This is one of Gary Rubinstein’s most powerful posts.
He analyzes a series of TFA videos that are shameless propaganda for the view that high expectations overcome poverty and that TFA has cracked the secret code of education.
This sort of rhetoric reveals the basic sin of TFA. The organization encourages policymakers to believe that they don’t need to do anything to reduce poverty. Maybe that’s why the corporate giants and rightwing foundations such as Walton love TFA.
No new taxes, just higher expectations from teachers with five weeks of training.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Who could ask for anything more? Oh what a feeling! So wrong, so wrong.
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More razzed-dazzle data bar graphs. When will the public cease to be impressed with this?
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Oops … “Razzle” (Never type with anger.)
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“No new taxes, just higher expectations from teachers with five weeks of training.”
Diane, what a fantastic closing statement.
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All test prep, any discussion?
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It’s a wonderful post. There’s only one part of Gary’s take that I don’t agree with:
“The funny thing about most of the ones that I’ve met is that they are completely oblivious about how what they do could be, in the long run, hurting kids, schools, and teachers. They are just blind to this and when you try to tell them about it, they get confused and a little sad, but not sad because they are doing anything wrong, but sad because they are so misunderstood.”
The confused/sad response of career TFAers and edrefromers is a put on, they are paid to do that, they are disengenious and are hurting the most vunerable so they have to hide behind pretending NOT to know what they’re doing. They know they are fleecing the poor to get rich. Pretending to be misunderstood is a manipulation, he’s too kind in his assessment.
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The problem in education is just a symptom of what is happening in the U.S. and around the world. The ever increasing concentration of income and wealth is leading to enormous political power by wealthy individuals and corporations which benefits them and hurts everyone else. All the talk about fixing education is a distraction. The social safety net is under assault. Defined benefit plans are fading fast, even social security is under attack. Fire the “bad” teachers, (veterans with their defined benefit plans) and replace them with “temporary” TFA types, most of whom will not stay long enough to become vested. The reforms happening in education are more about money and power than education.
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And finally, of course, Michael, let’s go attack the super rich in their gated communities and take away their wealth so they have to live humble, impoverished lives like we virtuous teachers. That’s only fair, right? Will you do it with a shotgun, a Luger, or an AR 15? Or maybe just an ax handle or a baseball bat.
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So obtuse, Harlan. My seven year old already knows not to draw such extreme “either-or” portraits when constructing an argument.
Let me try and understand what you’ve written: If you advocate a higher tax rate on the top 0.1% of the population—like, for instance, taxing hedge fund guys at the standard rate, 39% instead of the outrageous 17%—then you are to be equated with those who would use violence to get what they wanted?
Is that correct?
It’s very telling that YOU have such specific images and ideas about using violence. I don’t see anyone advocating for more progressive taxation rates, endorsing murder as a means of getting it.
Similarly, you resort to pre-adolescent “logic”, arguing that if one insists on less concentration of wealth in our country that they then want to attack “the super rich in their gated communities and take away their wealth so they have to live humble, impoverished lives like we virtuous teachers.”
Nothing like balanced, reasoned argumentation to persuade others.
Because everyone knows that we either keep the status quo—where the richest 400 individuals have more wealth than the bottom 150 million American citizens—OR we break into their homes, murder them if they resist and then force them to live no better than a teacher.
Only one of the two alternatives, listed above, are available to us: Either keep things the way they are, or have a nation of enforced poverty, imposed by brutal force.
Do you actually read your stuff before you hit “send”?
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You seem to ignore that it is still theft of earned money, whether you take it at gunpoint or by taxation that discriminates against investors and job creators. If you want less of something you tax it. Does that make no sense to you? That the rich have more isn’t even unfair, but the real question is what the effect of a policy is. I favor a consumption tax with elimination of the income tax. But that isn’t fair, right? So, go beyond critiquing a deliberately extreme argument to say what tax system you advocate.
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ignore Harlan. He’s the hater with an ax to grind against teachers. He disdains humanity and social policies that help the needy, but he does love corporate welfare. He’s stuck in Reagan’s 80s and thinks people should continue to fall for the fallacy of billionaire job creators and trickle down economics. You’re supposed to pity the hard working 1% whose highly profitable companies, in actuality, pay no corporate taxes, get tax refunds and cut jobs: http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/16-giant-corporations-have-basically-stopped-paying-taxes
And then, of course, there are those six Walton heirs who are wealthier than the bottom 40% of our nation, while Wal-Mart pays unlivable wages and gives their employees brochures about how to apply for food stamps. Good old corporate welfare at work again.
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I have to say what I see as the next step is that education “scholarships” will become part of a job’s benefits like health insurance is. You’ll have to get education “scholarships” to get your kids into a good school and university. It’s one great way for the corporates to gain maximum loyalty from their minions by making their health and children’s education dependent on being a loyal corporate lackey. And the corporates will get a tax rebate for all the scholarships they offer (like Florida) – essentially the lower/middle class will pay for the scholarships through their taxes but the corporates will control who actually receives them.
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Yeah, so you’ll spend 17 years working for a company to pay for your kid’s education and then, on your kid’s 18th birthday they’ll fire you and the education benefit won’t be portable.
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But, Dienne, when they can fire you at will, for any reason or no reason, don’t you realize that’s “Freedom”?
Think of how much worse it would be with that big, nosy, domineering UNION protecting your job after you faithfully served this company for almost two decades.
Besides, they’re “doing you a favor”, keeping you from being so “dependent” on the company, giving you an “opportunity” to “hit the streets” at 52 years of age, where you can fulfill your “True Destiny”, by forcing you out of the nest to fly or crash.
It’s GOOD for you! Don’t you understand the benefits of risk?
Besides, competition is what life is all about.
FYI, I have a good friend who excelled in college—which is where we met—and who was “shown the door” by the new management that took over his firm. He had been there 22 years and always received good reviews. He worked his butt off for this company, “knowing” that such loyalty would always be respected. Especially since the company was doing very well, rebounding strongly from the crash of 2008.
So, at 52 years of age, with two kids in college, he was now “allowed the freedom to find his true path and destiny!”
He shot himself 5 months ago, after 2 years of humiliating, fruitless, desperate job searching with no results. I guess for some people their “destiny” and “opportunity” was suicide.
Now, how soon can we bring this “benefit” to ALL of our teachers!
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Your first few paragraphs had me chuckling, Puget Sound Parent, and I was going to thank you for the laugh. But your last couple paragraphs reminded me that crying is pretty much the only possible response. I’m so sorry for your friend and his family.
And thanks for the response to Harlan above too. I was debating whether it was worth it to bother, but I’m glad you did. You said it perfectly.
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You have to wonder if TFA is trying to counter all the negative articles about them that have been cropping up in the mainstream media. They’ve been the little darlings of politicians, corporations and the media for so long that they’re probably not really used to seeing much criticism of them in the popular press.
Also, we should suspect that TFA is trying to do damage control due to TFAer Ms. Cobb, on Oprah’s Blackboard Wars, who is such a great example of why five week trained TFA “teachers” should never be placed in charge of classrooms. No wonder they didn’t acknowledge that Cobb is from TFA –who was outed here due to her LinkedIn webpage which says she’s TFA– if she is the best TFA could come up with for a national TV show. However they may try to spin the outcome of that show, the tapes are already out there showing a very immature TFA “teacher” who cannot manage a classroom with less than a dozen students, who takes virtually everything her students’ say personally, who needlessly admonishes them when she doesn’t get her way and who often cries to them when she feels hurt.
All the hype about TFA raising expectations for students means absolutely nothing when their own expectations for teachers are so low. And yet they are on the NCTQ advisory board telling formally trained, veteran educators at colleges of education how to prepare teachers. TFA is not an organization of educators and they don’t know jack about child development, learning and teaching.
No one is qualified to become a teacher just because they have been a student, and even the best students don’t necessarily become the best teachers. And yet, Arne Duncan’s Ed Department endorses TFA and bestows them with heaps of praise and dollars. Would the FDA have them rating meat quality, too, just because they have eaten beef?
With so many thousands of TFAers to date, you have to wonder why more of them have not come out and admitted to themselves and to the world that they are nothing more than impostors. Either the Kool-Aide is so heavily spiked that they can’t face the truth, or most of them are grateful for the wealth and perks that followed their TFA temp stint and don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them.
Time to call an end to this 20+ year old billion dollar scam, which has been at the expense of so many unsuspecting students who didn’t get to have real teachers, as well as all the veteran career teachers who’ve lost jobs to TFAers.
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Please STOP calling them “teachers.”
They are NOT teachers.
Professional teachers are educators who have to go through an educational program requiring specific coursework including the foundations of education, the development of children both physically and mentally, and more. They must also become “highly qualified” in their specific discipline. Further, teachers have to continually update their certifications by continuing coursework, or some alternate means as determined by their state department of education.
The TFA does none of this. The TFA does five weeks in the summer with a four day a week in front of 6-8 “students,” kids who are there because their parents want them there, and who are well behaved. They tend to be from an upper socio-economic class, not the students these pretenders will deal with in the real classrooms.
Quite frankly, I, personally, am tired of hearing these pretenders being referred to as “teachers.” They are not. And when we, the qualified educated teachers refer to them as such, we degrade and belittle our own profession. We minimize our own experience in getting and continuing our certifications. And, we tell young people considering the profession not to bother doing it the right way; not to be concerned about becoming a “professional.” TFA’s” are “teachers” anyway, so, they can take the easy way out too!
And that, friends, will be the end of the professionalization of education.
The deformers will have won.
Do NOT call TFA “teachers.”
They are not. They haven’t earned the title of our noble profession.
Thank you.
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Thank you for that. Maybe Interns For America? Temps for America?
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I always put TFA “teachers” in quotes, as I do with corporate “reformers,” because that’s their take, not mine.
I have supervised a lot of interns and I would advise against characterizing TFAers as interns. That implies they are apprenticing and are being supervised by master teachers. However, I believe whatever guidance they are getting is coming from staff who are former TFA temps that are no more qualified than Michelle Rhee, not career educators with decades of classroom experience. I’d go with “Temps for America.”
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An earlier thread suggested that TFA teachers be assigned to the top performing students. While it was meant as a criticism of TFA, I thought it rather a good idea as content knowledge is perhaps more important for that group. An undergraduate mathamatics major from my university has taken more mathamatics courses than a teacher with. Masters degree specializing in mathamatics education.
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You are aware that many of us have a BS or BA in the subject we teach, right?
Very common for HS teachers, at lease in my area.
And we all had to pass a pretty rigorous subject test to receive our license.
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And how, Diane, would you reduce proverty so that it will make kids better learners? Doesn’t “research show” that there is only a correlation between income and schools success, not a causative link? I claim that you could give each poverty family a million bucks and their kids would still be lousy students, although the family would not longer be impoverished, economically. Is there ANY research that shows that improving the economic underpinning of poor families produces better scholastic outcomes for the children in those families? You’re the expert, educate me.
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Harlan, read Richard Rothstein, “Class and Schools.”
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I will read the book, but judging from the table of contents he does not offer research that amending poverty causes improved school performance, only proposals which he thinks might do so. Nevertheless, it looks like a persuasive analysis of the problem. I will return, ready to refute your assumption that social policy reforms will eliminate the achievement gap if Rothstein fails to offer “research,” in which case you may hold it as a secular faith, but it won’t yet be “proof.”
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Also see Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy’s “International tests show achievement gaps in all countries” http://www.epi.org/blog/international-tests-achievement-gaps-gains-american-students/
This is not a problem that is specific to America. All nations have an achievement gap between lower and higher income students. There’s been a lot of research on this in England, too: http://www.jrf.org.uk/work/workarea/education-and-poverty
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Poverty, at least generational poverty, is about a whole lot more than a lack of money. Money would be a good first step (actually, decent, safe jobs with livable wages and benefits would be a better first step), but you also have to contend with the effects of generations of poverty and the associated trauma. Of course you’re not going to see overnight improvement. But you would see gradual, incremental improvement and generation to generation the effects would be dramatic.
Not that you really care.
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Actually I really care, but I am impatient with the cant spouted. Even you have no proof, only a presumptive hope. The Great Society was started in 1968 and has done more harm rather than good. You have a faith, not a plan. I agree about the trauma, and even more about jobs and wages. And how do we provide them? 17 trillion dollar debt? I keep saying, TEA party are the only ones interested in jobs and growth. What we get back is claims that all are like the idiot who said “legitimate rape.” it’s totally irrelevant to economics. It’s an excuse to ignore reality.
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Only a bigot like you would think there’s been more harm than good since 1968. Why don’t you ask women, minorities and gays/lesbians what they think about that. Assuming any one in any of those groups speaks to you.
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Oh, and if life was all a bed of roses before 1968, what do you think about the fact that top marginal tax rates were around 70% back then? Shall we return to those good old days?
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HU,
All worried about the National Debt?
“You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”
Dick Cheney speaking to Paul O’Neill
Ok,what he was saying was that deficits don’t matter to the electorate.
Cheney supported massive tax breaks for the wealthy and multiple wars, and didn’t even try to pay for them. His administration supported Medicare expansion and No Child Left Behind (expensive and dumb, IMOH!), and like the rest of the agenda, they just added the costs onto the national credit card, running up a bill for some future president to pay.
You do recall that the Cheney team inherited a large federal surplus, right?
And they left a deficit, you know.
Don’t remember any tea parties then.
But flash forward a few years and now, deficits are supposed to matter greatly to the citizens.
Wonder why that is.
Hummmm.
Let me think.
Why are so many middle aged, middle class, folk suddenly so nervous about it all that they are running around in tricorn hats? Firmly convinced that the debt is a huge issue.
Where did the fear and the urgency come from.
Can’t quite put my finger in it.
Where and why did they get these ideas?
BTW:
Check out what this nobel prize winning economist says about the huge crisis of the national debt.
http://thoughtfulindia.com/2012/01/why-deficits-dont-matter/
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Here is Senator Bernie Sanders’ list of your 1% idols that are supposed to be making the economy better for the rest of us, HU, “Top Corporate Tax Dodgers” http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/102512%20-%20JobDestroyers3.pdf
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Wealth Distribution in America:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0ehzfQ4hAQ
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“Two-thirds of corporations in Illinois pay no state income tax, and a meager 8% of state revenue comes from corporate income taxes. Eighty-one (81%) of state revenue comes from personal income and sales taxes. Statistics from the Public Policy Polling, a non-partisan polling firm found that nearly 80% of Illinois voters say legislation to require publicly-traded corporations to disclose how much they pay in Illinois corporate tax income is a good idea. By closing three corporate tax loopholes, Illinois could raise $1.5 billion over 3 years to help solve its budget crisis.” http://pureparents.org/?p=20356
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Do you know where your state pension funds are invested?
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I’m not familiar with all the details because I don’t have a pension.
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A defined contribution plan rather than a defined benefit plan?
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Nope. Neither. All I’ll be getting is a rather meager Social Security check each month.
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Is it just me or were those teachers & lessons thoroughly boring? Did anyone see kids working together in cooperative groups?
Lots of tech – $$$$$$. The children were exceedingly well behaved given that the focus seemed to be on one child at a time… skill drills are what they film to show what a wonder their strategies are to behold?
not impressed.
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Cheryl: color me “unimpressed” as well, at least by what was in the initial 10-minute video.
However, IMHO, I don’t think the teachers & lessons were “thoroughly boring.” After my stints as a TA [bilingual and SpecEd] and working with dozens and dozens of teachers at the elementary and high school level, what struck me was just how pedestrian it all was—not especially good or bad by public school standards, and certainly nowhere near the level of some of the teachers with whom I worked.
I don’t think I am assuming too much by asserting that they put the best they had in the promotional video. So in all honesty, if that is their best, I would hate to see what ‘ordinary’ teaching and lessons are like.
An aside: did anyone else notice the relatively small sizes of the classes and the bright seemingly new classrooms? Wish that were true for all public schools too…
Just my dos centavitos worth.
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The “Walmart heirs own more wealth than bottom 40 percent of Americans” http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/
The Waltons will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting a political agenda aimed at providing the least trained teachers to educate America’s most at-risk children. They will not help the parents of those poor children, many of whom are their own employees: “more Walmart employees on Medicaid, food stamps than other companies” http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/dec/06/alan-grayson/alan-grayson-says-more-walmart-employees-medicaid-/
Wealth and power trump hard working parents with hungry children. How sick is that?
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