USAS is the country’s largest student labor organization. The group’s main gripes with TFA and its Peace Corps-like model for American education, bringing college students—most from elite universities—to teach for a short period of time in some of the country’s poorest school districts, are that it is inadequately training teachers and promoting a for-profit, anti-union education reform agenda.
Virtually all labor organizations face the expanded challenge of recruiting and maintaining members in already unionized workplaces where the decision to provide financial support for the union has, for better or worse, become voluntary.
Civilians need to understand-- the biggest problem with the destruction of tenure is not that a handful of teachers will lose their jobs, but that entire buildings full of teachers will lose the freedom to do their jobs well.
Adapted from a longer piece in the current issue of New Politics (see link below). Fighting corporate education reform is less about restoring the old system to its former glory than building a just one for the first time.
The new president of the largest teachers union in the country will become the voice of roughly 3 million teachers at perhaps the most critical moment in the National Education Association’s history. First item on the agenda: Win back the public.
The new president of the largest teachers union in the country will become the voice of roughly 3 million teachers at perhaps the most critical moment in the National Education Association’s history. First item on the agenda: Win back the public.
Critics say that charter schools—publicly funded but run by private organizations—are being used as a means to privatize public education at the expense of the vast majority of students. They say the charter movement is a Trojan-horse riding under the guise of school choice, used as an instrument to break teachers unions.
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