Gary Rubinstein was a member of one of the first Teach for America in 1991. Since then, he became a career teacher. He teaches high school math in Néw York City. About four years ago, Gary began to speak out against TFA. He has written many posts about the flaws of TFA but this one is the most scathing I have read.
He refers to TFA as “Bait-and-Switch for America.”
He writes:
“Joining the 2015 TFA corps is a terrible mistake. Two years from now everyone will know this, but right now TFA has managed to get a few last lies out of their well-oiled PR machine and lure a few more unsuspecting kids into their trap. But here’s the problem with TFA: They are a bunch of self-serving liars and anyone who joins up with them is an accomplice to any of the damage that this lying results in.
“Take a claim, any claim, from TFA. It’s either completely untrue, or just extremely exaggerated. I’ve debunked so many of their claims, I’ve lost count though you can go through my archives if you want. As their lies get uncovered, TFA has changed their message. The big thing they say now is that TFA is not a teacher training organization, but a leadership pipeline, or something.”
He adds:
“TFA is a lot like the candy store that serves as a front for the racketeering outfit in the back room. That candy store isn’t a dangerous candy store at face value. They don’t poison the candy, for example. And working at that candy store might seem like an innocuous thing to do, selling candy, keeping the place as tidy as you can. But what’s going on in that back room is causing a thousand times more damage than any of the good that is coming from your work in the front. But they need that candy store and they need workers there so you’re going to have to decide if you really have to be one of them.”
There is much more. Read it.
TFA has a PR operation to protect their brand. The PR team must be very busy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wish I could retweet and reprint this a thousand times over. Thanks to Gates Foundation, we are being inundated with new, young ex-TFA “leaders” who have their 2 years of teaching done and have moved on, ready to show the rest of us fools still in the classroom how its done. They get called upon to testify in front of the WA State legislature and all the other groups who want a “teacher” to give the input they want to hear, like the Ed Deformer preschool proposition that just passed in Seattle. Though TFA the organization has gotten very little traction in Puget Sound, we are now stuck with the ones who come to Seattle to join Gates, the CRPE, LEV, etc., and now to infest us with their charter schools. They are like a cancer, invading, destroying, and ugly, but riding in on their Trojan horse as the saviors of public education. I suspect at least one of them will be running for State Supe in the next election, if I see things correctly, with the backing of the Gates Foundation and the other millionaires and billionaires here who buy elections.
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You can Tweet this post every day.
If you have a Twitter account, it’s very easy. All you do is keep a link to this post. Check in everyday and Tweet it again. If Twitter doesn’t allow you to Tweet it, just change one word or create line breaks.
Twitter is programmed to block posting the same tweet repeatedly without posting other Tweets. In fact, after you post 10 different Tweets, then you can post the exact same Tweet again (unless Twitter changed the limit from 10 to more)
In addition, I could Tweet this post several times in the next few minutes by just making simple changes or finding a pull quote from the text and using that pull quote to replace the wording in the original Tweet.
I’ll do it as soon as I sent this out and if you visit my Twitter page, you might be able to see them all in a row.
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Did you read Nick Kristof’s column today? It included this quote:
“I’m in the middle of a book tour now, visiting universities and hearing students speak about yearning to make a difference. But they are turning not to politics as their lever but to social enterprise, to nonprofits, to advocacy, to business. They see that Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America in her dorm room at Princeton University, has had more impact on the education system than any current senator, and many have given up on political paths to change.”
I left this comment:
“Wendy Kopp has changed education in the past decade more than any elected official… and that’s a problem because she is complicit in the privatization movement that has reinforced the opposition to “government schools” aka public education. TFA’s motives sound high-minded, but they have eroded the teaching profession by replacing government funded career employees with privately funded short-term contract employees. TFA provides many privatized charter schools with well-educated and well-intentioned novice teachers who are focussed on raising test scores but has diminished the profession in doing so.”
When “friends” of public education like Kristof are hearing from college kids that “non-profits” like TFA are the way to go we’re in trouble!
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Wgersen,
TFA produces scabs.
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Another name for scabs is people. I am not at all comfortable with labeling people in an attempt to dehumanize them.
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C’mon TE, don’t tell me you can’t tell the difference between what people do and what they are. People who choose to do despicable things (like crossing a picket line) deserve to be called out for their choices. Surely even you can understand the difference between that vs. demonizing people for being, say, Jewish or black, right?
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Dienne,
Are you saying that it is ok to dehumanize a person for an action they took, say calling a teenage girl a slut because she chose to have sex, but not ok to dehumanize a person for things that they did not choose?
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Oh, and it’s not dehumanizing for teachers to be wholesale demonized and scapegoated wholesale for the problems faced by poor children, as TFA and its leadership cadre routinely do?
Please spare us the cheap sanctimony.
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Michael,
It is certainly possible that both are dehumanizing.
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Obtuse, again, I see, TE. Like there’s no difference between choosing to have sex, which hurts no one, vs. choosing to steal someone’s job.
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Dienne,
Your original distinction was between calling people dehumanizing names because of something they choose to do and calling people dehumanizing names because of some characteristic that they did not choose, like race. If you wish to make a different distinction, thats fine.
I take it you are now defending a distinction based on what the person chooses to do. I think this will be a hard line to draw. A teenage girl who chooses to have sex with married individuals may well be thought to have hurt other people, for example. A TFA teacher may, in fact, be taking a teaching job in a poor rural area that no one else wishes to take. If the teen age girl has hurt other people, should she be justifiably called a slut? If the TFA teacher does not replace another teacher, would she be justifiably called a scab?
I think the most interesting part of your post is the use of the word “steal”. That word choice suggests that you think an employee “owns” the job in which they are working. Is that your view?
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And TE YOU ARE dehumanizing until an issue affects you and your sons. Same old rhetoric and spin.
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Linda,
When have I ever made an insulting comment or used an insulting name to refer to another poster here? When have I made an ad hominem argument against a poster?
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“When have I made an ad hominem argument against a poster?”
Oh, I dunno, I think it was just yesterday that you told someone that his class was a waste of time for his students.
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Dienne,
Your recollection is incorrect. What I said was that if students ended up with a lower score on the post-class test than they received on the pre-class test, the class might have not been worthwhile for the student. That is primarily a statement about the student, not the instructor.
I have recommended students against taking the class that I teach because it would not be worthwhile for them to attend my class. I have recommended that students not take others classes because it would not be worthwhile to take that class. I have recommended that my children not take a class because it would not be worthwhile for them to take that class. None of that was an attack on the instructor, it was good advising for the student.
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Linda: I seem to recall that a fan of a lover of “large data sets” [that would be Dr. Raj Chetty of VAMania fame] found it easy to “un-humanize” over 1000 Bangladeshi clothing workers that died completely unnecessary deaths because it was a gleefully welcome down payment on a “de-humanized” large-data-set notion of progress.
😱
You wrote something very pertinent: “Grow a heart please.”
I would remind you again what I wrote to you on that thread: “No pedirle peras al olmo” — don’t ask for pears from an elm tree [i.e., don’t ask for or expect the impossible].
For context, read the posting and thread accessed below—
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/05/12/remembering-the-triangle-shirtwaist-fire-of-1911/
Of course, when even a hint or whisper of “de-humanization” or “un-humanization” allegedly touches said fan directly, pearls and fainting couch and moral outrage are the order of the day.
😳
But then, true blue Marxists live and die by their arcane and seemingly contradictory definitions, even if they don’t make a lot of sense to the rest of us:
“Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh… now you tell me what you know.”
Again with the ¿?
Groucho..the famous Marx…who else could I be referring to?
😎
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Krazy,
Actually I would argue that trusting people to make choices about where they work is more respectful of their humanity than insisting on making those choices for them.
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TA…someone here expressed that you are “obtuse”…and I would add, pedantic. Are you by any chance Aspergian?
After reading your many posts over a long period of time, it just occured to me why it might be that you tend to argue just for the sake of it, and your repetition (never letting go, like a dog worrying a bone), and the need to be right. Some of the symptoms of high level autism…even your chosen discipline of economics has many Aspergian practitioners.
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Ellen,
I think you will find that frequent posters often hold the same positions posting after posting. The most obvious, of course, are “Wilson” posts, but I think you will find that to be true for most frequent posters, even yourself.
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The TFAs in Newark are not in an underserved rural area. They are taking away jobs from veteran teachers of color with roots in the community. To make matters worse, many of them have arrogant condescending attitudes to those who view teaching as a career rather than as a stepping stone.
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Diane et al….the TFA kids, though they may have just graduated from Ivy League schools, do not yet have the life experience to be able to discern that they are indeed SCABS. They may not even know or care what a Scab is….and since most are among the most highly priveleged young grads in the nation, an attitude of privelege and entitlement may have been de riguer in their upper class homes.
I have spoken with many seniors on various university campuses who see TFA as only a low pay filler job while waiting to get into grad school. This is not commitment to inner city education.
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That’s my sense as well based on conversations with undergrads… what’s frustrating is that Nick Kristof and the NYTimes editorial staff and columnists makes it sound as if TFA is high-minded and idealistic… and I think the Times really believes that “choice” and “charters” are civil rights issues and refuses to see that the people running for-profit charters have one thing in mind: $$$$…
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The candy-store-as-a-racketeering-front is a wonderful analogy.
I’m glad to see that Gary is no longer mincing his words at all, and calling these people out for the despicable liars they are.
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good article; amazing video
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RubiFrankensteinRubinstein is Frankenstein
To TFA officials
A monster who is out of line
Attacking their commercials
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“DFA” (aka “DOA”)
Doctors for America
With only 5 weeks training
May sound quite hysterical
But TFA is feigning
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