Only days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the head of the nation’s third-largest teachers union is blaming Teach For America for helping “kill and disenfranchise children.”
Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, bashed the national organization and one of its vice presidents, David Rosenberg, in a message that appears on the blog of educational policy analyst Diane Ravitch.
“We in Chicago have been the victims of their experiments on our children since the current secretary of Education ‘ran’ CPS,” Lewis writes, calling Teach For America a group of “education missionaries” who view teaching in poor communities as a “stepping stone to a more lucrative career.”br
Lewis admits she is using the Sandy Hook tragedy to advance the agenda of her union.
“There might have been a time where ‘politicizing’ tragic events, especially mass shootings, was thought to be in poor taste,” Lewis said. “That has changed with the 24/7 news cycle that continues to focus far too much time and energy on the perpetrator of the massacre than that of our precious victims.”
According to blogger Andrew J. Rotherham, Lewis appears to have written her remarks in response to Rosenberg, who was critical of attempts to link the Sandy Hook massacre to broader issues of education policy.