A union wins a victory against TFA. But can it be replicated nationwide?

For Teach for America, Boston seemed no different than the other 100 places it puts teachers. Arrange a deal with Boston Public Schools for bringing TFA to the city; decide that 19 TFA recruits would teach at the head of the class; sign a contract that says TFA recruits commit to two years of teaching and fall into a fast-track toward being rehired if they get laid off—standard operating procedure for an organization that for the last 20 years has given recent college grads a crash course in teaching and then sent them into high-need classrooms.

For the Boston Teaching Union, though, these contract nuances were unacceptable. BTU has its own contract with Boston schools, and it wasn’t the same as TFA’s. (Even though Boston TFA recruits were also union members.) A two-year commitment to teaching? Please. Try having all teachers reviewed annually for their first three years in the system with no guarantee that they could come back and teach again the next year. And that rehiring pool? No such thing for regular Boston teachers.

Sweetheart deals to outsiders don’t go over well in a town like Boston. So the teachers union filed a complaint to the state that the TFA contract was unfair. If union teachers didn’t have these rights, what made TFA teachers deserve to have them? The challenge worked. Boston’s superintendent announced last week that the district never intended any preferential treatment, and the TFA contract would be adjusted. TFA said it was happy to make the changes. All good and settled.

Except probably not. The Boston union’s victory is a potential bellwether for the rest of the country. Boston’s union surely isn’t the only one with a collective-bargaining agreement that differs from the standard TFA contract. If unions want to go after TFA—and there’s some belief, reason, and evidence that they do—Boston has shown them how to do it. The chink in TFA’s armor has been exposed. Whether it’s exploited may depend upon how desperate unions across the country are to look like they’re protecting jobs. And that means this whole controversy, like so much else, is wrapped up in our financial crisis.

The education community has never been entirely comfortable with TFA. The recruits graduate from college (often elite ones), are given quickie educational training during the summer, and come September they’re teaching in classrooms without any aid. Union members, meanwhile, have been teaching for years and most have master’s degrees. Educational debates rage about whether TFA recruits are too underprepared to teach or actually inject fresh energy and new ideas. An old professor of mine referred to them as scabs—interlopers from the outside who can’t help but draw the ire of the union insiders. (TFA, on the other hand, says it doesn’t hear complaints from its corps about animosity among longtime teachers and their new TFA colleagues.)

Meanwhile, in the 20 years that education experts have been arguing over TFA, it has only become more entrenched. This year saw 35,000 applicants for 4,100 positions. TFA makes up 10 percent to 30 percent of new-teacher hires in the districts it serves. For some, then, TFA is the mosquito that grew into a vampire.