Faced with low test scores in Providence, Central Falls, and other districts, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo wants more teachers from Teach for America, who have only five weeks of training.
She is a deep-dyed Corporate Reformer who believes in the magic of privatization by charter schools and inexperienced, ill-trained TFA.
This will not end well for the students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Dear Governor Raimondo: I can do TFA one better and supply teachers from among the Florida redneck community with only 3 hours’ training and no education whatsoever. Only $10,000 apiece finder’s fee. Call me. –Bob Shepherd, CEO of Bob’s Real Good Florida Schools
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Once again, ideology trumps evidence.
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Let me guess, this governor went to a private school. Often the private schools operate by hiring teachers out of liberal arts colleges who have had almost no training in education. Teaching for them is a second thought, a stop on their road to elsewhere. Some of these people make good teachers after a time if they stay with it, but most pass through. If they are in a private school, they are teaching kids who are successful due to the advantages people have if they are wealthy enough to go to a private school. So the participants in this system think it can be universally applied. I can see why they think that. Why can they not listen to those of us who know better?
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Hmm. I bet an English major from a good liberal arts college does have more potential for teaching English well than an education major from a weak university. However there does need to be some grounding in education theory, technique and history. TFA doesn’t give enough. Many of the mainstream Colleges of Education don’t do much better, and often fill heads with bad information, I’m afraid. I’m impressed with what I’ve been reading about Johns Hopkins School of Education.
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Temper your enthusiasm for Johns Hopkins University School of Education. They hired David Steiner, who was selected as Commissioner of Education for New York State by billionaire Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch. As state commissioner, he supplied a waiver to allow the totally unqualified publisher Cathie Black to serve as chancellor of the NYC public schools, where she lasted 90 days. He also led the effort to win $700 million in Race to the Top funds, which brought to New York the Common Core standards, a curriculum geared to the CCSS, testing tied to CCSS, teacher evaluation based on test scores, and a raft of other disasters. That “gift” of $700 million cost the state and its districts billions to comply with its mandates. After Steiner left town, Tisch selected John King to replace him; King had founded a no-excuses charter school that had the highest suspension rate of any school in the state of Massachusetts, and he too was a cheerleader for Common Core and its assorted mandates.
Also, when Steiner was dean at Hunter College, he created a special teacher training institute for KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and other charter chains, strictly to prepare charter teachers. It eventually morphed into the phony Relay “Graduate School of Education,” where charter teachers learn how to apply no-excuses discipline and how to raise test scores.
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Steiner has made mistakes, but I’ve liked him from the moment I watched him give a speech (online; I forget the venue). He is a learned man, like you.
Diane, I know you want to be a cheerleader for the public schools and I’m mostly on your side. But it’s easier to cheer when you’re not in the trenches. There is so just so much idiocy –only half of it stems from the Reformers. As Albert Shanker said of teachers –“They do not read!” Most are sheep. We need more Steiners and Shanker to lead this profession. It’s in a ditch right now.
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David Steiner followed the money, not his principles.
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An example of the disappointing lack of critical thinking skills in teachers: we’ve gone all in on literacy and math for the past decade, and kids are less literate and less numerate than ever. And yet it doesn’t occur to teachers that they’re doing something fundamentally wrong. Why can’t they critique the status quo? Because they know no alternative: they do not read Hirsch and others who present cogent alternatives.
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ponderosa, I beg to differ. Teachers DO know that something is fundamentally wrong. They battle with administrators and local and state school boards over all the wrong-headed ideas foisted on them and their students constantly. Do not blame the teachers.
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Look at the backgrounds of the education department’s advisory board at the Bloomberg- Johns Hopkins think tank with students. Look at the grants the department’s faculty have taken.
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I was attempting to describe what I think would be the thought process of a graduate of a private high school. Since I am such a person, I feel a little bit qualified to speak of this mentality. It struck me some years after I began teaching in a public institution that I was giving far better instruction to my children than I had received as a student. Still, my private school bretheren, most of them still close friends, had the advantage for the most part of being supported by parents who could afford education and were serious about their children getting one. I was I a school that was not selective, which forced me to invent technique that took into account the student’s background rather than just throw out those who did not fit. This was the difference.
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Catholic school, I believe.
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Corporate edu-destroyers drain resources from schools with charters and tax breaks for millionaires, making life harder for teachers. They de-professionalize teaching with TFA, media bashing, and testing, making teaching a less respected profession. They make teaching a less rewarding profession by endangering pension funds with TFA and churn-n-burn charters.
Then they scratch their heads, befuddled and perplexed by a shortage of teachers. And they decide to ‘fix’ the problem of too few teachers with more TFA, charters, testing, and tax breaks for millionaires. Real smart. What geniuses. They’re like drug addicts trying to solve their problems with more drugs.
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Providence schools are about to be taken over by the state, at the direction of Angelíca Infante-Greene. Who has been running Providence’s schools? Francis Gallo, who was superintendent of Central Falls when all of its teachers were fired.
“Gallo, who retired from running Central Falls schools in 2015, was named Providence’s interim superintendent shortly before Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green announced the state would take control of the struggling district.
The state’s intervention comes after a report from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found the school system is plagued by widespread dysfunction, poor test scores, and abysmal building conditions. One member of the research team cried after visiting a school. Others called Providence the worst district they had ever encountered.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/rhode-island/2019/09/11/providence-schools-spent-inspirational-books-now-has-plans-use-them/cAarWBtBAv8DiqMI1sK3VJ/story.html
Infante-Greene was one of Jeb!’s Chiefs for Change, and we can see from this threat she made in August how she’s gone about motivating the teachers of Providence.
“PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – Rhode Island’s education commissioner says she won’t rule out breaking a collective bargaining agreement with teachers if that’s what it takes to overhaul Providence’s dysfunctional public school system.”
http://www.997wpro.com/2019/08/09/education-commissioner-will-break-union-contract-if-needed/
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I was in the NYC Teaching Fellows – a program under the auspices of the New teacher Project and quite similar to TFA. I had a terrible experience my first couple of years, teaching the neediest students who deserved a much more experienced teacher.
It’s been years since Wendy Kopp wrote her senior thesis, and I think we can agree that her hypothesis hasn’t worked well in practice. Most of my Masters coursework consisted of theory and not things like “here are 3 ways to break down this reading / mathematical concept to teach.”
I do think there is room to attract people from other professions to become teachers with tuition incentives, but these programs should be as good as the best education schools in the country with plenty of opportunities for supervised classroom practice. The first years are hard no matter how you slice it!
I realize there’s a shortage and schools are desperate for bodies, but hiring TFA and people similar organization is not the flavor of the month anymore – and inexperienced new teachers are not equipped to fix the fundamental flaws in their schools or districts.
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Self-proclaimed free market capitalists rigged the system to create the shortage.
The shortage correlates with the richest 0.1%’s attack on the common good- public education.
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