currently is working with
universities (the same ones that accredit
teachers) and provincial Ministries of Education
to find ways to get accreditation for TFC recruits,
or to allow graduates without teaching degrees
to replace certified teachers.
• Teach For Canada’s directors are slick marketers
and apparently well-connected.
• The TFC launch was attended by Peter
Mansbridge and Indigo CEO Heather Reisman.
What is needed
• Slick marketing isn’t what’s needed to fix
educational inequities in Canada.
• What is required is adequate funding for public
education, a commitment to Aboriginal-led
education on reserves, and the addressing of
systemic issues such as racism, poverty and
inequality.