Peter Greene discovers what the real purpose of Teach for America is: to get a great job in the corporate world! (Actually, that is not the real purpose of TFA: the real purpose is to provide low-wage, temporary non-union teachers for charter chains.)
He read an article, what is usually called a puff piece, in a business publication about how TFA is terrific preparation for working at Google. In some cases, the young graduates secure the job at Google first, then defer their start time until they have done their TFA stint.
He writes:
“People looking to get a job at Google might first want to spend a few years as a teacher.
“That is the lede for what appears to be a serious imitation of the classic Onion send-up of Teach For America. Business Insider has written a glowing portrait of how TFA can be a great stepping-stone to a career at Google.
“A company spokesperson tells BI writer Aaron Taube that the tech giant loves people from TFA because the program “requires new graduates to think on their feet and achieve success in a challenging new environment…” Google in fact has a partnership with TFA that allows Googlers to defer a job offer until they’ve served their two years with TFA. How liberating it must be to walk into that classroom knowing that your real job is already waiting for you.
“Taube’s interview was with Meghan Casserly, Google head of culture communications, and A. T. McWilliams, TFA alum and current Googler.
“TFA graduates have to coach their students in an environment where motivation isn’t always a given … and solve very complex problems that require patience, perseverance and commitment — things we really value at Google,” said Casserly. “It’s difficult to find talented professionals with this kind of intense experience at such an early stage in their career.”
“McWilliams offers his own experience as an example. He was placed in Brooklyn (in one of the “coveted” TFA openings).
“There, McWilliams learned a handful of skills that he says have helped make him more effective at his job at Google, where he became a full-time member of the company’s New York corporate communications team this past summer.
“Taube actually frames TFA’s infamous five weeks of training (hey– how much do you need to be a teacher, really) as a plus. It forced McWilliams to learn on the job and come up with creative solutions. See, if he had actually been trained to be a teacher, he would have wasted his time just implementing proven professional instructional techniques, and lord knows he wouldn’t have gotten any business training out of that.”
Greene is disgusted by the way his profession as a teacher is viewed by these corporate types.
“Sigh. It is McWilliams who has the last word in the article. “I think the Teach for America experience is really applicable in any place that requires you to be smart and creative,” he says. Because, yes, that’s what TFA is apparently supposed to do– provide college grads with an experience that they can apply to their real jobs later. Those children are just your own personal ladder to success.
“I often discuss TFA as if it is dismissive of teaching as a profession, that it belittles the whole idea of teaching. But this is actually worse, because teaching isn’t even on the radar in this article. It’s just one more life experience for a college grad who’s just passing through, unable to see the children for all the visions of Googlebucks. Sorry, Onion. Real life has passed you up.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not the ones I knew and worked with in DC Public Schools:
“requires new graduates to think on their feet and achieve success in a challenging new environment…”
Challenging new environment…yes. Success…specious at best.
Something suddenly struck me.
Or not so suddenly—it meant thinking like a member of the corporate education “reform” team.
😡
If the best and the brightest TFA pass quickly through classrooms in order to go on to their real jobs and careers, ones that have a least a modicum of prestige and money and respect associated with them—
Then it follows, as night follows day, that only the dullards and laggards and stick-in-the-muds of TFA stay in classrooms.
😱
Or as the TFA appendix [2 pages, large fonts, lots of pictures] to the Broad Academy guidebook to the Potemkin Village Business Plan for $tudent $ucce$$ [a gargantuan 5 pages of same!] puts it, mangling a quote from George Clemenceau:
“Education is too important a matter to be left to educators.”
😒
P.S. “Borrowing and distorting” without attribution from others is not considered a no-no among the leaders of the self-styled “education reform” movement. Just consider all those identical or near-identical boilerplate bits in their resumés. No, “borrowing” without permission or knowledge or acknowledge gives them cred among their peers because it shows they can engage in creative disruption and innovative destruction.
Or as edupreneur Mr. Pitbull has said—channeled not too long ago by David Coleman of CCSS and College Board fame—
We don’t care
We don’t care
We don’t care
We don’t care, we don’t care
We don’t care, we don’t care
We don’t care ’bout ya clique
We don’t care ’bout ya crew
We don’t care ’bout ya bitch
We don’t care what you do
We don’t care about your cars
We don’t care about your chips
We don’t care about shit
Accept getting rich
*Typos and language and ideas not mine. Just passing along some pearls [?] of wisdom from the self-proclaimed “new civil rights movement of our time.”
😎
‘I’m not your steppin stone’ (parody of Teach For America …I mean “The Monkeys”… from a public school teacher’s perspective)
I, I, I, I, I’m not your steppin’ stone
I, I, I, I, I’m not your steppin’ stone
You’re trying to make your mark on your resume
You’re using your “experience” with the TFA
You’re reading all those teacher-bashin’ magazines
The cause that you’re backin’s making students scream
I said, “I, I, I, I, I’m not your stepping stone
I, I, I, I, I’m not your stepping stone
Not your steppin’ stone
Not your steppin’ stone
I, I, I, I, I’m not your steppin’ stone”
When I first met you, you didn’t have no clues
But now you’re walking ’round like you’re front page news
You’ve been awful careful ’bout the friends you choose
But you won’t find my name in your book of who’s who
I said, “I, I, I, I, I’m not your steppin’ stone
I, I, I, I, I’m not your steppin’ stone
Not your steppin’ stone
I’m not your steppin’ stone
Not your steppin’ stone
Not your steppin’ stone
Not your steppin’ stone”
Two points:
– Given that a large proportion of TFAers are employed by charter schools, so many of which use scripted lessons in an authoritarian, behaviorist environment, it’s absurd to speak of their “creativity.” In fact, the most-hyped charters (KIPP, Success Academy, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, etc.) are boot camps for the Worthy Poor, while the local public schools they divert money from are increasingly intended for what the so-called reformers perceive as economically surplus or redundant populations,
Either Google is not the employee paradise we’ve been told it is, or they don’t know what TFA really does, or they’re dissembling. I choose Door Number Three.
– While TFA’s primary purpose is to provide shock troops for the hostile takeover of the public schools, it’s secondary purpose, explicitly acknowledged by Wendy Kopp, is to develop “leaders” (read edu-entrepreneurs or serial public school killers, a la Michelle Rhee, Cami Anderson, John White, et. al) who will act as adjutants for Gates, Broad, the Waltons and the elected officials kept on retainer by the Malanthropists.
“It’s difficult to find talented professionals with this kind of intense experience at such an early stage in their career.”
Of course it is. No one will trust untrained, inexperienced people to practice and make mistakes on anything that matters. Well, except for poor and/or minority kids in bad schools. Apparently they are just tools, like pencils/paper/computers, that get used up and discarded in the process of leading their user to some larger purpose. And then there’s the bonus of being a training ground and screening mechanism for corporate America.
Mary M.—
Much said in few words.
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
😎
Wow, what spin. Communication skills? Please. The real reason behind the connection of google and TFA is for the tech giant to have eyes and ears in the schoolroom for product development insight and, as Michael mentioned above, to groom lackeys to be loaned out for the back-room business of carving up public education. This is where lobbyists and propagandists come from.
Google wants a piece of the education candy bar, just like Microscoff and Apple.