The reader called “Democracy” posted this comment and a link to a YouTube video from 2012. I was unable to open the video, perhaps you can, but the comments on the video were still live.
The comment reads:
“Wendy Kopp: “there was a front page article in Fortune Magazine saying that corporate America was going to take on education reform. So, there were so many elements that made the timing for this perfect. The other things is, I say this all the time, my greatest asset was my inexperience, my complete naïveté. I was convinced that this both had to happen and could happen, that it had to start on a significant scale right from the start and really, no one was going to talk me out of this, like people would tell me how crazy this was and I would just not really hear it, and I think that was truly one of my biggest assets. The other thing is that I think this particular idea was one that just very quickly magnetized just thousands of people, really, who really identified with the values on which it was built and just thought it made sense, you know, from college students who did in fact, you know, 2500 recent college graduates, you know, in four months responded to a grassroots recruitment campaign which at the time was flyers under doors, you know? The folks in corporate America who were quoted in that article actually came through with seed grants and ultimately with significant support, so, you know, in the first year alone, corporations and foundations donated $2.5 million to make it possible, and there was tremendous support in the education community as well…”
“Uh-huh.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Teaching is a calling, an avocation; you can’t just cherry-pick people out of the post-secondary ether to become teachers. You can’t just recruit teachers the same way you recruit MBAs, especially into those low income communities, without providing those communities and their schools the resources they need to survive, to thrive.
Her comment about ‘these two-year corporate training programs’ is also telling, as she obviously decided it would serve as a template for teaching. For most of us, teaching is a lifelong commitment to serve our students, our communities (and that goes for preK-university).
It opened for me. Let’s try it from here.
Yep, she really says all those things. She describes how she hit on the idea a 2 year “corporate training” type program that took idealistic college graduates and handed them over to corporate America’s education privatization machine.
She smelled the corporate money overtone, and even the deeper base fragrance, the motherlode of the public money trough. The scent was rising from the pages Fortune Magazine, and she was among many entrepreneurs who heeded its call.
Her fortune has been made, but the children are even worse off in their disrupted schools and gutted communities.
She is disgusting. She is all about herself and loading her pockets full of money. She is the typical “reformer”. Disgusting.
I expect every one of those corporate folks looking to invest in ed-reform must have licked their chops when they met this ingénue BA in public policy, sr. thesis in hand. Her tone in this quote is like fingernails on a chalkboard to an educator– sure sounds to me like the jubilation of a young broker who’s become a millionaire in a year, thanks simply to selling some klunkers to people who couldn’t afford to lose their shirts. But then, it appears she isn’t an educator at all, is she?
There are so many things wrong with this picture.. (just watched the youtube video after reading the excerpt above). Kopp claims she was growing weary of being referred to as the “me” generation” and wonders why Wall Street recruited students so heavily. She wonders why other fields like education were not doing the same level of recruiting when they were so desperate for teachers. She constantly says “me” and “I” throughout the piece.. what the idea SHE had did for HER. How SHE was lost wondering what SHE was going to do with HER life and how this idea helped HER create HER thesis etc… nothing much about the kids she wanted to help. She basically turned Wall Street profiteer’s attentions toward the profits of education and cheer led her way into a rather well paying (I am sure) position as the founder of TFA.
By the way, does anyone know what Wendy Kopp’s total salary is (from all things related to TFA only of course)! Does she do her public speaking nobly “for free” for the good of the social justice issue she supposedly promotes (aka education equity)? I am guessing this has been a rather corporate and rather lucrative career for Kopp who claims not to be a representative of the “me” generation. She sure seems like a poster child for the definition of the “me” generation to me (mind you many people of her generation are not “me” types at all).
Wall Street is the epitome of the” me” generation. Kopp is only displaying where her allegiance truly lies, and it’s not with education.
This connection was made easy for her since Wall Street is paved with Princeton “economics” graduates.
The tools of corporate education “reform” are “public policy” and “political science” majors.
After Kopp mentioned being a public policy major, I wondered why Wall Street would be recruiting anyone with that degree, when their blood and guts lie in deregulation. As a lobbyist maybe? Not sure why that would have been needed then though. That was the Reagan/Bush I era, so supply-side economics (favoring big business) and trick-down (supposedly of benefit to the masses) were the policies of the day.
I didn’t go to an Ivy League school and had no idea that corporations recruited new graduates on campus. I only remember seeing credit card companies recruiting on my campus. Silly me, I always thought young people were expected to acquire some experience and pay their dues before getting high powered jobs.
Wall Street recruits at Princeton because finance and economics is one of its specialties. They’re all connected. Princeton grads recruiting Princeton undergrads.
Good deconstruction.
I read the recent opinion in the case of the firing of 7000 New Orleans teachers, and the description of TFA was interesting compared to the millions of words we get in these glowing media pieces and ringing endorsements by political and business leaders.
The judges have to describe the organization in the opinion, just bare-bones, a simple definition, and the court settled on “inexperienced recent college graduates”. Which is true.
They fired 7000 local teachers without any process and replaced many of them with inexperienced recent college graduates, was the bottom line for the court. The factual description of what went on there is worth reading if you’re looking for a simple recitation of WHAT HAPPENED, without all the ed reform spin and marketing fluff.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2014/01/7000_new_orleans_teachers_laid.html
This is from Fast Company Magazine “dedicated to reporting about how the `fast companies’; entrepreneurs, and cutting-edge are doing what they do. ” I thought it was all about the kids?!
FROM FACEBOOK TO PIXAR: 10 CONVERSATIONS THAT CHANGED OUR WORLD
5. READING, WRITING, AND EDUCATION REFORM
Wendy Kopp proposed Teach for America in 1989 as her senior thesis at Princeton. By the spring of the following year, she had lined up 500 recruits and job placements for them. But Kopp still needed more than $2 million to launch. So she wrote billionaire industrialist Ross Perot.
“I thought, He’s from Dallas; I’m from Dallas. And he’s really into education reform. I had no connection to him at all. I just thought, He’s going to love this! I wrote him–as I recall, although he disputes this–numerous letters, one of which he actually read, and he called me and said, ‘When do you want to get together?’ And I told him I was going to be there in a week. I needed about $2 million, and I was asking him for half of it. Before I walked into his office, I just knew this was my last stop. I told myself, I am going to be glued to his chair until he says yes. I don’t think I’ve ever been as determined. I met with him for almost two hours. It probably took me an hour to inspire him to believe that this actually had some chance of happening and would be a good thing. I think he just realized that I wasn’t going anywhere. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I will give you $500,000 if you can raise the other $1.5 million.’ And I just knew that was all I needed.
All the funding came together shortly thereafter. I’d met a lot of potential supporters, but they were all sitting on the fence, trying to figure out if this was really going to happen or not. The credibility of Perot’s commitment did a lot to inspire the confidence of everyone else.”
6. MASS RETAIL MEETS HIGH-END DESIGN – TARGET
“All the funding came together shortly thereafter. I’d met a lot of potential supporters, but they were all sitting on the fence, trying to figure out if this was really going to happen or not. The credibility of Perot’s commitment did a lot to inspire the confidence of everyone else.”
Yeah, it’s tougher for traditional public schools because they have to engage in all that messy “democracy”. I just came off a school funding campaign to raise ed funding locally due to ed reformer-initiated education cuts by the state and we had to convince nearly 30,000 “stakeholders” who live here to raise their own taxes. The campaign was made more difficult by the national politician/business/media chant of “public schools suck!” and our “reform” governor, who is anti-tax and got elected telling people they don’t have to pay for any of the public services they receive.
Obviously, we should have just gone to Ross Perot. He made his entire fortune in government contracting, but we’ll just ignore that more complicated aspect of this inspiring private sector narrative.
“The other things is, I say this all the time, my greatest asset was my inexperience, my complete naïveté.”
Make perfect sense to me why she keeps screwing herself for her ignorance. Education can’t be bought by money.
Imagine this job interview.
And so Ms. Kopp, what do you see as your strongest asset?
Kopp: Well I think my strong suit is my complete and utter ignorance of the field that I want to influence. Inexperience is a good thing, if you ignore the importance of knowledge and wisdom.
In New York Times today (Saturday)–privatizers using children in their lawsuit against teacher tenure.
LOS ANGELES — They have tried and failed to loosen tenure rules for teachers in contract talks and state legislatures. So now, a group of rising stars in the movement to overhaul education employment has gone to court.
In a small, wood-paneled courtroom here this week, nine public school students are challenging California’s ironclad tenure system, arguing that their right to a good education is violated by job protections that make it too difficult to fire bad instructors. But behind the students stand a Silicon Valley technology magnate who is financing the case and an all-star cast of lawyers that includes Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general of the United States, who recently won the Supreme Court case that effectively overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
“Children have the right to access good education and an effective teacher regardless of their circumstances,” said David F. Welch, the telecommunications entrepreneur who spent millions of his own dollars to create Students Matter, the organization behind the lawsuit. The group describes itself as a national nonprofit dedicated to sponsoring litigation of this type, and the outcome in California will provide the first indication of whether it can succeed.
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John E. Deasy, the schools superintendent of Los Angeles. Monica Almeida/The New York Times
At issue is a set of rules that grant permanent employment status to California teachers after 18 months on the job, require a lengthy procedure to dismiss a teacher, and set up a seniority system in which the teachers most recently hired must be the first to lose their jobs when layoffs occur, as they have regularly in recent years.
Teachers’ unions, which hold powerful sway among lawmakers here, contend that the protections are necessary to ensure that teachers are not fired unfairly. Without these safeguards, the unions say, the profession will not attract new teachers.
“Tenure is an amenity, just like salary and vacation, that allows districts to recruit and retain teachers despite harder working conditions, pay that hasn’t kept pace and larger class sizes,” James M. Finberg, a lawyer for the California teachers’ unions, said this week in his opening statement in court.
The monthlong trial promises to be a closely watched national test case on employment laws for teachers, one of the most contentious debates in education. Many school superintendents and advocates across the country call such laws detrimental and anachronistic, and have pressed for the past decade for changes, with mixed success. Tenure for teachers has been eliminated in three states and in Washington, D.C., and a handful of states prohibit seniority as a factor in teacher layoffs. But in many large states with urban school districts, including California and New York, efforts to push through such changes in the legislature have repeatedly failed.
While several lawsuits demanding more money for schools have succeeded across the country, the California case is the most sweeping legal challenge claiming that students are hurt by employment laws for teachers. The case also relies on a civil rights argument that so far is untested: that poor and minority students are denied equal access to education because they are more likely to have “grossly ineffective” teachers.
Judge Rolf Michael Treu, of Los Angeles County Superior Court, will decide the nonjury trial. His ruling will almost certainly be appealed to the State Supreme Court.
Witnesses are expected to explain many of their basic assumptions about how to create quality schools.
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The first witness for the plaintiffs was John E. Deasy, the superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District and a staunch opponent of tenure rules and “last in, first out” seniority for teachers. Mr. Deasy testified that attempts to dismiss ineffective teachers can cost $250,000 to $450,000 and include years of appeals and legal proceedings. Often, he said, the district is forced to decide that the time and money would be too much to spend on a case with an unclear outcome, in part because a separate governing board can reinstate the teachers. Such rules make it impossible not to place ineffective teachers at schools with high poverty rates, he told the court.
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Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Philip Scott Andrews for The New York Times
“I absolutely do not believe it’s in the best interest of students whatsoever,” Mr. Deasy said of the layoff policy. “The decision about who should be in front of students should be the most effective teacher. These statutes prohibit that from being a consideration at all. By virtue of that, it cannot be good for students.”
Teachers’ unions contend that such job protections help schools keep the best teachers and recruit new ones to a job that is often exhausting, challenging and low paid. Mr. Finberg, the lawyer for the unions, said in court that the fact that Mr. Deasy has increased the number of ineffective teachers dismissed from the classroom — to about 100 of the district’s 30,000 teachers — suggests that the laws are working.
The plaintiffs’ legal team, from the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, includes not only Mr. Olson, who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush, but also Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Apple in its antitrust case on e-book pricing. The lawyers and public relations firm behind Students Matter previously teamed to overturn the California ballot measure against same-sex marriage and say this case could have a similar ripple effect across the country. Among the boldface names siding publicly with the plaintiffs is Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, who joined them in a news conference outside the courthouse this week.
“The case has the potential to have really broad and important implications not just for California,” said Michelle A. Rhee, the former Washington schools chancellor who now runs Students First, an advocacy group that works to elect leaders who support changing the employment laws for teachers. “In an ideal world you would want policies to be passed in the legislature, but in California there was no movement on that. I think in this case they were tired of waiting.”
Teachers’ unions nationwide have fought changes in employment laws, contending that their members must be protected from capricious or vengeful administrators. In Colorado, where a sweeping law in 2010 created a new system to evaluate teachers, the unions are suing over a provision that lets principals decide whether to hire veteran teachers who lost jobs because of budget cuts or drops in enrollment.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a telephone interview that the California case echoes the fights she had when she led the teachers’ union in New York, and called the lawsuit “worse than troubling.”
“It’s yet another example of not rolling up your sleeves and dealing with a problem, but instead finding a scapegoat,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They are not suing about segregation or funding or property tax systems — all the things you really need to get kids a level playing field. They want to strip teachers of any rights to a voice.”
State education laws across the country are changing. School districts in 29 states use poor effectiveness as grounds for dismissal, according to a report released Thursday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based think tank that tracks teacher policies. Just five years ago, no states allowed student performance to be considered in teachers’ evaluations, said Kate Walsh, the executive director of the center. Now, 20 states require such data.
“We have really seen mountains move in some places — the trend in the country has been toward meaningful ways to evaluate teachers and to use that evaluation to make tenure decisions,” Ms. Walsh said in an interview. “But I don’t think anyone has figured out how to implement them particularly well yet.”
I really resent the manipulative language they use and I wonder why they are never called on it.
The clear implication of a group that calls itself “Students Matter” and set up an adversarial challenge to public school teachers is that students don’t matter to public school teachers.
The same is true for StudentsFirst. Everyone who opposes Rhee’s privatization lobby shop thinks students come “second”, apparently.
It’s appalling that they get away with it.
With all these thousands of highly-paid advocates “for children” running around one has to wonder why existing public schools take hit after hit after hit under ed reform leadership. Are they just lousy advocates? You’d think if you quadrupled the number of paid advocates for “public ed” public schools would be better off, not worse, yet, oddly, that hasn’t happened. Public schools have instead been abandoned. What are they doing all day?
“What are they doing all day?”
Trying to figure out where to cause the next traffic jam?
“What are they doing all day?”
Certainly not the nitty gritty day in day out teaching in a public school!
So what are they doing?
Makin jack, what else is there in the world?
Why aren’t they suing the ineffective administrators that interviewed, hired, observed, evaluated, and tenured these teachers?
There may be a silver lining to this. If teacher ineffectiveness in LASUD is tied to VAM; I would expect an immediate counter-suit.
NY teacher: your first paragraph cut right to the heart of the matter.
The answer is: when you literally follow worst business practices [explained in painful detail in W. Edward Deming’s works] then the kick-down ‘blame game’ is the management tool of choice—
Any problem, real or imagined, is always the fault of the employee/worker/subordinate who is actually doing the work.
Even when an acknowledged expert in numbers/stats like W. Edward Deming, with vast experience in the theoretical and applied uses of statistics in quality control, showed that approximately 85% of faults in a system were the responsibility and under the control of management. [THE ESSENTIAL DEMING, 2013, p. 176]
But when under the influence of a self-generated Rheeality Distortion Field, any toxic adage will seem like a recently discovered and divinely inspired tablet—
“Unfettered greed will answer every need.”
It makes ₵ent¢. Rheeally!
The needs, of course, of that tiny but [self-styled] select, virtuous and meritorious band of charterite/privatizer true believers. For the vast majority, those who are being squeezed for every last ounce of $tudent $ucce$$ and being taken advantage of…
Not really.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
Krazy TA
A “Rheeality distortion field”
I’m voting for this as the best blog phrase of 2014
NY teacher: as a paraprofessional I must defer to the wishes of the teacher with whom I am working.
😃
Although, darn, there are still eleven months to go in 2014 and Robert D. Shepherd and Duane Swacker and Dienne and Linda and others have yet to make entries. *Chiara Duggan has already entered the, er, “race” with her general description of charters as “choice not voice” so I fear I will be in some tough competition.*
But I will grit my teeth and accept your accolade.
No matter how much it hurts…
😎
NY Teacher re: para 2, I just opined something similar on the Tenn teacher post. If tenure law expands grounds for dismissal to include ‘inefficiency’ (or some such) as evidenced by VAM results– & if VAM results (‘the evidence’) cannot be examined in detail, challenged, offered a fair hearing– the tenure law does not meet the test of ‘due process’ as understood by fed law.
VAM evaluation will be their legal undoing. Just wondering what’s taking so long?
The question is, which private, wealthy individual, group, or corporation will back the teachers who were unfairly dismissed due to unreliable, invalid, and inaccurate VAM evals????
Ed Dispatch – A Former TFA Teacher:
“My name is John Bilby and I was a TFA teacher in the New York region from September 2009 until March 2010. I left the organization because I felt that it does not adequately prepare its people to serve the poorest children in public schools. I also think that TFA is more interested in power, access, and influence in the federal game of education than it is concerned with resolving educational inequity. Its “corps members” are merely a means to this end, providing the organization with a front while it pursues the goals of its donors, namely to remodel public education in this country in order to favor a high-turnover, non-unionized workforce in charters run by hedge-fund managers for tax breaks. I foresee this further stratifying our current system into one in which children with disabilities, children who don’t speak English, and children who do not do well on standardized tests are funneled into substandard schools in a constant state of crisis due to continuous budget cutting.”
He hit the nail on the head. One of the most disgusting things about this is that they are completely running over poor people. Also, the case about California tenure is using school children to peddle their disgusting attempt to destroy teacher tenure so they can make more money. Absolutely disgusting.
‘completely running over poor people’ — right you are. And since ‘poor people’ in many districts means people of color, should offer grounds for a fed lawsuit re equal opportunity &/or segregation. I wonder how the DOJ lawsuit against Jindal’s voucher system is going?
This is latest story I can find about DOJ lawsuit over Jindal voucher plan. http://freebeacon.com/doj-continues-pursuit-of-federal-oversight-over-louisiana-voucher-program/
If any of our Louisiana readers know more, weigh in.
Okay, so I have learned there are some dissenters in the TFA ranks, so this isn’t directed to the actual “corps” members, but among the TFA ranks in government, the “leaders” of districts and states, are there any who veer from ed reform gospel?
Can someone point me to one? A former TFA’er in government who breaks with the charter/voucher/testing mantra?
Because if they’re really creating “leaders” rather than followers there should be at least one after all this time. Any examples of that?
Supposedly Steve Zimmer, who is a member of the LAUSD school board, broke ranks with TFA. I’m finding that hard to believe now though, due to the billion dollar IPad scandal, caused by superintendent Deasy, a big time Broadie.corporate “reformer,” who the board rehired anyways. I don’t know. I thought the “reformers” were not in the majority on that board anymore, so I don’t really get what’s going on there (That’s not my turf.).
Yes, it seems like they’ve gone along with it all. What a joke.
Wendy Kopp in this video wants us to believe that she came up with the idea for Teach for America and developed all of these corporate sponsors all by herself. It would be laughable if it were not so serious. When she was doing her undergraduate thesis at Princeton in 1989 she proposed Teach for America as a great career opportunity for undergraduates who wanted to make a difference in the world, but her thesis was based on the corporate model we see today. At Princeton she was a member of Business Today, whose mission is “to create a dynamic forum for influential business leaders to interact with top undergraduate students from campuses worldwide, and to educate the leaders of tomorrow.” http://www.businesstoday.org/about/ Like all of the corporate education reformers, she has no background in child development or pedagogy.
It is interesting how people affiliated with the Broad Foundation never speak about their affiliaton. Superintendents who attended the Broad Superintendents Academy never put this on their resume. In its 2009-2010 Annual Report, the Wendy Kopp is listed on their board. http://tinyurl.com/6w5sps2 (Page 25)
For more information about the Broad Foundation, including Wendy Kopps affiliation with them, see Julian Vasquez Heilig’s article “The Broad Foundation and Broadies: Kings of “Disruptive” and “”Unreasonable” Trickle-Down Reform”
http://tinyurl.com/k3oe5oz
That “Me Generation” (and some of their elders) followed the “greed is good” mantra of Gordon Gekko, from the 80s movie Wall Street, and became him, hostile take overs and all. They have had a very long time to figure out how to do that with public education, while concealing their intentions and actions with euphemisms and outright lies, but the Obama administration has enabled them to really ramp up their efforts.
On a related note, in November, David Simon, journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, told Australians at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, “My country is a horror show.”
Bill Moyers interviewed him after the State of the Union Address, and he said, “The horror show is we are going to be slaves to profit.”
He also said, “People are saying ‘I don’t need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I’m not connected to society. I don’t care how the road got built, I don’t care where the firefighter comes from, I don’t care who educates the kids other than MY kids. I am me.’ It’s the triumph of the self.” He talked about shameless greed, the loss of a social compact, our bought Congress, etc.
You can watch it here (part 2 will be aired next week): http://billmoyers.com/episode/david-simon-on-america-as-a-horror-show/
So true. Have you ever seen any interviews with the nut that helped to create PayPal? What a piece of work. He has no loyalty to anyone other than himself. He represents total MEEDOM. It is all about him. He wanted to create an international island to live on so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes. He obviously has no loyalty to the USA or California. He is a billionaire and I’m sure is pulling the strings of many politicians and gets to get air time on television to pronounce his nutty ideology. This is America today. Think about yourself and load your pockets full of money. Who gives a d#$% about how we harm others.
Interesting. And if this “self” is disconnected from seeing it is part of a larger group, then it is easier to have that self learn alone from a computer.
This self could view the world in which it lives in one of two ways, there is no need to change the environment because it provides what the self wants, or the world around cannot be changed, it just is, so the self must adapt to accept less, believing that voluntarily accepting less is still control by the self.
I think we have to be careful of labels. The “me generation” according to wiki is the baby boomers, despite the fact that the ’46-’56 contingent marched for civil rights & anti-Vietnam. I was once admonished by an elder that ‘yuppies’ were simply early boomers who’d given up the good fight (to which I replied she was in fact referring to our disaffected & stoned much-younger siblings). We may be talking here about the last half of the boom, or perhaps the early ‘Generation X”rs both have been excoriated: the last-1/2 boomers as ‘slackers’, the X’rs as purely materialistic.
Good points, Spanish & French Freelancer! I was quoting what Wendy Kopp said though, on the tape above, when she described how her generation was referred to as the “Me Generation,” that Wall Street actively recruited on her college campus and that her peers wanted to go to work in two year corporate training programs. She was born in 67.
“Me❢ Me❢ Me❢” is the New “Me”
Good Grief, What A Phony …
Jon Awbrey: you might remember Michael Jordan.
¿? Rumored to be a professional athlete, something to do with round spheroid objects. No, I don’t know the details but apparently he did something notable a couple of times. He once said: “There is no ‘i’ in team but there is in win.”
But what if you have the mindset of a leader of the self-styled “new civil rights movement” of our time?
To go directly to an unimpeachably rheephormista source of cage busting achievement gap crushing thinking [I use the last word loosely]:
“cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.” [Michelle Rhee, 2008, Aspen Institute]
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/31/AR2009103102357.html
Apparently pathetic losers like Michael Jordan don’t understand that “i” and “I” is always a winner in the pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$, especially when it comes at the cost of “team” which doesn’t even either an “i” or an “I” in it.
Note this remarkable factoid: the word “team” has a “Me” in it! Ok, last two letters backwards, but isn’t backwards pretty much the direction “education reform” goes in anyways?
Merit pay, forced ranking, management by the numbers, a kiss up kick down style of management…
iPads anyone—Broadly speaking, of course.
😎
lloyd Lofthouse.. do look at the video link I provided after yours as it must be part of the same video clip you show above only it shows another angle (“spinning” the great success of her TFA baby).. She presents it to garner money from corporate sponsors (and note it is likely part of the same filming as she is wearing the same clothing… ha ha… perhaps she is trying to be more like Steve Job’s who famously would buy up several of one type of shirt and several of one type of pant so he didn’t have to think about clothes).
Seems like a good idea, donate human capital and donated money to improve education. Genuine philanthropy.
Of course, now that it is evident it is a loss leader, to actually suck capital from education, that is not the same thing.
Like the Beach Boys said long ago so presciently,
“Wendy, Wendy what went wrong,
oh so wrong.”
Gadzooks, Wendy! Your idea can be replicated in so many areas. The possibilities …
Doctor for America to Debut This Fall
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-/doctor-for-america-to-deb_b_3559045.html
When Mao ruled China, there were barefoot doctors who were told if they had the passion to be a doctor, they could become one by watching a few films and then off they went by the tens of thousands—including illiterate peasants—to spread health advice and practice surgery techniques on real people with no actual training other than a couple of weeks watching films.
The common sense health advice like boiling water, taking baths and cleaning the house helped increase the average lifespan dramatically by the time Mao died but many who were operated on weren’t so fortunate. Imagine an illiterate barefoot doctor who watched a fifteen minute video on how to remove a burst appendix cutting into your abdomen.
lol Mao’s “barefoot doctors” program is exactly what I was thinking about, too. And I can remember the derision this program received from Americans. In essence, “Look at those poor Communists! Look what they have to resort to!”
While this system was good for basic public health as you stated (how nice if TFA students could have been placed in classrooms as assistants, working alongside teachers), “barefoot doctors” were not regular doctors. TFA is the capitalist equivalent to Communist “barefoot doctors”.
I wouldn’t blame Finland if it’s citizens are saying, “Look at those poor American Capitalists! Look what they have to resort to!”
I remember teachers keeping Chris Whittle and Channel One out of the classroom 25 years ago. That was small potatoes. This time they are fighting Big Testing, Big Data, Big Money for Private Hands, and Big Authoritarianism.
Mao also had the Hundred Flowers Campaign, “let a hundred flowers bloom”, to gather opinions. What do we have? inBloom, to gather data. “let a hundred megabits bloom.
This competition with China is getting out of hand! lol
Still wondering… does anyone know how much Kopp’s annual salary is???? Just curious …
Okay, I do think I found a site that lists Kopp’s salary… it was apparently $416,000 in 2012. I think this speaks volumes! Here is the link:
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4992
That’s more than the President of the United States: As of 2001, the president earns a $400,000 annual salary.
Wow.. just found a video Kopp produced for wooing corporate sponsors to her cause as they view the “charitynavigator” link I had posted previously. All I can say is … UGHHH
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.video&orgid=4992#.Uu12sihOTdk
Her inexperience was her biggest assist???!!
Why didn’t I have that experience when I started teaching, and where is MY corporate money?
Back in 1975 when I attended classes for a full school year and worked full time as an intern under the advice and guidance of a great master teacher to earn my teaching credential, I could have saved all that time and money and gone straight into the classroom inexperienced like her. Then I’d really be an expert.
I’m shaking my head at all that wasted time and money learning how to work with kids and teach successfully, because that’s what I did for the next thirty years—worked 60 to 100 hour a week during the school year.
If I had been inexperienced, maybe I’d have been qualified to raise millions from billionaires and corporations to destroy public education like her and be paid several hundred thousand a year to do it.
20 yrs ago, when I heard of TFA, it sounded a lot like Peace Corps & Vista– a good thing. As I have come to understand TFA’s negative effects on its host schools, & its essence as a CV plus for ambitious BA’s, it sounds a lot like… Peace Corps & Vista! Can’t help wondering now how many Peace Corps & Vista efforts simply reinforced local stereotypes about arrogant Americans & Anglos…
Spanish & French,
TFA started like Peace Corps but it has turned into a political machine. Read my chapter about it in “Reign of Error.”
I looked into joining the Peace Corps right after I graduated college in the early 70s and it differed greatly from TFA on three major points: they wanted people who had skills, they didn’t pay a salary, they just gave a very small stipend, room and board, and that room had to be in the same community and under the same living conditions as the people corps members were helping.
My only problem with that was, in my early 20s, I didn’t think that I could honestly claim expertise in any area, so I went and volunteered on a Kibbutz in Israel instead. It was the same deal as the Peace Corps, but no expertise was required. It turned out to be virtually the same kind of experience –no pay, just a small stipend, and free room and board under the same living conditions. A war broke out while I was there, so those living conditions included underground bunkers.
Who knew that 20 years later, TFA would be established and no expertise would be valued as a primary asset? But see how many TFAers they could recruit if they offered no pay, just a small stipend, and free room and board in the projects in the ghetto…
Part 1
Wendy Kopp is one of the great charlatans in the education “reform” game. Her organization, Teach for America, is mostly a front – and a financial conduit – for those who believe in privatizing public education.
Kopp and her organization represent a clear and present danger to public education’s historic role as a foundation for democratic governance and citizenship education.
Teach for America has very close ties to groups that “want to sidestep professional teachers, unions, and schools of education ‘and let loose the forces of the market.The marketplace of education is a big market. There is a lot of money to be made.’ ” Those who recruit TFA alums include “Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, KPMG, Credit Suisse, and McKinsey and Company.”
Kopp has received big funding from the Broad Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, and the Robertson Foundation (not to mention the Gates and Walton Foundations and a slew of Wall Street firms [Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase] and hedge-funders). The Gates, Broad and Walton Foundations are all tied to “market reforms.” The Broad Foundation is known for its “free market,” “data-driven “ approach to “reform.” This is same approach that Wendy Kopp calls “transformational,” a term she repeats more than often.
The Arnold Foundation is a right-wing organization founded by a hedge-funder who resists accountability and transparency in derivatives markets but calls for them in education. Its executive director, Denis Cabrese was former chief of staff to DIck Armey, the Texas conservative and former Republican Congressman who headed up FreedomWorks, the group that pulled the Tea Party strings and gets funding from the billionaire arch-conservative Koch brothers. The Robertson Foundation’s philanthropic “vision” is one that is a “businesslike, results-oriented approach that is modeled more closely on private equity investing.” In the area of education “reform” it seeks to encourage “competition by supporting the development of charter schools” and “voucher programs.”
These are the “reformers” who fund Wendy Kopp. Its their vision that Kopp calls “transformational.” It’s the kind of “reform” that seeks to privatize American public education. It’s one that deserves very bit of criticism it gets. And then some.
Part 2
Wendy Kopp has deployed a “deliberate strategy” to keep her agenda hidden. But she does, indeed, have an agenda and it isn’t one that is public education-friendly. This is a woman, who despite all the anecdotal and empirical evidence on the deleterious effects of high-stakes testing, says that “I have not seen that standardized tests make the profession less attractive.”
In an interview with The Economist Kopp talks about “reform” and the need for an “internal system to analyze the impact” of teachers in a way that will “compare the student growth” for each teacher. She is talking about “value-added analysis” but she won’t come out and say it in the interview.
(Kopp interview with The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/04/wendy_kopp_interview
Instead Kopp uses phrases like “building systems for accountability” and then slides in the zinger that “offering parents the ability to choose their public schools is the ultimate form” of accountability. Uh-huh.
Wendy Kopp has embraced her naivete – her inexperience, her lack of wisdom and knowledge – in the area of public education. It shows. She called the propaganda of Waiting for Superman “an incredibly powerful and accurate image.” Most TFA recruits teach only 2 years (if that), but Kopp calls them “just deeply, deeply committed.” Kopp herself has never, ever taught. Nor, likely, could she.
She’s been busy playing her role as a pretender, a poseur, and raking in the cash.