Gary Rubinstein started his teaching career as one of the earliest “corps members” of Teach for America. Over time, he became disillusioned with the organization’s grandiose claims and boasts. He is now an award-winning career high school teacher of mathematics in New York City.
He wrote about TFA’s latest woes:
Between 1990 and 2013, Teach For America grew in size and influence from a tiny inconsequential alternative placement provider to a $300 million a year political powerhouse. But the last ten years have been rough on TFA. In 2016 they fired about 15% of their staff. Then their recruitment figures dropped year after year until 2022 when they had their fewest number in nearly 20 years. And now Chalkbeat reports that TFA is set to fire another 25% of their staff in the coming months.
As an alumni of TFA (Houston 1991), I’ve been following the ups and downs of this organization for 32 years. At least to me, it is not a mystery why TFA is crashing and burning.
The first reason is that they have neglected their fundamental task, which is to properly train the new recruits. Every year their training seems to get worse until now they seem to have given up on trying to train the corps members at all. I had a ‘mole’ in TFA a few years back, someone who was once a student at the high school I work at. When I asked them about what they learned about lesson planning, they told me that they were never required to create a lesson plan for the entire institute.
Poorly trained teachers become failing teachers in the Fall and many of them quit and those who don’t quit are certainly not giving TFA good word of mouth. Eventually the pipeline dries up, which is exactly what is happening. Yes, with $300 million, TFA will always be able to recruit some new corps members, but without the positive buzz, they won’t be able to be as selective about who they admit.
Another cause of TFA’s current problems is that about 15 years ago they made a Faustian bargain with the so-called reformers like Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan. TFA jumped on the teacher bashing bandwagon, rode that wave for a while getting several alumni into leadership positions in several large districts. But all those leaders failed and got fired and TFA seems to have gone down with the ship.
And with all these issues to overcome, TFA would need a great leader. Unfortunately their CEO who has been in charge for about eight years, Elisa Villanueva-Beard (EVB) has just not been up to the task. To understand why, listen to this four minute interview she did a few weeks ago.
Her response was completely incoherent. It sounded like what you would get if you played Mad Libs and every blank had to be filled with ed reform buzz word.
“We’re living in an outmoded system that really needs to be ‘reimagined.'” Sounds like it comes from Trump’s Secretary Of Education Betsy DeVos in 2017.
‘We know that that [teacher quality] is still the biggest indicator of success for a child’s outcomes’ from Michelle Rhee in 2017
‘Science of reading’ from Obama’s other secretary of education John King. https://www.the74million.org/article/science-of-reading-john-king-close-literacy-gap/
‘High Dosage Tutoring’ This fits well with a new TFA initiative where they are having college students tutor students. What’s ironic about this is that for years the ed reformers insisted that class size did not matter and now TFA is saying that one-on-one tutoring is an efficient use of money.
‘They [kids] need us to have high expectations, have deep love and belief in them’ is a favorite of Joel Klein, a big TFA advocate. Elissa mentions this in every interview I have ever heard with her. How great it would be if low expectations was even one of the top twenty things that causes students to struggle.
And to end with “where we leave no kids behind” from the education visionary George W Bush whose policy did more damage to schools and students than anything else, even Race To The Top, in the past 20 years.
For the CEO of a $300 million a year organization with 33 years of work in education to spew twenty years of empty cliches in four minutes is definitely a bad sign for the future of this stumbling organization.
I actually feel a little bad for them. It would have been so easy to just have a more positive message. Rather than saying that real teachers are so lazy they can’t even muster up some high expectations, TFA could have said something like “Teachers are heroes in this country and we want our corps members to learn from them and aspire to be like them.” TFA could have also encouraged their alumni who wanted to lead schools to do so by climbing the ranks and become assistant principals and then principals of district schools. Instead they bought into the mirage of the charter networks who, in various ways, cheat to get their results.
Is it too late for TFA to make a comeback? If they don’t do some serous soul searching, there is not chance I think.
And certainly some of the 1000 disgruntled employees who are about to get fired can corroborate the misguided policies that have landed TFA in this mess. Contact me if you want to speak out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I can recall the NCLB had a tutoring component that was very unsuccessful. It merely provided an opportunity for profiteers to gain access to public school students and any college graduate was considered qualified to do it. I can remember seeing ads in the local paper for NCLB tutoring jobs that paid $10 per hour.
“Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools that fail to meet goals for three years to provide free tutoring. Each qualified low-income student can receive from several hundred to nearly $2,000 in tutoring services per year. Parents must request the help, and they can choose between programs run through the local school district or a private outside vendors.”https://www.npr.org/2005/06/07/4683278/no-child-left-behind-benefits-tutoring-business
In 2006 I attended a conference in DC about NCLB. Was it making progress? The paper on the tutoring program concluded it was rife with profiteers who offered principals rewards to hire them. The tutoring was a failure.
Gary says in his message that he feels bad for them. I unabashedly and proudly say I do not feel bad for them. In fact, I am unequivocally heartwarmed, gratified and comforted beyond all capacity for measure. I hope they go bankrupt. The damage they did, from Wendy Kopp herself to (especially) poster child for Reform, Michelle Rhee, is something they are exceptionally proud of. I make it a priority to educate our students about the Education Reform movement and how it’s all about money–no more. I have a Google Slides presentation with all the head figures, charts, graphs and whatnot. And they understand it.
What’s the word?
Schadenfreude?
Even
Even though TFA is cutting staff and has a shortage of recruits, it still has $400 million in reserve. Not sad.
Love this brilliantly devastating analysis of TFA and especially love the point that the message could very easily have been an aspirational modeling of teachers already out there doing the job…
…but they wouldn’t have gotten the Ed Reform money had they selected that path.
But great work, Gary R.
Tangential but related…
In his autobiography “Decision Points,” President George W. Bush declares No Child Left Behind to be the landmark achievement of his presidency. How can he not be considered a failed president at best, if this is the case?
No member of Congress, other than Senator Tester of Montana had the wit to call for the repeal of NCLB. Even more Democrats voted for it than Republicans in 2001.
Just so sad. Good to know about Senator Tester (very ironic name!).
Thanks for the article link, Diane. I read it and a few other items on Gary’s blog and also the Chalkbeat article about pending TFA layoffs. The Chalkbeat article mentions that the teacher recruitment problem is not unique to TFA, but is plaguing the entire education system right now.
I am retired from education, have never had any connection with TFA, and can also easily understand why veteran teachers have little love for that organization.
However, in the past few days, our country has seen yet another flare-up in gun violence, including two major incidents in my home state of California – one in Half Moon Bay right over the hill from where I live. Both of the CA incidents involved elderly Asian-American gunmen which is an even bigger shocker!!! The shooter in Half Moon Bay is of Chinese ethnicity, but the Monterey Park gunman has a family name of Tran. I am not sure if that might be Vietnamese, and the press has studiously avoided such details referring to everyone simply as “Asians” which is a term so broad as to be meaningless. I have yet to hear of a motive in either shooting, but both of these incidents in addition to two other shooting incidents yesterday at a Des Moines charter school and one other (Louisiana?), leave one with the impression that our society is burning down all around us. Under such circumstances I take no joy in seeing any else’s house go up in flames…
*anyone else’s
David,
I just got an unsolicited ad from a gun store, offering to sell any kind of weapon I wanted, with ammo. I wrote a snippy reply, and got an equally snippy answer, telling me I was misguided. This is our national cancer: guns.
Our national cancer is the US Military.
In Dana Goldstein’s “The Teacher Wars” (2014), in Chapter Ten, “Let Me Use What I Know”, Goldstein compared teacher training programs revealing that TFA had the worst results vs UTRs ( year long Urban Teacher Residency training programs) as the best.
Yet, UTRs are not the primary teacher training program in the US, but the smallest one.
I know all about how UTRs work because that is how I earned my teaching credential during the 1975-76 school year, in the same district I retired from thirty years later in 2005.
This entity is getting exactly what it deserved. And everybody knows it. The only shame is it took 15 years, meaning many of us have spent at least half (or all!) of our careers listening to their false accolades and putting up with their complicity to bash teachers. I will always believe TFA had one goal in mind, and I reserve no sympathy for any who try to poison the well of public education. Good riddance!
I’m possibly going to have to back on strike again in Los Angeles in a few months, and this right here is a big part of the reason why: “…they are having college students tutor students. What’s ironic about this is that for years the ed reformers insisted that class size did not matter and now TFA is saying that one-on-one tutoring is an efficient use of money.”
The most egregious aspect of TFA is that it perpetuates the myth that teaching is mission work. Simply find candidates with high intellectual aptitude from the best universities and students will thrive. Teaching is a profession that requires expertise on pedagogy that can only come from vigorous preparation, experience, and support. When college graduates who have predominantly lived in an “honors track” bubble are thrust into schools that are struggling with socio-economic and resource deficits, they simply don’t have the tools to teach the students. I saw too many TFA teachers who simply couldn’t make through the first year after basically 6 weeks of how to teach summer camp. You’d think we would have learned this by now.
Paul,
TFA was not a solution to shortages. Nor were the kids saviors as hyped. But the organization prospered. The executives make huge salaries, far more than a principal or district superintendent. And it has $400 million in the bank.
Grifting has obviously become a high growth industry.
I was part of a university sponsored certification program that prepared non-college of education graduates to be teachers. The tuition was reasonable for a year of intensive study. We had an average of about 50 teachers a year. In 8 years we had one Teach for America teacher. One. Our local school district had over 100,000 students and many TFA teachers.