GaryRubinstein writes here about the myth of YES Prep. It is run by the husband of TFA’s CEO. Wendy Kopp wrote in her last book that the YES Prep charter chain had cracked the code and was showing that every single student was capable of excellence.
Sadly, the latest school rankings show that one of the YES Prep charter schools is among the lowest ranked in the whole state of Texas! Out of some 9,000 schools in the state, a YES Prep charter is one of the 73 lowest-rated.
As Trump would tweet, “So sad!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So the way to sell your eduproduct is to make your resounding failures—especially one under the leadership of top management—disappear.
I have a suggestion. How about “high expectations” for those running charter schools?
You can’t self-correct if you don’t acknowledge your own failings.
The silence is deafening…
😎
Good one.
An essential ingredient for the school reform chaos created through years of manipulating test-scores as an excuse to invade Title I/public-tax-funding has been the ability of the larger profiteering game to utilize media to endlessly laud their spotlighted “successes” — while making their failures disappear as if they never happened.
The dollar itch”
Wendy Kopp
Cacked the code
Bumper crop
The mother lode
Struck it rich
On TFA
Dollar itch
Is here to stay
Charter is
The new frontier
Dollar biz
Forever here
The unfortunate reality is that lack of charter improvement seems to go unnoticed by those in power. Most of them can continue to churn out a dubious product because they are backed by big money interests. Many public schools with low scores are publicly scorned, often followed by state takeover and a sell off to the charter industry. Charter partiality is apparent in many cities, states and the federal government despite the industry’s history of meager gains, unless cherry picking students is corporate policy, despite frequent declines in student outcomes.
Gary Rubenstein’s blog is a source of wonderful teaching advice. Here’s a sample –he’s getting into the weeds about classroom management and arguing against vague rules like “Show respect to yourself and others”:
“The problem with even these vague lists is that it does not accurately reflect how an actual experienced teacher reacts to misbehavior. My actual consequences would look silly posted on the wall. It would say, “1. Teacher will pretend to ignore misbehavior while actually making a mental note so that later, if you break another rule, he can bust you on two offenses. 2. Teacher will make a ‘Teacher Look,’ which will simultaneously convey a modest amount disappointment, a bit of surprise, a touch of anger, and a dash of vengeance, but no fear whatsoever. 3. Teacher will attempt to call home later, but it will be a complete surprise so you won’t have to opportunity to plead your case with your parent before the call happens. 4. Student will be sent to one of the teacher’s friend’s room, assuming that it’s a day that that teacher is doing something pretty boring. 5. You may have won the battle, but the teacher will win the war. 6. If it gets this far, teacher will have to make up some new stuff.”
Reading his words of wisdom about teaching, I can’t help but think how refreshingly different it all is from the education school boilerplate. I never heard anything this cogent, concrete and honest in education school. Instead I heard a lot of vague (and in retrospect, utterly false) platitudes. Gary was a TFA teacher –I guess one upside of TFA is that you get to bypass education school. Reading Gary’s blog seems to me a better way to prepare for teaching than attending education school.
“Reading Gary’s blog seems to me a better way to prepare for teaching than attending education school.”
No, it isn’t, just as TFA doesn’t better properly prepare teachers for the classroom because without a solid background in pedagogical philosophy and history of practices and thought the teacher is but a mere trainer of animals.
Duane, have you read Gary’s tips for teaching? I certainly never got anything that wise in my lame ed school program. A lot of what I did get —alleged “best practice” –was actually harmful to my practice and took years to unlearn –e.g. “lecture is bad”. I always warn prospective young teachers to take what they hear in ed school with a yuge grain of salt.
I think a decent self-education in pedagogy could be obtained from reading Rubenstein and Diane’s history of American education “Left Back”. Then, using “Left Back” as a guide to the names and titles that have been influential in the great debates over the last century, select a variety of authors to study independently.
It’s like the truth doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t.
Just look at all the so called “experts” who, despite being competely wrong about this that and the other are still regularly sught after to give speeches, appear on news programs and advise the powerful.
Most people would be embarrassed to have been responsible for the sort of disasters that the fake experts have visited on the public but these posers have no shame.!