In the long run, we will need many more African-American, Latino, and Native American leaders, and leaders from low-income communities, who can bring additional insight and a deeply grounded sense of urgency, and who are the most likely to inspire the necessary trust and engagement among students’ parents and community leaders.
Wendy Koff, Founder of Teach For America
Four decades after Dr. King’s death, we are a very different nation. We are a nation where the White population will become the minority in the nation’s schools in just a few years. We are a nation where nearly a fifth of public school students come from linguistic minority families. Even though there is no significant effort to desegregate our schools now, thousands of American schools, mostly in the suburbs, are going through racial and ethnic change as Black and Latino families move away from central urban areas and many city schools experience displacement of one minority by another. Since teaching is the one profession that must interact effectively and in great depth with nine-tenths of the nation’s young people, lack of training and support means, at best, lost opportunities for deeper and more effective relationships. At worst, it means being helpless in the face of serious divisions coming into our schools from the outside community. American parents, by very large majorities, want their children to grow up understanding how to relate successfully with all groups in a diverse society. For this to happen, and for our society to avoid projecting into ever larger sectors of suburbia the kinds of poor race relations and resegregation that damaged so many urban neighborhoods, teachers must have the tools to understand and relate to students and parents from all backgrounds and to help children understand the very diverse and changing society they will live in.
Gary Orfield, The Civil Rights Project at UCLA
In America, $22 trillion economy in 2019 is projected by Focus Economics, followed by China, Japan, Germany, UK and India. In this same rich America, 15 million children are born in poverty, with three grade levels behind in learning as others in rich zip code districts. While others have graduated in high school, these low income students remain at 8th grade levels, although endowed with lots of skills and talents, unharnessed by the public schools.
Where you live determines what your future will be. Live in a poor neighborhood, and your chances of graduating in college is 3%, while if you are in a rich zip code district, access to good education is higher and 71% graduate from college, according to a 2014 Teach for America video on Los Angeles.
Picture this – young teachers of multicultural backgrounds, well-spoken, articulate in framing current America’s inequalities and a concept like positionality – “is the social and political context that creates your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability status; also describes your identity influences and potentially biases, your understanding of the and outlook of the world.” I wondered how an intense self-consciousness about one’s positionality brings about social change in the classroom, addressing the present learning gaps?
For a moment, it took me back to 1980’s with organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice (formerly Asian Law Caucus, Asian Pacific American Legal Center) and Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education (APAHE) who were focused on addressing social inequalities through civil rights work and training leaders in higher learning.
I remember attending education conferences of APAHE and leaving inspired. It was empowering to listen to conference speakers: black, brown and white professors who had stellar academic achievements in the field of education, know how to teach from the ground up, and are able to speak from a wealth of experience, from praxis or actual practice, what it takes to teach with equity-centered leadership and fairness and to develop curriculums. They invited community leaders as well to speak on best practices.
They were not just buzz words, but APAHE’s conference workshops reflected teaching and leadership development content, borne out of actual leadership and educational experiences for decades and more.
It paralleled what I saw in Teach for America’s summit presentors, Sarah Ha and Ricco Siasoco, each having 15+ experiences of teaching and advocacies. It was a unique combination of seeing a former teacher of Boston College, Rico, presenting with his former student at Boston College, Sarah. They had the Teach for America’s traits of teacher corps – a positive mindset, ability to influence others with their presentations, who work with respect and humility for those who attended the summit workshop.
In a short period of time, they got folks to reflect on their past, position themselves in a collective timeline prepared by LEAP (Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics), an organization we had supported in the past.
LEAP timelines for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders first dated back to June 9, 1880 when 148 Japanese were in the continental United States.
It glaringly lacked the history of Filipinos Americans in Louisiana since the 1700s, who originated the dried shrimp industry. They were Filipino sailors under the rule of the Spanish who escaped the Spanish galleons to establish the fishing village of Saint Malo in Louisiana, “Filipinos pioneered the dried shrimp industry, the predecessor of the modern shrimp industry,” says Robert Romero, the President of the Filipino Louisiana Historical Society, “there were no refrigeration then, and after you have been catching all these shrimp, so you have to just dry them.” Manila Village, Bassa Bassa and other Gulf Coast Filipino settlements would later be credited. (Source: Rico Siasoco’s slide presentation at Summit, Jan. 2019).
This caught my attention as one of the tenets of this summit’s session on ‘Sharing our Stories: Solidarity Across AANHPI Lines of Difference’ is – “We cannot understand U.S. history without understanding Asian American history.” Dr. Erica Lee, author of the Making of Asian Americans. My challenge to Teach for America in Los Angeles is to contact LEAP and correct this significant milestone omission.
Equally valuable in the exercise is an impression that we are all coming from diverse backgrounds, previously census-profiled at 25 Asian American groups in the 1980s, to now 48 diverse groups, speaking 300+ languages, according to Sarah Ha, Senior Managing Director of National Asian American and Pacific Islander Alliances, Teach for America.
A multicultural summit of educators
What was heartening was Teach for America-Los Angeles’ summit has gathered teachers from different parts of California, some had come from Sacramento, all 136 of them, from these cultural backgrounds: Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Indian, Thai, Cambodian, Laotian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander.
The summit provided spaces for these young teachers to articulate their voices, to share their past histories and to have the agency to do so – meaning they are empowered and presumed to have the “critical literacy.”
That would mean having the facility to critically process the information they have absorbed, and apply logically to present situations and find solutions and address the problems. They go to summer-long training institute, 13 weeks and are then assigned at high – need schools by the districts that employ them, with a minimum commitment of two years.
In Manual Arts High School, a school described by a teacher as plagued by gangs, drugs and teenage pregnancy – all indicators of poverty, a Teach for America teacher said that teaching there coming from a similarly poor background like hers, enables the students to see from her life example, that they can have a different future by getting their education.
Learning Matters.TV tracked seven teachers from Teach for America for two years. One featured Lindsay Ordower – who was dedicated to her students at Douglas High School in Louisiana and came back for another year to teach. She cared that her students passed their tests, though only 40% show up daily. By dropping her expectations, she learned to connect and found out that one student was uncaring and slept in her classroom because she did not have a home. “Whatever I did to motivate that student, it still did not fill the gap, as she still was homeless.”
Dr. Robert Winmann, 2014 principal at Manual Arts High School, attested to test scores going up by 10% when he hired 12 Teach for America’ s trained teachers. He said they were pedagogically trained and had content knowledge.
Fast forward to 2018, where census officials report 250,000 undocumented children coming from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, South Korea, China, India, Philippines – how would Teach for America teach these students?
What is critical literacy?
For example, positionality is to recognize our biases, but perhaps even apply them as they teach the students in high – need communities, a term now used so as not to diminish perceiving the high potentials of students coming from low income communities, the recipients of deficient public funding, as opposed to higher income zip codes, receiving their higher share of public funding.
One teacher I know of reached her students with special educational needs by having them write their personal story and reading those stories aloud. By reading these narratives aloud, they realized their commonalities and developed higher levels of respect and empathy for one another. She also recognized there were different ways of learning, and she had to creatively find ways of connecting and reaching them so they can learn.
At high school graduation, she had a small book printed with all their stories, published through community support, and all had graduated with a sense of renewed pride for their future and their potentials. Who is that – Bianca Nicole Nepales, once at Teach for America teacher, now has been promoted to coach/supervisor to various incoming teachers, and who invited me to attend and write about this summit. Other sessions that summit were on Immigration Rights, Representation in Ethnic Studies in K-12 Curriculum, Restorative Practices and Empathy Building, De-Centering Whiteness in Upper Schools Curriculum, Recognizing and Addressing Anti-Blackness and Colorism.
Teach for America is a brainchild of Wendy Kopp, a Caucasian, native born to Texas who went to Princeton University and actualized her senior thesis. It took a seed grant of $500,000 from Ross Perot to support the initial years of Teach for America, from an initial funding of $2.5 million. It claims to have trained now 33,000 teachers, and reached 3 million kids in 34 states. These are impressive statistics and in 21 years and we humbly asked – have they made a difference? Have they produced future leaders who are culturally competent, equity-centered and fair or have they developed more self-centered, narcissist, ‘what is in it for me’ leaders who replicate problems with stubborn attitudes and sense of entitlement? Wendy Kopp claims they take on big challenges and still have at that young age the vigor to make a difference.
In 2010, Teach for America claims to have trained 46,000 recent college graduates. Its statistics vary from 40% still teaching in Teach for America to where only 20% remain in education. Its roster of alumni reveal many have used Teach for America as stepping stones for policy careers, set up their own non-profits and even their own businesses.
Wendy Kopp has since branched out from Teach for America to Teach for all, establishing the program in different countries.
In an interview with Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith on October 28, 2016, Wendy Kopp cited their rigorous acceptance rates from 2008-2013 of 11 to 15% from 6,000 applicants. She enumerated Teach for India with 13,000 applicants vying for 500 slots; Teach for Pakistan had 1000 applicants vying for 40 spots and Teach for Colombia had 2,400 folks vying for 50 to 60 spots.
The Guardian on Nov. 27, 2018 reported that “The Australian Capital Territory government has cut its ties with the controversial multimillion dollar Teach for Australia program, citing concerns about the program’s value for money. Guardian Australia can reveal the territory formally split with Teach for Australia in July this year, unhappy with the cost of the program and unconvinced it was “delivering classroom ready graduates that remain in the teaching workforce.” It was funded at $77 million, according to The Guardian.
Teach for America has gone to frontiers where the highest need of learning in poor communities is partially addressed by teachers recruited in the prime of their idealism to take on the problem to hopefully, harness their passion and leadership skills to make a difference.
Some critics assert that the teachers are not equipped nor trained to go to teaching, as they pursued non-teaching degrees, and are not the most capable. Yet, their leadership skills are what Teach for America claim are needed to transform classrooms, for teachers to become social justice leaders, once the entire classroom is educated then, all are empowered to make a change in our life.
Teach for America’s teachers became transformative leaders, given their clustered traits of perseverance, ability to influence and motivate others, and approaching others with respect and humility. They are trained to use extraordinary patterns and that to do under an aura of status and awe that teaching this way is cool, teaching the students in these high-need schools, though poor are with high potentials and reaching them gives these teachers higher levels of satisfaction to know that from an environment of high weeds, choking wild plants, a beautiful flower can be clustered with others, to give out its fragrance and vibrant flowers.