Gary Rubinstein has taken upon himself the thankless task of watching what Teach for America is up to.
Recently he has listened to the banal speeches of its CEO, who is spouting the same tired cliches about how terrible the status quo is.
“Zip code,” “status quo,” “great teachers,” blah blah blah.
Hey, it’s a living. TFA has about $400 million in the bank, and they continue to get fat “finder’s fees” for supplying ill-trained tyros to school districts who pledge to stay for two years, although some don’t last that long. Meanwhile, everyone at the top is making six-figure salaries.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Lumina’s executives “still spouting same tired cliches”.
I wonder if anyone has a database of TFAers who are serving in Congress or have staff who are TFAs. The same question could be asked about the makeip of state legislatures and candidates for office in counties and municiaplities, including school boards. A major mission of TFA has been to train “TFA alumni” for these”leadership” roles. Of course many have also migrated to administrative roles in TFA and to private foundations.
a useful idea: recognizing and perhaps confronting actual background
Some TFA’ers are raking in cash for arranging financing for charter schools.
Sic Simper Ad Copy —
Less Tar, More Test …
LS/MFT …
Everyone has his own personal education journey. Villanueva-Beard feels that her public school did not prepare her for university. I came from a working class family and attended a selective public high school from which I graduated Summa cum Laude. My point is not to brag; I was a very hard worker. I was totally prepared for college from which I also graduated Summa cum Laude. My point is excellence in academics depends on the individual to a large extent. You get out of your education what you are willing to personally invest. Perhaps Villanueva-Beard should have hit the books more.
TFK
Teach for Kopp
For Wendy’s pay
Yearly crop
$500k
When you add Wendy’s take-home with that of her husband, who is CEO of KIPP, that’s a nice chunk of change.
It’s all about the Kopps and Kipps
And all about the drops and drips
Cuz TFA is trickle down
And kids on bottom simply drown
TFA’s tactics to repeat the same lies is the same as DT’s. Tell a lie enough times and it becomes the truth until a majority of people believe the lie is not a lie.
For instance, Monday morning (3-18-2019), Trump had used the term “This is a witch hunt” 261 times since the beginning of the Russian investigation and it allegedly is paying off because a recent poll (not all the polls) says “50% of Americans AGREE that Robert Mueller’s investigation is a Witch Hunt.”
On that note, here is an Op-Ed from The Washington Post that agrees with Trump, but not in the way his deplorable followers want to think.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-right-this-is-a-witch-hunt/2019/03/18/a2487b14-49bf-11e9-b79a-961983b7e0cd_story.html?utm_term=.f77b3b477cac
Hint:
What is a witch hunt for?
Answer: To hunt for evil witches.
“Early in the podcast, and then again at the end, Villanueva-Beard references a charter school she just visited in D.C., Ingenuity Prep, a school that hires lots of TFA corps members, you can bet. She speaks about the high expectations the TFA teacher has for the kids there and how much energy she experienced in her visit hearing from the kids about their future ambitions.”
The plug for charter schools is required, I think- along with the complete and deliberate exclusion of any and all strong public schools.
Apparently there are literally NO strong public schools in the United States.
The echo chamber has very strict rules about permissible speech. All charter and private schools are miraculous, all public schools suck. It’s VERY scientific 🙂
It’s amazing how a movement that is supposedly “about” public education completely ignores 90% of students and schools, but somehow they manage it.
I always feel sorry for public school students in these cities where ed reformers dominate- what’s it like to attend a public school in a city run by people who specifically and ideologically opposed to the existence of public schools? Do the kids notice their schools are completely ignored, treated as if they don’t exist?
Here’s a press release from the Trump Administration on education:
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/presidents-budget-expands-education-freedom-supports-teachers-protects-vulnerable-students
Read it and try to draw distinctions between it and any random ed reform organization.
They’re identical, down to words and phrases. It’s an echo chamber.
I could post a Duncan speech and a DeVos speech and do the same thing. They literally all say the same things. I’m not even clear at this point why they need multiple organizations. They’re interchangeable. One is funded by the public (The US Department of Education) and the others are funded by billionaires but they’re basically redundant. In fact, in many cases the funding is JOINT- like with TFA, so there’s not even a real distinction on who is paying for this immense echo chamber.
They have successfully merged “public and private” to a degree where it could be the Walton Family or it could be the federal government and no one can tell them apart.
Here’s the bottom line:
“25 states spend less on K-12 and 41 less on #HigherEd than they did before the recession. ”
As ed reform lobbying groups have multiplied, public education has done worse.
Are they just lousy advocates? What’s the problem here? How can this be? With each paid ed reform lobbyist we add public education loses funding.
We’re really not getting a lot of value returned on this investment. Public education gets less funding now than when all these people were hired. It’s a net loss for k-12 public school students in 25 states and for higher ed students in FORTY ONE states.
If they’re “advocates for students” they’re not doing a very good job. It seems to me the striking teachers got more done “for students” in the last 2 years than ed reformers have accomplished for the last 20, and we didn’t have to hire any lobbyists. We were already paying the teachers.
Representatives that should be working for people are working for the 1% and corporations. They divert our tax dollars into privatization that nobody vote for and in most cases even wants. Most of them do not want to hear from people, and they avoid a public vote like the plague. That is why we should keep track of representatives and their actions and dump them when they do not represent the will of the people.
Just found out that Wendy Kopp will be the commencement speaker this year at UC Berkeley. It’s so offensive that one of the great symbols of public education in California will give the platform to a group that represents a significant cog in the privatization machine. Who made this ill-informed and untimely decision, after everything that has happened with the strikes locally and nationally? Apparently it was a decision supported by the students, as well as the ACUC committee and the school’s chancellor Carol Christ. It’s a disgrace, and the UC board needs to be called out on it. TFA has managed to bamboozle the students who have agreed to participate in TFA in large numbers, as well as the senior class president, who supports Ms. Kopp. http://www.dailycal.org/2019/03/18/teach-for-america-founder-wendy-kopp-announced-as-uc-berkeley-spring-2019-commencement-speaker/
Wendy Kopp has done more to damage the teaching profession than any other individual I can think of.
I debated her at Aspen in 2011 and found her to be vacuous as well. She is the mistress of platitudes.
Wendy Koop was one of the original reformers to out put out a coded narrative about public school teachers. When she said status quo, she was using coded language for older, more experienced teachers – who I guess in her mind were not hip to her leanings. Her narrative, combined with the good teacher – bad teacher scheme has done tremendous harm and undue stress on many hard working teachers. I found her to be, in the Charles Rose interview, also to be vacuous and kind of all over the place. He kept asking her – well what is it ? And she could not answer him. … no secret sauce, well, we already knew that. And her philosophy behind her program is just patronising.