ProPublica reports on its investigation of the funding and mission of Teach for America, in which it discovered that TFA is an arm of the charter movement, which aims to replace public schools with non-union private charter school.
This is an eye-popping article, an exemplar of investigative reporting.
It begins:
When the Walton Family Foundation announced in 2013 that it was donating $20 million to Teach For America to recruit and train nearly 4,000 teachers for low-income schools, its press release did not reveal the unusual terms for the grant.
Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the foundation, a staunch supporter of school choice and Teach For America’s largest private funder, was paying $4,000 for every teacher placed in a traditional public school — and $6,000 for every one placed in a charter school. The two-year grantwas directed at nine cities where charter schools were sprouting up, including New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee; and Los Angeles.
Here are some things you will see documented in this article.
TFA is one of the richest nonprofits in the nation.
TFA has received huge gifts from the anti-union, anti-public school Walton Family Foundation.
TFA supplies a large supply of teachers for non-union charter schools.
TFA has used its resources to help its alumni attain positions of power, as state and local superintendents and as state and local school board members, where they advocate for charter schools and TFA. In Colorado, a TFA alum Michael Johnston is running for U.S. Senate and has received huge campaign contributions from allies of TFA and DFER (Democrats for Education Reform).
Read the article to understand the nexus of power that ties TFA to the Waltons and the privatization movement.
To understand how deeply connected TFA is to rightwing politics, note that a member of its national board of trustees is former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, who promoted the DeVos agenda of charters and vouchers while in office. Haslam is a billionaire.
The two outside members of the board of TFA’s political arm, Leadership for Educational Equity (sic) are billionaires Emma Bloomberg and Arthur Rock.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sinisterer and sinisterer.
Just as telling about the info. in the article itself–it was in my FB feed yesterday–was the immediate 5-tweet counter-response from TFA. Couldn’t help myself when I tweeted: Just keep spinning, spinning, spinning…
TFA would like to be viewed as a positive force in education. However, as an organization backed by dark money, it is impossible to ignore the fact that their focus is less on teaching and more on politicking.
It is the politicking that has allowed TFA to infiltrate public schools. The AFT and NEA have been far too complicit in allowing TFA to move into public schools. Allowing newcomers in a public school without any traditional teacher training undermines the entire profession. The whole point about certification is to ensure that minimum standards have been met. TFA should never have been allowed to place an “associate” in a public school. It is a terrible precedent. It makes teaching part of the “gig” economy, not a profession.
this is what hurts after years of it being devastatingly true — and yet still no union leadership change: The AFT and the NEA have been far too complicit in allowing TFA to move into public schools
it’s up at Oped. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/ProPublica–How-Teach-for-in-General_News-Charter-Schools_School-Reform_Teaching-190619-401.html
with this comment which has links at the address above!
The EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX has engineered the end of public education, which means the end of democracy and the end of income equality for the masses of the people. Walton is a big player in the EIC!
As for Charter schools, here are just a few of the hundreds of articles I read at the Ravitch blog, that tell the tale and also:
My series at OpeED News: on Charter Schools, the fraud & the CHAOS,
https://www.opednews.com/Series/CHARTER-Schools–the-scho-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-141014-281.html?f=CHARTER-Schools–the-scho-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-141014-281.html
Jeff Bryant reports here on the waste of millions of federal dollars poured into charter schools in Louisiana.
Rob Levine: How Charters Kill Public Schools, the Example of Minneapolis
National Education Policy Center Reviews Claims about Fiscal Impact of Charters and Finds Them Shallow and Misleading
Bruce Baker of Rutgers University reviewed three policy briefs produced by the pro-charter, pro-choice Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and found them to be “generally superficial and misleading.”
Who Benefits from Unlimited Expansion of Charter Schools?
It is the politicking that has allowed TFA to infiltrate public schools.
Yes, but not just public schools and charter schools are privately managed. They are not really public.
My school board has an elected TFA and another is running for a second position. Many have beed trained to be “legislative” aids at the state and federal level. I have noticed that TFA experience is often suppressed in biographical information. The bio just says so and so taught at….. In other cases the TFA bio reflects the boldness of an up the ladder braggart “Founding Director” of After school Program at y school.
I read the article. I wish all of ProPublica’s work on education was like this.
I was more than a little annoyed with their extended article titled “Miseducation,” rich in data about schools, lots of rankings based on test scores and other measures not entirely controlled by schools, including policies and financing. f
Is the legislative aide of Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, a former TFA’er like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s is? Brown’s education aide, a young woman, graduated from the private George Washington University which currently costs $68,000 a year while the median Ohio family income is less than $60,000. Too bad Sen. Brown couldn’t find a public university grad.
Pro Publica should name names.
Just “an arm?” How about a tentacle–one of eight grabbing & squeezing the life out of public schools?
Keep fighting, all!
While Teach For America has received more than $40 million annually in government grants, according to the recent tax filings, some of its largest private donors also bankroll charter schools. Over the years, these backers — including Greg Penner, Walmart’s board chairman and a Walton family member by marriage; Arthur Rock, a retired Silicon Valley entrepreneur; and Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist — have cycled through Teach For America’s board. Together, the three tycoons and their family foundations have doled out at least $200 million to Teach For America.
“There are only so many donors and Teach For America is probably going after all of them, certainly whether they have a charter agenda or not, but many of them are very supportive of charters,” Kopp said.
Would charter schools hire an organization that lobbies against charter schools to work in their schools?
Of course not. So why would public schools?
How is that fair to public school students? They’re paying people who are actively working to replace the schools they attend? We have to have an arm of the Walton family lobbying shop IN our schools, and not only that, we have to pay them for it?
Charter schools would never accept this, and we shouldn’t either. Is the assumption in ed reform that public school students and families don’t value their schools? Ours are expendable and the assumption is we want them all privatized? How can they possibly serve our children if their belief is our children’s schools should no longer exist?
I’m curious if the charter schools that Fordham sponsors in Ohio have TFA’ers. If so, it might explain why some of the schools pronounce themselves “public” at their websites even though the Ohio Supreme Court said they are not.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
TFA is a tool the Walmart Walton family uses in their subversion to take over the United States.
The Walton Family Foundation gave ACE’s inaugural speech about education policy at the University of Notre Dame (Alliance for Catholic Education).
Curious who funds ACE.
I’ll offer a proposal to ed reformers. I’m going to start a teacher staffing agency/lobbying org that is funded by people who want to eradicate charter schools.
I’d like to place my people in your charter schools as teachers and principals.
Okay with you?
Of course not. So why is it okay for public schools? Don’t our students deserve people who actually support their schools working in their schools?
The same deal applies to lawmakers. If ed reformers get elected officials who fund, promote, praise and cheerlead private and charter schools, shouldn’t public schools also have advocates in government?
Or our kids just don’t get any? They’re designated the neglected and ignored “default” – the unfashionable “government” schools that no one advocates on behalf of?
How is that fair? Why do I want a lawmaker who grudgingly allows that public schools might have to continue to exist until privatization is complete? That doesn’t benefit public school students at all. Why would I vote for that person? I never signed onto this ideological agenda. I’m going to throw my own local school under the bus in pursuit of The Agenda? And I’m supposed to pay for that?
When Bernie Sanders said he wanted to halt the growth of charter schools, charter school supporters objected. They said “what about our students?”
That’s exactly what public school supporters say when given Bush, Obama, Duncan, Trump and DeVos.
Why do I have to accept lawmakers who don’t support my son’s school, who don’t provide ANY affirmative benefit to existing public schools? Charter supporters don’t accept that. But I’m told I have to. I don’t. It’s unacceptable.
So well said, Chiara!!! Bravo!!!
TFA ‘s image is tarnished.
There’s the ACE Teaching Fellow program (Alliance for Catholic Education). The program “welcomes graduates from nearly every academic discipline” to join “a corps to meet the needs …of the underserved”. After the “First ACE summer … (Fellows) prepare to lead a classroom of their own starting in fall”. “Some (Fellows after the two year service experience) choose to teach in public or charter schools”.
The ACE program has the virtue that it is unabashedly designed to encourage young people to teach in Catholic schools. They live in community and take salaries far below the minimum wage. They don’t join to pad their resume and to get on the fast track to Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase or law school.
A religious group without the baggage of the Catholic and evangelical churches may make a compelling argument for the existence of its schools (but, no public dollars for them and total separation of church and state).
I look forward to churches (1) that stop the practice of sending their school-age boys to Wash. D.C. to influence legislation that denies mothers, sisters and all women the right to make the best health decisions for themselves, knowing that church-imposed decisions could cost the women their lives (2) that make amends to satisfy victims for decades long, widespread institutionalized cover-ups of sexual abuse (3) that recognize women as equals to men and respect LBGT rights (4) that aren’t antagonistic to the science of evolution and climate change and, (5) that remain neutral (or support) democratic socialism as an economic system.
But, even given those changes, I will still oppose a religious group’s actions to spread vouchers and charter schools.
I wonder if TFA and Relay “Graduate” School are interconnected in some way. They both seem to share the common goal of watering down the legitimate teaching profession.