Your article about the Student Labor Action Movement’s calls for Harvard University to cut ties with Teach For America (“Student Activist Group Calls on Faust To Sever Ties with TFA,” Sept. 28, 2014) unfortunately missed an opportunity to present the perspectives who were criticized—the countless TFA alumni now pursuing graduate degrees here at Harvard.
If SLAM members are concerned that TFA alumni only “want to teach for a few years and then go to law school or business school” to pursue lucrative careers in other fields, let me assure them otherwise. I am fortunate to count many TFA alumni among my classmates at Harvard Law School, and I continue to be struck by how they are using their time here to acquire the skills and competencies necessary to fight the opportunity gap and economic inequality more broadly.
No, they are not leading a classroom anymore. But they are spending their summers in unpaid internships with organizations like the Education Law Center and NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. They log hours in the Education Law Clinic here at Harvard, advocating for individual students touched by trauma to be given the tools they need to succeed in school.
They cross-register for classes at the Graduate School of Education and at Kennedy School that focus on education law and policy. They volunteer in local classrooms and meaningfully engage in communities like those they taught in through a whole host of student organizations and clinics.
My peers may have left their classrooms, but they have not left their students and their communities behind. Many of them—myself included—have come to law school in order to figure out how to better serve our students and their communities.
I do not disagree with some of the points made by SLAM. I do, however, urge its members to consider that having some TFA alumni move on to graduate school after time in the classroom is not a flaw of the organization.
Isabel Broer, J.D. ’16
TFA Corps Member, 2010-2012
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