Mercedes Schneider reports that Betsy DeVos is giving $13 million to New Orleans to fix the problem of high teacher attrition and to increase diversity.
Schneider points out that the grant is ironic since pre-Katrina had a teaching staff that was 72% black, with deep roots in the community and they were all fired en masse.
Now, with the young inexperienced TFA staying for s couple of years, then leaving, NOLA has a teacher retention problem.
USDOE Pays Shallow Ed Reform Orgs to Address NOLA Teacher Retention Issues
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I ask folks to recall the innumerable times that rheephormsters of all political shades and colorations and ideas about education “stuff” [thank you Bill Gates!], here on this blog and elsewhere, have used a variation of the “voting with your feet” ploy.
For example, it almost seems mandatory that those defending the diversion of public monies to private actors like charters point to supposedly humongous lists of applicants to those businesses as an example of parents and students that are, in effect, “voting with their feet” in favor of leaving those “big gubmint monopolies” aka “factories of failure” for the Promised Land of $tudent $ucce$$.
Leaving aside such spurious claims based on “truthful hyperbole”—
What is the high attrition rate over a sufficiently long period of time mentioned in this post if not an example of people with firsthand experience (and not during the best of economic times) “voting with their feet” on the soundness and viability and success of every crackpot rheephorm practice that has been unleashed on New Orleans?
No wonder you don’t hear much about the “New Orleans Miracle” lately. Or its DC or Detroit etc. versions. Many feet. Voting. The results are in.
Corporate education reform has lost by a landslide.
😎
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I don’t understand the math of giving New Orleans money to restore minority teachers to the system. Before Katrina the city had a cadre of certified, qualified black teachers. They now see the problem of relying on young teaching temps. Some furloughed teachers may be able to teach again in the city. However,hey will not be working for the state; they will be working for corporations. These teachers will not have the same level of security or benefits under corporate conditions. The first thing they should do if they return to teach in the city is join a union.
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Why don’t TFA -ers stay?
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They don’t stay because, with the exception of those who are identified, trained and groomed to be “leaders” (read charter chain touts/operators and serial public school killers), which Wendy Kopp has explicitly stated is the real reason for TFA’s existence, these young colonizers are there to polish their resumes and give them a bogus “social justice” patina (Ha!) before they “go on to better things.”
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“colonizers.” YES.
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