TNTP, you may recall, was originally founded by Michelle Rhee .to recruit bright young staff for inner-city schools. In Tulsa, they took responsibility to turn around a troubled school. Their efforts failed.,
Teacher and historian John Thompson tells the sorry story. It begins with high hopes and boasts.
“At the beginning of the school year, after replacing 3/4th of the school’s faculty, McClure School Principal Katy Jimenez said, “I have never experienced a vibe and energy like we have right now.” Jimenez said, “The team has come together in an amazing way. My returning teachers gave up their summer to build a team they wanted to be a part of. Their investment is very deep. We are exhausted but so excited.”
“The principal borrowed a line from the corporate reform spin-meisters known as the TNTP and praised a second-grade teacher, Paige Schreckengast, as “an irreplaceable.” Ms. Schreckengast was featured the story’s photograph.”
Tulsa World reporter Andrea Eger “reports that even in this high-profile restart, “two vacancies went unfilled for much of the year because of a lack of applicants.” I’m not surprised by that, however, because many or most of the best teachers have heard the jargon before and many refuse to participate in such restarts because they know that the ideology-driven playbook is likely to fail. Neither am I surprised that “seven teachers bugged out mid-year; and then another seven left at the end of 2014-15.” [88% of the new teachers had less than three years’ experience.]
“The irreplaceable also left.
“Now, Tulsa says that the district officials learned from mistakes made in McClure’s faculty restart. The principal, Jimenez, says that she will no longer accept Teach for America candidates. According to Eger, Jimenez is balancing her remaining optimism with “a brutal, unrelenting reality.”
When will the so-called reformers understand that reviving troubled schools is hard work that requires experienced teachers with a long term commitment? When will they understand that disruption and chaos never saved a school or helped children?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
TNTP and their like need to postpone all boasting for at least one school year. At least.
I’d settle for forever!
“When?” Never, as long as there are profit prospects in some part of the system.
Quoting former North Carolina TFA Executive Director and Harvard Kennedy School graduate, “Risk-friendly environments are where people and organizations really grow.”
Risky environments are ideal to rip-off tax payers and to avoid taking responsibility for failure.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t corporate education reform always begin with the same old propaganda filled with fancy slogans and amazing and often impossible promises of what will be achieved once they take over and start filling their bank accounts with public money. Isn’t this the same BS they dish out every time they pull this same stunt?
And after they fail, they either close up shop and reopen in another city or state repeating the same old propaganda, or the RheeFormers stay and manipulate the numbers and/or get rid of the most difficult students to teach in a fraudulent effort to manufacture false facts to make it look like they succeeded.
Meanwhile, 90% of the media controlled by six huge corporations seldom if ever reports the real story. Instead the corporate media helps the RheeFormers spread their misinformation and lies.
Is there any different between the corporate controlled media and the corporate controlled education reform movement? I mean, they are both in it for the money, aren’t they?
Lloyd, one of the things learned during the Bloomberg-Klein era was that corporate reformers set impossible goals, roll out a new program daily or weekly, hail it as a success before it is launched, ignore it if it fails, and keep moving forward with new claims of unprecedented progress. After 12 years of this, the schools should be perfect by now, with every child registering high test scores. They are not. Same problems, same complaints. Moral of the story: Get a large PR staff.
I don’t have many fond memories of the previous regime, but we are almost 40% of the way through de Blasio’s term and far, far more has stayed the same than it has changed. The ongoing credit recovery scandals and the legal fight to keep school leadership team meetings off-limits to the public may have even out Bloomberged Bloomberg. And de Blasio’s signature change, eliminating small class size extended day, also happened to be a terrible move for a lot of schools (not like PS 6 or PS 29) and families.
We’ll see what the next 893 days hold!
but this is how business IS in the US…. this is a model deeply embedded in the US capitalist psyche…. this country still operates under the original land-thieving, genocidal, slave owning, wild west mindset —- exploitation, whatever you can get away with, no rules, no morals, maximum profit/gain for minimum effort/expenditure….
there’s a reason Ayn Rand came to prominence here and you have libertarians and neo liberals and neo conservatives and people like Bill Gates and Donald Trump having so much influence…. nowhere else in the world does this craziness (pretending it is something else) reach the same heights as it does here in the US….
the refusal to accept that reality is what is keeping people stuck in minimally effective ‘fight back’….
people seem to EXPECT that the reformers only need to be ‘educated’ and they will stop and change direction and become humane and caring and reasonable – they wont….
“Look ma – the emperor has no clothes”….
Cripes! Lives ruined and children played. What is the take-away? (I hate the term, but couldn’t resist.) Experience matters and it takes more than 2 hours of ‘team teaching’ for 5 weeks in the summer to be a teacher. Well there’s more….but that is for starters.
Why Did TNTP’s Turnaround School Fail?
Because it turned all the way around rather than half way? (360 degrees rather than 180)
But did it jump
Down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton? Or hay?
You can’t very well turn round and not do that, you know.
I’m not in education so it remains difficult for me to believe that ed reformers are just now realizing that experience matters. This is wildly accepted in the entire rest of the work-world. It isn’t the only factor! That’s true! One can be experienced and still do a very bad job! But “experience” is WIDELY, almost universally accepted, as having value based on the idea that people actually learn things in the course of their work.
Except in ed reform. That ALONE should have given them pause. Why would education be unique?
actually, it’s NOT widely accepted in the entire rest of the work world…. it USED to be – at least in non-US countries…. but not any more….
that’s why people who are in their 40s and 50s can’t get work any more…. the work has gone offshore or to 20-somethings who will work for less, without benefits and seniority…
it used to be that companies/bureaucracies knew the value of institutional knowledge and expertise/mastery of skills…. now, because both of those traits are a drag on the profit margin (they cost more in wages/salaries and pensions), they dont….
According to SchoolDigger, McClure Elementary in Tulsa is 99% free and reduced lunch. That’s the problem not the teachers.
Triumph104, the reformers’ theory is that poverty is just an excuse. We are waiting for them to prove their theory.
According to Eger, Jimenez is balancing her remaining optimism with “a brutal, unrelenting reality.”
In the public schools attended by poor people’s children, brutal, unrelenting reality is what teachers face every day.
Excitement is not a strategy.
Have the 3/4 of the staff that was disposed of received their letters of apology?
These “reformers” should be stopped from inflicting chaos and disruption on poor students whose lives are already surrounded by despair and poverty. Children are not rats in a maze or guinea pigs. It is irresponsible to allow corporations use “trial and error” as they insert themselves in children’s lives and futures. They should only be permitted to use evidence based approaches. Human experimentation is inhumane and irresponsible.
and just how will they be stopped and who will do the stopping?
Furious hype and spin does not a success make. From the beginning of a piece from May 8, 2013:
[start excerpt]
Chicago has been opening and closing public schools every year for the past decade.
It’s a controversial strategy that former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan believed was an answer to improving public education.
But in the most recent round of proposed school closings, CPS is shutting down the very schools Duncan created.
Eleven years ago, on April 10, 2002, Duncan announced he would shut down three elementary schools—Williams, Dodge and Terrell—for chronic low performance. The idea was to start over from scratch in order to create something better.
Five years later—it seemed to have worked.
In 2008, Dodge was where then president-elect Barack Obama announced Duncan as his pick for U.S. Secretary of Education.
“He’s shut down failing schools and replaced their entire staffs, even when it was unpopular,” Obama said at the time. “This school right here, Dodge Renaissance Academy, is a perfect example. Since this school was revamped and reopened in 2003, the number of students meeting state standards has more than tripled.”
But fast forward another five years, Dodge is closing its doors.
In fact, all three of the schools that would eventually help to launch Duncan’s signature Renaissance 2010 initiative are getting shaken up by the current CPS administration.
[end excerpt]
Link: http://www.wbez.org/news/education/cps-wants-close-first-renaissance-schools-107072
The more things change, they more they stay the same.
Howzabout trying something radical like, say, best pedagogical practices with sufficient resources and support for public schools rather than the rheephorm business plan that masquerades as an education model in order to get lots of $tudent Succe$$ for a few adults?
Lakeside School for everyone. No excuses. Whatever it takes.
😎
“Lakeside School for everyone. No excuses. Whatever it takes.”….
exactly……
No unions? No tenure? No requirements that teachers have graduate degrees? No SWDs or ELLs, or any students who don’t perform exceptionally well on IQ tests?
These conditions are what make Lakeside and other elite privates what they are.
the rich and deep liberal arts as well as strongly academic curriculum, the small classes, the drama, music, sports, extra-curricular opportunities, the support services, the campus/amenities…
$28K (give or take) per student/per year …. cheap at twice the price, considering it costs taxpayers $40K/year to house and feed a prison inmate….
I would imagine the $23M from the Gates Foundation adds to their chutzpah. http://elfasd.blogspot.com/2015/06/what-is-influence-of-money-on-education.html
““I have never experienced a vibe and energy like we have right now.””
She obviously didn’t “experience” the sixties!
I wonder if the new commissioner Deb Gist who left our state (alleluah!) to go to Okie will even keep public schools there or push charters as she tried in RI
This hits close to home for me. I am a Tulsa native who earned an Urban Education degree at the University of Tulsa, and am also a second year corp member of TFA. I’ve voiced my concerns before that TFA and other short-term organizations should not be Oklahoma’s primary solution to the teaching shortage. However, we’re not really in any position to refuse help, regardless of the source. It’s so incredibly hard to work in Oklahoma schools (our state being the reddest in the nation, with a governor who has more disdain for the public sector than most) without help from these corporate organizations and foundations. I do the best I know how, and read as much as possible to learn how to divert Oklahoma’s dependency on short-term solutions toward more sustainable, democratic answers.
BTW, I’m reading Reign of Error through for the second time, and am a daily blog reader of yours! Thank you for your tireless, invaluable work!