The Houston Independent School District Board did not renew its contract to hire Teach for America recruits.
TFA profits handsomely on each person it places, collecting $3,000-$5,000 per person. Is it a rental fee or a finders’ fee? The organization has accumulated more than $300 million in assets and has created an international operation called Teach for All, which undermines teachers’ unions around the world. It also has a political operation called Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), which trains its members to run for office and finances their campaigns. In some districts, like Atlanta, TFA controls the school board and uses its power to promote charter schools and privatization. Many charter schools rely on TFA to supply their teachers.
Houston ISD trustees voted Thursday to end the district’s contract with Teach For America, an organization that places high-performing college graduates from non-traditional teaching backgrounds in classrooms.
In recent years, about 35 Teach For America corps members joined the district annually, committing to a two-year program. Corps members are HISD employees and earn salaries paid by the district, though they cost HISD an additional $3,000 to $5,000 in fees related to recruitment and support.
Board members voted 4-4 on a motion to continue the contract, with a majority vote needed to support its renewal. Trustees approved the contract in 2018 by a 4-3 vote, but the outcome swung this year with Board President Diana Dávila flipping from “yes” to “no” on Thursday.
Opponents of renewing Teach For America’s contract noted corps members are less likely to remain in the district long-term than educators certified through more traditional methods. Some trustees also quibbled with the fees paid to Teach For America at a time when educators across the district are receiving modest salary increases.
“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.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Houston finally caught on to the fact that they were not getting much return on all the money spent on TFA. Why should a city spend thousands of dollars to recruit a temp employee when the state already has both a traditional and non-traditional path to certification available? These paths offer far more intensive training than what TFA provides. TFA does not provide enough value to the district for what it costs the city. I hope other cities wake up to the same conclusion as Houston has. https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/certification/texas/
imagine if exposing the MONEY spent on TFA became a journalists’s first goal
A couple of years ago, I went to draw some money from an ATM, and up popped a Xmas message, asking me which of the following charities I wanted to donate $1 to: the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, or Teach for America? I raised holy hell with the bank. I haven’t see that message since then.
the very fact that TFA can be called a “charity” and seen as equal to the other two — and thus published together — says so much about the overwhelming mess we are in
It also dawned on me that TFA should be required to repay the money paid them by the district if the teacher does not complete their contract if that is not already the case. Stay a year; repay half.
Good for Houston. I wish more districts would follow their lead. Here in North Carolina, we have less presence of TFA than we might, due to them not having as much of a foothold in many of the larger districts (especially Wake, Durham and Asheville.) Unfortunately, LEE did manage to get one of their own elected to be State Superintendent in 2016 (by a 50.6% to 49.4% margin), though he’s now fairly widely hated and unlikely to be re-elected when his current term is up. He’s a classic TFA-turned-politician type who did his two years as a TFAer in a high-poverty school in Charlotte, then bailed to be a corporate lawyer and get himself elected to the Winston-Salem school board. Fortunately, he hasn’t been able to increase TFA’s presence in the state, so I guess we should count our blessings on that point.
It would be wonderful if the National Association of School Boards conducted a study of the cost of hiring TFAs and their length of service before moving on and some other comparative cost/benefit return-on-investment calculations in these hires. This is a national issue and there is too little information about the basis for fees paid by districts for these hires.