https://www.psc-cuny.org/news-events/city-council-passes-resolution-supporting-new-deal-cuny
On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, 10:05:28 AM EDT, Jonathan Wynne
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://nypost.com/2022/03/22/eric-adams-makes-picks-with-charter-ties-for-schools-governance-panel/
On Tuesday, March 15, 2022, 08:41:42 AM EDT, Marjorie Stamberg
<marjoriestamberg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
excellent piece on rise and fall of Teach For America
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Gary Rubinstein's Blog <comment-reply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 1:25 AM
Subject: [New post] The Incredible Shrinking TFA
To: <marjoriestamberg@xxxxxxxxx>
| garyrubinstein posted: "Teach For America has an operating budget of $300
million. Their main responsibility is to recruit and prepare corps members to
teach for a minimum of two years in low-income communities. They started in
1990 with 500 corps members. In 1991 they grew "
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New post on Gary Rubinstein's Blog
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The Incredible Shrinking TFA
by garyrubinstein |
Teach For America has an operating budget of $300 million. Their main
responsibility is to recruit and prepare corps members to teach for a minimum
of two years in low-income communities. They started in 1990 with 500 corps
members. In 1991 they grew to 750 corps members. By 2005 they had 2000 corps
members and they peaked in 2012 with 6000. Now, according to Chalkbeat, They
are at a 17 year low, back to 2000 recruits.
Teach For America blames their recruitment woes on the pandemic, but I have
been following the ups and down of this organization for over 30 years,
starting when I was a corps member myself in 1991, and I have a different
theory.
There are three reasons why TFA's popularity is fading, and all three of these
reasons stem from an overarching problem -- arrogance. In my analysis, those
three reasons are: Failure to properly train corps members, ineffective
leadership, and a close alliance with a toxic and oversimplified type of
education reform based on teacher bashing.
Reason #1: Failure to properly train corps members
Teach For America has been training teachers for 31 years. The first few
institutes were staffed by experienced teachers since there were no TFA alumni
yet. Still, the training was inconsistent and most of us had very rough first
years. But the program was new and there were teacher shortages at the time, so
this was pretty much expected. In 1994, TFA had major financial problems and
they created a new low-budget institute staffed by TFA alumni in which corps
members trained in four teacher cohorts who shared a class for student
teaching. That class often had only a few students which did not make for a
very useful student teaching experience. Corps members from the mid-90s
struggled a lot in their first years -- as did their students.
TFA expanded this model to different regions and even though the training was
terrible, the program grew steadily. The training continued to be terrible. TFA
would not acknowledge the weakness of the training. I had all kinds of meetings
with various TFA administrators in the early 2000s, I just couldn't get them to
see the reality of this. Improving the training was going to cost a lot of
money and require TFA to be less arrogant by admitting they needed to do better
-- they weren't willing to do either.
Not improving the training is bad for the corps members who had to experience
the trauma of having an awful first year of teaching. But worse than that, the
students of those new TFA teachers would suffer too. TFA did not care enough
about either group to do something about this.
One example of a major deficiency in TFA's training was that corps members
would teach students during the summer training that were in different grades
than they were going to teach in the fall. TFA would say that it was
logistically impossible to have corps members train with students similar in
age to those they would teach in the fall -- many corps members didn't even
know what grade they were going to teach in the fall. But if TFA really cared
about training the teachers properly, they could have easily created a system
where new corps members would replace corps members who were finishing their
commitments and leaving their schools. It just wasn't a concern to them. The
training, to them, was good enough.
Except it wasn't good enough, and when you do such a bad job training teachers
year after year, corps members do not recommend the program to others. There
aren't as many 'whistle blowers' as you would expect from all these corps
members who witnessed the low quality of training, but those people did not
speak highly of TFA and, as a result, they are not able to recruit new corps
members anymore. The organization has a $300 million operating budget to
recruit and train 2,000 corps members now. So that's $150,000 per corps member.
And poorly trained corps members at that.
The contempt TFA showed for the students who had to suffer with these untrained
teachers and the arrogance they had to not be willing to improve is what I
consider the main reason nobody wants to do TFA anymore, but it isn't the only
reason.
Reason #2: Ineffective leadership
When founder Wendy Kopp stepped down as CEO in 2013, she was replaced by two
co-CEOs, Elisa Villanueva-Beard (known in acronym-happy TFA as EVB)and Matt
Kramer. Two years later, Kramer left TFA and Elisa Villanueva-Beard became the
sole CEO. Her salary now is $450,000 a year, I never got the sense that she was
more than a figurehead CEO. Though TFA national headquarters are in New York
City, EVB continued to live in Houston. For ten years she has been giving the
same interview anytime she gets a chance. The problem with education in this
country, she contends, is that teachers are too lazy and uncaring to set high
expectations for their students. As evidence of this, she throws her own school
teachers under the school bus and blames them for the struggles she had
adjusting to college her first semester. The low-expectations narrative is
something you might hear in 'Waiting For Superman' or some other teacher
bashing propaganda film. It is just too oversimplified for it to be a
compelling message. To me, it is a deliberate lie. Young TFAers are going to
have high expectations and that is going to make all the difference. It bashes
veteran teachers and props up the untrained TFA corps members in one shot.
Maybe it is a good message for fundraisers, but that's about it. I would expect
her to be stepping down fairly soon, it's time for a change.
Reason #3: Alliance with teacher bashing reformers
Around 2006 I noticed a big change in the attitude of TFA. They were suddenly
the darlings of the politicians who vilified experienced teachers as the main
problem with American education. This scapegoating was very 'Trumpian' and it
led to the rise of the toxic TFA rockstars, most notably, Michelle Rhee who
became chancellor of D.C. schools. Rhee was a regular on Oprah. She was on the
cover of Time Magazine and Newsweek. She had a simple message -- teachers are
lazy and abusive and it is impossible to fire them. This message was a hit
among Republicans and most Democrats. Obama appointed Arne Duncan who could be
best described as 'a dummy' who seemed to truly believe that teachers were the
enemy.
This also helped TFA raise money. TFA was mentioned in 'Waiting For Superman.'
TFA accepted money from a fundraiser for the Walton produced bomb 'Won't Back
Down.' Other toxic TFA superstars rose to power -- Kevin Huffman in Tennessee,
John White in Louisiana, Cami Anderson in Newark, Paymon Rouhanifard in Camden,
Chris Barbic in Tennessee, Michael Johnston became a state senator in Colorado.
Michelle Rhee left D.C. and started StudentsFirst.
TFA's recruitment peak coincided with the peak of the toxic TFA superstars
around 2016.
Where Are They Now?
But the peak didn't last long. With those leaders unable to deliver with their
simplistic solution to bash teachers, they all started resigning. Currently
there is just one TFA school system leader, Penny Schwinn in Tennessee where
they are banning books and forbidding teachers from teaching about race.
StudentsFirst merged with something called 50CAN, and they seem to be becoming
more and more irrelevant by the day.
TFA also attached itself to the sinking ship known as the charter movement.
Many charter chains were started by TFA alumni, like the KIPP network founded
by Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. Feinberg was fired by KIPP after being accused
of sexually assaulting a student. In the trial it was ruled that there was not
enough evidence to implicate him, but the accuser's testimony was pretty
compelling. KIPP did not stand by Feinberg. Charter schools, in general, did
not live up to their promise that non-unionized teachers will outperform
veteran unionized teachers. They were able to keep up the lie for ten years and
chains like KIPP still get a lot of tax payer money to expand, but low
performing KIPPs around the country that are often pleading with the school
boards not to shut them down definitely have make networks like KIPP lose their
luster.
Even now, TFA still clings to their oversimplified teacher bashing theory of ed
reform. Just last week they produced a new podcast about TFA alumni who have
'turned around' failing schools. Here is the introduction to the first episode:
Many of the conversations that I have with folks about education start on the
idea that schools are somehow failing children. That like if schools were
working better, more kids would be successful. But if we look at the history of
education in the United States, that’s probably not accurate. What’s more
accurate is that schools are doing exactly what they were designed to do. They
were designed to sort: a learning class and a laboring class.
The problem today is that more frequently, we’re able to predict which kids get
which track based on where they’re growing up and their skin color.
But what if that wasn’t the case?
What if schools actually did work for kids and for every kid. Regardless of zip
code, regardless of their last name, regardless of where they’re from.
Still using all the reform code lingo. They have not learned a thing.
Ironically, the North Carolina school, North Phillips School of Innovation
(NPSI), is described as a formerly 'failing' school because it had single digit
proficiency scores in 2016. So they 'reimagined' the school and gave students
hands-on experiences and opportunities to do research. These are all good
things and there was no mention of test prep, which is good too. But there is
also no mention of how, at least by a test score metric that got the school
called 'failing' in the introduction, of the school improving their scores.
This has always been the problem with the toxic teacher bashing style of ed
reform. Every school with low test scores is called 'failing' and every school
with high test scores is 'high performing.' But so often there are charter
schools founded by TFA alumni that have low test scores, yet those are not
called 'failing' by TFA. It is a double standard and one that has alienated TFA
from the education community. This is why being a TFA alumni is now a strike
against any candidate applying for a high level leadership position.
All these issues have led to so many articles and reddit pages and different
ways for potential recruits to learn about the ongoing weaknesses of TFA. For
my own part, I did try to give constructive criticism over the years. I wanted
them to improve for the sake of the students the new CMs taught and for the CMs
themselves who would find my blog and contact me telling me they were having
mental breakdowns and TFA would just give them guilt trips. But had TFA
improved, they would have helped themselves to continue to thrive and maybe
even grow.
There were a lot of critics publicizing the problems with TFA. Often I was the
most high profile and my interviews on NPR and on Adam Ruins Everything
certainly couldn't help them, but I was just a unionized teacher with a chip on
my shoulder so my contributions were certainly overshadowed by TFA's refusal to
do the right thing and to choose growth and thirst for power over students and
their own recruits.
garyrubinstein | March 15, 2022 at 1:25 am | Categories: Uncategorized |
URL: https://wp.me/plDtP-4Yx ;
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