Follow the money is a basic principle.
To understand an organization, see who funds it.
Take Teach for America.
It presents itself to the public as a noble charity.
Unfortunately, it promotes the bad idea that anyone with five weeks of training can teach. That has the effect of undermining teaching as a profession.
Does anyone believe that five weeks of training is adequate to become a doctor or lawyer or architect or engineer?
TFA supplies the workforce for a large proportion of charter schools, 90% of which are non-union.
TFA simultaneously undermines the teaching profession and teacher unionism, which assures that teachers have rights and voice in the workplace.
Who would promote these goals? .
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“To Fail America (TFA)”
To Fail America, train five weeks
Choose the haughty Ivy geeks
Supermen without their capes
Climbing down the fire escapes
“Jello for America (JFA)”
TFA has got some gall
Nailing Jello to the wall
Claiming that their staff will stick
Even though it’s just a trick
“TFA Fullofsophy on on publicTeachers”
“We’re headed for an awful fate
With morons teaching schools
The bottom third from Flalafel State
We Yalies know they’re fools”
“The Fountain of Reform”
The Fountain of Reform
Is on the Princeton campus
Where Wendy Kopp’s the norm
And goal is to revamp us
a great two line argument against TFA: TFA has got some gall, nailing Jello to the wall
it’s up at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/To-Understand-Teach-for-Am-in-General_News-American-Hypocrisy_Education-Costs_Education-Funding_Educational-Crisis-190602-414.html#comment735409
with this comment “Who funds Teach for America? Billionaires who want to end public education and who send their scions to private school. Corporate leaders who want an uneducated citizenry who will become wage-slaves. ‘Gilded’ entities who want an ignorant citizenry, because they know that it is “shared knowledge that MAKES DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE”. http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/hirsch.pdf
An ignorant citizenry is the goal.
Another comment offers links to Diane’s books.
There are a few human activities that a LOT of people think don’t require much knowledge or training but that are actually very, very difficult and demanding.
I’m a fairly accomplished classical and jazz guitarist. I was fortunate enough, in college, to take classical guitar from Javier Calderon, himself a student of Segovia’s. Later, in Boston, I had the supreme good fortune of taking lessons from Berklee Music Professor Jon Damian, one of the finest guitarists and instructors in the world. I’ve played fairly seriously for decades. So, I’m pretty decent. Here’s the thing about the guitar: it’s an extraordinarily difficult instrument to play well. Anyone can learn a couple pentatonic scales and a few chords and then wow folks at a rock concert, but actually being able to play the instrument well takes DECADES of training and learning and practice. (I’ve noticed, btw, that there is an inverse relationship between people’s ability to play the guitar and how high they set the amplifier volume when doodling in a music store. yes, teenagers, I’m talking to you.) Ask people, “Do you play guitar?” and every other one will say, “yes.” But being able to strum a few chords and sing “Guantanamera” is to playing the guitar like what having been to the Paris airport is to having lived in Paris.
Acting is another of those fields. Most people who are somewhat outgoing or extroverted think that they can act. But put them on a stage, and they are horrible–awkward, wooden, unrealistic. It’s PAINFUL to watch them perform. It actually takes enormous learning to be able to act well. One must know other people well enough to be able to crawl inside them and BE them, and to get there, one must learn how to observe, carefully, characteristics in others that are so familiar that most people pay no attention to them, and then one must actually DO THAT. It’s a lifelong undertaking, learning to act, and there’s no bottom to it. Here, a list of just a few bits that actors must master: control over and expression via pitch and intonation, stress, vowel length, rhythm, pace, volume, timbre, articulation, enunciation, diction, respiration, facial expression, eye contact, gesture, stance, posture, proximity, heightening, expectation, pauses, movement, register, dialect, appearance, paralinguistic vocalization, and body language.
Likewise with teaching. The best that someone with five weeks’ training who then taught can say of this is, “I wasn’t a teacher, but I played one in a classroom.” You know, kinda like Trump being a businessman.
TFAer: “I wasn’t a teacher, but I played one in a classroom before going on to a real job in investment banking.”
A rough outline of what should be taught, I think, in a preparation program for English teachers: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/what-should-be-taught-in-an-english-teacher-preparation-program/
I’d love to hear you play. Do you have anything on line?
Also, what do you think of David Gilmour?
I don’t have anything only, SomeDAM. Perhaps I’ll put something up soon. I’ll let you know. I LOVE the lead solo in that clip by Gilmour. He’s not trying to do anything particularly flashy. He is attending completely to making the melody he’s playing SING. And he succeeds in this. The lines he plays in this are so, so like a human voice! That’s one kind of true musicianship. One exercise Damian gave me was to take a very, very simple line of a melody and to play it again and again, slowly, trying to make each note perfect, to make it sing.
I don’t know anything about guitar (I am a total amateur clarinet player), but I love Gilmour too.
He puts so much emotion into his playing.
Reminds me a lot of BB King, whom I saw in concert on several occasions, including once on New Years Eve when he played for 4 hours! (I believe he was in his late 60’s at the time)
We’ve been good about repeating the notion that TFA thinks five weeks of training qualifies one to become a teacher. We need to also remember the other troubling TFA premise– a two year classroom experience qualifies one to be a leader in education policy, or run a school district, or even a state education department.
YUP. TFA is the pipeline to a well-remunerated position in a Gates- or Walton-funded position as an EduPundit for some astroturf organization named for students, parents, and teachers
Or pipeline to your local school board with TFA viewed by dumb Democrats as not problematic at all.
by far the more dangerous by-product of TfA…
Well, evidently, Peter, being a moderately good basketball player or the daughter-in-law of someone who runs a pyramid scheme marketing scam qualifies one for leading the Department of for the Privatization of US Education, formerly the USDE. So why not give people with no experience leadership of a district or of a state education department? After all, the goal is to DESTROY the public schools that these organizations administer.
and it so frustratingly is enough to allow TFAers to get attention on the news and to get interviews with well-known journalists: teachers of thirty years are never heard, are never even asked to speak, but those TFA kids “care” so much that surely they must be given a voice
That’s a heckuva list of donors to TFA. A lotta money from pretty much the whole Fortune 500. Everyone who has any interest at all in union suppression has thrown some money at Kopp’s organization.
LCT,
That’s the unifying thread on TFA donations: union busting.
I’d say it’s the “uniondefying thread”
The Little Sis website has some other incredible tracings. Some other chilling ones are from Wrench in the Gears, especially for pay-for sucess contracting. In another life I would want to invest time in mastering this platform.
One of the most successful ways that undermined TFA’s power was a movement on college campuses to educate students as to what TFA really was all about — rich billionaires who ALSO lobbied to cut funding from everything that helped poor students to rise who then wanted foolish people to believe that their giving boatloads of money to a group of that took money from public schools in exchange for giving them poorly trained teachers was all about “the kids”.
Once college students became aware of how they were being played by the people who actually hated poor kids and thought all but a small number of them should rot in poorly funded public schools, they turned away.
TFA had a problem because they weren’t successfully recruiting on college campuses like they used to be. Too many smart kids realized how corrupt the entire organization had became.
That anti TFA movement has quieted, but it needs to rise again. Students at colleges all over the country should be leading the movement to illuminate this corrupt organization funded by the same far right billionaires who lobby to cut every program that helps poor families.
There should be student-led public protests every time the corrupt TFA and their racist views that poor kids only deserve poorly trained teachers, funded by billionaires who believe poor families deserve to rot.
There will certainly be Trump-supporting students who would be attracted to the TFA agenda to given poor students the most poorly trained teachers because that’s all those students deserve. But most will turn away from TFA’s ugly agenda to destroy public schools while their highest administrators happily pocket their oversize salaries.
I think TFA made a mistake identifying exclusively with the ed reform echo chamber.
They go into public schools. I would think the MAJORITY of schools they go into are public schools, just because there are so many more public schools than there are charters.
Why would they choose to wall themselves off like this and become part and parcel of this very specific market-based “reform” that offers nothing to public school students other than standardized tests?
They should have stayed open to all views. Now they’re just another echo chamber org, reciting the same slogans. I get why they did it, that’s where the political clout was and that’s where elite opinion was, but they supposedly SERVE public schools. They join orgs that work AGAINST the very schools they’re in? How is that serving public school students?
They made a decision to become just another charter promotion outfit. I think it was short sighted. Poor management and leadership.
I think TFA has attempted to change this, so maybe they realized it was bad, but I object to how ed reformers portray graduates of any colleges except elite and exclusive colleges as “less than”.
Most people in this country don’t attend Harvard. The vast, vast majority of the kids they teach won’t either. What kind of a message does it send to students to make this the sorting mechanism for worthwhile or good work?
Ed reform is littered with this elitist view “she went to STANFORD so could have done anything but decided to be teacher!” Wow. I think I get that message loud and clear! We’re blessed to have their PRESENCE, we of the state school population. We are lucky they even darken the door of our lowly schools. Yuck. No thanks.
The NYTimes has a good article about the drug addiction crisis in Ohio. The public schools in these places are taking the entire brunt of the crisis. They’re the only people responding. The student in the article is quoted as saying “school is my happy place”.
That all these politicians would strut around attacking public schools and not offer them a BIT of help with these huge social problems is just disgusting. I hope they’re proud of themselves. They provide no practical assistance to anyone- all they do is lay blame.
Public schools in Ohio got stuck with the drug addiction crisis because NO ONE else in government did anything, like they get stuck with everything else. Yet it’s fashionable in Columbus and DC to give speeches about how public schools suck, while offering NO help at all.
People in these places will KNOW who came thru in this crisis, and it wasn’t Betsy DeVos or the CEO of the TFA or Obama or Trump. It was local public schools and ordinary principals and teachers. The same people ed reformers smear as lazy union thugs. That’s why people stick with public schools. That’s why despite 20 years of ed reform propaganda people aren’t willing to throw them on the scrap heap. In many places they are the ONLY thing that is working.
The Deutsch blog, 7-28-2015,”TFA Seeks Help Promoting Itself on Capitol Hill”, identifies Elizabeth Warren’s ed advisor, Josh Delaney, a harvard education school graduate who is inextricably linked to TFA (in one of the comments following the article).
This gigantic list demonstrates there are too many wealthy people that get tax breaks to undermine public education. Maybe it is time to change the law.
Over the years I have crossed paths with a number of TFA “recruits.” Particularly at the now defunct Aspire Preparatory School in the North Bronx. The principal of that short-lived institution somehow got it in his head that he could build a strong, stable, middle school in a tough neighborhood by hiring only these neophytes.
In my experience, jaundiced though it may be, the only thing that surpasses the colonial mentality and ignorance of actual sound practice in teaching among these “teachers” is their moral certainty about their “mission.”