David Greene mentored many Teach for America teachers. He knows how poorly prepared most of them were for the job of teaching in New York City’s toughest schools. He tried to help them cope.
Here he offers good advice to TFA.
Archives for category: Teach for America TFA
This thoughtful and provocative essay by Shawn Gude situates present-day corporate reform in its historical context. Gude shows the connections between early 20th century social efficiency and the present-day demand for testing, standardizing, and data-based decision-making.
Here is an excerpt:
“There’s a special resemblance between the struggles against scientific management, or Taylorism, and today’s teacher resistance to corporate reform schemes. Just as factory workers fought top-down dictates, deskilling, and the installation of anemic work processes, so too are teachers trying to prevent the undemocratic implementation of high-stakes testing and merit pay, assaults on professionalism, and the dumbing down and narrowing of curricula.
“There are more obvious parallels: Proponents of scientific management counted some prominent progressives in their ranks, just like the contemporary left-neoliberals hawking education reform. The nostrums of both Taylorism and the education accountability movement paper over foundational conflicts and root causes. Many of those who espouse education reform cast their solutions as unimpeachably “scientific” and “data-driven,” yet as with scientific management partisans, the empirical grounding of their prescriptions is highly dubious. And proponents of scientific management and corporate school reform share an antipathy toward unions, often casting them as self-interested inhibitors of progress.”
And here is another excerpt:
“When education is reduced to test prep, rich curricula and the craft of teaching are imperiled. The vapid classroom of neoliberal school reform mirrors the vapid workplace of Taylorism. Teach for America, which implicitly advances the idea that the sparsely trained can out-teach veteran educators, engenders deskilling and deprofessionalization. Non-practitioners dictating to practitioners how they should do their work mirrors management’s disciplining of workers; both militate against work as a creative activity. The appropriation of business language — the head of the Chicago Public Schools is the “CEO” — reinforces the idea that schools should be run like corporations. Merit pay individualizes and severs educators’ ties to one another, forcing them to compete instead of cooperate. So too with the anti-union animus that neoliberal reformers and scientific management proponents display.”
Read the essay. You will understand the roots of the corporate reforms of our day.
In one of his most brilliant posts, Gary Rubinstein calls Teach for America on the carpet for continual lying. Gary, who is one of TFA’s most illustrious alumni, thinks TFA has many achievements in which it should take pride but he can’t tolerate these big lies.
1. the training for TFA teachers is adequate.
2. High expectations works miracles.
3. TFA produces miracle teachers or schools or districts.
Read his post to see why each of these claims is a lie.
Gary is a fearless myth buster.
TFA should take his good advice.
John Merrow recently offered advice to those considering joining Teach for America, and retired teacher and active blogger G.F. Brandenburg decided to offer his own advice.
Brandenburg links to Merrow’s post.
Brandenburg’s advice can be summarized in a word: Don’t.
The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing has raised the standards for those who teach English language learners. No one get will uncertified interns be allowed to teach these students who need well-prepared teachers.
This is a problem for Teach for America because California has a huge number of ELLs.
Will TFA fight the higher standards or will they make sure their corps members are better prepared?
EduShyster writes a personal letter to Teach for America.
Please, she says, we know you are excellent.
We know you are beyond excellent.
We know that there is no one more excellent than you. Please, we get it. Enough.
But consider what all this self-praise does:
“Every time you toot the horn of triumph, alerting us to the good news that your new teachers are better than our new teachers, even though the evidence is indisputable that all new teachers struggle, or that your handful of alumni teachers are better than our experienced teachers, you hammer the nail in a little deeper. You fan the illusion that temporary teachers who jet in from elsewhere are just as good, are in fact more excellent, than real teachers who are in it for the long haul.”
And one more thing:
“The idea that we could replace our entire teaching force with TFA-style excellence is a fantasy, of course. There are more than 3 million teachers in the country and fewer than 6,000 new TFA corps members each year. And yet the steady drum beat, the constant horn tooting, hat raising and praise singing, creates the illusion that such a thing is not just possible but a worthy goal.
“So please stop, Teach for America. I get it. We get it. The question is do you get it?”
By now, we have all read the encomia heaped on KIPP, and we know that KIPP presumably has what Mayor Rahm Emanuel once referred to as the “secret sauce.” That is the extra ingredient that
magically turns ordinary kids into scholars bound for Harvard.
Gary Rubinstein, ex-TFA, went to visit a KIPP school. He didn’t see the magic. He saw young teachers struggling to control their classes.
Read it to see what goes on, and be sure to read the comments.
Mercedes Schneider here recounts how Teach for America alumni manage to rise to six-figure salaries at a tender age, and her paradigmatic TFA graduate is John White.
White, now the Commissioner of Education in Louisiana, arrived to do Bobby Jindal’s handiwork, that is, demolishing public education and dismantling the teaching profession.
Quite a task for a young man, but he is up to it.
Just got this in the email. It was posted on Facebook:
Deborah Hohn Tonguis posted in LA Public Teachers: Our Classrooms are Not for Sale!
Here is my email response to Holly Boffy, who sent an email request to all of the Louisiana Teachers of the Year to participate in an upcoming visit by NBC. She has no shame…
From: Holly Boffy
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 9:53 PM
Subject: Unique opportunity in the New Orleans area
Dear Teachers of the Year,
If you live in Orleans or one of the surrounding parishes and are currently a classroom teacher, please email me about an opportunity to be part of NBC’s upcoming visit to our state. I’d love to have a Teacher of the Year involved in the activities.
Sincerely,
Holly Boffy
Dear Holly,
Are you talking about NBC as in “National Board Certification”?
If so, which Louisiana Teacher of the Year would like to make NBC aware that the BESE board wants to make teacher certification optional in all but public schools? That our highest education policy-making body believes that schools should not require its classroom practitioners to have any sort of education-related degree, certificate or training, much less a passing Praxis score or a state issued teaching certificate to teach in Louisiana’s fast growing charter and for-profit school industry?
Perhaps a Louisiana STOY would be proud to articulate this to NBC: that our own Superintendent of Education, John White, with whom you have aligned yourself in ALL voting on the BESE board, has publicly demonstrated that teacher education and experience DO NOT matter in the classroom, and then proved his belief by hiring a former TFA teacher with only 2 years of classroom experience to spearhead our state’s highest teacher accountability system for public school teachers, COMPASS. She now facilitates teacher evaluation training workshops. This 27 year old BESE Board approved hire is telling administrators what highly effective teaching looks like. This from someone with a 5 1/2 week “how to” course and practically no teaching experience. (http://theadvocate.com/home/4004848-125/evaluator-defends-not-renewing-own)
Maybe a former LATOY would be proud to inform NBC that our new BESE board president, Chas Roemer, another board member you have unilaterally voted in agreement with, stated publicly his wish that even more Louisiana public schools would become charters, in spite of the fact that charters do not outperform public schools.
(http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20130207/NEWS01/130207023/BESE-president-wants-see-more-charters)
Let’s see if a highly respected LATOY would be willing to further perpetuate our state’s legacy of corruption by explaining that Chas Roemer’s sister, Caroline Roemer Shirley, is executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools. As a state employee, I was required to take an online ethics course that specifically forbids “the participation of a public servant or elected official in a vote on any matter in which a member or his immediate family has a substantial economic interest. ” But then again, our BESE board seems to be above the law as evidenced in its continued practice of funding non-public voucher schools with tax payer money even after the program was ruled unconstitutional.
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2012/11/30/la-judge-bobby-jindal-school-voucher-program-unconstitutional/)
Holly, surely you would not encourage the good people from the National Board Certification office to visit our state and see the shameful way duly certified, highly qualified teachers are being made obsolete at the hand of our own DOE.
But then again…maybe you meant NBC as in “National Broadcasting Company”. In that case, please bring them on and place me at the top of the list, for we could use national media attention on what is happening to our state’s education system in the name of reform.
Deborah Hohn Tonguis
2009 Louisiana Teacher of the Year
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Howard Thurman
Kevin Huffman, Tennessee’s State Commissioner of Education, taught for two years as a member of Teach for America. Then he was the TFA “communications director.” That is, the PR guy.
Somehow he got picked to be head of education in a whole despite his minimal experience and his lack of any administrative experience.
He certainly lacks any political skills. He treats the duly elected Metro Nashville school board as if they are peons and he is their master. He refuses to meet with them. Where did he get these arrogance.
The state is about to adopt radical ALEC legislation to snuff out local control so the big charter corporations can set up shop without the trouble of asking for permission from a local school board. They can just go to Huffman and all his buddies will get their charters and make big bucks.
Diane Ravitch's blog 