Gary Rubinstein entered teaching via Teach for America, but unlike most TFA recruits, he made teaching his career. He is also TFA’s most incisive critic, sometimes a critical friend, other times a critic of TFA hypocrisy.
In this post, Gary deconstructs TFA’s statement on Trump’s nomination of choice zealot Betsy DeVos. TFA, like other reform organizations, is in a dilemma because they want to be on the side of social justice, but they also want to be on the side of the new administration, which will be very good indeed for TFA. More charters mean more jobs for young recruits. Billions of dollars for school choice are heading the way of the “reformers,” and it is hard for them to seem sad about that. Gary wishes the TFA statement had included a few good words on behalf of public schools and on behalf of teachers. It didn’t.
The TFA statement includes 11 policy priorities, and Gary analyzes each of them. He wishes TFA had called on DeVos to stop the teacher bashing. It didn’t. He wishes it had called on DeVos to protect the funding of public schools while promoting choice. It didn’t.
Read the whole post for links and analysis.
Gary concludes:
Accountability has been used as a weapon to fire teachers and close schools throughout the country based on highly flawed metrics. Obama and Duncan did a lot of damage with this one and maybe TFA feels that they used it in a fair way, even if I don’t. But that same weapon in the hands of Trump and DeVos should be something that TFA should be concerned about. I don’t think that this was something that TFA needed to ask the new Secretary to be vigilant. Based on the contempt she has shown for public schools and teachers over the years, it’s pretty clear that DeVos will use her power to try to make it even easier to fire teachers and close schools. This could have a negative effect on not just all the TFA alumni who are still working in public schools, but also for the ones who are at the few charter schools that try to keep their most needy students and whose test scores suffer for it. In the bigger picture, I think that having DeVos too strong on accountability will negatively affect so many students in this country.
Finally there’s policy number nine about using “evidence and data” to ‘drive’ “teacher improvement and development over time.” This is code for trying to use test scores and value-added metrics to rate teachers, no matter how inaccurate those metrics are.
More telling than the policies TFA chose to include on this list is the ones they chose to exclude. Knowing that DeVos is planning to use her power to divert funds from the public schools (and charter schools too) for vouchers for private schools, perhaps TFA could have asked that she not cut funding to schools. Knowing how much contempt DeVos has shown toward public school teachers, TFA could asked her not to bash teachers so much. Knowing that DeVos has funded reform propaganda sites like Campbell Brown’s The Seventy Four, TFA could have suggested that she spend time in public schools and see what great work is being done.
There’s a lot they could have said to help stave off the at least four year battle everyone in non-charter schools is going to have to fight daily. Instead they padded their valid concerns about discrimination with a bunch of reform code.
Of their nine policies that TFA is urging DeVos to consider (three of the eleven are basically saying, make schools safe for all students), six of them are things that she was already on board with. It’s the TFA way of saying “We are already in agreement with you on most things so you can trust us and work with us to help you out in general.” They seem to care more about their own survival and the continuation of Duncan’s reform strategies than they do about the potential damage that the Trump / DeVos duo can wreak on the children of this country.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Under the question: “What’s wrong with this picture?” I wonder why regulation is so intensely needed for public schools and their teachers, but yet is considered unnecessary for charter schools? How does that NOT smack of “Why not trust us to self-regulate–we are business-people, we know better”?
Let’s ask that question of other business people, like the tobacco giants, or the credit-card companies, or the Maddoffs of the world, or those on Wall Street–you know, the ones with the sterling ethics–or big pharma; or the oil and pipeline companies, or more recently, Wells Fargo (wasn’t that a nice commercial they made after they were caught stealing identities from their customers?).
Regulation from outside sources is a public good. It makes all of us true members of the community just by existing as a part of the overall plan. Without it, you have an isolationist Ayn Rand world devoid of human excellence.
It’s so disappointing watching one group after the other cozy up to power as Trump-Culture becomes the new normal.
Jonathan: You could call it: “Consolidation of power.”
All due respect TFA are kidding themselves with DeVos and “social justice”
Obviously not familiar with western Michigan Dutch- NOT the most “progressive” people you”ll ever meet 🙂
Those western Michigan Dutch must have come from the same stock as the South St. Louis Dutch (of which my father is from).
Disregard the misdirecting social justice rhetoric that emanates from TFA. It is an inherently reactionary and racist orgaization, and thus will do just fine during a Trump administration.
Sorry, that should be “organization.”
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Right from the horse’s, well, here is Wendy Kopp on the true nature and fundamental purpose of TFA—
[start]
In 2011, TFA founder Wendy Kopp spoke on a Seattle radio station, saying that people often misunderstand the function of TFA. “We’re a leadership development organization, not a teaching organization,” she said. “I think if you don’t understand that, of course it’s easy to tear the whole thing apart.”
[end]
Link: https://www.thenation.com/article/teachers-are-losing-their-jobs-teach-americas-expanding-whats-wrong/
So when it comes to those running TFA, their version of “The Art of the Deal” in the “ed bidness” is all about selling THEMSELVES, i.e., THEY are their own product and the chief beneficiaries of the organization’s efforts.
And just why does that Trump fine sounding moral platitudes about social justice and the like?
Look, their moral flexibility comes right out of their rigid Marxist fundamentalism:
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
¿😳?
Groucho, of course…who else?
😎
The Democratic Party drove voters to Trump. Pres. Obama lamented, a while back, that when times are tough, people turn to religion and guns. America’s economically vulnerable (i.e. most Americans) recognize, through experience, that their lives are a crap shoot. They’re desperate to feel good about themselves. (1) The Democrats joined Republicans in telling them that their skills were antiquated, robots could do their work and, (2) their common goods, like schools were worthless. (3) The equity in their homes was lost and, not one banker went to jail. (4) Praise for worker collectives, by Democrats, was anemic, at best. (5) Workers’ rights to Social Security, because it’s earned, didn’t find a voice in the Democratic Party. Predictably, Americans turned to pulpits for relief. And, the new Sec. of Ed. is the result
From the article:
“Then there’s policy number eight about ‘accountability.’ Accountability has been used as a weapon to fire teachers and close schools throughout the country based on highly flawed metrics. . . Finally there’s policy number nine about using “evidence and data” to ‘drive’ “teacher improvement and development over time.” This is code for trying to use test scores and value-added metrics to rate teachers, no matter how inaccurate those metrics are.
Metric: noun,
Often, metrics. a standard for measuring or evaluating something, especially one that uses figures or statistics: new metrics for gauging an organization’s diversity;
pretty good by any metric.
Can anyone identify the standard and its standard unit of measurement in the teaching and learning process?
No, they can’t because there isn’t any nor what is supposedly being “measured” truly observable in and of itself and not by proxy. In other words there is no agreed upon standard unit of measurement for the teaching and learning process.
Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition] Also, notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”)
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit and what is supposedly being “measured” is nonobservable, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable” when there is no measuring device???
Tain’t rocket science folks. Tis all a huge hoax.