Even though Northern Arizona University associate professor, Barbara Veltri, knew the State of
Arizona was closely tied to the charter school industry and to Teach for
America (TFA), which supplies a third of the teachers in “no excuses” charter
schools, she had no idea that her published research and scholarship on TFA would
ever be slighted, denigrated, and mislabeled by her own university.
The new corporate
paternalists and the old line segregationists have much to gain from the spread
of charter schools in Arizona. White
charter schools, which make up the 48 percent of Arizona charters, are whiter
than their public counterparts; black charters are blacker; and Native American
schools charters are more Indian than the public schools that would, otherwise,
serve these students:
White
students left district elementary schools to enter charter elementary schools
that were, on average, 10 percent more white. Black elementary school students
entered charters that were, on average, 29 percent more black than the district
schools they left....Native Americans across all grade levels chose to attend
charter schools that had a higher concentration of Native Americans than the
district schools they exited. Hispanic elementary school students were the only
group that didn’t … [have] a higher percentage of students from the same ethnic
group.
The State of
Arizona, the state university system, and the Arizona Board of Regents are heavily
invested in charter schools. Some
officials earn large incomes from the charter industry, even as they continue
to work not as separate governing bodies but, seemingly, in tag teams with the
legislature, which privileges policies and funding for TFA and corporate
charter schools:
·
Jay Heiler, for instance, serves as Chairman
of the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR), while he is the current President and
founder of his own charter company in Arizona, the Great Heart Academies, which
enrolls almost 10,000 students.
·
Governor
Doug Ducey, an ex-officio member of ABOR, is a former regional board member of
Teach for America.
·
To rub salt
in the wounds of public educators of Arizona, the state legislature provided $500,000
in 2015 for TFA recruiting and support, even as the community college funding
was wiped out, while other higher education funding and K-12 funding were cut $100
million each in the budget deal.
·
Arizona
State University is listed as a Teach for America sponsor in Phoenix, and the
Mary Lou Fulton College of Education partners with TFA.
While the
white/Asian charters in Arizona boast rich liberal arts curricula, the segregative
charter schools that serve the poor, black, brown, and Indian children of
Arizona are based on the brutal “no excuses” model, TFA temps, and never-ending
test prep. As elsewhere in the U. S., Arizona’s KIPP Model charter schools have
huge teacher attrition problems that could not be sustained without a constant
infusion of inexperienced, untrained recruits from TFA.
As “no
excuses” charter teachers barely last two years on average before they are
burned out by corporate charter management demands for higher test scores and,
thus, more salable brand names, the Teach for America link is critical in the charter
industry’s human capital chain.
Even with
all this blurring of state and corporate lines, the special treatment she
received came as a surprise when Dr. Veltri submitted her latest work to the
public relations office at UNA. Twelve other
publication or conference presentations were duly noted by the PR Office on the
day that Dr. Veltri’s work was publicized, and every single one, except hers,
had the work's title along with the reference of where it was published/presented.
Why would
Dr. Veltri be treated differently than the other faculty members who submitted
their recent accomplishments? Could it have something to do with the title of
the chapter she recently contributed: “Teach for America’s Socialization and
Manipulation”?
Instead of
listing the title of her chapter, this is how the Northern Arizona University noted Dr. Veltri’s contribution:
Barbara T. Veltri, associate
professor of education, had a chapter published in Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching.
Veltri’s chapter explores supplying the needed manpower and values components
required to deal with high levels of attrition in schools.
Not only did
the university fail to list the chapter title, but the description is not close
to capturing the focus of the critical research that Veltri shared in the
chapter. To say that her chapter “explores
the needed manpower and values components required to deal with high levels of
attrition in schools” would be equivalent to saying The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was about shifting political
values in Germany in mid 20th Century.
For those
seeking more information on the TFA’s contributions to educational inequity for
poor children of color in the United States of America, they would never know
from NAU’s pablum-atic description that Dr. Veltri’s chapter deals exactly with
this problem. All the other scholarly work on the same issue that she mentions
in the chapter becomes misrepresented as well by this inaccurate description, which
means that NAU’s censorious cooptation is spread among other researchers who
are focused on similar issues.
No one wants
her work to be characterized with a summary that is unrecognizable from the work’s
intent or meaning. Dr. Veltri’s chapter is not about "supplying the needed
manpower and values components required to deal with high levels of attrition
in schools." Only a technocrat with a desire to spare the feelings of
Arizona’s corporate politicians could come up with such a disparaging and
disrespectul thumbnail summary that conceals the essence of Dr. Veltri’s work.
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