Gary Rubinstein writes that Teach for America searched for a leader of its operation in Nashville. The final selection was warmly welcomed to the city. Four months later, he was gone.
What happened? A You-Tube video surfaced, in which Nashville’s new TFA leader was interviewed at a Tea Party meeting, where he complained about his students’ sense of entitlement.
How was he vetted? Inquiring minds want to know.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Inquiring minds want to know. Of course.
BUT
Inquiring minds went out the window when politicians usurped educational understandings.
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I don’t believe that his 5th grade class “chanted” his personal motto that “nothing in this world comes easy, because what comes easy goes easy”. The chant he claims “every single one of them endorsed” is actually much, much longer than that- I can’t remember the whole thing.
I think he completely fabricated a story about what a bunch of 5th graders “endorsed” and “chanted” to promote his future political career which is pathetic and embarrassingly poor behavior from this adult.
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Off topic, but important:
Postal Workers and Nurses Unions Endorse Bernie Sanders
“In a recent Rolling Stone article titled The Case for Bernie Sanders by Matt Taibbi, says Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It’s the rest of us who are lost, it says.”
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15082
AFT, NEA… Do you represent the voices of your members?
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“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
Mark Twain.
A pompous adult that sneers at the poor children that TFA so proudly claims to help and serve.
But until he said out loud too many times what the organization wished he had kept to himself he evidently demonstrated the “right corps member mindset”—as evidenced by his rise in the group.
Any wonder why I call rheephormsters like him edubullies and edufrauds?
😏
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There’s actually more to this story. Adnan Barqawi cancelled the TFA Nashville contract with RePublic (no excuses) charter schools because of abusive treatment of teachers. Without TFA, RePublic can’t function. So, because RePublic and its leader, Ravi Gupta, are so well-connected and powerful in the charter movement, Mr. Barqawi was removed from his post and the TFA contract reinstated. Caution is advised here – attacking Mr. Barqawi will likely give TFA and RePublic cover to say that the abuse of teachers wasn’t real and allow them to conceal the real reason he was let go.
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Thank you for that clarifying nuance.
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An article published by Drew Franklin, in October, titled “TFA Embedded in Black Lives Matter”, should be expanded for further analysis. An extended article titled, “Tea Party Policy Initiatives, Covert Ops?” would be interesting. Education reform was packaged as civil rights, but driven by the richest 0.2%, looking to make a profit. What if current activism, very narrow in solution,is a good cover for a plan to devalue and de-professionalize another significant public sector profession, law enforcement? If the TFA rank and file and leaders, outside of the recruits from places like the Kennedy School of Government (current intern page features a student who worked at the Heritage Foundation), turned the tables on the organization’s financial backers and added a demand for better pay to attract higher quality people to public jobs that require professional attitude and behavior, in a highly variable setting, requiring complex decision making, it would be interesting to see what happened.
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Linda, is this the Drew Franklin article you referred to?
http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2015/10/the-movement-lives-in-ferguson/
Just last week, Balck Lives matter had a meeting at the Univ. of Memphis campus, and according some people who were present, it was an advertisement for TFA.
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Thanks for posting the link. I read the article at “Popular Resistance”, where the main header was titled as I indicated. Franklin’s research, in naming specific people, if correct, adds insight to an important subject.
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Same article, though.
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Here we go https://www.popularresistance.org/teach-for-americas-embedded-in-black-lives-matter/
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