Dive Brief:

• Letters in the ongoing dialogue between members of Harvard's United Students Against Sweatshops and Teach for America,stemming from questions over TFA's motives, have been published by The Washington Post.
• The exchange began after members of Harvard's Student Labor Action Movement sent a letter to university president Drew Faust, asking that he sever ties with TFA if the organization does not make massive changes.     
• The back-and-forth ends with TFA's co-director, Matt Kramer, inviting USAS activist Blake McGhghy to speak face-to-face.  

Dive Insight:

The orginal letter to Faust demanded that Teach For America only send students to areas short on teachers, that the organization provide corps members more education and training, and that it cut ties with corporations like Exxon Mobil and JPMorgan Chase that the students felt threaten teacher unions. This rhetoric is very much reiterated in their letter to TFA itself, in which many of these concerns are repeated. Evidence cited in the correspondence included Chicago's Board of Education voting to increase payments to TFA by about $1 million and add 325 new recruits from the organization at the same time the city slashed its public education budget and laid off teachers.

TFA, on the other hand, contends its program's purpose is to "meet local demand for teachers and long-term education leaders" and that the demand in many districts is the result of a significant lack of candidates for low-income schools in general, or to specific subjects and grades. The organization says its teachers take only open positions and are less than 1% of teachers in total, and that 90% are still in education or working in low-income areas. USAS, however, says that number not only lumps together various statistics. but also comes from a survey that only 23,000 TFA alumni responded to.

Ultimately, the back-and-forth highlights the need for honest statistics. If TFA is saying 90% of alumni work in education after their two years in the classroom, but only 23,000 alumni make up that statistic, what does that mean about their in-house research regarding corps members success in the classroom? Are those statistics skewed, as well? While it's great that TFA has reached out to USAS to meet in person —​ additionally inviting Randi Weingarten since the AFT has supported the efforts of the Harvard activists —​ there is a disservice in the in-person meeting: The dialog will no longer be recorded for the public.