I posted before that four TFA alums are running for the Atlanta school board. This seems to be the TFA long-term plan, as Wendy Kopp has often stated: to build a cadre of leaders with a strong network of funders across the nation.
We know what this has meant in Louisiana, the District of Columbia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, where TFA-trained leaders have fought for privatization, high-stakes testing, test-based teacher evaluation, and merit pay.
Here is an Atlanta article about what lies ahead if TFA alums constitute a solid bloc on the board and are close to controlling it. It is interesting that some of the candidates do not acknowledge their TFA connection.
The article describes a little-known offshoot of TFA called “Leadership for Educational Equity” (LEE). This appears to be the political action arm of TFA, spinning off groups like “Families Empowered” and “Mississippi First,” both of which advocate for privately managed charter schools. LEE is not transparent. Only members can access its website.
You can see why the far-right, anti-union Walton Family Foundation gave TFA $50 million, and why it is the favorite charity of major corporations. It is a training ground for the privatization movement.
Especially interesting in this article is the analysis by Julian Vasquez Heilig, who has studied the effects of TFA in the classroom.
The following is a quote from the article:
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“Overall, the four are a largely pro-charter school group. If all four are elected, TFA alumni will constitute a near-majority voting bloc on the BOE.
So, what does this mean for APS, and how might a TFA voting bloc impact educational policy for APS teachers, parents, students, and other stakeholders?
“The first thing is, it’s not surprising you have so many TFA alum running for the School Board.
TFA alums are everywhere but the classroom. Their turnover rate, after three or four years, is around eighty percent,” Julian Vasquez Heilig, an Associate Professor of Educational Policy and Planning at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the Cloaking Inequality blog, told Atlanta Progressive News.
“It’s a revolving door of temporary labor. It [TFA] perpetuates inequality in teacher quality,” he said.
“It empowers districts to continue a revolving of rookie teachers. What TFA will argue is their five weeks of training in the summer is adequate for their teachers,” he said.
“In recent years, they’ve aligned themselves with the corporate reformer movement. That means vouchers, charter schools, parent trigger, anti-union,” he said.
“You see the Teach for America alum leading out in this movement to corporatize education. What that means, take education out of the public space. They [charter schools] are no longer democratically controlled,” he said.
“What TFA has done over the last few years, is aligned themselves with a variety of faces in the reform movement that are taking democratic control away from communities, and they seek to privatize many functions,” he said.
“The voters have to decide if they like what TFA is selling. If the public is happy with the temporary tourist approach to education, then they’re the right choice,” he said.
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TFA = Toxic For America
SFA = Scabs for America
You realize, of course, that the concept of scabs doesn’t cross the mind of those in right to work states, really. It doesn’t fit into the context of our situation. Union issues are not what we have.
I think the impact of TFA will just be to kill University Ed programs in the south (or right to work states). In a few years after TFA leadership takes hold, the Universities will go to the legislatures and make a case for how their enrollments have been hit. That is my prediction.
I may have missed this, but I didn’t see discussion of the new public high school in Atlanta:
“But for the Atlanta Public Schools, which are just beginning to recover from a cheating scandal that in March brought indictments against 35 educators, including a former superintendent, the shining new school is being pitched as an important step toward redemption.
About 48,400 students will attend public school in Atlanta this year, about 400 fewer than last year.
“We have a special obligation here,” said Howard E. Taylor, the new principal. “The district is digging out of a historic crisis.”
He and other educators say that the new school building is an opportunity to show that a large, urban public high school can be a viable alternative to the rising tide of charter schools, voucher systems and private education.
Some of the 1,400 students who will attend the school this year come from the wealthiest families in the region, but others, Mr. Taylor said, are homeless. Nearly half are black. About 27 percent are white and 20 percent are Hispanic. They speak more than 40 languages.
“If there was ever a model for an urban high school, this is it,” he said.
Is this one way to push back against all the doom and gloom reformers have saddled public schools with? A confident and bold investment in a truly public school? As a public school parent, one of the things I hate about “reform” is how public schools are either ignored or attacked. We have a lousy advocate in Arne Duncan, and too many governors have abandoned public education. People in Atlanta took a risk here, and they’re going against the status quo. They made a bet on public education. They need support.
North Atlanta is not a new high school. It is a rebuilt high school. It has always been kind of special. It was M to M in the 1980s and beyond and was where the teachers sent their kids before they built a middle class school on the lower end of 285 (The Perimeter highway around Atlanta) to attract some of the middle class black children out of North Atlanta. Another school that attracted a good many middle class kids, although not quite so much as North Atlanta (originally Northside) is Grady High, which is an intown school in a middle/upper middle class area called Midtown which is more liberal than Buckhead. In Atlanta the key to the quality of the schools was to watch where the teachers sent their kids. Zoning has always been loose for high school ,especially, and, unless they have changed, a Board employee of any level from a lunch room lady to a superintendent can send their child to any school that has space. It’s just that the kids have a really long bus and train ride to get out there if they don’t have a car.
North Atlanta has had the fine arts magnet forever and had some celebrities as students. It also has or has had a good many international students and has a magnet for international studies. It is and always has been a special school.
Private schools are not common in Atlanta. The most elite ones the very wealthy parents are known to sign their kids up for at conception (yes, conception). The parochial system has always been small because Catholics are seriously a minority and there are some special needs schools. but they are also small. Almost all the children go to public school.
@twinkie1cat – I don’t know where you get your information, but it couldn’t be more wrong… “Private schools are not common in Atlanta. The most elite ones the very wealthy parents are known to sign their kids up for at conception (yes, conception).”
Private schools are VERY COMMON in Atlanta as parents are forced to find a quality education alternative to APS for their children. This is not limited to the “very wealthy.” There are plenty of middle class families in the “elite” private schools to which you refer, who scrimp, save, and sacrifice everything to save their children from the train wreck of APS.
As for signing up at conception, I’m not sure which schools you referring to, but the top 3 schools (Westminster, Lovett, Pace) absolutely have no such program. Every child must apply the year prior to admission.
This is a recipe for resegregation of the schools, by race and class.
I don’t understand a ship’s crew preferring to sink the ship. That makes no sense to me. If schools for the public are to serve the diverse needs of the public well, eventually an offering of only charters and private schools will encounter exactly the same issues that public schools have already tackled and are revising and improving. “Let’s run the ship into the rocks! Yeah, then we can scavenge and take what we want and rebuild a new ship the way we want” just sounds like a really silly idea to me.
And no matter how hard you tap dance to convince people that running the ship into the rocks is not what is happening, you can’t fool everyone.
There was a lot of talk about common ground yesterday on this blog. In simple terms I see the issues (in terms of teachers, since this post is about TFA, albeit it is about TFA alum in leadership, but the way we got here, as I see it, is as follows): we have a preparation gap among teachers. We have those who have a solid and strong foundation in the liberal arts or another area who want to teach briefly without too much personal investment in becoming prepared in the field of education (TFA) and we have those who have a solid training in education , but might lack the depth in another subject that a TFA grad probably has– . The two sides are fighting it out about who should call the shots and design the scenery, and write the script (if you will) for public education. The resolution I see (the coming together of this divide) is that education training not be given in five weeks, nor that it be given as an undergraduate major. . .but that it become more like law school training and be offered only as a graduate level degree.
I know that is not a practical idea, particularly with the high cost of college level degrees anymore. But what is the other common, middle ground? TFA is not going to go away. Teachers passionate and with an understanding of child and adolescent development, the history of education in America, education from a psychology standpoint and a philosophy standpoint are also not going away (even if the profession is “wiped out” as we know it. . .teachers, many of them, are born loving to teach—they will find a vehicle for doing so and will succeed at it).
I wonder what other middle ground scenarios people have thought about.
I look forward to reading Diane’s book. I think, though, that it will lead people to beginning to ask more productive questions (I hope) more than it will lead TFA to drop everything and find a new cause.
“. . . but might lack the depth in another subject that a TFA grad probably has. . . ”
The Temporary Faculty of America would love you to think that those vaunted east coast private elite colleges are just that much more superior. Jokes on you!
A generalization, that even with the qualifier “might”, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. So my 39 hours undergrad in Spanish language courses along with “electives” such as Geography of South America, Archaeology of South America, Social Revolutions in Latin America, the History of Mexico was not as “in-depth” as the supposedly “superior” Northeast elite schools’ language programs? Sorry, I don’t buy that.
Fair enough. But it isn’t me you have to convince.
Where is the middle ground? Where is the common ground? I think the statement you chose from what I wrote. . .the joke that is on me. . .is one that will require bold conversations waiting to happen. I don’t see things going back to how they were. So, if you don’t buy that, what do you buy?
Duane–
It is an elitism thing, isn’t it?
I get that. I see that. (albeit that is harder for me to remember, sometimes).
But how does that change? Have the ivys and the “hidden ivys” gotten so out of reach for hard-working Americans who don’t have a link to them, or who are not pursued by those institutions because they lack the je ne sais quois that makes them somehow desirable to that institution; and for those who do attend them do so only to realize upon graduation that they will have to work hard same as the rest of us (possibly. . .) or that they are drawn to teaching (but not the life of a teacher) and so they now want to usurp what the rest of hard-working Americans have carved out? Is that how you see it? (I am not challenging you—I hear you. I am just trying to find a better way to frame things that is bridge-building). Also, I was raised to value those elite circles by one side of my family (the other side not so much—perhaps that is why my parents did not stay together). I know you have challenged the notion that we all have a price. Are you saying that if given the chance to go to Yale, most hard-working Americans would turn it down?
Somewhere there has to be cross-over in the gap. I can’t define it.
Ang:
I went back to school to become a teacher. So, no, I do not have a poor education. I have a BA in my subject, followed by a Masters and certification. I worked in my field before I was a teacher of it as a subject.
But my point was the difference in education between those trained as teachers in undergrad and those now seeking to upstage them with TfA. I fall in neither category. I was not saying that one is better or worse. But there is a conflict between the two.
Clearly there is a difference or we would not be having the conflict between TFA and not TFA that is happening. I am trying to find answers. You are aiming something at me; I am stating an observation.
Joanna,
Please realize that the vast majority (yes I consider the vast majority to be 80%-think of how political pundits would be drooling* over a presidential winner if they got 80% of the voting age population votes), of the Teach for Awhile corps (and that’s what they call themselves a “corp member”-you know a fantasized marine expedition into the wilds of an inner city jungle) leave after five years.
Yes there are some exceptions to the vast majority of Temporary Figureheads of America who do stick around, but the fact is, is that they obviously can’t teach or else they’d make a career out of it (kind of like the majority of administrators in the schools).
Unkind words? yes. Not looking for “common ground?, yes. There is no common ground for those folks who are oh so great. And I am saying that TFA as a program as it is run now is definitely the worse option.
*Actually, they’d be multiple orgasmic for days on end.
“we have a preparation gap among teachers. We have those who have a solid and strong foundation in the liberal arts or another area who want to teach briefly without too much personal investment in becoming prepared in the field of education (TFA) and we have those who have a solid training in education , but might lack the depth in another subject that a TFA grad probably has– . ”
Really?
I thought you were a teacher?
Did you just suggest that you have a poor education? Do you lack depth in the subject you teach?
I do not nor do the vast majority of my colleagues.
My friend, don’t drink the “career teachers are not smart/educated” kool aid.
Ang and Swacker:
Thanks for not giving up on the dialogue.
So Dwayne you are saying that if TFA can get enough alum out there voting, they can change the trajectory of everyone (which would mean all things tilted towards the 1% —whose trajectory they ever intended to change being questionable anyway).
I hear what you guys are saying. I don’t have an issue of whose “team” I am on or seeking to differentiate myself from anyone. (Facts are facts as far as where people went to school; I am not making a judgement call there). What I am trying to do is find an answer. I see that you think fight off TFA and make it go away is the only solution.
I have no answers. I will keep thinking about it, though, because I like resolution and I don’t like the contentious nature of things right now. It’s not my style. I like harmony, remember? Music teacher. Real harmony and figurative harmony. Right now the soundtrack to the climate of education in US is loud and cacauphonous. I want it to have an Andante section, in a major key.
My point , my friend is….
You do not believe yourself to be ill educated or unprepared in your subject area.
So do not assume that about he rest of us.
there seems to be some sort of need recently for folks who consider themselves “good teachers” to separate themselves from everyone else.
Get me?
The whole “yes I am a teacher, but I have this that or the other reason that I am not sucky like the average teacher”.
I have a degree from one of the so called “secret Ives” a college that changes lives sort of place.. A place where they now recruit for TFA.
The best teacher in our building is an extraordinary gentleman who went to state schools and has multiple degrees in math education. He is beyond compare. You would wish for your child to have such a math teacher.
We often come to this from different places.
We do not lack depth just because we became teachers or just because we went to certain schools or hold certain degrees.
The worst teacher I have ever encountered was from a very famous college. He was so crazy they had to call the cops on him, during school. He did not have an Ed degree.
Again, do not drink the teachers are all bottom of the heap kook aid.
Just think about it, OK.
XO
Just out of curiosity, what is the background of the worst teacher your building?
Ok, I know Atlanta and it would be hard for school board members to be elected who are #1 White #2 Republican. If they are anti gay too, they will sink like a rock. All the papers I would think would jump on this and find out where they stand—from AJC to Georgia Voice, to Creative Loafing. So if these kids are not local and known to locals I don’t think they can take over. I certainly hope not, anyway. People have told me Atlanta has changed, but I don’t think it could have by so much as to elect conservatives to local government.
There have been a few charters in the past few years, really before the charter movement started. The first was Ann E. West. When the public school was closed it was taken over by the parents who formed one and when I left in 2004 they were also planning to start a middle because the zoned middle school (King) was horrific and the principal was a racist.
What could make the Board (as the school system is called) more problematic would be the effects of the cheating scandal. But I don’t think they were ever blamed for that, just the teachers and the superintendent. By the way, cheating had gone on for years,, back into the 90s that I know of. In fact one of the indicted teachers was a paraprofessional at a school that cheated its scores up too high to get Title 1. I know. I was there.
TFA control of the school board would guarantee that more taxpayer dollars and jobs
LEAVE Atlanta and the USA to enrich multi-millionaire Wendy Kopp, standardized testing companies, New York and London Common Core creators, and more outsiders.
Atlanta – run as fast as you can from these folks before they loot your schools and your children’s future to add to their private, already comfortable gains.
Good Evening, Ms. Ravitch:
If you can, please comment on Maureen Downey’s Blog in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/get-schooled/2013/sep/18/teach-america-experience-help-or-hindrance-atlanta/