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Saturday, June 2, 2012

Seattle Schools Community Forum: TFA's Tactics Within SPS

Seattle Schools Community Forum: TFA's Tactics Within SPS:


TFA's Tactics Within SPS

As we have previously explained at this blog, TFA is not a teaching corps development program.   They certainly want their members to stay in education (but the majority do not remain teachers).  They want them to be principals, superintendents, administrators, School Board members and even, yes, deans of colleges of education.  And not to mention, to find a place on the  stage of national and state administrators and elected officials.

Now this is interesting because you can go to their website and there's a lot of blah, blah about "join our movement" but not specifics about what their ed agenda is.  I think you need the TFA secret handshake for that but given a huge number of TFA core members teach in charter schools, I think it's safe to say TFA is ed reform all the way.

So how does this work in practice?

Well, an explanation can be found in e-mails from within SPS and TFA.  To whit, conversations between Hamilton principal, Chris Carter, and former chripy local TFA recruiter, Janis Ortega.

Ms. Ortega wrote to Mr. Carter in October of 2010, asking to meet him as yes, he is a former TFAer.