Truth For America is a podcast that provides voice to educators, parents, students and other stakeholders about Teach For America.
Episode 5 is co-hosted by Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig and Jameson Brewer. They are joined by Amber Kim and Sarah Matsui. They discuss two recent bestselling books in which TFA alums describe their experiences in more than 15 cities across the nation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is wonderful to see how thoroughly the presenters in this podcast understand the difference between spin and substance.
TFA’s spin machinery is sophisticated, designed by experts, and costs a lot.
TFA charges fees for placing amateurs into high poverty, high minority schools. It receives 36 percent of the operating cash contributions coming from public sources (24% State & District Fees, 12% Federal Funding). This is a very large and well-subsidized operation that does not need, and should not be receiving, public dollars.
In 2015, the architecture of the organization was failing, perhaps under its own weight of expenses—advertising for teachers, finding jobs for the recruits and fee collection for job placements, gap-filling and trouble shooting caused by inadequate preparation, booster activities for alumni, management and fundraising costs, the latter $36,123,948. There are big-time expenses with not much invested in teacher preparation.
In 2015, from an “expense” budget of $367,373,799, only $42,774,017 was invested in pre-service teacher preparation (11.6%).
TFA is a well-funded advertising, fund-raising, and branding machine that should be off limits to public funding.
These podcast reports from TFA alumni, with more first-person accounts in their books, help to debunk the myths that have been sold to major corporations and foundations and all too many federal, state, district, and higher education “partners.”
Financial information from https://teachforamerica.app.box.com/s/c88nvda3jrezmy91o9cuy2pukbu24fv5
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I recommend this new series to anyone who mentions TFA. In fact, TFA in our city is pretty much a secret society, the temps don’t admit to it, the charter school operators (the only place I’ve seen TFA) are equally tight-lipped about their TFA ties. The stigma is due to their own practices, resulting in disastrous effects on the children and unsuspecting families when the “corps” member exits the profession, leaving a path of destruction, even if it’s accidental, in their wake.
Every parent should ask their child’s teacher, Are you in TFA? And the school should have to disclose their TFA members.
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