Gary Rubinstein was one of the earliest recruits to Teach for America. He was a corps members in Houston, class of 1991. Since then, he has become a high school math teacher in New York City and a persistent critic of TFA.
His major criticism of the organization is that it recruits smart, idealistic young people and gives them inadequate training for the challenges they will face. He is also not pleased with TFA’s alignment with the Corporate Reform machine that is devoted to destroying and privatizing public education.
In this post, he gives advice to new members of TFA in Houston. He watches videos in which they present their thoughts. He hears too much of the TFA can’t about how they have arrived to save poor children from lazy veteran teachers and a broken system. He knows they are being set up for failure. They don’t know it yet. But they will.
TFA is now into its 25th year. To date, its teachers have helped to staff thousands of privatized, non-union charter schools. The organization has become super-rich and powerful. They are the darlings of rightwing foundations like the Walton Family Foundation, which gave TFA $50 million to keep building the workforce for those non-union charters. Arne Duncan also gave them $50 million. The Broad Foundation bundled $100 million for the same reason.
With all that money, what has TFA actually accomplished?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, Rhe answer to your question is simple. They have accomplished exactly what they set out to accomplish. POWER, INFLUENCE, AND CONTROL.
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Can someone please explain to me why Randi Weingarten sits on the board of the Eli Broad foundation and is supposed to be working for the best interests of public school teachers?
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“Randi’s Broad Board Defense”
To Broaden one’s horizon
Is really not a crime
So all of your surmisin’
Is really out of line
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// sarcasm off
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The entire organization is set up to ultimately fail.
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It’s basically a front (and affront) and some have made a lot of money and/or advanced their careers from it
“Teach for Kopp”
Teach for Kopp
For Wendy’s pay
Yearly crop
400K
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Ohio has a TFA for principals and superintendents now. As usual they’re conducting this experiment in the most needy districts.
If these programs are so great how come we never see them in wealthier districts? Wouldn’t one conduct an experiment among the children who can most afford downside risk- children in higher income schools?
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/07/13/program-training-school-leaders.html
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As usual, Chiara, you bring up great points! In the classroom, I usually try new approaches, methods, technology, etc. with my accelerated kids first – if “stuff” doesn’t work there, it usually won’t work with my remedial students either!
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To answer your last question:
NO!
EXPERIMENTING ON CHILDREN, especially with policies and practices based on false premises, IS WRONG no matter which socio-economic group they are in!
When I started teaching I sought out experienced teachers for help and advice. As the years went on I tweaked and adjusted as I saw fit, usually with input from the students. I find it unconscionable to make large unproven changes to one’s teaching. “Let me see the proof that it works” is a wise aphorism to follow when talking about making changes in one’s classroom.
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Great point Chiara! I don’t see TFA at the middle class schools in my district. I wrote about TFA…. They are another weapons of mass deception being used against our schools.
http://weaponsofmassdeception.org/5-teach-for-awhile-fake-teachers/5-1-why-replacing-real-teachers-with-fake-tfa-teachers-harms-our-kids
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One of the superintendents in a rural district says he can’t attract qualified people because they haven’t passed a tax levy since 1995.
That doesn’t sound like a shortage of qualified people to me. It sounds like they need to provide funding to pay principals and superintendents. One of the newly-minted principals comes from a family of teachers and THEY question whether this is a good idea in the piece. They say he doesn’t have any experience and very little training. He should listen to them 🙂
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That superintendent is a poster child for the term “adminimal”.
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Elizabeth Hanson and Chiara: spot on.
If I may riff off of Chiara’s comments, using that bidness lingo that rheephormsters are so so proud of: what we have here is a shortage of high quality world-class inputs in order to produce high quality world-class outputs. *Must admit: talking rheephormish leaves a bad taste in my mouth.*
You want highly qualified and highly experienced and “highly effective” teachers? Excellence doesn’t come cheap. Salaries and state-of-the-art facilities and small class sizes and such strongly support the kind of pedagogy the corporate education rheephormsters continuously prattle on about. The kind they ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN and the kind that they deny to the vast majority of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
One example out of many. From the first three paragraphs, 6-16-2015, Lakeside School, “Lakeside embarks on a master-planning process”:
[start]
Starting this summer, Lakeside will begin a master-planning process, working with Seattle firm The Miller Hull Partnership. As part of the master plan, the school will explore the possibility of adding a performing arts center to the Upper School campus and performing arts practice space at the Middle School, as well as consider possible locations of future buildings, should the board decide to increase the size of the student body.
Head of School Bernie Noe announced the project to the parent and guardian community, writing: “With the completion of The Paul G. Allen Athletic Center one year ago this past January, the board and school leadership turned their attention to the need to build a new performing arts center on the Upper School campus…. In beginning to consider where on campus we might place a performing arts center, the board thought it prudent to do an all-school master plan for both campuses…. The master plan will help us make the best use of our campus resources and guide our vision of where to locate a performing arts center.”
The current Upper School performing arts center, St. Nicholas Hall, was built in 1979. In recent years, the facility has grown too small for Lakeside’s current student population in terms of audience seating, performance and rehearsal spaces, and backstage areas.
[end]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=984830&bl=/default.aspx
This is where Bill Gates, de facto Sec. of Ed and heavyweight among heavyweights of the self-styled “education reform” crowd, went. Where his own children go.
And BTW, just what is the Paul G. Allen Athletic Center? Same website, navigate from home page to “Athletics Facilities” and click on “THE PAUL G. ALLEN ATHLETICS CENTER”:
“The Lions’ 63,500 square foot facility features the arena-style Ackerley Gymnasium, a multi-purpose fieldhouse, the full-service Harry Swetnam strength training and cardio spaces, the Ed Putnam Sports Medicine Facility, mat room, three classrooms, and administrative spaces for athletics staff and coaches.”
Is this all they’ve got? Nope. On the same page as above, “Lakeside is home to some of the finest high school athletic facilities in the Puget Sound region. In addition to two artificial turf fields lined for multi-sport use, a natural-grass soccer pitch, an all-weather track, boathouse, and Middle School multi-sport gymnasium, Lakeside recently opened The Paul G. Allen Athletics Center.”
No need to wonder why those calling the shots in the $tudent $ucce$$ movement don’t feel a personal sense of urgency about equity and fairness and equal opportunity.
They don’t see the need because they literally, personally and up close and in a most familiar and familial kind of way, don’t feel the need.
That’s how I see it…
😎
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
What has the Walton supported, union busting, teacher-bashing Teach for America (TFA) really accomplished?
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“HOUSTON, TX—The Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) today announced that Neerav Kingsland has joined the Foundation as a senior education fellow. Mr. Kingsland will oversee the Foundation’s efforts to improve K-12 education. Most recently, he served as the chief executive officer of New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), a nonprofit organization working to ensure that every child in New Orleans, Louisiana, is able to attend a high-quality public school.”
This is the guy that wants to privatize all public schools, right? Glad to see the ed reform “movement” is moving towards ever-more extreme policy and practice.
Can someone who wants to eliminate public schools really “improve” public schools? If the ed reform movement attaches no value at all to schools that now exist, are they really likely to go about “improving” them with any kind of appreciation for the downside risk inherent in replacing them with the privatized model?
http://www.arnoldfoundation.org/neerav-kingsland-joins-the-laura-and-john-arnold-foundation-as-a-senior-education-fellow/
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“He was a corps members in Houston, class of 1991. . . ”
Horse manure! There are no “class of xxxx” for TFAers. Five weeks of shitty training a class does not make.
Let’s quit using TFA’s lying, deceiving, obfuscating language.
And he wasn’t a “corps member”. That term should be reserved for Marines. More lying, deceiving, obfuscating language usage.
Language usage in edudeformer circles is fiendishly flagrant, diabolically dissembling and grossly godawful.
Let’s not be like them.
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Duane, agreed. Reformsters use language to deceive.
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Thank you, Duane and Diane, for reminding us again about the words of deception.
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And that “corps member” crap is meant to be parasitical off the “real corps-Marines” meaning in part that those heroic (sic) TFAers are “coming to the rescue” saving the children from those barbaric union thugs. And those TFAers end up believing it just as real corp members have been trained/brainwashed to think of the enemy as sub-human.
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Stolen and used for nefarious purposes, just like the word reformer.
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This is one of the primary reasons it’s a bad idea to ‘debate’ these folks because when they say things, they don’t have the usual meanings and can even mean the exact opposite of what is normally understood.
Maybe it would be good to write a smart phone app that unpacks all their twisted terminology and translates it into human readable form.
I already have a perfect name for it: “The Disdissembler” (TM), after the “disassembler”) a computer program that translates machine language (numbers) into human readable assembly language.
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“The Disdissembler”
Disdissembler
Unpacks crap:
“School deformer
Crap unwrap”
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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