Matt Damon’s Mom Won’t Let Him Accept Nomination for NEA Award

posted at 3:30 pm on January 5, 2012 by Mike Antonucci
[ Education ]   

Each year, the National Education Association issues its Friend of Education award – usually to a friendly Democratic politician. Last year’s award went to the 14 fugitive Wisconsin Democrats.

This year, the Massachusetts Teachers Association wanted to nominate actor Matt Damon and/or his mother, Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, who is a professor at Lesley University and an education advocate. Damon famously spoke at the Save Our Schools rally in DC last July.

The New York Times and the Washington Post report that Dr. Carlsson-Paige has rejected the nomination on behalf of herself and her son, because of what she calls a “collaboration” between NEA President Dennis Van Roekel and Teach for America. TFA, according the Post‘s description, “recruits newly minted college graduates who are not education majors and gives them five weeks of summer training before placing them in classrooms in high-poverty schools. Recruits are asked to commit to only two years of teaching.”

The collaboration consisted of an editorial co-written for USA Today by Van Roekel and TFA founder Wendy Kopp that listed three ways to improve the teaching profession.

This was apparently too much for some union activists, who accused Van Roekel of sending “mixed messages” about teacher training. You know we’ve reached the point of no return when the president of the national teachers’ union can’t pass Matt Damon’s ideological purity test.

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