This is an unintentionally hilarious story. Teach for America has created a rapid response unit to reply to critics and protect their brand.
Instead of listening to thoughtful critics like Gary Rubinstein, they plan to spend half a million or more to dispute him. Hey, Gary, you are scaring them!
A nonprofit group has begun a public relations campaign to defend Teach for America against critics of the program that places newly minted college graduates in teaching jobs in some of the country’s most challenging classrooms.
The new campaign, called Corps Knowledge, is an offshoot of the New York Campaign for Achievement Now (NYCAN), a network that supports public charter schools and school choice and wants to weaken teacher tenure laws.
Derrell Bradford, NYCAN’s executive director, said the campaign aims to counter attacks on Teach for America’s image, which some people loyal to the program think has been damaged by “a few disgruntled alumni” and other critics.
Several TFA alumni have written negatively about their experiences, saying that TFA’s five-week training session did not adequately prepare them for teaching in struggling schools and that the two-year commitment that TFA requires adds to the teacher churn in high-needs schools.
So, TFA chooses not to listen to its alumni who say they were ill-prepared by five weeks of training for the challenges of the classroom.
And TFA thinks that its two-year commitment does not add to teacher churn in high-need schools.
Why would anyone spend $500,000-$1,000,000 to say that these criticisms are wrong? Why not think about it? Does TFA believe that a recent college graduate with five weeks of training should be responsible for children with disabilities? Do they think no special training is necessary? Are they saying that people who earn an M.A. or a doctorate in special education have wasted their time?
Does TFA ever reflect on its constant boasting? Does TFA ever feel a little bit ashamed of claiming that any TFA recruit is superior to an experienced teacher? Do their recruits have nothing to learn?
Has TFA ever wondered why its stars promote charters and vouchers and high-stakes teacher evaluations? It appears that TFA dislikes public schools and teachers who make a career of teaching. Why do they like VAM? Is it because TFA teachers don’t hang around long enough to get a VAM rating? Why are they opposed to teacher tenure? Is this a by-product of their low opinion of experienced teachers or are they just thinking of themselves, knowing they will never stay around long enough to acquire tenure?
Instead of mounting an expensive campaign to refute Gary Rubinstein, they should talk to him. He is one of the smartest, kindest, most thoughtful and considerate people I have ever met. He also has a great sense of humor. If TFA listened to him, I bet they would learn a lot. At the very least, they should try to find out why one of the original members of TFA has become a critic. They will never know unless they listen.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe you’re just pretending to be naive on the internet, but expecting TFA to listen to feedback would be like expecting Tobacco For America to heed its own research on the health effects of the product it’s trying to push.
TFA’s engaging in multi-million-dollar damage control campaigns is nothing new. THE NATION covered this a while back:
http://www.thenation.com/article/what-happens-when-you-criticize-teach-america/
Here’s how the article starts:
THE NATION:
“ Last year, Wendy Heller Chovnick, a former Teach For America manager, spoke out against her former organization in The Washington Post, decrying its ‘inability and unwillingness to honestly address valid criticism.’
“In recent years, such criticism has centered on Teach For America’s intimate involvement in the education privatization movement and its five-week training, two-year teaching model, which critics claim offers recruits a transformative résumé-boosting experience but burdens schools with disruptive turnover cycles.
“In the interview, Chovnick referenced the extent to which Teach For America manufactured its public image, explaining,
” ‘Instead of engaging in real conversations with critics, and even supporters, about the weaknesses of Teach For America and where it falls short, Teach For America seemed to put a positive spin on everything. During my tenure on staff, we even got a national team, the communications team, whose job it was to get positive press out about Teach For America in our region and to help us quickly and swiftly address any negative stories, press or media.’
“An internal media strategy memo, obtained by The Nation, confirms Chovnick’s concerns, detailing TFA’s intricate methodology for combating negative media attention, or what it calls “misinformation.”
“Given that TFA takes tens of millions of government dollars every year, such strategies are troubling. According to its last three years of available tax filings, Teach For America has spent nearly $3.5 million in advertising and promotion. As the strategy memo indicates, much of this promotion goes toward attacking journalists, including ones previously published in this magazine.
“The memo details the numerous steps TFA’s communications team took in order to counter Alexandra Hootnick’s recent piece for the The Nation, ‘Teachers Are Losing Their Jobs, but Teach For America Is Expanding. What’s Wrong With That?’ ”
AND ON IT GOES …
“Does TFA ever reflect on its constant boasting? ”
“Self Reflection”
One way mirror
Little help
For finding error
In oneself
What perhaps started as an idealistic attempt to engage young people in the service of poor students has devolved into a union busting tool of billionaires that want to destroy public education. Instead of looking at their own dismal results, they continue to spin their web of deceit as they mostly benefit privateers that exploit under prepared TFA members as a cheap source of expendable labor for other people’s children. Rather, TFA “is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”
“PReach for America”
Teach for Kopp
For Wendy’s pay
Yearly crop
400 K
PReach to stop
Alum dismay
Yearly drop
500 K
It’s comical, like when all the villains on Batman get together.
Even though nobody has ever responded with deference or wanting to give credence to my questions along these lines, I still think that the factors for whom TFA appeals to and for whom it does not are based on many different things, including family background (and I don’t mean socioeconomic or race). I mean the makeup of the family. Just as we consider birth order in some personality traits, I think people who grow up in blended families develop, perhaps, develop different value systems. Have we ever had a generation who grew up with as much divorce as we have now? How does that impact the way they see the path to valuable education?
We talk about public schools as a cornerstone of democracy, and we elevate the notion of university trained teachers who major in education. TFA recruits students who have had good educations at a variety of top schools in our country (and I know all of the issues with why they disrupt the flow of democracy and how it’s not fair to children who end up with teachers who have not been well prepared). . .but why do some view it as OK and some do not? I think it’s because our country doesn’t operate on one value system (obviously) or sometimes we develop values based on experiences that were beyond our control.
I would be curious to see a poll on the family structure backgrounds of teachers, both TFA and traditional. Maybe it’s a non-issue, but when we see a complete shift in how a generation and how the majority of leadership (I’m thinking about Obama’s ed policies and those of Jeb Bush and even Hillary, the momentum away from due process and pay ladders based on experience)view the path to success for students in education. . .those old ideas and things have gone out of vogue? Why?
Whose ethic is driving the education ship and why? I really don’t think it’s as simple as short sighted greed. Or is it? And if it is, why? Why now? Why are we greedier than ever before? Why did we once value public schools but now we don’t? What happened?
I’ll give your questions a go.
I grew up in a traditional, two-parent household with a mother who stayed home and a father who worked a unionized factory job. Neither parent attended college, although both graduated from HS.
Dad fought in WW2 and Korea. Dad was a registered Republican, Mom was a Democrat – though these designations meant something other than they do now.
Two children – both attended college, earning multiple degrees in science and business.
I worked twenty years as a geologist before teaching, and have been teaching for 12 years.
So what does this tell you?
My ethics, values, moral compass are a result of my upbringing, my faith, and my life experience. A younger person will lack the life experience that a 50-something has, and thus their viewpoint will be shaped by far less experience than mine. It doesn’t make it better, but radically different.
Personally, I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. A teacher’s values are largely shaped by their boots-on-the-ground experiences, not their socio-economic group, their family type, etc. These TFA’ers are young and idealistic, but their directors and managers are not. It appears their idealism was subverted into something destructive to the public good.
In time, if they stay in education – real education not education “policy”, they will probably come to a similar ethic that most current teachers have.
We can only hope…
Involved Mom,
You ask good questions about the drive to replace public education with privatized schools and to weaken the teaching profession. Why is the same thing happening to other once-public institutions? Prisons, hospitals, libraries, and almost anything else you can think of. Even the military outsources some of its functions. What is behind it? In part, I think, a belief that democracy is inefficient as compared to a private corporation. Greed. A love of shaking things up. The dominance of the 1% and their beliefs and values. It is not rational because outsourcing and privatization means that taxpayers are paying investors, instead of paying for the services they need and want.
The answer to your final 8 questions, Involved Mom.
(1) The Koch’s influence. In 2010, the New Yorker magazine published Jane Mayer’s article, which explains America’s descent into a John Birch national vision. (2) Now deceased, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s infamous memo, described at Wikipedia (3) The creation of the U.S. oligarchy, as the result of a weakened progressive tax system and, (4) Dominance of multinational corporations, in pursuit of a global profit-making. MNC’s have no allegiance to any nation and, are structurally organized to serve only corporate shareholders.
I am sure that many idealistic young people consider TFA a community service like the Peace Corps or Americorps. The unfortunate reality is they are being sent into classrooms without the requisite training, and their employment is being used to line the pockets of those at the top of the exploitative pyramid. Some may find their way, but many others serve their time and move on. This is no way to build a stable school by constantly using poor students as guinea pigs.
There are currently many members of Congress whose goal is to destroy the bulk government services and turn them over to the market. There are also opportunists that seek to profit from any cheap form of education such as cyber schools that continue to waste money and get abysmal results. Others support private schools because they want children to get a religious training. Other members of government such as Obama believe the “market” will solve the failing schools’ problems. All of these ideas are naive and lack a basis in fact, but this is the current political and economic climate we find ourselves in. Currently, the impetus of privatization has been focused in urban areas. The privatizers will not stop at city limits. Unless middle class parents rally around public education with their votes and voices, I fear, middle class schools will eventually be on the chopping block as the billionaires will continue to seek more profit, and they have too many legislators in their pockets.
Is TFA recruiting fueled by the same “pressure points” that any other job re recruiting is? Is it simply a business that competes with something also available through state avenues? In the big picture, what are we learning from its existence? How will the fact that TFA was created effect traditional teacher training, if at all?
I would also add that I don’t mean to imply a Dan Quale style bemoaning of family values—I am a step child and a step parent and have been a step sibling, albeit our parents did not stay married. I know the discipline and effort involved in navigating blended families. Maybe my point is as dumb as the thing I read sometime ago about the size of someone’s second toe indicating they are gay, but seriously as these norms of daily family life have changed they can’t go without impact. And I just wonder if some of the perceptions of what is appealing in the running of public services hasn’t been affected by that. Maybe I just think too much.
I surmise that the recruits are joining TFA for much the same reason my generation joined VISTA. In addition, my experience with colleagues in their thirties tells me about the influence of Reagan.
Having taught between 1965 and 2013 in “inner city” schools, I would also say that student behavior among the more asocial students has eroded.
This is an interesting mix.
My semester of courses plus student teaching probably was not much more than a TFA student receives, but our attitudes and expectations might be considerably different. And some TFA are entering a vastly different setting.
TFA is the absolute worst. They are a Trojan horse for the corporations hiding beneath the typical progressive cloak of “but we care about the kids”. Meet any TFA conscript and you hear the same inexperienced, bumper-slogan anti-public ed. propaganda. That is until they figure it out.
Most maddening- TFA receives federal funding, so taxpayers foot the bill for their advertising. It’s a variation on the theme of advertising for charter schools, only it’s covert instead of overt.
Non-profits that have been around a while suffer from a kind of “mission creep” where they expand the reason they exist to justify their continued existence.
So TFA goes from “placing teachers in under-served areas” to “cultivating edu-leaders who promote ed reform” to “serving as a pipeline for charter school teachers and principals”.
If ed reform believed in their their own ideas, where experience has no value and “disruption” is the key attribute they should voluntarily disband TFA instead of re-defining them.
“mission creep”, which has led TFA to Black Lives Matter.
An added benefit for TFA, the association bolsters their sagging brand.
I want to see what happens, if and when, Black Lives Matters demands a more professional police force, accomplished by devoting money to the public sphere of enforcement. Police focus was misdirected, when the military discarded their hardware to them.
Hey I participated on a rapid response team and I believe it was very meaningful…oh, wait I work in a hospital. Anyway, Derrell Bradford sounds like a quite a prize. I don’t understand how people don’t see through him. Also, TFA recieved a huge grant from the National Science Foundation?? Does anyone know of this and who decided that?
“Anyway, Derrell Bradford sounds like a quite a prize.”
What caught my eye, and perhaps speaks more to the truth of what TFA is about is this quote by him:
“We certainly talk, but this is separate from TFA,” Bradford said. “TFA is letting us take her sister out, and we said we would bring her back on time.”
The key is what happens (serious whoop de do?) during the time before “bringing her back on time.” But hey, we kept our word!!
Derrell Bradford.
That name rings a bell.
He’s the moderator of a privatization forum for a group called EdBuild, a video of which was posted last fall.
Watch Moderator Derrell Bradford and Panelist Rebecca Sibilia (and the off-screen panelists as well) as they are salivating and positively orgasming at the prospect of school district bankruptcy and the opportunities to privatize the schools … a la New Orleans:
(27:12)
(27:12)
DERRELL BRADFORD: “I wanna … I’m kinda wanted to save it up, but I love disaster movies, so I”m going to hit it with you now.”
— (SIBILIA smiles wantonly as she anticipates Bradford is about to talk about Detroit’s and other major city school systems possibly going bankrupt.)
DERRELL BRADFORD: “Detroit is about to go belly up. I would argue that most school districts can’t even afford to stay open NOW, and that they’re largely on borrowed time… uhhm… ”
(something about banks)…
(anyone who doubts my analysis, try freeze-framing Sibilia at 27:19, or her lip-licking, from 27:23 – 27:26, as she involuntarily betrays her unconscious mind at work. Sibilia’s reactions are rapturous.)
DERRELL BRADFORD: “What are these guys gonna do when they go belly up? What’s happens when Chicago can’t meet its pension obligations anymore, and they can’t afford to do what it wants to do? What are your thoughts on that?”
REBECCA SIBILIA: “Hopefully, they call Andy Smarick.”
— laughter ensues.
REBECCA SIBILIA: “I mean… No, look.. When you think about bankruptcy- ”
DERRELL BRADFORD: “Do I have to put Jamie between you two?”
(WTF? Is he inferring that she will sexually maul Smarick, who’s sitting next too her?)
REBECCA SIBILIA: “This is a huge opportunity for school districts, and… this is something that EdBuild is going to focus on. Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids. Bankruptcy is a problem for the people governing the system. Right?
“So when a school district goes bankrupt, all of their legacy debt… can be eliminated. And when you’re answering questions that Andy and Mike put forward, like:
” ‘How are we going to pay for the buildings?’
” ‘How are we going to bring in new operators where there’s pension debt?’
“Like, if we can eliminate that in an entire urban system, then we can throw all the cards up in the air, and redistribute everything with all new models.” (“redistribute” being euphemism for privatize)
(—orgasming is the best way to describe how Sibilia sells her this next part.)
(28:41 – 28:50 )
(28:41 – 28:50 )
REBECCA SIBILIA: “And so… you’ve heard it here first! Bankruptcy may be… like… THEE THING that leads to an education revolution!”
————————————
Someone wrote about how callous and excited these idiots seemed at the prospect of an entire school district going bankrupt, and Sibilia angrily wrote back, denying she acted this way.
After criticism of this video of the EdBuild broke out, panelist and EdBuild officer Rebecca Sibilia emailed the writer of one of the critical pieces, PR Watch’s Jonas Persson’s. She claimed that she was slandered by what Perssons wrote..
Here’s the Persson’s piece that prompted Sibilia:
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/09/12932/bankruptcy-huge-opportunity-privatize-schools-says-edbuild
Here’s Ms. Sibilia’s response to it:
http://edbuild.org/blog/2015/misleading-attacks
(By the way, Sibilia doesn’t even link to Persson’s piece. She’s just telling everyone, “What was written about our EdBuild panel—and my comments in particular—is really icky. Right? So… like… don’t even read it for yourself. Just … like… just trust me that it’s really icky, and just leave it at that. Right?”)
Ms. Sibilia claims that Persson misrepresented what she said, and took it out of context. She even challenges his transcription, and advises people to watch the whole thing.
REBECCA SIBILIA: “I encourage everyone to actually watch the whole panel and see what I had to say.”
Well, Peter Greene at Curmudgucation took her up on that challenge, and found that, no… Persson was dead on in his description. The context in now way absolves Sibilia. (Go the link at the end of this.)
Sibilia denies being cold or callous about the disastrous turmoil and chaos that would accompany an entire school district going bankrkupt, saying …
REBECCA SIBILIA: “Bankruptcy isn’t something that’s sought after (by EdBuild or by me / Sibilia) … we (I /Sibilia & EdBuild) aren’t excited about prospect of any school district going through bankruptcy…”
What a bunch o baloney! The problem with Sibilia claiming this is that the video shows otherwise.
Really Rebecca? You actually claim … bankruptcy is “not sought after…” by EdBuild and by yourself?
That EdBuild and Siblia are “not excited about prospect of any school district going through bankruptcy.”?
Let’s watch it again:
————————–
(28:41 – 28:50 )
(28:41 – 28:50 )
REBECCA SIBILIA: “And so… you’ve heard it here first! Bankruptcy may be… like… THEE THING that leads to an education revolution!”
—————-
As the sounds and images emanate from my computer screen and speakers, I feel the need for a Silkwood-style shower and scrubbing…
Indeed, here’s a whole bunch of crazy and stupid in Sibilia’s remarks.
Would she also argue…
“Divorce is not a problem for the kids in a family. It’s only a problem for the adults.” ?
“The house burning down where there’s no homeowner’s insurance is not a problem for the kids in a family. It’s only a problem for the adults.” ?
Also, Sibilia’s euphemism “eliminating legacy debt” thru bankruptcy means that tens of thousands of retired teachers who devoted their lives (decades some of them) to teaching—and contributed part of every paycheck to that pension system—will no longer receive a penny in pension money, and then would have no way to pay their bills and feed themselves.
Is that something to be excited about?
From EdBuild’s ideology and point-of-view, if that also means that unions can be busted, and schools can then be turned into profit centers… err… excuse me… charter schools… run by money-motivated profiteers… then yeah, it is something to be excited about… I guess.
As they dwell in their ivory tower, these EdBuild ideologues are as cold-blooded and sociopathic and devoid of compassion as anyone at the Wannsee Conference.
Here’s a homework assigment… watch the two videos—Wannsee Conference, and the EdBuild panel—- back to back…
… to see if this isn’t true.
I’ll let Peter “CURMUDGUCATION” Greene get the last word in here in his description of the segment above:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-happens-after-you-blow-it-all-up.html
PETER GREENE: “Bradford sets up her next bit by observing that some school districts are in trouble, and he would argue most can’t afford to stay open, and that would be awesome, and I say, you know what would help with that? What would help is to stop allowing charters to suck the blood out of the public system.
“And all that brings us to the quote that has circulated, where she envisions bankruptcy as a great way to blow up a district, specifically getting rid of all its ‘legacy debt’ so that they no longer have to pay for like buildings and pensions, which is totally cool because having a school district go bankrupt is no problem for students, just the adults. Which is just– I mean, I imagine that students would notice that their district is collapsing financially and cutting programs and teachers and resources with a chainsaw.
” ‘Bankruptcy is not a problem for kids,’ is a statement that, in the best of contexts, is still grossly tone-deaf and reality-impaired. In the context of Sibilia’s discussion of how to blow up public schools so we can have charters, it’s even more tone-deaf and reality-impaired.
“And while the tone of the whole panel is, as I said, disturbingly light and happy, Sibilia is just so thoroughly gleeful about the prospect of districts becoming bankrupt, their pensions zeroed out and their teaching staff scrubbed. I have seen people less excited about getting engaged to the eprson of their dreams.”
#resistTFA
TFA stands for: “Totally for Amatures”. I have personally met many, many TFAer’s who openlly admitted that they only planned to teach for two or three years and then go on to medical or law school. These folks are looking to pad their resumes and move on after their two years are up. Personally, I prefer working with experienced teachers or teachers who plan on staying in the profession. (And if the TFA propanda response unit is reading this, feel free to chime in)
Billy D.—
Some time ago, online, a wag dubbed TFAs “TeachForAwhiles.”
I think in many instances this is an apt and sober description.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
How many years has TFA had brand placement on tv shows like the TfA mug on Molly’s desk in the tv show Mike and Molly?
Since much of Teach for America’s budget is funded by American taxpayers (outright grants, ‘finders fees, etc. from Districts), we can only assume that the half million surplus that Teach for America is ponying up to pay a non-profit organization for damage control is coming out of our own pockets – to defend themselves against . . . well . . . US.
TFA seems to have devolved into a typical temporary employment agency like the ones who used to place hundreds of post-college students in the late 1980s in corporations. Those employment agencies, like TFA, got a fee for every employee that they could place. The temp employees would learn that they were paid $7/hour while the company was charged $15/hour for your time with the agency pocketing a nice profit.
The most successful employment agencies were the ones who courted the HR people at corporations who would hire their employees. As long as the temps didn’t cause any trouble not a whole lot was asked or expected from them. On occasion, a good one would get hired permanently, but for most of those temp employees, that temporary job was a stopping ground. It didn’t matter to the employment agency, since they got a big cut of what the corporations were paying for those bodies. All they had to do was make sure the HR folks would keep hiring their people instead of another agency’s people. I’m sure they always sent lovely Christmas baskets.
TFA has it even better — they realized that the people they had to court were the big donors who believed in privatization and who donated heavily to government/education officials who would do their bidding. As long as TFA kept providing warm bodies to schools and provided support for the notion that teaching can be a temporary job and stayed very quiet on the value of an experienced teacher, the jobs will come their way and TFA can profit nicely. But if TFA’s temp employees start speaking out that teaching demands more, that is a HUGE problem for them, since their “success” depends on pleasing those exact big donors. Just like the temp agency’s success depending on pleasing the HR people in corporations. And their big donors do NOT like anyone saying these jobs can’t be filled by temps. If TFA employees are speaking out, the billionaire donors will have to find another temporary employment agency with employees who are more “obedient” and quiet. And TFA is desperate to prevent that from happening. Maybe getting such smart college grads wasn’t so smart after all. Some were bound to notice what was right before their eyes, and not all could be bought off with high paying jobs in the “education” marketplace where they never had to enter a classroom.
And of course, there is one more problem — temporary employment agencies need warm bodies to place. Those 1980s temp agencies used to spend mega bucks advertising for “college grads” in the old “help wanted” sections of the NY Times and other newspapers. TFA advertises on college campuses. But as the warm bodies start to realize that they are being exploited, it isn’t so easy to find them anymore. Maybe TFA will have to raise their hiring rates to get better temporary employees to join their temp agency or maybe they will go the way that those old temp agencies of the 1980s went and disappear. But TFA is just a new version of those old temporary employment agencies. Maybe once it aspired to be something different, but that was a long long time ago and they have long since made it clear that they want the lucrative franchise of being the billionaires’ temp agency for schools. And in order to “win” that contract, the customer they have to please is not the students or their families, but the billionaire donors who want to make sure none of their temporary employees speak any truth that the billionaire donors want to hide.
^^I also should have added that some of those former TFA teachers are now old enough to have kids of their own in public schools, and not all of them can afford private schools. So perhaps they are alarmed to think that the goal is for more and more teachers to be as inexperienced as they once were. I’m sure some TFA teachers were darn good, but I suspect most of them, as parents, would think twice about having their own kids taught by newly minted teachers with the same experience they once had.