The state's roughly $1 million contract with Teach for America, a group that channels promising college graduates into high-poverty classrooms around the country, ignited an emotional and at times strikingly personal debate at Louisiana's top governing body for education on Tuesday.
Teach for America teacher Kaitlin Friedman was photographed in August 2009 settting up her fourth-grade classroom at Joshua Butler Elementary School in Westwego.
The contract, which defrays the cost for TFA to recruit and train another 250 or so new instructors for Louisiana school districts each year, has become a perennial source of tension on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, or BESE, a kind of proxy in the broader debate over how to improve the quality of classroom instruction statewide.
Tuesday's back-and-forth, ahead of a successful finance committee vote to extend the contract another year, helped to underscore how embattled some Louisiana teachers feel about not only the state's recruitment of TFA instructors but a raft of controversial new steps aimed at measuring teacher performance and loosening job protections.
"I speak for those in the trenches," said Joyce Haynes, president of the Louisiana Association of Educators. "Morale is now terrible."
She was joined in condemning the contract by Steve Monaghan, head of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, as well as a pair of veteran teachers who took personal days to appear in Baton Rouge for the vote and a group of students earning their traditional teaching credentials at LSU.
They argued that spending $1 million to recruit teachers from a program that only provides five weeks of training betrays a lack of respect among state officials for traditional education programs that require years' worth of course work.
Candy Watsey, a teacher from St. Tammany who mentioned that she had taught BESE President Penny Dastugue's daughter, told board members, "I'm shaking right now because I'm so hurt - insulted."
"I feel misunderstood," Watsey continued. "Some of you on the board seem to have no idea what it's like to stand up in front of a classroom of children."
Rachel Ginn told the board that she was working toward a degree in early childhood education at LSU and couldn't understand how anyone without the type of coursework she was doing could get by in the classroom. "How do they even understand what to do?" she asked.
Their remarks in turn brought an unusually impassioned response from Louisiana Superintendent John White, himself a TFA alumnus.
White acknowledged that state officials have not done enough to make their case to teachers, but pointed to the contributions the program has made in New Orleans and said local principals and superintendents in poverty-stricken areas of the state still find it difficult to attract qualified talent.
"If any one of us ran our classrooms with the tone that I've heard over the last half hour here, our kids would be less ethical, less loving, less moral people," he said. "And I know that no one here is a teacher who tries to bring that spirit. We should not have to tear other people down in order to justify our own roles in this."
Michael Tipton, TFA's executive director for southeast Louisiana, reeled off a set of statistics aimed at rebutting the image of TFA teachers as short-timers from out of state who take the place of veterans and struggle with unruly classrooms.
He cited state figures from a few years back that showed TFA instructors moving test scores among their students more quickly than other first-year teachers and in some cases as quickly as more veteran educators. He said that 71 percent of the 1,000 TFA alumni in the state are still working at schools in some capacity and that the group had 100 requests for teachers in the state last year that couldn't be filled for lack of funding.
"That's why we're here today," Tipton said. "State support allows us to operate where the private funding base wouldn't allow."
Veronica Brooks, a TFA alumna who acts as policy director for the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, recalled for the board growing up in rural poverty on a West Virginia hog farm before discovering that her public schools hadn't prepared her for the challenges of college.
Fighting tears, she turned to the teachers who had spoken before her and said, "I have nothing but respect for you," but defended TFA as a group that instills its corps members with a belief that poor children can perform at high levels.
"I graduated at the top of my class, got into a top university, thought I had it made. And I struggled every single day because I hadn't been prepared," Brooks said. "We weren't really expected to go anywhere anyway."