Cami Anderson, former leader of Newark schools and reform superstar, made a startling admission at the TFA conference.
““Here is the inconvenient truth: Education, including education reform, is part of the problem,” said Cami Anderson, the polarizing former schools chief in Newark, N.J., and a 1993 TFA alumna. “We have not made a dent in the problem, and in some cases we’ve made it worse.”
“Anderson said that the reform movement of which TFA is a part has for too long turned a blind eye to complaints about schools “quietly pushing out the most difficult kids,” meting out excessively harsh discipline and having high rates of suspension and expulsion.
““Why has the school reform community been largely silent about the school-to-prison pipeline?” she said.”
Bravo for Cami! It is nice to see a key reformer reflecting on what went wrong when so many reformers seem to be trained never to admit error.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As the curtain is gradually pulled back, some, like Cami, will renounce their sins.
“Oh no my dear, I’m not a bad woman, just a very bad reformer.”
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This is a significant admission. John King is trying to appear contrite as well, but he’s not very good at it. Will Eva be next???
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If Success Academy does not hire first year TFA as stand alone teachers, that is the most important detail regarding TFA.
Success Academy says there training model is baloney.
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Well, it’s a start. But frankly, I don’t believe anyone based on one utterance – not even you, Diane. It wasn’t what you said about charters, accountability, etc. after you realized what was going on, it was what you did that convinced me. Anderson has a lot of doing to do before I’ll be singing her praises.
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It doesn’t really matter if she says it as a closed meeting of like-minded ed reformers in government and the private sector.
Ed reformers have been promoting a narrative that the two sets of schools were serving the same students. Tons of federal and state law is (now) based on that.
If that isn’t true than we poured 15 years of resources into a charter system they misrepresented, often to the detriment of public schools.
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Yes, pushing out problem kids is not real reform. It is a strategy often used by private and parochial schools, as well as by charter schools.
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Yep!
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Yes, and just about “everyone” knows it, too.
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““Why has the school reform community been largely silent about the school-to-prison pipeline?” she said.”
Cami is wrong. What the corporate public education demolition derby (CPEDD) and the rest of the country doesn’t talk about is the “poverty to prison pipeline”. There is no school to prison pipeline. That is another sound bite manufactured by CPEDD and repeated enough to make too many fools think it is a fact.
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Lloyd is 100% correct, as usual.
The pipeline starts with ALEC and ends with ALEC.
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ALEC (the Koch brothers) the Waltons and Bill Gates – they are all on the same path built by greed and a hunger for power over others.
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Exactly so, Lloyd, exactly so.
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Would someone inform, Anderson, about the following?
“From WWII through 1968, the wages of U.S. workers tracked productivity closely.” From 1968 to present, wage increases have not reflected productivity gains, due to U.S. policy decisions. Corporate decisions to exploit labor and ignore health and safety precautions in foreign nations, resulted from policy decisions, not the inevitable, much paraded excuses, globalization and technology.
If U.S. min. wage had kept up with productivity, it would have been, about $20, in 2013. The median wealth of an American adult is $34,316, below, Japan, Luxembourg, U.K. Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia…
One in five children in the U.S. lives in poverty, fewer than 10%, are, in poverty, in the U.K., Nordic countries, Austria…”
Then, Anderson should be asked, “Why did people like her turn to the corporations and unproductive hedge funds, for solutions?” Answer- “stupidity?”
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One of the guiding principles of the “no excuses” branch of “reform” is to ignore poverty. Ignoring poverty does not lessen its impact.
Thanks for your statistics. It helps to put the whole picture in perspective.
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I still wouldn’t trust anything she says. So many reformers seem to be back peddling but why? As the saying goes: Words should only hold weight when honest intentions are behind them (and I’m not so sure honest intentions are behind all these back peddlers’ words).
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I tentatively agree with the last paragraph of the posting, but I add these initial caveats…
Ms. Anderson’s statements are—like so much of rheephorm—impersonal, dehumanized, voided of any clear sense of personal responsibility. For example, it is not “schools” that are responsible for what she talks about in the third paragraph of the posting but human beings. Some of those human beings are driven by what one person who guest posted on Gary R’s blog called the “right corps member mindset” [2-22-2014]. Part of that mindset (and not just for TFA) includes what can only be described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations of public schools and their staffs.”
One of the great conceits of many of the [second-tier and downward] leaders and enforcers and enablers and beneficiaries of the self-styled “education reform” movement is that the main thrust of their efforts is particular and unique and varies with time and place and circumstance. To them, the phrase “corporate education reform” to describe the essential nature of their endeavors seems like a gratuitous slap in the face (or worse) by special interests composed of lazy greedy thugs and liars. They’re the new kids on the block, full of hope and vision and goodwill, fighting against a corrupt and self-serving establishment—hence, the need for them to be self-critical is not only silly and self-defeating but superfluous. And in those instances when things just don’t go right, well then, their knee-jerk response to fixing things (to paraphrase the NJ Comm. of Ed) is to “double down on whatevers.” *Meaning: keep doing what you’ve been doing, just twice as much twice as hard twice as fast.*
I am cautious about what Ms. Anderson has to say because the entire corporate education reform is in the process of rebranding itself. Genuine self-reflection, self-criticism, and self-correction has not been a part of their DNA. Can the so-called “reformers” reform themselves to support public schools and genuine teaching and learning? Can they so transform their drive to achieve $tudent $ucce$$ that they can truthfully be described as working to ensure a “better education for all”? I am not holding my breath but—
A ver qué pasa [let’s see what happens]…
😎
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Reformers self-correcting….not so much.
Remember the recent advertisement for an “Influencer Strategy Manager for Gates Foundation Project” (Jan. 7, 2016, posted by Laura Chapman) and, the Nov. 20, 2015 “Impatient Optimist” blog post by Brent Maddin, “Unleashing the Power of Best-in-Class Teacher Training and Great Teachers……(posing and answering a question) Who is ensuring that every professor is high quality,,,Teacher Squared…”.
Then, there’s Bridge International Academies’ expansion.
Gates has given lots of money to groups who have to churn out something to warrant continued funding. IMO, it is funny, however, that PR people must be hired to make self-serving efforts, look like something noble.
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What is Cami doing now? At first glance, her remarks are shooting herself in the foot if she is a true reformster. She was obviously ill prepared to head up the schools in Newark. Perhaps those in favor of management by mandate were over confident with early “successes.” When people realized what was being done to their schools (and communities), their voices began to disrupt the reformster agenda. We need to keep speaking out; the more people who do the harder we are to ignore, and some reformsters may actually reexamine their beliefs and their actions.
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It’s a shame she didn’t see fit to address the flip side of charters pushing out kids.
Those kids then go to public schools, right? That’s the unspoken part of this.
How did the public schools who received the children fare with higher numbers of the neediest kids?
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Since many states and districts keep cutting funding for public schools (and shoveling money to the charters), you can expect that the public schools receiving these kids will have a tremendous struggle serving their needs.
How will they be able to teach them appropriately with ever-larger class sizes and fewer resources and support services available? For the love of God (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Whoever), many areas have cut special education funding, as well. Special ed is required by federal law!
And, of course, as the public schools struggle more and more to teach kids in poverty, English Language Learners, disabled children, etc, this will be used by the the so-called “reformers” as further proof that the public schools are not the answer.
I want Bill Gates to send his kids to an inner-city, poorly-resourced school for just a week. Well, no, I really don’t, because it’s not his children’s fault that their father is a clueless jerk. 😦
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When teaching autonomy returns to stay, in all of its splendor, to me and my school colleagues all over this country, only then will I believe that those in leadership positions, such as Cami, have had an authentic epiphany.
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She likely knew very will what a problem she and reform were while she ran Newark into the ground. Her disdain for parents was startling. Not sure what her deal is now – if she actually feels guilt or is looking for another line of work. But she deserves to feel bad about herself for a very long time.
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Well now, and what does Randi have to say about this? Isn’t she speaking ex cathedra from the TFA site as well?????
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Scami Anderson. I trust her as far as I can throw my car.
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