Gary Rubinstein, ex-TFA, finds it startling that TFA issued a reading list that included “Waiting for Superman,” the discredited propaganda film of 2010.
It’s an embarrassment that TFA wants to dwell in the glorious past, but also an admission that their thinking is stuck in the past, the good old days when the future looked bright.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Comment I left for Gary…
You write: “Geoffrey Canada’s charter schools have done very poorly”
When I search for Harlem Children’s Zone research results, the most oft-cited study seems to be the one reported in the 2014 Dobbie & Fryer paper: “The Medium-Term Impacts of High-Achieving Charter Schools” which states: “Youth randomly offered admission to the Promise Academy demonstrate large increases in academic achievement and are more likely to reach important benchmarks such as high school graduation or college enrollment, on time.” https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/dobbie_fryer_hcz_01062015_1.pdf
A more comprehensive overview is provided by Danielle Hanson, who brings a healthy amount of skepticism to the task, and asserts: “The Harlem Children’s Zone’s success in significantly improving outcomes for poor and minority students in Harlem has understandably led to a push to bring the HCZ approach to communities around the country. That is good, but communities should be cautious in assuming that exactly what works in the Zone and why is sufficiently understood.” https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-harlem-childrens-zone
I don’t yet find solid support for your contention.
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The schools of the Harlem Children’s Zone have a few advantages unavailable to public schools in their district. They have a very large endowment, which enables them to offer free medical care, one-to-one tutoring, social services, and an array of supports that all children should have. They also have smaller class sizes than neighborhood public schools. There are a few billionaires on the board of HCZ. These are connections that Geoffrey Canada may have made when he was a student at Bowdoin. A few years ago, the HCZ had over $200 million in assets. It may be more now. If only every public school had the same resources!
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Indeed. One might hope for its successes to be celebrated and emulated..
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Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every public school had an endowment of $200-500 million to support medical services, 1:1 tutoring, field trips, trips to Disneyland, social services, and whatever kids needed?
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I see a 2016 HCZ financial statement references, alongside two schools, also 20 Centers for Children and Families apparently supported by the endowment, serving about 25,000 people.
But, if that’s the case, still enviably well-endowed.
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Geoffrey Canada went to Bowdoin, a very elite college in Maine. He made good connections there, and some of his Bowdoin friends are now Wall Street billionaires, who serve on the board of HCZ.
I have always praised the munificently endowed social, medical, and other services that HCZ provides to students and their families.
As important as their work is, it has not ended poverty in Harlem. It might take 50 HCZ operations to do that, plus jobs for everyone who lives in the area.
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Don’t get sucked into “Ronan’s World.” He’s simply a cherry-picking troll that should be ignored.
His modus operandi is to cherry pick information from obscure reports and bulletins in an attempt to get you to spend vast amounts of time disproving his claims. Invariably, they are nebulous claims, at best.
Let him stew in Massachusetts, where he’s one of the charterists that have been attempting to circumvent voters.
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Thanks, Steve. I have Paul Tough’s book in front of me, and Ronan’s read is bizarre.
Geoffrey Canada kicked out the entire 8th grade because their scores were low and not going up.
Anyone who reads the book can see that. Except Stephen Ronan.
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YES. Separating apples from oranges: a task so few think necessary.
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It’s been very much downplayed that Geoffrey Canada threw out the ENTIRE 7th-grade class of his school. It’s mentioned in Paul Tough’s book about it, but buried (since it undermines Tough’s theme) (which by the way is disgraceful journalism). Just that fact signifies crashing failure.
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Caroline,
I was once on NBC’s happily forgotten “Education Nation” series, and I debated Geoff Canada. Education Nation was funded by Bill Gates and the entire audience was made up of supporters of “Reform.” I directly said to Canada that he dismissed an entire class because their test scores were too low, and he replied with indignation that it was not true, he had closed the school and started over. But as you know that is not what Paul Tough wrote. He wrote that the scores of the first class to enter the HCZ charter were low and no matter how many times they changed principals, they could not raise those scores. Canada’s board was frustrated and he decided to throw out the class. And that is exactly what he did. The book is called “Whatever It Takes.” The kids were bewildered because it was May and the seats were all gone in the best “schools of choice.” They had to find any school that would take them. Canada had promised them that if they went to his charter school, they would go to college. He broke his promise.
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Oy, re Diane’s description of Geoffrey Canada denying that he threw out the entire class (even though I’m sure Tough’s book was authorized, meaning approved by Canada). … I do have to note that TFA fell out of favor at Oberlin College, where both my kids went, sometime between when my son started there, 2009, and my daughter graduated, 2017. My daughter said only the desperate considered signing up by the time she graduated. If you Google it, plenty of discussion revealing TFA’s true nature comes up, so that would deter an awful lot of prospects.
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I was a visiting lecturer at Amherst a few years ago. The head of the teaching fellows program said he would not permit his students to enter TFA because of so many bad experiences. Kids who really wanted to teach were given a few weeks preparation, then sent into difficult classes for which they were ill prepared. They never wanted to teach again.
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Carolinesf: “Geoffrey Canada threw out the ENTIRE 7th-grade class of his school. It’s mentioned in Paul Tough’s book about it”
I think if you double check, Caroline, you’ll find that the great majority of those seventh graders completed not only that year at the HCZ school but also the next year, eighth grade, the last year of middle school. As chapter 10 of Tough’s book concludes: “In unison, grins on their faces, they made a show of shifting the tassel on their mortar-boards from left to right. And then, with a shout, they all tossed their caps straight up in the air, as high as they could throw them.”
Confusion potentially arose from the fact that the school and students had hoped that they could attend a new high school that HCZ had planned to open. But the board of directors feared that the HCZ schools were expanding too quickly; they weren’t confident that they were sufficiently successfully educating the challenging cohort of kids (partly reflected by test score analysis) and decided to hold back on starting the High School until they were more confident in their capacity. As it turned out the final official test scores when they arrived weren’t too shabby. In sixth grade, just nine percent of the “class had scored on grade level in math. In seventh grade, 34 percent of them did. Now, in eighth grade, the number had jumped all the way to 70 percent.” Attrition may have explained some fraction of that improvement. Overall, the city’s subsequent Report Card gave Promise Academy middle school an A.
Understandably, there was some considerable disappointment and some anger at the failure to start the promised high school on time. And it might perhaps be appropriate to criticize the HCZ/school leadership for that, if we think we could have and would have ourselves opened the H.S. successfully on schedule. I will abstain from doing so.
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I think that you were reading a different version of Paul Tough’s “Whatever It Takes.”
In the original, which I have in my hands, there is a chapter called “Graduation,” which begins on page 234.
It describes the disappointment of the board of the Harlem Children’s Zone because of the low test scores of the students in 8th grade. On March 27, 2007, Canada sent a letter home to all the parents, informing them that the entire 8th grade would be leaving “Promise Academy” at the end of the year. This was a shock to the students. They realized that they were being kicked out. Their scores were too low. Canada had tried everything. He had brought in a new principal, who knew about test prep, but even that was not enough to raise the scores enough to satisfy the billionaires on his board (Stanley Druckenmiller [hedge fund billionaire], Ken Langone [billionaire founder of Home Depot]). The kids had to go. The city had already held its lottery for high school, and the kids were going to have a hard time finding schools that had room or would take them.
“Canada’s letter tried to put a positive face on things. The changes, he wrote, would ‘permit us the opportunity to focus our efforts on making the middle school the best possible environment for a child to be educated.’ To the students in the eighth grade, though, the message seemed a lot simpler: ‘They’re kicking us out.'”
On p. 240: “Although Pinder [the principal] had done his best all year to tamp down expectations for the state tests, Canada was hoping for a big jump in scores–fifteen or twenty percentage points. But when the English test numbers landed on his desk in the middle of March, the estimates were mediocre across the board, showing no movement at all for the eighth-grade students, more or less the same disappointing scores they had received in seventh grade, when only 24 percent were on grade level. Canada was crushed. It wasn’t just that there was no improvement. He knew Pinder had had only a few months on the job, and it was always hard to turn an underperforming school around quickly. The truly disheartening fact was that the scores had been so consistently low for so long. For three years now, if these new estimates were accurate, his middle school students had been falling short of expectations on standardized tests. Canada couldn’t quite believe it, but he also knew that he couldn’t let it continue.”
So he prepared a presentation of options for the board.
“Option one was to continue with the status quo. Option two was to close the middle school altogether and ship all three grades off to other schools in September. Option three was to graduate the eighth-grade students into other schools, cancel the sixth-grade lottery, and ask KIPP or another charter entity to take over the middle-school charter–something like what Langone and Druckenmiller had suggested to Canada more than a year earlier.” Canada was afraid that option three would create morale problems among the staff, although he had already discussed it with Dave Levin of KIPP. KIPP didn’t want his failing students. So Canada settled on option four: Suspend the lottery, graduate the eighth grade, and continue negotiations with KIPP. If Pinder could raise the test scores, he could keep his job and the school would remain open. But if he failed, KIPP would take over.
Now, Stephen Ronan, if you want to spin this sad tale of failure and low test scores into a different story, you are welcome to do it, but it is not based on Paul Tough’s book. The eighth grade was informed–too late to get into the city lottery–that they were all being pushed out. Their scores were too low, and Canada agonized about how to salvage what he could. The kids were kicked to the curb.
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Since you have the book handy, Diane, kindly do double check on their graduating middle school, tossing their hats in the air and all that, and the info about their test scores actually turning out remarkably well. Seems like HCZ had done a rather good job with them throughout all of middle school judging not merely from their improved test scores, but mainly from their disappointment at being “kicked out,” as some would have it, of an HCZ high school at which they had not matriculated and that did not yet exist.
I tend to be generally sympathetic with those who struggle to find the better of what they consider two difficult, unsatisfying alternatives, and decide on either one, whichever they sincerely believe to be the better. I would hope and expect that you often are also.
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Stephen,
I read the book. The entire grade was kicked out because their scores were low. When they “graduated” from eighth grade, not knowing where they would go to high school, they tossed their caps in the air. They were kicked out. If you can’t read, I can’t help you.
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I will add that it was cruel to tell the kids they were on their own in late March because NYC under Bloomberg converted to all-choice high schools, and the choices had already been made. The kids had to figure out where they would go, since all the most desirable high schools were already full. They were on their own.
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Diane: “If you can’t read, I can’t help you.”
But, dear Diane, if you read too quickly to adequately comprehend, I can, gladly, help you. And I’ve now found my copy of Tough’s book (close by Reign of Error and The Prize).
Ravitch “The kids had to figure out where they would go, since all the most desirable high schools were already full.”
On 237, we learn that “rumors flew around the table” among several kids that all the good schools were full already.
Merriam Webster: Rumor: “1 : talk or opinion widely disseminated with no discernible source. 2 : a statement or report current without known authority for its truth.”
On page 242, we read in respect to Canada: “These were children he had known for almost three years, and he cared about them deeply. In the end, he thought, they would be just fine, he had worked out a plan to get them all into decent high schools, and he believed there was a way to use the other programs of the Harlem Children’s Zone to continue to support them all the way through college. But on a personal level, he felt that they had put their trust in him, and he had failed.”
On page 246, Canada “had assembled a team of experts and advocates from around his agency, he said, who would spend the next several weeks consulting with the families of the eighth-grade students on how to get their kids into the high school of their choice.”
If your principal complaint, Diane, is that the kids coulda, shoulda, woulda gotten into Bronx High School of Science if the exam date hadn’t passed, and they hadn’t chosen to take the exam when it was offered, believing from their middle school experience that an HCZ High School could be surpassingly better than the exam schools, feel free to register your outrage. It’s your blog. And I learn useful material from it now and then. Thanks.
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No, Stephen. The kids were kicked out because their scores were low. I quoted the passages to you.
You are unfamiliar with New York City’s choice system for high schools.
Students in eighth grade rank 12 high schools they want. The high schools list the kids they want.
When the process is completed, there are no spots left anywhere except in the high schools that no one chose.
Canada could have informed the kids in October or November, when there was time for them to enter the choice process.
He waited until March 27, after seeing that their scores were still low and not getting better to tell them he was not keeping them.
If you read the book, which I seriously doubt, you know that the kids knew they were being kicked out.
There was no longer time to enter the choice sweepstakes.
Their interests were disregarded because the billionaires Druckenmiller and Langone wanted high test scores.
Please don’t reply again because I won’t post it or answer it.
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“You are unfamiliar with New York City’s choice system for high schools.”
In curing that deficiency, I find that during the 2017-2018 school year, the DeBlasio administration announced plans to close or merge 14 schools in the Renewal program, making that announcement after the high school application deadline, but “said it would work closely with students and families to ensure that each student is offered a spot at a higher-performing school for next year. It said that in some cases it would open new schools in the buildings where schools were being closed. Ms. Fariña that the department would provide more information in the coming weeks.”
As you may recall, Klein and Canada had a good working relationship…
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Stephen,
Geoffrey Canada threw out the entire eighth grade class.
He crushed their dreams because of their low scores.
That’s the way charters work.
Low scores, you are out.
It was late March. The lottery was over.
You don’t know what happened to the students.
Paul Tough didn’t know.
End-of story.
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Thanks, Diane, because I read the book but don’t have it to refer to. That was some Sarah Sanders-like weaseling in an attempt to defend/deny/may-as-well-say-it-lie from a “reform” defender.
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Ronan,
Tell us how much the billionaires gave Dobbie and Fryer in grants and who wrote the checks.
And, sum up for us, where democracy entered the picture in education policy for the schools that COMMUNITIES FUND for THEIR kids.
Why does Gates have any influence when he lives in the state with the most regressive tax system in the nation? The heirs to the Walton fortune live in the 2nd poorest state in the nation, what do they know about success for anyone except the richest 0.1%.
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Believing in “Waiting for Superman” at TFA’s age is marginal.
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Am not as concerned by TFA’s dwelling on the glorious past—I’m a Latin teacher, after all—as I am w/ TFA’s insistence that two-and-through teaching addresses educational inequalities. TFA, please LEARN from the past about what works: career teachers who have a long-term commitment to students, schools and the community. I influence ed. policy by staying in the classroom as a Latin teacher at a Title I high school—and encourage others to stay. It’s been a wonderful life these past 34 years.
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Sadly, it’s not just choice schools that believe in this crazy amount of turnover. My public school district LOVES to turn over administrators, causing chaos among staffs, who then spread to the four corners of the earth, because losing principal after principal, and not knowing what’s going to happen next, has a tendency to cause alienation among staffs (go figure). The district doesn’t care about longevity and ties to the community.
And I’ll bet that my district isn’t the only district doing this. Charter schools’ love of disruption has translated to public schools, too.
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TOW,
I have posted the article twice, but urge you to google Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine,” in The New Yorker, where she totally demolishes disruption as a business tactic or a tactic for anything involving human interactions.
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Thanks, Diane! My district needs to see this.
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How dumb is TFA?
That depends.
If you judge them by their unwritten goals to disrupt public education and destroy the teaching profession while planting trained and programmed agents working for members of Congress to influence those elected reps to ramp up the war to destroy public education and the teaching profession, then they are not dumb at all. They are crooked, lying, sneaky, clever, crooks and frauds.
Nothing new there. This is the United States where greed is great and if it takes lies to make money, then like like there is no tomorrow. The following list is a sample. It could be much longer.
The sugar industry had done it for decades.
The Tobacco industry did and still does it.
The auto industry does it.
The legal drug industry does it.
The private prison industry does it.
The fast food industry does it.
And every time they lie to boost their wealth, their victims suffer and sometimes die horrible, painful early deaths. In fact, these monsters like so much when the lies lead to wealth, that we can’t trust anyone that is wealthy or even dreams of being rich.
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Lloyd,
You are EXACTLY RIGHT.
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TFA works hard to disguise its close connections to the far right, but in promoting far-right-funded “Waiting for Superman,” it let the mask fall off. (By the way, Michelle Rhee is no longer listed as affiliated with Miracle-Gro. But even though her operation, StudentsFirst, fizzled out, it presumably reaped some billionaire “philanthropic” donations, and she and her disgraced husband (with multiple accusations of sexual harassment against him) have gone radio silent and are presumably living nicely on the StudentsFirst money.)
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yes, important to remember that Waiting for Superman was funded and produced by Philip Anschutz. Check him out in Wikipedia. He is an evangelical, hates gays, makes money fracking and destroying the environment.
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I Googled Teach for America AFTER I posted, above, that if you Google, plenty of debtae shows up. So on the first page of results, naturally there’s a slew of links to Teach for America itself, but then these also come up — on the FIRST page of results.
How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million: An …
https://www.city-journal.org/…/how-i-joined-teach-america—and-got-sued-20-million…
I Quit Teach for America – The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/i…teach-for-america/279724/
Teach for America recommendations: I stopped writing them, and my …
https://slate.com/…/teach-for-america-recommendations-i-stopped-writing-them-and-my…
This Is What Happens When You Criticize Teach for America | The …
https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happens-when-you-criticize-teach-america/
Last year, Wendy Heller Chovnick, a former Teach For America manager, spoke out against her former organization in The Washington Post, …
New trouble for Teach for America: San Francisco wants out – The …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/new-trouble-for-teach-for-america-san-francisco-…
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The charter-loving, Neo-liberal Center for American Progress is filled with former TFA’s.
A new book by Quinn Slobodian explains that Neo-liberalism’s goal is to shield markets and private property from democracy.
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