Teach For America In Recruitment Crisis

From the NY Times:

Teach for America, the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is suddenly having recruitment problems.

For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.

The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.

And I'm sure that recruitment crisis has nothing to do with this:

The economic momentum evident late last year carried into 2015, the Labor Department said Friday, with American employers adding 257,000 jobs in January as wage growth rebounded and more people joined the workforce.

With new figures on the last two months of the year, 2014 turned out to be the strongest year for job gains since 1999. The government revised upward the already-healthy figures for payroll gains in November and December, increasing their estimate by 147,000. All told, the economy added, on average, 260,000 jobs a month over the course of the year. 1999.

“This is the best employment report we’ve had in a long time,” said Guy Berger, United States economist at RBS. “The labor market looks like it’s in really good shape as we head into 2015.”

Average hourly earnings rose 0.5 percent in January, the biggest monthly gain in more than six years, though it followed a disappointing increase in December that left the average for the two months running at just over 2 percent, in line with the recent trend.

Still, the overall picture was so strong, Mr. Berger said, that the Federal Reserve might begin its long-awaited move to raise short-term interest rates in June, a step many economists had been expecting to be delayed until September.

And indeed, the Times reports that is one of the problems:

Leaders of the organization say their biggest problem is that the rebounding economy has given high-achieving college graduates more job choices.

“It’s so different from three years ago, where suddenly you have candidates that may have an offer from Facebook and Wells Fargo and an offer to join the T.F.A. corps, and clearly, the money is going to be radically different,” said Lida Jennings, executive director of the Los Angeles office of Teach for America.

But this might be the bigger issue:

When Haleigh Duncan, a junior at Macalester College in St. Paul, first came across Teach for America recruiters on campus during her freshman year in 2012, she was captivated by the group’s mission to address educational inequality.

Ms. Duncan, an English major, went back to her dormitory room and pinned the group’s pamphlet on a bulletin board. She was also attracted by the fact that it would be a fast route into teaching. “I felt like I didn’t want to waste time and wanted to jump into the field,” she said.

But as she learned more about the organization, Ms. Duncan lost faith in its short training and grew skeptical of its ties to certain donors, including the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart. She decided she needed to go to a teachers’ college after graduation. “I had a little too much confidence in my ability to override my lack of experience through sheer good will,” she said.

And of course the biggest might be that after years of attacks on teachers, the teaching profession and teacher benefits and job protections, it's just not a very appealing career choice:

Teaching in general has been losing favor. From 2010 to 2013, the number of student candidates enrolled in teacher training programs fell 12.5 percent, according to federal data.

Andrew Cuomo's about to make teaching an even less appealing career in New York State if he gets his reform agenda.

I can't see Cuomo's desire to link 50% of a teacher's ratings to test scores, fire them if they're deemed "ineffective" on those scores two years running by an NYSED algorithm, weaken tenure such that few teachers will ever get it and streamline the 3020a discipline process so that teaching becomes an at-will position will make the career, such as it is, more appealing.

Ed deformers have been very successful at transforming the teaching profession over the past ten years into a data-driven career with little autonomy and few protections - so successful that few people want to become teachers either in TFA or out.

Education Reform's Dirty Secret: Reformers Target Black And Brown Teachers For Replacement

Glenn Sullivan, a recent graduate from New Orleans’ Lake Area New Tech Early College High School, writes the following in the Washington Post:

In my school, as in many schools — especially in reform-oriented school districts — a lot of the good, black teachers have been replaced by younger white teachers. Before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, nearly 75 percent of the city’s public school teachers were black. That began to change after Katrina, when charter schools began to grow in number. The percentage of minority teachers across New Orleans public schools dropped from 60 percent to 54 percent between 2010 and 2013, according to data compiled by Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives.

This troubles me. Particularly upsetting to me was the departure of the music teacher, a veteran black educator who helped run the New Tech school choir and put together trips for students.

When I talked to administrators about the departures of good black teachers, I was told that students need diversity in order to receive a high quality education. The school principal, who is black, has pointed out that a majority of the teachers are still black — a higher percentage than at some other New Orleans charter schools. He also pointed out that students are not always privy to the reasons teachers depart, and some might have chosen to leave.

Students do need diverse educational experiences, but that diversity doesn’t need to be about a teacher’s race. Hiring more white teachers is not the best way to improve education for students, particularly students of color.

In city after city, education reformers have gone after teachers of color and replaced them with young white people who work a couple of years, then head on to greener pastures.

Those in turn are replaced with more young white men and women.

New Orleans, a district that has been completely charterized, is one of the most egregious examples.

But there are a lot of others, including NYC, where the Bloomberg DOE made the teaching corps. a lot whiter than before they took power.

Next time you hear some jive ass education reformers link education reforms, particularly reforms that give districts the power to fire large numbers of teachers, to civil rights, remember that many districts are using these initiatives to fire lots of black and brown people.

Students United For Public Education Take On Teach For America

From The Nation:

On October 1, Students United for Public Education will be launching its first national campaign, Students Resisting Teach for America.

The goal is to raise awareness in prospective TFA corps members about the problems surrounding TFA; elevate the voices of students and TFA alumni whose stories are often overshadowed by TFA’s message; put pressure on TFA as an organization to change its ways; and, through this, resist the broader neoliberal movement in education.

What started as a nonprofit dedicated to solving teacher shortages has become a highly political organization that threatens to perpetuate inequalities in low-income communities both through its teaching model and its connection to the corporate education reform movement.

SUPE chapters and other college students across the country will be leafletting, holding teach-ins and panels and raising critical questions and consciousness about TFA to college students and campus communities. —Students United for Public Education

Good to see this.

The more groups out there that expose TFA for the harm it does to students, teachers and schools, the better.

Most people outside of education don't understand this about TFA.

There's too much propaganda around them in the media.

Daily Data Tracking

Teach for America corps member Mary Mac Thielman enters her students' daily exit ticket percentages onto the data tracking wall at O.M. McNair Upper Elementary School in Belzoni, Miss.

The above photo and text appeared with a NY Post editorial touting the wonders of Teach For America teachers over traditional public school teachers.

I want you to take a very close look at the photo.

The bulletin board says "Data is not the destination, it's part of the journey."

Between those words at the top and bottom of the bulletin board, the TFA teacher is updating her students daily data on Daily Data Wall.

I want you to think about the kind of classroom this woman runs, where daily data is tracked on every student and put up on a wall outside the classroom.

She must focus an awful lot on the kinds of things that can be quantified and tracked.

But what about the lessons in life that children need to learn that cannot be simplified and quantified, cannot be tracked, cannot be updated on the Daily Data Wall?

And how about the slogan "Data is not the destination, it's part of the journey"?

Can that slogan be true when data is tracked on every student every day and put up publicly on a wall outside the classroom?

Doesn't this Daily Data Wall equate students solely with their daily data record?

Doesn't this so Daily Data Wall send the message to students that they are their data?

Isn't this Daily Data Wall tantamount to child abuse?

Someday in the future, when the current crop of meritocrats and sociopaths running the country in positions of power in politics, business, public education and non-profits are graveyard data themselves, people are going to say "Did those people in the 21st century really believe that everything that mattered in life can be quantified and tracked?  Did they really believe the data they tracked and used to make decisions - from the BLS jobs report to the inflation numbers to the value added's on teachers - was accurate and gave them enough information to make good and wise decisions?"

This fetishization of data will end when people begin to realize data-driven decisions are only as good as the data itself and more often than not in our world, data is manipulated, simplified, erroneous, or essentially useless because it doesn't give the whole picture.

Mark Dayton, Ravitch Honor Roll Member, Hits 57% Approval

Diane Ravitch on May 27:

Governor Mark Dayton vetoed an earmark (set-aside) of $1.5 million for Teach for America. The governor quite reasonably noted that TFA is a wealthy organization with $350 million in assets and saw no reason the state should pay to rent more of them. He suggested a competitive bidding process. Here is his veto message.

For his recognition that Minnesota needs a cadre of highly professional, experienced teachers, for his willingness to stand up to the fawning media hype about TFA, Mark Dayton joins the honor roll as a champion of American education.

Click here for the post , the veto message link, and the comments via Gov. Dayton Joins the Honor Roll | Diane Ravitch’s blog.

Today from the Star-Tribune:

Gov. Mark Dayton has the highest approval ratings since taking office, with more than half of Minnesotans saying they like the job he is doing, according to a new Minnesota Poll.


The poll shows that 57 percent of Minnesota adults give the DFLer high marks for his performance as governor, and in Hennepin and Ramsey counties that figure soars to 72 percent.


Dayton, who was in Düsseldorf, Germany, on a trade mission, said he was encouraged by the results.

“It shows that people understand that we did what we had to do to restore fiscal balance to the state and we’re on the right track,” he said. Still, he said he is not expecting an easy re-election campaign next year.


The uptick in job approval, led by a turnaround in the opinions of independent voters and an increase in approval among Republicans, follows a legislative session in which Dayton enacted sweeping changes. He pushed for — and got — a $2.1 billion tax increase mostly on the wealthy and on smokers; made Minnesota the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage; granted state aid for expansions of the Mayo Clinic, 3M and Mall of America; and funded free, all-day kindergarten across the state.

Dayton raised taxes on the wealthiest 2% in the state in order to maintain state services.

I like that kind of thinking.

It's a shame Governor 1% in NY State doesn't think that way.

And then there was the veto of the TFA earmark.

You know Governor 1% in NY State would never do anything like that.

Missing The Forest For The Trees

From Andrew Hartmann:

TFA exists for nothing if not for adjusting poor children to the regime otherwise known as the American meritocracy. Kopp’s model for how teachers should help poor students acclimate to the American meritocracy is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a nationwide network of charter schools. Founded by TFA alums Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, and currently lead by CEO Richard Barth, a former TFA staff member who also happens to be Kopp’s husband, KIPP now runs over 100 schools, typically in cities that staff a multitude of TFA corps members, such as Houston, New Orleans, and New York City. Many KIPP teachers began their careers in education as TFA corps members, and an even higher percentage of KIPP administrators are TFA alums. KIPP schools are in such high demand that students must win lotteries for the opportunity to attend. The pièce de résistance of Waiting for Superman chronicles one such dramatic lottery drawing.

Slots in KIPP schools are in short supply because, unlike most charter schools, they have a track record of actually improving student performance and of helping poor children gain acceptance into college. Their methodology consists of nothing novel: teachers and students work very hard. But more than that, KIPP students and their families must sign contracts committing to a rigorous program of surveillance—the only way to ensure that underprivileged students overcome lives that otherwise drag them down. As one KIPP administrator described the philosophy: “At every moment, we asked ourselves, what about this moment of the day is or is not fostering college readiness in our students?” While visiting a KIPP school in New York City early one morning, where fifth graders were busy with drills at 7:00 a.m., Kopp quietly lamented, without a touch of irony, that her own child of the same age was still in bed. Thus, in the KIPP model, we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. This is made starkly evident in the concluding scene of Waiting for Superman, when young “Anthony,” one of the lucky few, arrives at his charter school with suitcase in hand, since his particular school boards its students. Anthony is rightly ambivalent about giving up his life with his grandparents and friends in order to attend a SEED Foundation school—the prototype in education reform—where 24-hour supervision is the only way to ensure that poor children have a chance at success.

In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?

What kind of psycho looks at test prep drilling kids at 7 AM and says "Gee, I wish my kid was doing this..."?

Seriously.

The Teach For America Teaching Model

Move 'em, use 'em up, move 'em out:

“I’ve heard a number of our alumni—people who are running schools and school systems—think a lot about different models for the teaching profession,” Kopp says. “Models sort of like in the law profession, where people come in and have to meet a very rigorous bar to make partner, maybe in year seven. You could consider a structure like that, where you try to recruit folks to spend five or seven years in teaching, and then retain a very, very few of them.”

I'm better at year ten than I was in year one through nine.

Where I have especially improved is in how I handle the problems students are dealing with OUTSIDE of the classroom that affect them INSIDE the classroom.

I am better at this part of the job because a) I have learned from previous years how to handle situations in productive way b) I have learned when to push and prod a student and learned when a hands-off approach would be better c) I am in my 40's and have developed socially, emotionally and psychologically above where I was when I was in my 30's so I instinctively know how to handle situations with students that, quite frankly, used to baffle me.

I have more life experience. I have more teaching experience. I have more work experience. I have less energy than I did in my thirties and I couldn't do the 10 hour/6 day a week that Kopp and the the other ed deformers want their missionaries to do.

But I am a better teacher.

In Kopp's world (or the KIPP world, or For-Profit Geoffrey Canada's world, indeed, even in Barack Obama's world), I am TOO OLD and TOO EXPERIENCED to be a good teacher.

This is an amazing thing to me.

When I first started this job ten years ago, everybody asked me if I had any experience at the job. Experience was a plus to getting work.

Now, if you have experience, you're on the chopping block.

Welcome to the new 21st century feudalism - the corporate overlords make all the decisions for your life and some are based simply on age and experience.

Too old, too experienced?

Move on.