TFA Is Rescued!

Teach for America continues to take shellacking from people who think to ask questions like "How do you prepare someone to be a teacher in five weeks?" or "Why aren't wealthy, white districts lined up to take advantage of this awesome program?" or "How exactly does it help a high needs school to have an endless parade of untrained amateurs wandering through classrooms for just a couple of years at a time?"

But TFA fits the reformster narrative in many ways (Some people are just better than others, so they should make great teachers-- certainly better than those dopes who are in teaching as a career. Poor schools are failing because the Right People aren't there, so we'll put the Right People there and that will fix everything!), and it has allowed many people to put "teacher" on their resume as they move onto their real careers as bureaucrats, lobbyists and political appointees, so that TFA has become a multi-million dollar operation with plenty of friends in high places. Still, they also participate in another popular reformster narrative-- "Even though we are Better People and we're doing Great Things, people keep popping up to say mean things about us, and that makes us sad."

And so periodically reformsters try to fight back, and we get the bizarre spectacle of millions of dollars being spent to outfits like the $12 million Education Post or the $4 million per year the74 to combat a bunch of people who blog for little or no money.

Now TFA is joining the party. As reported by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, NYCAN (part of  a network of pro-charter, anti-public school, anti-teacher union reformsters) has set up a Big Fat PR engine to combat TFA criticism. Why would NYCAN do that for TFA? Well, most likely because they are all interconnected and run by the same folks.

NYCAN has put up $500,000 to run the Corps Knowledge campaign. They have a nifty website, where they lay out their goals to rally alumni, combat misinformation, and provide a platform for alumni to share stories. Of course, that can be tricky because much of the criticism of TFA comes from its own alumni, like Gary Rubinstein, a TFA alum and critic that CK tried to take down.

And although Layton is just writing about Corps Knowledge now, they've been kicking around for a few months. Back in September they posted about the Badass Women of TFA and were unhappy to attract the attention of the Badass Teachers Association; they turned off comments and scrubbed responses (though they saved a few to mount a counter-attack).

That was back in September, and it underlines a lesson that TFA and friends have had a hard time absorbing: it's a lot easier to attack the establishment than to be the establishment, and coming up on their twenty-five year anniversary, TFA can no longer claim to be upstarts or outsiders. far better funded than any pro-public ed group and so well-wired into the reformster establishment that they can it will mount a $500 PR campaign on their behalf just because, TFA is part of the status quo. And after this many years, their track record is too well-known to be washed away by PR. They don't provide sufficient preparation for entering a classroom. The vast majority of their people don't enter into a teaching career, and by and large don't intend to. And as much as they like to claim success while being a group that "doesn’t need to tear down another group to affirm that success," their premise has been and continues to be that "regular" teachers just aren't up to the task of educating American students, but TFA recruits will fix it.

TFA has reinvented itself many times, and Layton's article contains a pretty straightforward admission of the core mission: "The program is designed not so much to groom career teachers as to inspire recruits to work on the larger issues of urban education in varied ways."

Darrell Bradford, NYCAN executive director, has one point to make that is fair, albeit ironic:

“Some of the best people I’ve ever known have worked for TFA — great, caring, smart — and it’s tough to see your friends get dragged through the mud,” said Bradford, who has $500,000 for the campaign and is aiming to raise an additional $1 million to expand it.

It's a useful insight, and one that Bradford, who is no dummy, might apply to understading the people who resist NYCAN's agenda in general and TFA in particular. Some of the best, smartest people I know are public school teachers, and it is hard to watch them get dragged through the mud by reformsters who insist that teachers are so bad that it's better to replace them with five-week-trained fresh college grads who don't even particularly want to teach. And we don't have a million bucks lying around to fight back with.

Choice: Real Problems, Fake Answers

By following link to link, I ended up at this piece by Derrell Bradford, executive director of NYCAN and experienced in the reform game (if not the school biz), part of the 50CAN network of choice-pushing charter fans. But his essay "I am your black friend who grew up in Sandtown-Winchester" is as raw and powerful an argument as I've ever heard from the Friends of Choice. And it crystallizes once again where the big, fat hole in the choice argument lies.

Bradford, it turns out, grew up in the same area as Freddie Gray. It was an earlier time, but it was still ugly. Bradford's personal story, which has fueled his reformster career, is the story of escaping that neighborhood.


I never thought things were rough in my neighborhood when I was a kid. I thought they just “were.” But the older I got the more my life became a focused square of activity because of those rough streets. School, sports, home at night, dinner, then the blue chair in my grandma’s Baker Street living room where I fought to stay awake and master the quadratic formula. In retrospect, a lifetime of dinner conversations and events make the haze of memories crystal clear. My grandma talked about redlining, a lot. My friend Stuart, a big redhead black kid a few years older than me that lived on Calhoun Street, was shot and killed. Grandma got mugged while walking home from church one morning. I'd been beat up and had my bike taken from me. All the streets around us-- Stricker, Presstman, Gilmore, Gold-- loomed with their own sort of eerie malevolence. In a city of neighborhoods, mine was exactly one square block.

Say what you like about Bradford-- the man can write.

He creates a compelling pictures-- as compelling as any of the many word pictures being crafted in the face of the Baltimore riots-- of a school and neighborhood that is a toxic, terrible trap for the young men and women who live there.

His point is simple. He escaped. He wants others to be able to do the same. And this is where I lose the thread of his argument.

Bradford had the fortune to land at a tony top-notch prep school. The kind of school that gets way more in money and resources than the school to which zip code would have consigned him. That's what got him out of the old neighborhood.

This is what I don't get about reformsters like Bradford. Why are they not saying, "We demand a school for our neighborhood that is every bit as good as that big, shiny prep school."

The problem of underfunded, under-supported, under-resourced schools is real. The choice solution is not real at all. It proposes to rescue some students and make things worse for the rest. It proposes to further cripple the neighborhood school that should be an anchor of the community (look at a twenty-year study of social capital and education done in Baltimore).

You find a group of children trapped on a sinking ship, so you rescue some by tearing boards out of the hull of the sinking ship to reinforce your lifeboat. And then you leave most of the children on the now-sinking-more-rapidly ship.

You find a group of children starving in a home, so you take some of them with you to feed, but on your way out you take all the pots and pans so you can cook for the kids you're taking, leaving the remaining children to starve even faster.

I absolutely get the dire nature of the problem that Bradford and others are describing. But please tell me how school choice helps? It rips resources away from the already-struggling school, making it that much harder to "fix" it. It "rescues" only a small percentage of the students.

Why why why WHY is this a better solution than moving heaven and earth to get that "failing" school the resources it needs? Why is it a better solution to move a handful of students to a bright, shiny school instead of doing everything in your power to turn the community school into a bright, shiny school for every student and family in the community? If you know how to create a magically awesome alternative to the failing public school, why can't the awesome alternative model be applied directly to the public school itself.

Don't tell me the bullshit about how money doesn't matter. Bradford has made the argument that failing public schools spend too much money on bells and whistles, but until you show me a highly respected private school that markets itself by saying, "We promise to spend next to nothing on your kid," or "Never mind the full voucher. Just send us the student with $500 and that's all we need to educate her," I'm not buying the money-doesn't-matter argument. And truly, neither is anybody else. Nobody believes that. Nobody.

This is what I have always found baffling about voucher proponents. It's not that I don't believe in the problems they cite. It's that their solutions strike me just like somebody who says, "I've had a terrible cold lately, so I'm going to jab myself in the gut with a steak knife and soak my head in kerosene." The voucher solution is non-sequitor, a solution that seems to hold no reasonable promise of help (and at this late date, no empirical or anecdotal support, either).

So I'm saying to Derrell Bradford-- I find your writing moving, your story moving, your picture of the problem compelling (and I am not using my trademark irony here-- I mean it). But I can not for the life of me see how school choice brings us the slightest step closer to a solution, nor in all the reading about choice that I've ever done, have I seen a clear and sensible explanation of how this non-solution solution can hope to solve a thing. I'm still listening.