Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote recently about Teach for America’s changing focus. Founded in 1990 to recruit college graduates to teach in urban and rural schools for a minimum of two years, TFA made bold claims about the success of its teachers in closing achievement gaps and raising test scores. For many years, they attracted hundreds of millions from corporate sponsors, foundations like Walton, Broad Gates, based on their certainty that their young teachers were better than experienced teachers.

Messenger wrote that teachers were leaving the profession because of demanding parents and school politics.

He thought that might explain why TFA was headed in a new direction.

He wrote:

It’s also a reason why a nonprofit organization that has been providing teachers to several area school districts is changing its focus with a bit of a twist that at first seems disconnected from the problem. Despite the teacher shortage, New York-based Teach for America is no longer providing teachers to the St. Louis Public Schools and other districts. Instead, it will work on training school leaders, like principals, administrators and school board members.

It’s a change that to some degree comes from a place of failure. Teach for America was founded in 1990 as an education reform organization, to try to boost academic achievement of students in urban settings and reduce the learning gap between white and Black students. But the numbers haven’t budged much after 20 years of training young teachers who make a two-year commitment to come to places like St. Louis and teach in public or charter schools.

“As a whole, student achievement is not growing the way we intended it to,” says Elizabeth Bleier, the interim executive director of Teach for America in St. Louis. Bleier came to St. Louis from Chicago. She taught in the St. Louis Public Schools for a few years, and then worked at charter school KIPP in the city for a few more, before going to work at TFA.

With 600 similar alumni in St. Louis, TFA plans to help mentor those teachers and former teachers. This week it announced its latest class of Aspiring School Leaders Fellowship, in which 15 existing public school or charter educators, many of them people of color, will be trained and mentored for a year while earning a principal certification through St. Louis University.

In turning the focus to training principals and other school leaders, Bleier says the goal is to improve school cultures so that teacher retention eventually improves. “There is a lot of teacher and principal turnover in St. Louis,” she says. “When there is a strong school leader, teachers are happier and stay longer. We want our people to be able to go into the schools and have an influence.”

It’s a demonstration of hubris on the part of TFA to believe that they can ”train” TFA teachers to be principals.

How will a staff of teachers, ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 60s react to the announcement that their new principal is 24-25 years old, with two years of teaching experience? It is hard to imagine that the insertion of a young, inexperienced TFA principal would raise morale and stop the exodus of teachers. It seems likely that they would prefer a veteran whom they can turn to for help with teaching problems.

Parent activist Trevor Nelson explains how parents organized to get accurate medical information to other parents and the public. Governor Doug Ducey took a strong stand against mask mandates, and anti-maskers turned school board meetings into screaming matches. Nelson organized parent opposition to policies that endangered their children. He tells his story here at ”Public Voices for Public Schools,” a new website created by the Network for Public Education.

He begins:

Arizona had a problem. The people showing up at our local board meetings were anti-mask and anti-vaccine. Meanwhile, other parents had stopped showing up to the meetings because they felt frustrated and fearful of speaking up at all. Getting yelled at, hooted out, called a liar, and threatened will do that to you. It was starting to feel like the 2020 election all over again. And yet for all of the rancor, I knew that most parents felt the way I did: desperate to get their kids back to school as safely as possible. 

My friend and fellow parent advocate Jessica Wani and I hatched a plan, with the help of some great Arizona healthcare workers to provide grounding in science and data. We’d begin collecting signatures from our fellow Arizonans to put pressure on the state government, local government and school boards, including as many representatives from the medical community as we could get. Even as our governor doubled and tripled down on his extreme anti-mask position, we were determined to demonstrate that when it comes to common sense safety measures in schools, public opinion is on our side.

We started small, with a single google form that people could easily sign, then we began to work on elected officials: boards of supervisors, city councilors, mayors, legislators—we reached out to all of them. And we kept our efforts intentionally non-partisan, making a point of not asking signers about their political affiliation. Next our scrappy team reached out to representatives of the medical community, including pediatricians, family doctors and public health experts.The number of signers quickly grew. By the time we put out our first newsletter, filled with the latest info about health and safety protocols in schools, we were up to 4,000 people. 

The puzzle pieces began to fall into place. As we reached out to medical experts, we also encouraged them to raise their voices. And they did. Doctors and other medical professionals started writing their own letters, reporting on what they were seeing on the ground in real time, as hospitals in Arizona began to fill with COVID patients. They also urged their own colleagues to get involved and help make the case for vaccines, masking and social distancing in schools.

Please read the rest of his account. He is well that the parents and medical community are up against a governor who wants to dismantle public education. But they keep fighting.

The school board of Sarasota County passed a mask mandate to protect student safety, despite Governor Ron DeSantis’ strident opposition to such mandates. When parents learned that they could get a medical exemption form signed by a local chiropractor, they stood in long lines outside his office to get him to sign the form. When the Sarasota board received 1700 requests for medical exemptions, they declined 650 of them. Most of the 650 were signed by chiropractor Dr. Dan Busch. Chiropractors are not medical doctors.

Long lines surrounded Twin Palms Chiropractic late into the evening the day the mandate went into effect. The doctor worked late hours to evaluate and sign medical exemption forms for families all across Sarasota County free of charge.

The next day, district officials announced in an effort to ‘prevent abuse’, the school board would only accept medical exemption forms signed by medical doctors, osteopathic physicians, or advanced registered nurse practitioners. They would no longer accept forms from all licensed healthcare providers, including chiropractors. The change went into effect on the first of September. 

“Dr. Busch is disappointed to learn that the Sarasota County School Board has chosen to reject every single medical exemption to the mask mandate signed by Twin Palms Chiropractic, despite those exemptions previously being accepted, and despite the school board continuing to accept exemptions from other licensed chiropractic physicians, dentists, and psychologists who are no longer able to grant exemptions under the new form,” Busch’s attorney sent 8 On Your Side in a September 2 email.