On his blog, Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig reported that the Houston Independent School Board has terminated its contract with Teach for America.
How could it be that Houston doesn’t want just-graduated-from-college recruits with five weeks of training to transform the lives of students in only two years?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great news! I pay a lot of taxes to Houston. I would rather pay for real, qualified teachers that all students of all backgrounds deserve. If Houston sneezes, will the rest of the state please catch the cold?
Awesome that the Texas contract has been terminated…that’s where raimondo’s hubby, Andy Moffitt was TFA for 1 year 11 months ….from Aug 1991 to June 1193- and now look how far he’s gone…to being a Senior Practice Expert and member of core leadership team for McKinsey & Company’s Global Education Practice.
On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 12:31 PM Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “On his blog, Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig > reported that the Houston Independent School Board has terminated its > contract with Teach for America. How could it be that Houston doesn’t want > just-graduated-from-college recruits with five weeks of traini” >
I’m surprised this comment has garnered a meager 2 comments. This is big news.
Very good news indeed!! This practice should be “scaled up”
Here’s a link to the article in the Houston Chronicle:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/amp/HISD-trustees-vote-against-renewing-district-13834070.php
I wonder if other districts will follow HISD’s lead.
From the above link, here’s someone who gets it:
“TFA is an organization that is problematic,” HISD Trustee Elizabeth Santos said. “It deprofessionalizes teaching, increases turnover and undermines union organization. We should not subsidize TFA with extra dollars. They should not have special privileges over alternative certification paths.”
Quite hard to believe. Fat chance of this happening in Memphis, unfortunately.
Recently, Stanford Social Innovation Review published a summary of a 2018 paper about TFA written by two professors (the authors gave TFA a positive spin). The paper was an odd choice for academic interest and the self-described “reporter” who decided to summarize it in spring 2019 also provokes questions. A sceptic would think it was part of a PR campaign.
I find the Stanford Social Innovation Review not much more than PR for programs that seem to be “hot” among entrepeneurs. Many of the entrepreneurs are clueless about the implications of the proposed program. I say this also after spending a day looking at the bizarre causal reasoning about “impacts” on the future of the 21st century from this or that version of instructional delivery, most by computers, to children in preschool. Specifically, I looked at the published grants of the Chan/Zuckerberg Foundation for 2018 to 2020. Many are going to institutions and agencies active in destroying the public sector, including public schools, in the first two decades of this century. BUt the jargon is thick about holistic development of students, meeting their individual needs through competency based learning modules and responding to the demands of “the future economy.” The word salad is both amusing and dangerous because it displays no understanding of the complexity of education or uncertainties about the economy.
Chiara made a good point a few days ago about the isolation of the 1% and those aspiring to join their ranks. They made their connections and friends at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Bowdoin, Goldman, JP Morgan, etc. They don’t know any actual working people. They hire them, but they have never actually been friends with anyone who lives from paycheck to paycheck. They look at the 99% with a combination of condescension, pity, and contempt. They want to help them by controlling their lives and futures.
TFA needs PR. Its reputation is damaged. The shine is gone.