In this brief radio interview, Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig of California State University in Sacramento explains the rationale behind Assembly Bill 221, which would ban TFA teachers from teaching in schools with high numbers of impoverished students. He says that the neediest students need well-prepared, experienced teachers, not novices.
A description of the bill is here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
TFA should be banned from all public schools. These teaching temps are not professional teachers. I do not know what slight of hand was used to push them into public schools, but it violates states own certification laws. The presence of people with six weeks of brainwashing accepted as legitimate teachers cheapens everyone’s bachelor and masters degrees. What other profession has been allowed to be violated and deprofessionalized in such a manner? Even plumbers and other tradesmen go through a more rigorous process than than someone that is entrusted with children. I refuse to call TFA members, a wholly political creation, teachers. They are associates like Walmart associates.
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I wrote in one of my books about a doctor’s proposal in the Wall Street Journal where he suggested “Heal for America,” as helpers to real doctors and nurses. They could do home visits and make sure patients were taking their meds, but they could not pretend to be real doctors or nurses.
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Not all public schools. If rich, elite white folks want 5-week trained temps teaching their kids in tony suburbs like Lake Forest, IL or such like places, I have no problem with that. If the elites really think TFA is the bees knees, let them prove it with their own kids.
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Let’s take that one step further and replace ALL of the teachers that teach in expensive, elite private- sector, for-profit K-12 schools with TFA temps … and let’s start with Lakeside School where Gates and his children went. I think his youngest daughter is 16 so she’s probably still attending Lakeside.
And while we are replacing all of Lakeside’s teachers with TFA temps lets increase class sizes to the level Gates wants for all of our public schools. What is that number – 50 to a 100, right?
Oh, and since we are still in the process of fixing Lakeside to meet Gates agenda for the rest of the nationals schools, let’s turn those TFA temps into proctors who stand around and only watch the students learning from computer monitors using keyboards. No more PE and sports, No more band. No more chorus, No more drama. No more arts.
Just 8 hours a day five days a week for 190 days a year sitting and staring at computer screens finishing lesson after lesson with tests in between and when they fail a test, they repeat another option of the same lesson they just failed.
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In my State, TFA has singled handedly created one of the worst ranked public education systems in the Nation. Both large school districts bought in to this scheme and has placed TFA teachers in high needs STEM subjects such as Math and science. Most only stay one year, some don’t even make it that long.
TFA receives priority over certified teachers, so if a teacher applies for a job that is occupied by TFA that teacher will not be hired. If a district is downsizing TFA will not be affected. They receive grants from the George Kaiser Foundation to get an Masters in Administration. Most move out of the district once completed or move in to charters as Principals.
Might I add that our second largest district is headed up by Deborah Gist and her Broadies. So, they are in a free fall at the moment.
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ah, but in the minds of people like this those inner city kids are incorrigibly unhappy and simply cannot be expected to do well with those tired older teachers who are just plain ‘bad…’
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I put this on another post this morning.
The TFA Burden (after The White Man’s Burden, by Rudyard Kipling)
Take up the TFA burden —
Send forth your Ivy Best,
To schools in inner city
To give the standard test
Instill the grit and rigor
In ignorant and wild —
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the TFA burden —
And take the bronco ride
And fill the kids with terror
And check their wild side
By grabbing bee from table
And swallowing it whole
To make kids pay attention
Accomplish Wendy’s goal
Take up the TFA burden —
The savage wars of Rhees —
Fill full the mouth with bumble bee
And bid the talking cease!
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the TFA burden —
And reap the old reward:
The blame of Diane Ravitch
The hate of those ye guard —
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: —
“Why brought they us from wildness
From ignorance of night?”
Take up the TFA burden —
Ye dare not stoop to less —
Nor call too much on hedge fund
To donate and invest
By all your tests and rigor
By all ye leave or do,
The inner city people
Shall weigh your God and you.
Take up the TFA burden —
Have done with childish days —
The lightly profferred laurel,
The easy, unearned praise.
Comes now, to grace your vitae
Through all* those thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
*two
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“Take up the TFA Burden”
Wonderful and biting poem
The first stanza set to music? – the song, Tom Dooley
A follow-up poem about the TFA glory found in subsequent jobs with charter school lenders…
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Awesome SDP, as always.
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In 1975-76 when I earned my teaching credential through Cal Poly Pomona, I was offered a chance to go through a year-long, full-time urban residency teacher-training program. I accepted and ended up in my master teacher’s 5th-grade classroom in a grade school where the child poverty rage must have been close to 100-percent.
I spent an entire school year in her 5th grade classroom as she guided me and taught me the best way to work with, teach, and manage children that lived in poverty. The classes I was required to take through Cal Poly were in the afternoons after the school day and during the summers.
I ended up being hired in that district and taught in schools that all had higher rates of child poverty starting at 70 percent. It was never easy, but my master teacher taught me the skills that served me for the next 29 years until I retired in 2005.
How does that compare with the few hours of training that TFA recruits get?
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Exactly, Lloyd.
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Good grief. Do people “get” that this is enabling TFA and disrupting neighborhood schools? TFA should be shut down.
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I think i used the wrong email address.
Good grief. Do people “get” that this is enabling TFA and disrupting neighborhood schools? TFA should be shut down.
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I think the entire premise / promises of TFA is WRONG.
What Went Wrong With Teach For America
by Peter Greene
February 17, 2016
https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/went-wrong-teach-america/
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Similar to Broadies, TFAers now infiltrate state and local governments to continue with their privatization agenda. David Silver, Director of Education for Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, is one of those former Harvard educated TFAers that is now actively lobbying our state assembly against AB221. He recently wrote a letter claiming that this bill would “take away a pipeline of proven effective credentialed teacher candidates”. With 5 weeks of experience for our high needs kids. Because that’s all that they deserve. What on earth is he smoking?
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TFAs who move along in the organization populate other organizations, include anti-public school non-profits where they serve as “consutants” analysists, or what have you. Some enter a program that prepares them to run for elective offices such as school boards and staff positions in state legisltures.
I would certainly love to know how many TFA alums are in staff positions to members of Congress or are now members of Congress.
Even without the TFA identity, there are toom many anti-public school shills in public office. For example, the Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction, Paulo DeMaria, has a long record of promoting charters, choice, and deregulation. His LinkedIn profile shows that he is also proud of the dreadful school report cards in Ohio with mandated value-added metrics. These reportcards are designed to increase the number of schools judged “failing” and to justify the growth of charters and other schemes that promise “high quality seats” or put down the need for any seats in brick and mortar schools–which means on-line instructional delivery (mislabelled personalized learning.)
DeMaria’s Linked-In bio claims credit for supervising state employees and contractors responsible for “processing of over $7 billion annually in payments to school districts and other entities.” He claims credit for proposing statutory changes needed for legislation in support of charter schools and vouchers.
DeMaria also “directed the production and release of the 2007-08 state, district, and building report cards which included, for the first time, the use of value added computations.” Value-added computations and report cards are still used in Ohio and the report cards are designed with absurd metrics and combinations of these, reduced to A-F ratings.
Minor detail? DeMari has no qualifications in education for work in administration or teaching. He is a finance guy and political operative.
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Yes, we want qualified and experienced teachers in the classroom but, in a state where there are chronic teacher shortages and significant hurdles to becoming a teacher, I find it alarming that we would consider eliminating the crucial pipeline that TFA provide. I’ve known many motivated and talented TFA teachers who, on average, are not any less effective than other first-year teachers and certainly far better than the dozens of grossly ineffective “veteran” teachers I’ve seen who are permitted to stay in the classroom for too long (probably because there is no one lining up to take their places). If we want to elevate the teaching profession, we need to broaden its appeal and increase the supply of applicants. TFA does this. It is not perfect and could do with some reform but it still plays a crucial role in helping get high-quality teaching into some of the highest need schools in California
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TFA is not a crucial pipeline. It is a lucrative money maker for its founders. Last time that Mercedes Schneider checked, TFA had $300 million in the bank.
In North Carolina, there was a wonderful pipeline called the NC Teaching Fellows Program, a five=year program in the NC university system that produced career teachers. When the Tea Party took control of the legislature in 2010, one of the first things it did was to kill the NC Teaching Fellows Program and transfer its $6 million appropriation to TFA, whose teachers commit to only two years. TFA has produced leaders like Michelle Rhee and John White and the current Republican superintendent of schools in NC.
TFA doesn’t cure the teacher shortage. It gives the false impression that anyone can teach, that teaching is not a profession, and that five weeks of training are quite enough to take on the job of a professional.
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TFP
TFAs a pipeline
Carrying the pee
Propagating trype line:
TFA is key
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Tripe
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Ah, another TFA troll probably paid to disrupt any social media conversation/debate that reveals the corruption, theft, and incompetence caused by TFA.
I wonder if this alleged troll lives in Russia.
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To steal from Peter Greene, there is a teacher shortage in the same way there is a shortage of Ferraris – I was trying to buy a Ferrari for five bucks the other day and couldn’t find a single one, ergo there must be a shortage, right?
As any good free marketeer should know, if there is a “shortage” of anything, then the price is too low.
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America sends it’s second string football players to Canada. Send all the TFA to Canada and rebrand it Teach For Canada.
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What do you have against Canada?
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Why not send all the TFA recruits to Russia instead?
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Ted,
TFA started an organization called Teach for All, which has outposts all over the world. I think Finland is one of the few countries that won’t admit them, because in Finland all teachers must be very well prepared before they are allowed to teach. Five years of training and study, not five weeks.
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