Gary Rubinstein began his post-college career in Teach for America. He was idealistic as are other recruits to TFA and eager to make a contribution to society. He worked in TFA and remained a loyal member for many years. But when he went to the TFA anniversary party along with the most powerful figures in American education, he got turned off. See his story here, when he spoke recently at Tufts University, his alma mater.
Rubinstein viewed the latest video from TFA CEO Elisa Villanueva-Beard and listened attentively. She has three big ideas. Two of them bash experienced teachers, who are “the status quo.”
Rubinstein learned the hard way that “high expectations” and “believing” are necessary, but not sufficient to be a good teacher. Contrary to TFA, experience matters.
Big Idea #2 — experienced teachers are lazy because they don’t believe their students can learn.
Big Idea #3 is that non-TFA teachers feel sorry for their students instead of working hard. Experienced teachers use their energy on pity for their students rather than working hard to teach them.
If only high expectations were enough!
He points out this irony:
One of the most ironic things about Elisa Villanueva-Beard is that she makes these oversimplified claims about how the problem in education is the status quo with low expectations while her own husband runs the YES prep schools in Houston which have a large number of TFA teachers. One of those schools, according to the latest 2018 rankings, is an F rated school and out of 328 rated schools in Houston, it is rated 312th.
Teaching is hard work. Change is incremental. High expectations and hard work are necessary; good preparation and experience enhance both.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a last ditch propaganda piece from an organization that is in decline. TFA has existed due to idealism of young people that now understand it is an authoritarian, exploitative arm of privatization. TFA is backed by billionaires and corporations that want a cheap, disposable workforce for their charters.
Experienced teachers provide real value to any school system. Not all teachers are perfect, but senior teachers understand the culture of the district, and they have large reservoir of skills and knowledge. They have built relationships with colleagues and families in the district. They serve as mentors to younger, inexperienced teachers that are developing their craft. TFA offers no evidence to supports its assertions and looks weak and desperate by trying to peddle more lies about legitimate teachers.https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/does-teaching-experience-increase-teacher-effectiveness-review-research
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“One of those schools, according to the latest 2018 rankings, is an F rated school and out of 328 rated schools in Houston, it is rated 312th. ”
Some people do not learn, especially if their pocketbooks are filling up by not learning.
I’m tired of experienced teachers being put down. Teaching is a difficult job and worthless people like this are not helping our profession.
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Gary is heroic! And I remember reading “The Reluctant Disciplinarian” when I was a young teacher back in the 90’s. Never made the connection. Now he’s a one-man wrecking crew against the lies, disinformation and propaganda pushed by Ed Reform and their stooges in the media. Grateful for all of his efforts!
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Thank you Diane, for posting this. As carolmalaysia points our above, we teachers are exhausted at being portrayed as worthless, so they can fill the school with trained novices, like TFA.
They made war on the classroom practitioners, silenced their voices, and ended their AUTONOMY. If the did that to doctors, mandated what they should use, what they should do, people would die. Learning died, when they made the conversation about teaching, and evaluating those teachers.
Indeed, trashing the EXPERIENCED EDUCATED, DEDICATED PRACTICE in the PRACTICE is the PLOY in the PLOT to destroy public education, and it began two decades ago, as the EducationaI Industrial Complex which owns all the media and our Congress, needed to defund the ‘schools’, by proving them failures.
Yes, they defunded public education in order to privatize the schools. Yes, they created bogus tests. Yes the corruption is rampant. I read about all that endlessly… but they killed the Real teachers ‘out there.”
Here is what they did to me, and I was celebrated educator, and my practice was studied by Pew to match the underlying principles of LEARNING, in the thesis put forth by Harvard for the research. I was one of six (of 20,000 studied)who were very successful thanks to a unique CURRICULA that I wrote http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
Some big “R’ s to use:
Return to the Real teacher… the dedicated, professional who builds Relationships with the kids who will be with her for 10 months. But what their ‘r’eform did was to Remove the autonomy and the authority of the authentic professional.
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“If the did that to doctors, … ”
That reminds me of an exchange with a male TFA teacher talking to some career educators.
“Don’t you think that teachers should get the same respect as doctors, lawyers, engineers … ?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because ya know … doctors, lawyers, engineers … those are REAL professions.” (stressing the word REAL)
with the implicit “unlike you teachers, who are not in a REAL profession.”
Again, he was talking to career educators, some of whom had been teachers two decades or more.
How to win friends and influence people.
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When we look at our social structure we can see that for decades men have been described as having the ‘real’ professions (along with professional pay and protections) while women have often been described as ‘just teaching…’
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ciedie aech:”Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
Prov. People who are able to do something well can do that thing for a living, while people who are not able to do anything that well make a living by teaching. (Used to disparage teachers.
From George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman.) Bob: I’m so discouraged. My writing teacher told me my novel is hopeless. Jane: Don’t listen to her, Bob. Remember: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
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George Bernard Shaw was wrong. He had one teacher that was obviously an idiot with bad judgment, and Shaw judged the other 3.5 million public school teachers the same.
That makes Shaw an equal or worse idiot even if he could write.
Teaching is a tough and demanding job that most people in the private sector can’t do. In fact, that’s why most TFA recruits leave before they finish their first two years in the classroom and why so many teachers never make it to pst the fifth year.
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over and over and over and over…
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They have already finished the privatization of health care. Dr’s don’t have autonomy anymore as they are beholden to the rules of the insurance companies and to the health care systems that are making all the money. People die all the time and are misdiagnosed all the time. It all started late 70’s and early 80’s….now pretty much complete.
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Agree…they did do it to doctors…
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This is why I am totally against privatizing the VA medical system.
In the VA, my primary care doctor makes the decisions regarding my health care, not an insurance company that thinks about profits first.
And in the VA, thanks to their computerized individual information system for vets, it isn’t as easy to make a mistake and/or misdiagnose vs the private sector, for-profit, medical care system.
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What about the TFA teachers that have stayed and continued to teach? Are they also worthless?
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It would be better if they had been properly taught to teach. TFA training is insufficient, not worthless but worth less.
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Gary is a TFA teacher who became a career teacher. He just doesn’t like lying.
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So is Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles.
The TFA mainstream flows towards charters, however, and support of high=stakes testing, like John White in LA and the current state superintendent in New Mexico.
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It’s interesting how TFA leaves Alex out of all the promotional materials touting its alumnae, and its history books. It did the same thing with Steve Zimmer, even though he was President of the LAUSD School Board, the second largest district in the U.S.
There you and the top guy with management, and the top guy with labor as TFA alums in the second biggest school district., AND IN THE CULT OF TFA, THEY ARE APOSTATES, AND WE MUST ASK AS IF THEY DON’T EXIST.
It’s almost as if they have to do this to appease their corporate backers.
“Yeah, we know that these guys came from our org, and that they are opposed to everything that you corporate ed. reformists stand far. We apologize for creating Alex & Steve, then letting them loose on the world, so we’ll never mention them from this point on. We’ll turn them into non-persons in our Soviet-style revisionist history of TFA. Sadly, they’ve been duped into joining the evil defenders of an educational status quo that puts adult interests ahead of children’s interests.”
Meanwhile, arch privatizers such as Nick Melvoin, Chris Barbic, Dave & Mike KIPP (well maybe not Mike any more), Michael Bennett, Michelle Rhee et al are all celebrated as “heroic, transformational change agents who are disrupting the failed status and putting children’s interests ahead of adult interests.”
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Both Caputo-Pearl and Zimmer are politicians. They are not involved because they want to promote and protect our profession rather they want to climb the political ladder. L.A. has a huge number of teachers that have been forced out based upon tRumped up charges of abuse and incompetence and UTLA does almost nothing to protect us. Caputo-Pearl rules like a tyrant and ignores decisions of the UTLA House of Representatives and Board of Directors.
He’s all about his power not teachers rights.
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TFA many not be growing so fast in the USA but it is working to capture a global market with the help of major USA funders who are not friends of public schools or teacher education programs unless they follow the model of Relay Graduate School of Education.
Teach for all funders:
GLOBAL CHAMPIONS give at least $1 million in annual funding: Carnegie Corporation of New York; Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, a donor advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; Deutsche Post DHL Group; ExxonMobil; Laura and John Arnold; Lawrence Ellison Foundation; Omidyar Network; Robertson Foundation; Seedlings Foundation; Silicon Valley Community Foundation; Susan and Thomas Dunn.
PARTNERS give at least $500,000 in annual funding: Acacia Conservation Fund, Credit Suisse, Finnegan Family Foundation, Oak Foundation, William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation
SUPPORTERS give at least $250,000 in annual funding: America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chubb Charitable Foundation, Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, IKEA Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Kenneth C. Griffin, Lone Pine Foundation, Inc., The Greg and Carrie Penner Fund of the Walton Family Foundation, The Moriah Fund
STRATEGIC PARTNERS offer significant in-kind support: Boston Consulting Group, Cisco Systems, Inc.
FRIENDS give at least $5,000 in annual funding: Aga Khan Foundation, Amgen Foundation, Antonella Mei-Pochtler, Apax Foundation, Arconic Foundation, Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Dow Jones, Echidna Giving, Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, Felipe Medina, Gregory Wendt, Huo Family Foundation, Ian Davis, Lidow Family Trust, Lu Li Humanitarian Foundation, Marcy Engel & Stuart Cobert, Menezes Foundation, Nommontu Foundation, Rachel and Mike Jacobellis, Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Fund, Shwartz Family Foundation, Sue Lehmann and Ted Dreyfus, The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Inc., The Kendeda Fund, The Pershing Square Foundation, The Scully Peretsman Foundation, Tim Purcell, Vitol Foundation, Warburg Pincus, Western Union.
The 2017 IRS form for Teach for All shows a compensation package for Wendy Kopp at $447, 640. She has become an award-winning darling of the international community of entrepreneurs.
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TFA is backed by a cadre of wealthy vulture capitalists and other misguided wealthy folks that are accustomed to taking advantage of others in order to enrich themselves.
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Thanks for posting this. Lots of usual suspects, hedge and investment funds, etc. But what in the world is the America for Bulgaria Foundation and why is it giving at least $250k to TFA? That’s weird.
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my guess would be that Teach for All (the international version of TFA, headed by Wendy Kopp) has opened offices in Bulgaria to do to that country what they did here.
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To be fair, those knocks against experience are necessary for their hugely reductive no-excuses ideology. In fact, they are precisely excuses for no excuses. That should be their motto.
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E 4 No E
I want payment for that.
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It’s time for a class action suit against TFA for slander and libel against public school teachers both working and retired. I’ll join that lawsuit.
Let’s ask for $1 million in damages for each and every teacher retired or still teaching in the country.
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The judge may pity them and believe they couldn’t do any better.
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I’m with you!
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All we need is a pro-bono lawyer willing to carry this class action lawsuit forward.
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TFA has always had this harmful and false narrative about experienced teachers…which in actuality reads ageism… In Asian and European educational culture the experienced older teacher is respected and someone one aspires to become. Those educational systems are built on the passage of knowledge and wisdom from master teachers. In the United States there is so much drift and starting over with something new, new programs -you feel so jerked around…well now we are doing this! There is no continuity and building up from a foundation. It is always let’s throw out that and now we are doing the latest new thing. wow…
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