EduShyster and co-author Chad Sommer reveal the contents of newly released documents that show the close relationship between Teach for America and charters (90% of which are non-union).
Sommer is an alum of TFA, class of 2011
TFA are inexperienced and inexpensive. They are an essential part of the charter business model.
They write:
Emails sent by the Broad Foundation, a leading advocate of market-based education reform and charter expansion, and acquired through a freedom of information request, reveal that many charter management organizations consider TFA presence in a region a necessary prerequisite for opening new schools. According to the documents, charter management organizations including Rocketship, KIPP, Noble, LEARN and Uncommon Schools all indicated that a supply of TFA teachers was a general pre-condition for expanding into a new region. The emails, which detail the Broad Foundation’s failed efforts to lure high-performing charter operators to Detroit, were released as part of a trove of thousands of documents requested as part of an investigation into Michigan’s embattled Education Achievement Authority.
Greetings from the charter state
In New Jersey, where controversial charter expansion plans have been unveiled in Newark and Camden, TFA is likely to play a key role in providing *local talent* to staff new schools. Cami Anderson’s One Newark education reform plan is predicated on 40% of Newark public schools becoming privately managed charter schools by the 2016-2017 school year. Meanwhile in Camden, yet another TFA-alum-turned-state-appointed-superintendent, Paymon Rouhanifard, has begun introducing local residents to the charter operators that will soon be *turning around* their public schools, but without naming the schools to be turned around. [Note: effective in the fall of 2014, TFA corps members in Newark, Camden and Trenton will all be managed under a single entity: TFA New Jersey].
The handover of public schools to private management would not be possible without the availability of the reserve army of eager and unquestioning TFA, who are willing to work long hours and won’t stay around long enough to ask for a pension.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would like tyo see the link between the owners of the charters and the Gov. and Ed Comm. When Christie talked about extending the school year he means with charters because of the salary and pension issues with reg ed. I don’t see NJ charters doing anything different than public schools except taking money that would go into classrooms, salaries and giving it as profits to his big business friends.
What comes through for me in the emails between the Broad Foundation and the Educational Achievement Authority staff (who were brought in from Kansas City) is that the Broad Foundation is running a Michigan public school district.
It’s really remarkable that a Los Angeles foundation is running a Detroit school district. How did this happen? Do elected officials have any role at all anymore in public education in Michigan? Why have they relinquished their responsibility to a foundation?
The only time the governor’s office appears in this correspondence is when they’re setting up a photo op for Governor Snyder at one of the EAA schools, or raising private money. Governor Snyder is no more running those schools than I am. They’re just completely abandoned their duties. Is this what we’re paying them for? So Eli Broad can run a Detroit public school district? Who hired HIM?
I would imagine it would have been easy to lure some KCMO folks. I know one of them, in fact. KCMO is a frustrating district, so after a few years it would have seemed like a golden opportunity, I am sure, to go somewhere and infuse success!!! by golly. (no matter the ridiculous notion of an “achievement authority”—when someone is waiving a good salary at you and you have children of your own to raise, you can understand how they were able to get a team in from KCMO).
But it is bothersome that nobody said, “hey wait. . .what? An achievement authority? huh? What country is this?”
People go where the jobs are.
Chiarra, Broad and his wife are from Detroit originally.
New law put forth by ed reformers in Louisiana:
“This bill appears to be part of a “legislative backup plan” in the event that the Louisiana Supreme Court affirms District Judge Michael Caldwell’s January ruling that held Act 1 of 2012 unconstitutional. School boards should help craft the overall policy direction of the district and provide financial oversight, not micromanage the hiring process or personnel decisions. Superintendents should have the freedom to select and hire the individuals who work for them in the central office.”
It’s an end-run around the state constitution (in response to the lawsuit on the state constitution) and removes nearly all power from elected school boards. It puts them in a much-weakened “oversight” role where they simply approve decisions made at the state level.
It’s a way to change the Louisiana constitution without exposing politicians to the electoral risk of admitting they’re seeking to change the Louisiana constitution.
If you still have an elected school board and some publicly-run schools in your part of Louisiana, you’d want to oppose this. I think the real purpose behind the proposed law is two-fold; to lift the limit on class sizes, and to remove any job protections from teachers and other school staff.
http://lalegeeducation.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/house-bill-1022/
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Chiara Duggan! Any unconstitutional issues you see with education legislation in Louisiana, I’d love to be able to alert others to. (This is one I’d not yet caught — I’m still going through all of the ed bills.) The reform agenda must be stopped.
This is an old release of info out of Newark, for anyone who hasn’t read it. The ACLU sued to force the foundations and elected leaders in Newark to release the plans for the Facebook donation.
“MZ’s money is not going in to classrooms,” Booker aide Sharon Macklin wrote on Sept. 19, 2010. Instead, aides discussed how to allow small donors to fund individual projects, and Macklin suggested they would “get a lot of local props” for that.
Newark residents who are critical of Booker at school board meetings often say they are wary of outsiders and would rather have a superintendent who has some connection to the city. Sandberg appears to have been concerned about how the gift would be viewed. In an email to Booker and other Newark officials, she wrote that a draft of a press release about the donation used “too much ‘national’ language.”
“I wonder if we should basically make this focused on Newark with just a touch of ‘and this will be a national model,’” she wrote.”
So it was planned as a national model, they just don’t want to sell it that way.
Obviously, there was nothing stopping the original Newark ed reform planners from releasing info the info to the public voluntarily, but they chose not to. Why is there so much secrecy around ed reform? Why not conduct these meetings in public? Why does the ACLU have to sue in Newark and a state lawmaker have to file a FOIA request in Detroit? These are public schools. Why isn’t there any transparency in ed reform?
http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2012/12/25/booker-facebook-emails-about-100-million-schools-gift-released/
When I read all of this, I go back to high school in my mind. . .1991. Just around the time Kopp was bringing her ideas to fruition with the grand support of many entities, and being heralded as someone who was bringing a lot to society. (I remember my mother telling me about TFA, and I went to an informational meeting; alas, I am fiercely independent and did not like the idea of being told where I would teach, so it was not for me).
But I think of my English class in high school. . .a number of us went off to top tier, private schools for college, and many others stayed at the state universities and became teachers. So I see the TFA effort as sort of like being those of us who went off to a private school coming out and demanding the jobs that a high percentage of other students were trained to do over a course of years (for the betterment of our state), because we didn’t have another job option even after our fancy private college educations.
It really is sort of a spoiled brat mentality. . .I get everything! I get to go to the top schools AND then I get to come out and hoard the jobs for which other people actually invested themselves fully into becoming prepared because I was smart enough to go to the top tier school. And yet, it’s also a mentality of wanting to help. . “.I have this fancy education, why should I not be able to grace the public schools of my country with its merits” type thing.
But then one could argue that because it is the students coming out of very elite schools wanting to teach for TFA, that it will raise the bar for everyone! Suddenly we will all speak the Queen’s English because a higher caliber of student is demanding to teach, even if somewhat under prepared in terms of the job itself.
All I can say is wow. Some kind of shift is occurring and I think it’s because women are drawn to teaching children (often) and did not used to have the option of the elite private schools that are open to men as much as they do now. But the job market has not kept up with the availability of graduating from a top tier school for a woman (and for each woman who does make it in another area that used to be dominated by men, another male top tier graduate is pushed out and also looking for a niche. . .hence, education presents itself). But going to school to become a teacher on top of graduating from a private, elite school is expensive (I should know. . .I did it). It cost me a lot. That’s just a fact. I am thinking TFA figures they have come up with the happy medium. . the five week training on top of a top tier education.
To me it would be like a student going to a top tier school and studying biology (but not nursing) and then wanting the jobs the nurses had (for which the nurses were well prepared, but the biology major not so much).
This is an academics over job preparation conflict. I’m not knocking the academics of any teacher preparation program. . .but what is the value of a private, elite and competitive education otherwise, if a person is drawn to teaching (at least for a brief while)? We advocate compacting and acceleration for gifted kids in public K-12 programs, and in some ways TFA is just compacting and accelerating teacher prep. We allow service in the military to be for a few years OR for a career (if you can cut it), so here we are wrestling with a similar issue in the teaching force. The problem is TFA presents itself as a national solution and entity, but education (prior to RttT) has mostly been a state entity. Thus we have these incongruous issues that the military does not have, because it is a national effort.
Do career military people who do not attend the Academies get angry when Academy grads come into higher ranks right away? Is it similar with the TFA situation?
These questions go right along with the college debt situation, how much money should be loaned out for college, etc. It’s all part of the same ball of wax and it’s all a part of whether our education system is a state thing or a federal thing. TFA has found a way to navigate through that dichotomy, but the states have not figured out how to keep there from being unintended consequences in the job force (or if it really is an intentional privatizing effort, then it’s just hitting everyone between the eyes on an issue it is hard to find common ground on). I think it used to be that states believed in public schools (look at the constitutions of most states). Indeed, many of the new questions and struggles coming out from TFA etc. point to constitutional questions for states).
I have no answers. Just observations.
I think it’s a weird contradiction, TFA. We’re supposedly telling students to develop grit and persistence but the people telling them that have made a 24 month commitment.
Why should the kids commit to anything that takes longer than 24 months, like getting a bachelors degree or finishing high school? The adults don’t.
No one is “great!” at anything that is worthwhile and difficult in 24 months. That’s just a lie.
Joanna Best and Chiara Duggan: comments like these are why I keep coming back to this blog.
I especially liked the point that MODELING TEMPORARY grit/commitment/hard work speaks much much louder than ANYTHING THEY SAY.
And just to add my dos centavitos worth—I am completely unimpressed with anyone’s sheepskin, regardless of what fancy name is on it. By itself it means nothing—and I say this as someone who can wave around some fancy sheepskin myself. Remember the old saw “There’s no fool like an educated fool”?
IMHO, it’s what you can do with whatever education (formal and school of hard knocks) you get that counts.
And when it comes to teaching, one of those old dead Greek guy nailed it:
“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” [Aristotle]
Hence the shallow obsession of the self-styled “education reformers” with secret sauces and clever techniques and quick fixes du jour and the like.
Thank y’all for your comments.
😎
I genuinely don’t get it. We’re telling students they don’t work hard enough and they’ll have to stick with something or other to achieve mastery, except that doesn’t apply to teachers? People can just dabble in teaching?
A lot of ed reform is contradictory to me. It just doesn’t hang together. I think they’ve glossed over a lot of the parts that don’t fit in a sort of desperate effort to keep their political coalition in line but eventually these cracks will become gaping holes, because they’re reality. How does Wendy Kopp justify her own value? She’s been at this better than 20 years. Presumably she would say she learned something over 2 decades. That doesn’t apply to teachers? That’s ridiculous on its face.
She should stop pontificating as an expert. According to her own rubric, she learned nothing as is simply “stale”.
So, local schools pay a finders fee ($4000on average) to hire TFAers who stick it out for two years. This creates a pool of TFAers who will then be available to staff charter schools which take money from the local system.
Give them enough rope.
This reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode where the benevolent aliens show up to help earth. They have a guidebook called “To Serve Man”. Scientists try to decode the book. As one scientist is leaving on the spaceship, his colleague informs him that To Serve Man is a cookbook.
Is “corruption” too strong a word for this?