New trouble for Teach for America: San Francisco wants out

Valerie Strauss May 13

(Kirby Lee/USA Today)

 

There’s more bad news for Teach for America, this time coming out of San Francisco.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s school board has decided it doesn’t want any more Teach for America recruits — even though there are at least 500 teaching jobs that need to be filled by August. The board was supposed to vote on a contract to accept 15 TFA teachers for the 2016-2017 school year — in science, math, special ed and bilingual education classes — but Superintendent Richard Carranza realized he didn’t have enough support on the panel to get it approved and pulled it from the agenda.

There currently are 15 TFA corps members in their first year in San Francisco schools and they will continue to be supported in their second year. TFA recruits are required to agree to teach for two years, although many of them don’t make it through and many others stop teaching after the two-year requirement. The Chronicle quoted Matt Haney, the school board president, as saying:

“Our goal as a district should be to get experienced, highly prepared, fully credentialed teachers with a track record of success into our high-needs, high-poverty schools. For now, I believe that we should press pause on our contract with TFA, as we consider how best to address our own challenges of getting the best, most-prepared teachers where they are most needed.”

TFA, a highly popular organization with school reformers, has won millions in federal funds from the Obama administration and much more from private philanthropy. It is known for giving recruits about five weeks of training in the summer and then sending them into some of America’s neediest schools to run their own classrooms.

But as popular as TFA has become with reformers, it has been the target of a growing chorus of critics who say that TFA recruits are not trained nearly long enough to do the work they are asked to do. The criticism, sometimes coming from former TFA members, has risen as the organization has been having trouble meeting recruitment targets.

TFA supporters say that the decline is in part because the job market is improving for college graduates, who constitute the majority of TFA recruits, but it is worth noting that high-performing students the organization seeks are usually not the young people who have a difficult time finding a job.

In any case, San Francisco is not the only place that is reconsidering its relationship with TFA. In 2014, for example, the school board in Durham, N.C., voted to end it — even though it had openings for teachers — because, as school board member Mike Lee was quoted as saying: “I have a problem with the two years and gone, using it like community service.” A year earlier, Pittsburgh public schools had decided not to bring in any new TFA members, and Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) vetoed a line item inserted into the state’s higher education legislation that would have given $1.5 million to Teach for America over two years.

TFA released a statement about the news from San Francisco, which you can read here. It says in part:

We will continue to provide support and training for the cohort of TFA corps members currently in the midst of the first year of their commitments as they enter their second year of teaching, and we will continue to help Teach For America alumni moving to the city or region who are interested in teaching to connect to opportunities in the district. Schools may still hire our qualified candidates, and we’re open to considering alternative financial arrangements with interested schools given the dire shortages; however, we’re already working to meet significant demand from our charter partners within San Francisco and district partners throughout the Bay Area who acted quickly to provide this resource to their schools.

Teach for America: 2nd Downsize

TFA Cannot Downsize Itself Free of Alumni Concerns– Especially Diversity Displacement
by deutsch29 3/23/16

On March 21, 2016, education historian and activist, Diane Ravitch, posted a communication dated March 17, 2016, from “a current high-level administrative employee at Teach for America.” The big news is that TFA will be cutting roughly 150 national and regional staff. The communication also notes that when TFA failed to reach its recruitment goals for 2015, jobs were cut, but not at the higher levels. This time (2016), TFA did not reach its recruitment goals for a second year, and this time, the job cuts are not just “rank and file staff.”

On the same day as Ravitch’s post, March 21, 2016, TFA posted news of the cuts on its own web site.

In TFA’s case, the negative announcement is introduced via a shell of positive vocabulary:

Teach For America recently set out a new strategic direction focused on three objectives: strengthening our community, pivoting our programmatic model, and rallying the next generation of leaders to join this effort. To reach these objectives, our regions need to continue to adapt and innovate on our model for their unique local contexts, and our national organization needs to move from strong, direct management to facilitating regional learning and innovation. As CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard shared on February 29 with our network, this strategic shift is pointing us toward a leaner, more agile central structure, resulting in the elimination of some roles and the creation of others and a change to how we’re approaching the critical work of diversity and inclusiveness. …

The second paragraph is more direct at its center (the first opening and closing sentences are still emotionally-upbeat goo):

Extraordinarily talented and dedicated people work at Teach For America. Attrition and individual moves into other open roles at TFA should appreciably reduce the number of people who lose their jobs. We project our total national staff size will become about 15 percent smaller. For individuals who do not find their next role with us, we are providing a generous support package, as well as supporting our people in finding roles in our partner organizations. The need for talent is great in the vital work of supporting schools, children, and communities.

One of the cut positions is its national diversity office. TFA’s explanation: All TFAers should advance diversity; so, no diversity office is needed:

Additionally, guided by our strategic direction, we determined that the essential work of diversity and inclusiveness should sit squarely with those closest to and supporting the people who are most directly impacted. Every single staff member will take responsibility for diversity and inclusiveness, rather than having this accountability live in one centralized team. As just one example, the members of our program team who work most closely on corps member preparation and support will own our work on culturally relevant pedagogy.

The reality is that TFA has suffered in its recruitment for two years in a row, and it is changing its direction more drastically than it had planned, but it did plan to shift more decision making power to its regional offices, as noted in this February 2015 report on TFA, Bellwether Education Partners:

In 2013, the [TFA governance model] task force proposed a new operating model. Under this model, which Teach For America is phasing in over the next two to four years, regions will have greater control over their own budgets and staffing levels, and will be able to select varying levels of nationally provided services from a “menu” of options. … ..The task force then articulated a set of “freedoms and mutual responsibilities,” or FMRs, that outline the flexibility regions have to customize their work to local needs as well as the areas in which regions must implement a common approach or utilize shared resources.

Within the context of the FMRs, regions will have the ability to select to receive more or less support from national staff. … Regions that choose to receive less support will retain more resources within the region. Recruitment and admissions will remain national functions, as will core operating infrastructure such as technology, finance, and the Office of the General Counsel. …

The hope is that this approach will allow regions to innovate in ways that generate even stronger corps member and alumni impact. The risk is that it may now be possible for regions to fail. But Teach For America ultimately decided that the potential benefits—the ability to attract and retain experienced regional leaders, build deeper relationships with community partners, foster innovation, and ultimately increase corps member and alumni impact—outweighed the risks. Realizing these benefits, however, will require a significant culture shift. Regions will need to build internal capacity to work without a national safety net and to customize their work to local demands. National staff will have to shift from viewing their work as driving regional outcomes, to supporting regions in achieving their own goals. Eventually, the structure and work of many national teams may evolve significantly in response to regional demand. Teach For America has only begun this transition, which will continue to unfold and shape the organization’s development and growth over the coming years.

Bellwether’s report on TFA is an intriguing read because Bellwether is a friend to TFA, and Bellwether had to have TFA’s ready cooperation (and approval) to produce the report. As one might expect, in the Bellwether report, TFA appears to reveal itself as it sees itself– or at least how it viewed itself roughly a year ago. The report is a long read (97 pages), but it offers a comprehensive view of TFA history as TFA wishes to portray it and is therefore in its own right a study in TFA’s psyche.

And, as one might expect, a third party not enamored with TFA is able to readily view holes in that TFA-adulating presentation.

For example, the timing of the report captured TFA’s failure to achieve recruitment projections for 2015. It notes that TFA experienced high growth in the years following the economic crisis of 2008. TFA/Bellwether believe that a negative economy prompted more newly-graduated college students to flock to TFA for employment. As a result, TFA administration became larger.

If this were the case– that TFA grew as a result of a negative economy– then it seems that TFA leadership should have planned for a future when the economy was not quite so fragile– and when TFA recruitment might take a hit.

Based on the February 2015 Bellwether report, it does not seem that TFA had given serious thought to the possibility that their recruitment could fall. Then again, perhaps they thought of it and planned for what to do next (i.e., cutting national and regional positions) but just chose not to disclose as much in the Bellwether report.

What is also interesting in the February 2015 Bellwether report is that even though Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva Beard were TFA co-CEOs at the time, Beard is frequently cited and Kramer appears to be missing in action. Indeed, in September 2015, Kramer “stepped down” as TFA co-CEO, leaving Beard as the TFA CEO.

An organization faced with national office downsizing surely does not need co-CEOs. Just an observation.

Aside from noting economics as a reason for decreased recruitment and failure to meet 2015 recruitment projections, the Bellwether report also notes that TFA faced negative press. In a comical quote, former TFAer (and, as of November 2014, former TN ed commissioner) Kevin Huffman states, “Teach for America is now Goliath instead of David.”

Sure, Goliath was a lot larger than David, but Goliath was the bad guy– who David stunned with a rock and then decapitated.

Is TFA on its way to decapitation by negative press?

According to the report, TFA just didn’t see resistance coming.

That’s just foolish. TFA is a teacher temp agency that then tries to place its former temps in strategic and powerful positions in order to advocate for test-score-driven ed reform. Of course many people will not approve.

Perhaps in its arrogance, TFA did not believe anyone could confront them in the media. But it happened. And, as the Bellwether report notes, the comedy continues. Consider this excerpt:

The volume and vitriol of the attacks caught Teach For America off guard. …The advent of social media exacerbated these challenges. While some of Teach For America’s critics, such as education historian Diane Ravitch, were highly adept in using social media to amplify their messages, Teach For America was slow to adopt a social media strategy. “We had lost touch with how this younger group of people were engaging with the world,” notes [former TFA staffer] Aimee Eubanks Davis.

“This younger group of people”?? Diane Ravitch is 77 years old.

Makes one wonder just how far out of touch TFA is with reality beyond itself.

It seems TFA just believed that younger people would not read Ravitch. But apparently, they do. (Ironic how she blew the whistle on the current TFA downsizing.) Whereas TFA might label her criticism as “vitriol,” it seems that they recognize that their recruits recognize her as among the “reputable voices” criticizing TFA’s temp-teacher lifeblood. From the Bellwether report:

Teach For America was equally unprepared for the negative impact that the external criticisms would have on corps member, alumni, and staff morale. “If you’re a brand new corps member and facing lots of challenges, the only thing that gets you through, especially the first year, is the belief that you are making a difference in the world,” says Ted Quinn. “If you struggle all day and then go on Facebook and Twitter and find reputable voices telling you that you’re hurting kids, it is absolutely shattering. We hear this very directly from our corps members. They may not buy into it, but they feel battered.” In the absence of a strong public response to critics, corps members felt abandoned and alone. Alumni and staff members report a similar experience.

The impact of external opposition has been most evident, however, to Teach For America’s recruiters. From 2013 to 2014, the number of applications dropped by 7,000. The number of first year corps members starting school in fall 2014 was smaller than the previous year—the first time that had happened since 2000—and the total number of corps members fell 800 short of the year’s target. These recruitment trends have continued: in December 2014, Kramer and Villanueva Beard sent a letter to district and school placement partners informing them that, based on current recruitment projections, Teach For America’s 2015– 16 corps could fall far short of the number of teachers its placement partners had requested. While a variety of factors have contributed to this trend—including an improving economy that increased employment options and competition for recent college grads—it is clear that the polarized education climate and external critiques have had an impact. As part of its continuous-improvement efforts, Teach For America conducts follow-up outreach to high potential candidates who ultimately choose not to apply. This outreach indicates that negative criticism of Teach for America influenced nearly 70 percent of these candidates’ decisions.

The report continues with TFA’s efforts to counter negative media:

…The feedback from corps members, alumni, and staff convinced Teach For America leaders that they needed to more proactively respond to critics. …

To address these issues, the organization created a new Public Affairs and Engagement Team, pulling together previously scattered functions of communication, marketing, external research, and community partnerships into a single integrated team. To lead this team, Kramer and Villanueva Beard tapped Aimee Eubanks Davis, a highly respected internal leader whose leadership of Teach For America’s diversity efforts had demonstrated her capacity to deal directly and sensitively with thorny challenges.

Eubanks Davis and then–acting Senior Vice President of Communications Peter Cunningham put in place a set of systems that allowed Teach For America to respond much more rapidly to external events and attacks. Every day, key leaders from the Public Affairs and Communications Teams participate in a daily call to review events in the past 24 hours, including any misinformation or attacks that demand a quick response, and to plan response for events expected later in the day. To keep an eye on the longer-term picture, the Public Affairs Team meets by phone to review communications and marketing campaign plans for the upcoming month. To help with rapid response, Teach For America also created an “On the Record” web page, where it can quickly correct misinformation and share facts. This approach allows Teach For America to respond to breaking news stories much more rapidly than it could through more traditional means, such as requesting corrections or writing letters to the editor.

TFA’s manner of countering criticism resulted in more criticism in George Joseph’s 2014 piece in The Nation. Joseph’s article demonstrates just how connected TFA is. In short, TFA was tipped off by another Nation writer about a freedom of information request made by its writer to the USDOE for info on TFA. A TFAer working at USDOE tipped off TFA, and TFA produced an internal memo about how to combat the negative press. Joseph obtained a copy of that internal memo. Joseph maintains that to TFA, negative media attention and “misinformation” are one and the same.

Back to Bellwether.

The report continues by noting TFA’s efforts over the past couple of years to create a “public-facing narrative about its work and values.” But here is another blind spot for TFA:

The Bellwether report does not address the growing number of former TFA voices critical of TFA.

And they are growing. And the authority of their authentic TFA experiences carries weight with a public that is itself growing increasingly critical of TFA.

For example, there is former TFAer Gary Rubinstein, who has been critiquing TFA for years and whose Open Letters series of posts to reformers (many who started with TFA) is well worth the read. For years, it seemed that Rubinstein was largely alone in his TFA criticism.

Not so any more.

For example, in 2015, former TFAer Jameson Brewer has co-edited a book, Teach for America Counter Narratives: Alumni Speak UP and Speak Out. Also in 2015, former TFAer Sarah Matsui published Learing from Counternarratives in Teach for America.

There are also Kerry Kretchmer and Beth Sondel, both former TFAers, who organized resistance to TFA.

And the list continues to grow. What is important to note is that an emerging concern with TFA is that even though it maintains that its recruits are ethnically and racially diverse, those recruits are displacing teachers of color whose lives are grounded in communities in which those revolving-door, “diverse” TFA recruits are landing.

A powerful accounting of this “diversity” shell game is Jennifer Berkshire’s (“EduShyster”) March 21, 2016, post entitled, “TFA’s Diversity Paradox.” In this post, Berkshire interviews TFA alumnus Terrenda White. The interview was also featured in the March 22, 2016, Washington Post. Here is an excerpt:

EduShyster: You have a new paper out examining TFA’s initiative to become more diverse. You use the word *paradox,* but don’t you mean ‘success’? I just read this TFA tweet that *The TFA corps more closely reflects the public-school population than any other large teacher-provider.* What’s paradoxical about that?

Terrenda White: When I was first writing about TFA, I was complaining about the lack of diversity in the corps, especially when I was there in the early 2000s. And so a part of me is really happy that TFA seems to care about diversity and improving their numbers, and I think I’m fair in my piece about acknowledging that. But while TFA may be improving their diversity numbers, that improvement has coincided with a drastic decline in the number of teachers of color, and Black teachers in particular, in the very cities where TFA has expanded. I don’t see them making a connection between their own diversity goals and the hits that teachers of color have taken as a result of policies to which TFA is connected: school closures where teachers of color disproportionately work, charter school expansion, teacher layoffs as schools are turned around. We have to talk about whether and how those policies have benefited TFA to expand in a way that they’re not ready to publicly acknowledge.

EduShyster: You argue that even as TFA may be bringing some teachers of color into urban areas through the *front door* of its recruiting and PR operation, the organization’s advocacy for specific reform policies is pushing teachers of color out the *back door.* Can you talk about how this is playing out in some specific cities?

White: What happened in New Orleans, for example, is a microcosm of this larger issue where you have a blunt policy that we know resulted in the displacement of teachers of color, followed by TFA’s expansion in that region. I’ve never heard TFA talk about or address that issue. Or take Chicago, where the number of Black teachers has been cut in half as schools have been closed or turned around. In the lawsuits that teachers filed against the Chicago Board of Education, they used a lot of social science research and tracked that if a school was low performing and was located on the north or the west side and had a higher percentage of white teachers, that school was less likely to be closed. As the teachers pointed out, this wasn’t just about closing low-performing schools, but closing low-performing schools in communities of color, and particularly those schools that had a higher percentage of teachers of color. What bothers me is that we have a national rhetoric about wanting diversity when at the same time we’re actually manufacturing the lack of diversity in the way in which we craft our policies. And we mete them out in a racially discriminatory way. So in many ways we’re creating the problem we say we want to fix.

What White describes above is not addressed in the Bellwether report, just as addressing legitimate TFA alumni concerns is not addressed.

What is addressed is the drop in alumni promoting TFA. As the Bellwether report notes:

Teach For America uses several measures to track corps member and alumni satisfaction. The Corps Strength Index, a set of questions that assess corps members’ attitudes, perceptions, and feelings about their experience with Teach For America, is administered before and after Summer Institute and twice during each year a corps member serves. Teach For America also collects data on net promoter score—a commonly used metric, across a range of industries, that assesses satisfaction based on whether the respondent would recommend an organization to someone else. Both indicators reflect declines in corps member and alumni satisfaction over the past five years.

Since Teach For America implemented the Corps Satisfaction Index, in 2008, Net Corps Strength, a figure that summarizes corps members’ response to the index questions, has declined every year. During the same period, Teach For America’s net promoter scores for both corps members and alumni have also fallen. In 2010, Teach For America had an alumni net promoter score of 50—meaning that the percentage of alumni who would strongly recommend Teach For America to a friend was 50 percentage points higher than the percentage who would not recommend Teach For America. Today, Teach For America’s net promoter score stands at 8—still positive, and therefore better than the net promoter scores of many organizations—but significantly down from just a few years ago.

Teach For America leaders were understandably troubled by these trends, and have invested considerable effort in understanding the forces that are driving them. By comparing corps strength and satisfaction data across regions, Teach For America has identified a number of factors, at a regional level, that can appear to lead to a stronger or weaker corps culture. A strong regional vision, the quality of relationships between corps members and staff who support them, and clear expectations all contribute to stronger corps culture at a regional level. But while these factors explain the variation in corps satisfaction across regions, they do not explain the trend of declining corps satisfaction over time, nor has Teach For America been able to establish any correlation between corps strength and regional pace of growth or the age of a region.

Note that according to TFA’s strategic direction report, TFA’s net promoter score had dropped to 4 percent– which means that the percentage of TFA alumni likely to recommend TFA to a friend is only four percent greater than the percentage not likely to recommend TFA to a friend.

To raise its net promoter score up to 30 over the next few years, TFA uses fluffy language about relationships and feeling connected– but it does not note the need to actually listen to alumni concerns, such as those about TFA’s displacing community-rooted teachers of color with its in-and-out, manufactured “diverse” temp corps:

Movements are all about people and relationships, and our people are at the heart of everything we do. Our community must feel far more connected, supported, and part of something that is bigger than them, particularly given the strains we’ve felt in recent years. To do this, we must dramatically improve the culture and connectedness of our community of corps members, alumni, and staff.

Now, back to Terrenda White’s words in the Berkshire interview:

What bothers me is that we have a national rhetoric about wanting diversity when at the same time we’re actually manufacturing the lack of diversity in the way in which we craft our policies. And we mete them out in a racially discriminatory way. So in many ways we’re creating the problem we say we want to fix.

TFA has a problem, and it is one that image polish, a gentle Bellwether report, and a “leaner, more agile central structure” cannot fix. A growing number of former TFAers are voicing their discontent with the damage TFA inflicts upon community-rooted education, discontent that will likely only increase over time.

Watch out, Goliath. You might not make it past this one.

Teach for America’s Deep Bench

James Cersonsky October 24, 2012 The American Prospect

The education nonprofit is also training the next generation of politicians, who have very specific ideas on school reform.

“Is this our Egypt moment? Will we seize the moment?”

Former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein spoke those words at Teach for America’s 20th anniversary summit last summer. Coming from Klein, who is now a divisional leader at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, incitements to political uprising might raise some eyebrows. But at the summit for the nonprofit, which recruits college graduates to be teachers in poor school districts around the country, Klein was onto something that Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman have ignored in their eight pro-TFA columns: behind the veil of well-funded, debate-worthy idealism, TFA is coordinating a political revolution.

Since its founding, TFA has amassed some 28,000 alumni. Two have made Time’s “Most Influential” list: its Chief Executive Officer and founder, Wendy Kopp, and former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor and StudentsFirst founder Michelle Rhee. Others have gained prominence as the leaders of massive charter operations, like KIPP Schools and New Schools for New Orleans. And TFA alums are currently the heads of public schools in Newark, D.C., and Tennessee.

What about the other 27,000-some-odd people? That’s where Leadership for Educational Equity, or LEE, comes in. LEE was founded in 2007 as a 501(c)4 spin-off of Teach for America to provide resources, training, and networking for alumni who are interested in elected office or other extracurricular leadership positions. Its goals are ambitious: by 2015, as its standard job posting reads, it hopes to have 250 of its members in elected office, 300 in policy or advocacy leadership roles, and 1,000 “in ‘active’ pipelines for public leadership.” If all goes as planned, LEE could shift control over American education reform to a specific group of spritely college grads-turned-politicians with a very specific politics.

LEE functions in part as a network for TFA alumni. In the restricted section of its website, to which I gained access through an existing member, you can find job postings ranging from government relations at the National Education Association to Web Editor for the Heritage Foundation. Members are also encouraged to connect with each other: “[P]erhaps you want to bring some of your fellow LEE members to an education rally in Houston. You could cast a wide net, and search for all LEE members within 100 miles of zip code 77001. Your search returns about 240 LEE members—that’s quite a rally.”

The organization also provides resources for the electorally curious. Besides running two six-month fellowships pairing members with public officials, it offers a variety of webinars and tool-kits on organizing, advocacy, and elections. In a PowerPoint entitled “What School Boards Can Do,” you meet two reformers, one of whom is pushing for “data-driven, outcomes-focused” superintendents, the other “driving debate on pay-for-performance.” In another presentation, charter operator Future is Now advises on getting elected to union office. “New unionism,” in its rendering, means “enabling unions to play a critical role in the development and implementation of new efforts aimed at meeting students’ needs/achievement.” Inspired by Obama’s call to “out-educate” and “out-innovate” the world, Future is Now is in the dual business of “reforming” unions and pushing for new charter schools—in other words, something a little afield from the Chicago Teachers Union, whose reigning Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators has rallied alongside community groups to stop school closings and fight for more resources in district schools.  

Though LEE’s 990 filings are missing from the IRS’ online database and chronically allergic to press attention, executive director Michael Buman says that its budget this year is $3.5 million. While Buman maintains that elections constitute the “minority” of LEE’s work, some portion of that sum has gone toward electing TFA alums to office.

“We provide various kinds of in-kind support,” he says. “If we host a training and the person is a candidate, that’s an in-kind contribution. Sometimes they want us to take a look at a piece of mail that they’re sending out.” On the other hand, “Sometimes the candidate looks at our services and says no thanks.” Furthermore, he says, LEE does not operate independent expenditures campaigns, which support candidates or candidate committees without officially cooperating or consulting with them.    

The limited-access section of LEE’s site reveals the numbers: In 2010, 12 LEE members ran for local boards of education (with 4 wins), 31 for Chicago local school councils (14 wins), 31 for neighborhood council or other local office (21 wins), and four for state legislature (two wins). In LEE’s accounting, these totals are a step up from 2008, when five members ran for school boards (four wins) and four for other local offices (three wins). In total, as of August 2011, LEE counts 56 TFA alums in office: 14 on school boards, 13 on local school councils, 24 on neighborhood councils or other local boards, two state senators, a constable, a judge, and a justice of the peace.

LEE’s poster boys—its two state senators—are of similar breeds. Soon after uprooting a 27-year incumbent to become Maryland’s youngest ever elected state senator, Bill Ferguson, who is 29 years old and worked as a TFA teacher in Baltimore, introduced a package of bills last year that included a Maryland version of parent trigger. (Parent trigger laws allow some proportion of parents to vote for new school management—and in some cases, entirely new staff—at their kids’ schools.) Upon entering office in Colorado in 2009, Michael Johnston, who is 37 and served as part of TFA’s Mississippi Delta corps, wrote a controversial, and ultimately victorious, bill that weakened teacher tenure and upped the role of students’ “academic growth” in teacher and principal evaluations to 50 percent. Ferguson got elected with significant support from TFA alumni; alumni also make up four of five Johnston staffers.

Of the five LEE members profiled at its website’s “Candidate Corner,” three speak a common language: Caitlin Hannon, vying for the Indianapolis School Board, supports merit-based pay and decries the “lemon dance” of “ineffective practitioners” lampooned in Waiting for Superman; Rob Bryan, a Republican running for the North Carolina House and fellow merit pay proponent, asserts that “the solution for struggling schools is not simply throwing more money at their problems;” and Allison Serafin, TFA’s former executive director in Nevada and candidate for State Board of Education, has signaled support for expanded standardized testing and parent trigger. (Takashi Ohno and Jeremy Ly, candidates for the Hawaii and Illinois Houses, respectively, have meager site material on big-ticket issues; neither could be reached for comment for this piece. It’s worth noting that Ly led a campaign to unionize a charter school and has received donations from the Illinois Federation of Teachers.)

According to Buman, “LEE does not have any kind of litmus test about any policies. We’re completely policy-agnostic.”

Alex Caputo-Pearl, a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District and a member of TFA’s inaugural class, is leery of LEE’s politics. Caputo-Pearl is a co-founder of the United Teachers of Los Angeles’ Progressive Educators for Action Caucus, which, like its Chicago allies, advocates member and community organizing and resists school privatization. “LEE hasn’t been openly unsupportive of our work,” he says. “But LEE is clearly looking to strategically promote folks who have a different politics”—including, he claims, his union’s “NewTLA” caucus, trumpeted by Future is Now and founded by a TFA alum.

Steve Zimmer, who was elected to the LA school board with the help of TFA alumni and is still a proud alum, now feels a cold shoulder from the group—possibly, he suggests, because of his stances on charter schools and unions that buck “TFA orthodoxy.” “There are many ways we can get to transformation in public education,” he says. “Either TFA is going to welcome those multiple pathways or it will run the risk of creating the resistance in the political arena that there once was at the school site.”

Because it counts on federal grants and local contracts—in sum, $43 million in 2011—TFA has to be involved in some amount of political advocacy. LEE voiced indirect opposition to TFA skeptic and Wendy Kopp persona non grata Linda Darling-Hammond when she was being considered as Obama’s Secretary of Education. In the case of Kira Orange-Jones, TFA’s executive director in Louisiana who was recently elected to the board that oversees New Orleans’ Recovery School District and approves TFA’s contract, TFA is in a position to influence its own contract from both sides.

LEE adds a new dimension to TFA’s growing empire. A selective crowd of high-achieving college graduates is primed to take over the leadership of America’s schools. This summer’s elections for Nashville’s school board, which featured a race between TFA alums, could be a preview of intra-family rivalries to come. (The winner, Elissa Kim, is TFA’s chief admissions officer and garnered near-record donations for her campaign.) And while LEE may be policy-neutral, it isn’t hard to imagine the massive proliferation of Michelle Rhees and, in turn, the entrenchment of education reform geared toward money-soaked charter expansion, “new unionism,” and test-based student achievement. In other words, what began—and is still viewed by many—as an apolitical service corps could be the Trojan horse of the privatization of public education.

Revealing Thoughts From Former TFA Teacher

4/26/13

By Lauren Blair Aronson

Unlike most of the people who drop out of Teach For America, as I did, I really like and respect TFA.

I think TFA does great and important work—but I also think it can do better. While internally TFA is a model of reflective practice, at times the organization has resisted outside criticism. This is not unreasonable, as much of the criticism leveled against it is less than constructive. But as a not-so-successful corps member who now works in education policy, I think I can offer some constructive criticism from my perspective as both a TFA insider and outsider.

Here’s the deal: More than two years ago, I joined nearly 48,000 people in applying to TFA. I was head over heels for the cause and proudly accepted my offer. I remained in New Orleans, where I had attended Tulane University, to serve a community desperately in need of great teaching.

I didn’t stay, though. I didn’t fulfill my two years as a corps member or as a 4th grade teacher at Nelson Charter School, where I had been assigned. In fact, I left after only nine months on the job. Unfortunately, my story is not unique. Nine percent of corps members leave before the end of their two-year commitments, a TFA official told me. And my personal experience tells me that many more corps members struggle to adjust to their work.

As an organization that serves the dual objectives of closing the achievement gap and engaging future leaders in education, Teach For America may find that my perspective—while not necessarily better, or truer—merits some consideration. That’s because, based on my experiences, I can offer two pieces of advice that could help TFA get smarter about recruiting and retaining talent in the classrooms.

• First, recruit new talent honestly. Teach For America knows how to attract talent. The organization’s profile has gone viral on elite college campuses. Tulane, which does not have an undergraduate education concentration, sent 28 graduates to the organization in 2011—and many more applied. Among Ivy League institutions, 12 percent of graduating seniors applied to the corps in 2010, and the numbers keep rising. But just because students are ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the organization does not mean that they are aware of what it really means to join the TFA teaching corps.

More often than not, TFA paints an idealistic, rather than realistic, picture of what life in the trenches is really like. TFA founder Wendy Kopp’s June 2012 op-ed in the Huffington Post is a great example of this: The stories are indeed inspiring, but they are also a shiny misrepresentation of what to expect.

“While TFA does its best to provide professional support for corps members, sometimes it fails on providing them with a real human connection.”

When a corps member fails to live up to these success stories, he feels like the lone wolf who simply wasn’t cut out for the program. For instance, Teach For America told me that my leadership experiences as student body president would prepare me for the hardships in the classroom. The (very persistent) recruiter said that I was the “perfect candidate for TFA”—though I had no classroom experience—because I was a campus leader. As it turns out, my extracurricular successes at Tulane did not translate to successes (by TFA standards) in the classroom.

TFA should reconsider its approach and move to a more transparent recruitment process.

It should share some less-than-ideal stories of what life is like in the classroom. Show prospective or incoming corps members a struggling teacher’s classroom. Perhaps conduct a debriefing about possible pitfalls and solutions in the classroom. Don’t just talk about how TFA may be the “hardest thing a young adult will ever do.” That vetting strategy does not effectively weed out the weak among the Type-A, never-give-up applicants the organization attracts. Instead, that kind of truth-telling is like catnip to them.

Making the process more transparent may scare some people away, but TFA will be left with corps members who are not only mentally prepared for the real deal, but who are also joining the corps with the right mission in mind.

• Second, motivate, don’t indoctrinate, recruits. While TFA does its best to provide professional support for corps members, sometimes it fails on providing them with a real human connection. I do not necessarily fault TFA for this, but the overarching TFA culture makes new teachers feel guilty for saying—or even feeling—anything that would go against the organizational grain.

At one regional meeting during training, the Greater New Orleans team addressed the need for some corps members to give up their urban placements and take jobs in the Louisiana Delta, a new addition to the region four hours north of the city. Most corps members had already been placed in schools in the city, and the corps members who did not yet have placements did not want to uproot the lives that they had just started to build.

The conversation stalled until a new corps member said: “Those kids need us in the Delta just as much as they need us in the city.” Definitely true. But the comments devolved into: “I already have a placement in New Orleans, but if I didn’t, I know I’d move to the Delta. We should be sacrificing everything for our kids,” and “I’m putting my students before my friends, my family, my health, and my sanity.”

To me, this showed an irrational lack of perspective. It’s the kind of mindset that leads to unhealthy behaviors that could be harmful both to teachers and those they are supposed to teach.

What if TFA adjusted its motivational culture to change that perspective? What if the organization provided a safe space for dialogue and even dissent? It could give reasonable people room to doubt and question TFA norms. This would mean not responding with one-size-fits-all, big-picture-driven responses when corps members express real concerns about the corps and their students. If TFA fails to do this, the organization will risk alienating great teachers—teachers upon whom TFA depends to continue a strong movement.

If TFA could start to engage with corps members as people—not cogs in the organizational machine—it would see a jump in retention, teacher performance, and, ultimately, student achievement.

There is a bright side, and I want to be clear: I believe in Teach For America. My shortcomings as a corps member were as much my fault as the organization’s. But, I hope that TFA, after reading my story, can find some value in the lessons learned by those who left the corps early. With some careful reflection, the organization could better attract and retain the high-quality individuals it—and many, many students—so desperately need.

Lauren Blair Aronson oversees external relations for education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. She previously served as a Teach For America 4th grade teacher in New Orleans.

Onion “Point/Counterpoint” Raises Real Issues

July 17, 2012 The Onion

My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids

By Megan Richmond, Volunteer Teacher
When I graduated college last year, I was certain I wanted to make a real difference in the world. After 17 years of education, I felt an obligation to share my knowledge and skills with those who needed it most.

After this past year, I believe I did just that. Working as a volunteer teacher helped me reach out to a new generation of underprivileged children in dire need of real guidance and care. Most of these kids had been abandoned by the system and, in some cases, even by their families, making me the only person who could really lead them through the turmoil.

Was it always easy? Of course not. But with my spirit and determination, we were all able to move forward.

Those first few months were the most difficult of my life. Still, I pushed through each day knowing that these kids really needed the knowledge and life experience I had to offer them. In the end, it changed all of our lives.

In some ways, it’s almost like I was more than just a teacher to those children. I was a real mentor who was able to connect with them and fully understand their backgrounds and help them become the leaders of tomorrow.

Ultimately, I suppose I can never know exactly how much of an impact I had on my students, but I do know that for me it was a fundamentally eye-opening experience and one I will never forget.

Counterpoint

Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher?

By Brandon Mendez, James Miller Elementary School Student
You’ve got to be kidding me. How does this keep happening? I realize that as a fourth-grader I probably don’t have the best handle on the financial situation of my school district, but dealing with a new fresh-faced college graduate who doesn’t know what he or she is doing year after year is growing just a little bit tiresome. Seriously, can we get an actual teacher in here sometime in the next decade, please? That would be terrific.

Just once, it would be nice to walk into a classroom and see a teacher who has a real, honest-to-God degree in education and not a twentysomething English graduate trying to bolster a middling GPA and a sparse law school application. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a qualified educator who has experience standing up in front of a classroom and isn’t desperately trying to prove to herself that she’s a good person.

I’m not some sort of stepping stone to a larger career, okay? I’m an actual child with a single working mother, and I need to be educated by someone who actually wants to be a teacher, actually comprehends the mechanics of teaching, and won’t get completely eaten alive by a classroom full of 10-year-olds within the first two months on the job.

How about a person who can actually teach me math for a change? Boy, wouldn’t that be a novel concept!

I fully understand that our nation is currently facing an extreme shortage of teachers and that we all have to make do with what we can get. But does that really mean we have to be stuck with some privileged college grad who completed a five-week training program and now wants to document every single moment of her life-changing year on a Tumblr?

For crying out loud, we’re not adopted puppies you can show off to your friends.

Look, we all get it. Underprivileged children occasionally say some really sad things that open your eyes and make you feel as though you’ve grown as a person, but this is my actual education we’re talking about here. Graduating high school is the only way for me to get out of the malignant cycle of poverty endemic to my neighborhood and to many other impoverished neighborhoods throughout the United States. I can’t afford to spend these vital few years of my cognitive development becoming a small thread in someone’s inspirational narrative.

But hey, how much can I really know, anyway? I haven’t had an actual teacher in three years.

Teach For America Exposed in Seattle

A letter to the Seattle School Board from Dr. Barbara Torre Veltri regarding Teach for America, Inc.

Posted on March 20, 2012 by seattleducation2011

March  16,  2012

Seattle  Board  of  Directors

Seattle,  Washington  98124-­1165

Dear  Mr.  DeBell,  Ms.  Smith-­Blum,  Ms.  Patu,  and  Executive  Committee Members,

Thank  you  for  your  interest  in  children  and  your  advocacy  for  education  in  Seattle.  I  have  had  the  pleasure  of  preparing  teachers  at  Northern  Arizona  University  who  are  Seattle  natives  and  are  teaching  in  your  schools.  I  have  also  been  privileged  to  work  with  Seattle  Public  School  teachers  and  administrators  in  the  capacity  of professional  development  presenter  over  the  last  two  decades.

While  in  your  city,  I  felt  the  commitment  of  your  teachers  and  administrators,  who not  only  participated  in  faculty  development  sessions  (Thematic  Teaching  with  Sports…Baseball),  but  also  were  hungry  for  new  ideas,  innovative  teaching  methods,  and  ways  to  motivate  and  engage  their  elementary  and  middle  school  students.

I  write  to  you  now  because  I  am  very  concerned  about  what  appears  to  be  the  national  erosion  of  the  professional  educator.  I  am  eager  to  offer  my  expertise  on  a  program  that  I  have  spent  nearly  a  dozen  years  examining.  By  chance,  I  became  the  mentor,  coach,  instructor  and  university  liaison  for  Teach  For  America’s  novice  teachers  and  they  have  become  the  primary  research  area  of  my  professional  work.

Like  many  Americans,  who  appear  impressed  with  the  patriotic  sounding  name, Teach  For  America,  and  their  work,  I  assumed  that  I  knew  about  the  program,  even  though  I  had  no  firsthand  knowledge  or  information  about  the  organization.    I  never  imagined  that  I  would  learn  about  the  corps  experience,  recruitment,  training,  professional  development,  grade  level  placement,  and  why  recent  college  graduates  even  apply  to  an  organization  that  suggests  that  their  two-­‐year  commitment  is  a  type  of  “service”  directed  at  poor,  children  of  color.

Over  seven  years  of  consecutive  interactions  with  alums,  corps, administrators  and current  corps  members,  I  found  out  through  direct observation  in  classrooms  and  as  an  invited  presenter  at  TFA’s  All-­‐Corps Meetings  and  the  even  small  gatherings  that  TFA  teachers  requested  I attend,  when  things  began  to  unravel,  that  TFA  teachers  do  not  have  a command  of  what  it  takes  to  execute  the  necessary  classroom  skill  sets.

Matt Damon and Mother (an educator) Turn Down Teacher Union Award for Collaboration With Teach For America Founder

Jan. 5, 2012, NY Times

By Anna M. Phillips

7:19 p.m. | Updated The actor Matt Damon and his mother, a professor of education, on Wednesday turned down the opportunity for an award from the country’s largest teachers union after reading an opinion article that the union’s president had co-authored with the founder of Teach for America.

Writing that she was “confused by your collaboration” with Teach for America, Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige said she and her son, Mr. Damon, no longer desired to be nominated for the National Education Association’s Friend of Education Award.

In the opinion piece that Dr. Carlsson-Paige referred to, Dennis Van Roekel, president of the N.E.A., and Wendy Kopp, founder of T.F.A., urged the importance of evaluating and improving teacher training programs across the country. Yet in her e-mail to Mr. Van Roekel, Dr. Carlsson-Paige said she finds this message somewhat disingenuous on the part of T.F.A.

“I am very familiar with TFA and believe that its short-term, minimal training of teachers undermines teacher quality and harms children who too often get an inadequate education with its teachers,” the e-mail states.

Already a celebrity in the entertainment arena, Mr. Damon became one in the education world during a rally in Washington last July, where he publicly opposed the emphasis on standardized testing in public schools and the pressure educators are under to teach to those tests.

“This has been a horrible decade for teachers,” he told the crowd, according to a report by the Washington Post. “The next time you feel down or exhausted . . . please know there are millions of people behind you.”

Dr. Carlsson-Paige is an education teacher at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., and founded the university’s Center for Peaceable Schools and Communities, and focuses on the impact of violence on children.

On Thursday, Mr. Van Roekel issued a written response to Dr. Carlsson-Paige’s letter, saying:

“I respect Matt Damon and thank him for his support of public education.”

“I believe NEA should talk to those who support public education, even if we don’t agree on everything, and work together to serve students.

Wendy Kopp and I agree that students will benefit from stronger
recruiting and teacher preparation.

“NEA isn’t going to quit fighting for students and our members, or for stronger teacher preparation. In fact, better teacher preparation is part of our 3-point plan on Leading the Profession that was released last month.”

Dr. Carlsson-Paige’s letter:

From: Nancy Carlsson-Paige
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 20:03:02 -0500
To: Dennis Van Roekel, Paul Toner
Subject: Friend of Education
January 4, 2012

Dear Mr. Van Roekel,

You wrote a lovely letter of appreciation last August to my son Matt Damon after he stood with teachers at the Save Our Schools rally. I was so happy to read your letter and forward it on to Matt.

In October, Paul Toner, President of the MTA, asked if Matt and I would accept the nomination for the Friend of Education Award to be given by the NEA in July, 2012. After some discussion and deliberation, Matt and I decided we would accept the nomination if it became a reality.

Recently, I read the opinion piece you wrote with Wendy Kopp in USA Today and was upset and confused by your collaboration with Teach for America. I am a life long teacher educator. I believe that one of the first things we must do to improve our nation’s schools is to extend, strengthen, and support teacher preparation. I am very familiar with TFA and believe that its short-term, minimal training of teachers undermines teacher quality and harms children who too often get an inadequate education with its teachers.

In your letter to Matt in August, you wrote about a first-grade teacher who was retiring because she wouldn’t teach to a script. You said that teaching to the test strips teachers of their professionalism. Yet it is the best-trained, most knowledgeable teachers who can offer the most meaningful, excellent education in this test-driven climate. It’s the under-prepared teachers who are most often teaching to tests and using scripts because they don’t have the knowledge base to do otherwise.

I have decided that because of your collaboration with TFA, it would not be wise for me or for Matt to be nominated for the Friend of Education Award. I regret this turn of events.

Nancy Carlsson-Paige
Professor Emerita
Lesley University