This post is Mercedes Schneider at her best, pulling together the strings of a tangled web involving money, power, TFA, Chiefs for Change, John White, the Rhode Island $5 million contract, and Julia Rafael-Baer.
Read it to the end. It’s rich with details that show how an ambitious young person can monetize her TFA experience and her network.
There is big money to be made in the education industry. Unfortunately, not for classroom teachers who devote their lives to their students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ed reform is an echo chamber. They hire from the same narrow group of people and all their ed reform experts propose the same set of “solutions”.
Membership in and lock step adherence to the echo chamber is a requirement for employment.
It’s amusing that 20 years into utterly dominating education policy to the exclusion of all other voices and opinions they still promote themselves as “disrupting the status quo”
They are the status quo.
nicely said: disrupting the status quo has become the status quo
Today in the ed reform echo chamber, they’re all promoting this “report” from a charter lobbying group – they accept everything in the report blindly and completely and just blast it out to fellow echo chamber members.
https://www.k12dive.com/news/report-charter-school-enrollment-grew-7-during-pandemic/606936/
The “ed reform movement” exists to promote charter schools and vouchers. They spend a good part of each workday promoting charter and private schools and bashing public schools.
Why are public schools signing fat contracts with a “movement” that doesn’t support public schools and work to eradicate them?
Would a charter chain or private school ever hire a group of people who worked to eradicate charter schools and private schools? Of course not. So why are public schools hiring ed reformers?
If I were an education policy person who advocated for the eradication of private schools would any private school hire me as a consultant?
Of course not. Yet that’s the situation for public schools hiring ed reform echo chamber groups. We hire and pay people who spend most of their time lobbying against our schools and students.
We don’t have to do this. We can stop hiring out of the echo chamber. It’s a big country with a lot of talented people. We can do better for our students.
Eva Moskowitz doesn’t hire charter opponents to advise her on her charter chain. Public schools don’t have to hire public school opponents to advise us on our schools. Demand better.
This post gives us a good look at TFA’s how TFA’s new strategy to influence policy operates. It starts with networking and moves into power and money. it is interesting that as Rafael-Baer moves up the ladder, she conveniently omits her original stint with TFA. All these “stink tanks” and consultants are parasites on the public dollar. They do not want to improve education. They want to monetize it. If America objects to “socialism,” it should realize that no bid contracts and subsidies to private companies with finances behind the opacity of private ownership are just a sophisticated form of socialism and, in some cases, it is grifter’s paradise. In the real world of public education teachers are buying school supplies and other items for their students because budgets have been cut.
I am sure that if we knew more about military contracting, we would see the same nauseating profiteering that is common in private education companies. In my local newspaper there are always lots of announcements of local LLCs getting multi-million dollar contracts. We never learn how these companies were awarded the contract.
cx: This post gives us a good look at how TFA’s new strategy…
I have commented many time before how the whole Nation At Risk spiel was designed precisely to nudge education funding into a defense funding model.
TFA’s purpose has been, from its beginning, to create “leaders” from temp teachers. It is and always was an insidious plot to infiltrate school systems with weaponized young college grads trained to loathe experienced teachers. It’s not Teach For America, it’s Teach to Become a Manchurian Candidate for Jeb! Bush.
It’s the old Chiefs of KaChing! principal, er, principle ae work again —
You scratch my back, I’ll scratch some scratch from taxpayer dollars to fund your campaign war chest.
Indeed “Quite the lesson on how market-based
education reformers leverage themselves for money,
power, and prestige.”
Prestige based on credentials, the concocted
notoriety,spawned by the PTB and summed by RWE:
“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate
to badges and names, to large societies and
dead intitiutions.”
Credentials, the fruit of sort and separate,
layered with a syntactic din, of competency,
coached by an outsourced decision matrix.
Try to tag them with malfeasance and the
“free pass” card will be played.
What would you say to a TFA, if they said:
I was “just” following orders.
They will stop funding me if I don’t go along.
I, like millions of others, have a family to
feed, and bills to pay.
I’m victimized by the PTB, so you can’t lay
my actions at my feet.
It’s the (fill in) parties fault, not mine.
This is excellent. They get sinisterer and sinisterer. I nominate Mercedes as the first Laura Chapman Professor–endowed with our most earnest affection–of the Ravitch Institute, which, by the way, ranks much higher in the US News rankings than the Broad Academy.
When I hear “there’s big money to be made,” I think of cutthroat capitalism, meaning someone is going to be shafted, cheated in some way. In cutthroat capitalism, a few win, and the rest lose. Traitor Trump has practiced cutthroat capitalism all of his life.
There’s capitalism, cutthroat capitalism, what’s known as cuddly capitalism, and socialism.
Cutthroat capitalism explains the rising inequality and growing political instability, the direct results of decades of bad economic theory.
With cutthroat capitalism, profit is the Golden Calf. Nothing else counts: the environment, the species, health care, education, et al.