Impersonating A Teacher

In a John White valedictory piece, he's called "a former English teacher in New Jersey." I have twice this week come across a reformster who says he "started out as a teacher." Regular students of ed reform have seen similar pattern over and over-- the reformy whiz who has been busy at the ed reform or ed leadership or ed consulting or even ed leadership biz for a while, but who claims to have been a teacher. Sometimes you have to dig hard, and sometimes it's just right there in the LinkedIN profile, but the answer is invariably the same.

Teach for America.

My hackles raise right up, all by themselves. If you clerked for a year before you went to work as a welder, you are not a former lawyer who's now qualified to sit as a federal judge. If you were pre-med in college and spent a summer working as a hospital orderly before you started managing a Piggly Wiggly, you are not a former doctor who's now qualified to serve as head of surgery for a major hospital. And if you spent two years in a classroom after five weeks of training and before you started law school and went into practice doing corporate acquisitions for hedge funders, you are not a former teacher who is now qualified to run an entire school district.

There are lots of complicated policy issues and intricate nuances to analyze about the last few decades of education reform. But one of the biggest problems with the modern ed reform is actually pretty simple-- ed reform has put a whole lot of unqualified amateurs in positions of responsibility that they lacked the knowledge or experience to manage well. John White, Kevin Huffman, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Chris Barbic, David Coleman-- unqualified amateurs all. And that's just the national stage-- it would be a herculean task to track all the regional amateurs, guys like David Hardy, Jr., who have trashed a local district after finding themselves in leadership positions they weren't qualified for. The graduates of the Broad Academy. Most of the Chiefs for Change. The rich guys like Gates and Zuckerberg who decide they should steer national education policy. All amateurs. Almost every boneheaded policy idea that made teachers shake their heads and roll their eyes-- produced by some unqualified amateur.

We can talk about the deep details of the last thirty years, but at heart it's as simple as a whole lot of important decisions made by people in charge who didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

And so many of these amateurs proudly touted "former teacher" on their resume, based on their two years with Teach for America.

Two years is nothing in teacher years. A second year teacher is still a teaching baby. Particularly if they started out behind and having to learn things that other beginning teachers had already learned before they arrived in the classroom. Particularly if, instead of asking questions like "How can I better grasp and develop this technique so it will serve my students better for the rest of my career" they are thinking things like, "Well, this is good enough to get me to the end of the year and then I'll never have to worry about it again."

Five to seven years is what it takes to get most folks up to speed. If you've got at least five years in in a classroom, I'll agree that you are a former teacher. At two years, you're just somebody who tried teaching and bailed. You are not a "former teacher" or someone who "started out as a teacher." I'd buy "tried teaching for a bit," but then, that wouldn't provide the kind of resume-enhancing, virtue-signaling, expertise-claiming punch you're looking for.

Are the Teach for America folks who were really sincere about their interest in teaching, or some who really meant to give it a shot but fund it wasn't for them? Sure. You can spot them because they kept teaching, or they got out and didn't try to pass themselves off as education experts for the rest of their career.

Can people develop expertise in education without having spent five years in the classroom? Sure-- mostly by doing a lot of listening to people who have.

Is this kind of snotty and elitist? Yes, I'll own that. Not everybody can teach, and not everybody who can teach can do it really, really well. I get that it's a club lots of people want to belong to, for a variety of reasons, but not everyone can. If you want a membership, then earn it.

I'll give David Coleman credit-- he at least proudly admitted to being an unqualified amateur. But I do wish that the rest of these folks would stop impersonating teachers. It demeans the profession and enables their claim to expertise that they simply don't possess. The world has always been filled with people who were sure they were education experts because they went to school, but now some of them have found a way to formalize that baloney.

One of the hallmarks of modern ed reform is language that is at best imprecise and at worst deliberately misleading. It's the score on a single two-subject standardized test-- it's "student achievement"! Well, memo to education journalists-- John White is not a former teacher, and neither are any of the rest of these impersonators running around trying to make a brief bout of edutourism look like a previous career choice.

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.

ICYMI: This Week's Readings from the Edusphere

Some reading from this week in the edusphere.

13 Years of Dress Rehearsal

Chris Thinnes ran a back-to-school parent's night speech by Rachel Thinnes that is a great reminder that school is not just about students getting ready to live their lives -- their lives are going on right now. She also references Excellent Sheep, which is always bonus points as far as I'm concerned.


EdTPA and TFA Are Two Sides of the Same Coin 

Fred Klonsky spent a chunk of his week fending off feverish defenders of Pearson's teacher certification baloneyfest, EdTPA. Klonsky wrote several good take-downs of the program, but this one put it in the context of another favorite reformster program.
 
10 Years of Corporate Media Celebrating Disaster

You'll need a strong stomach for this look back at some of the decades most notable cheerleading for death and destruction in New Orleans. Because who cares how many people have to die, neighborhoods have to be destroyed, and citizens have to be permanently displaced if, when it's all done, privatizers can make some money and test scores go up, a little, in some places, for some people.

Message from Bethlehem Superintendent

The superintendent of Bethlehem Area Schools in PA wrote in the local paper a piece to show that he gets it, and that he regrets "a different world we are now in where a teacher potentially risks a negative evaluation because she is committed to helping her students develop their passions, gifts and talents."

NC Teachers Being 'Voluntarily Exploited' 

Brief but powerful profile of three North Carolina teachers and how they make it work. These ladies are inspirational-- wait till you read about how one turns the experience of not being able to buy groceries into a growth experience for her own practice.

I'm Defending Teach for America

I'm about a week behind on this, mostly because I don't usually pay any attention to conservative rantist Michelle Malkin. Yes, she often rants against Common Core and corporate commandeering of public education, but when I first started picking apart the odd alliances, congruence, and alignments of the education debates, one thing became clear to me-- in these debates, as in other aspects of life, the enemy of my enemy might well be my enemy. Or at the very least, a trellis asshat.

Malkin made her recent stink in the New York Post, where she accused Teach for America of harboring dangerous radicals.

But those concerns pale in comparison to the divisive, grievance-mongering activities of the group’s increasingly radicalized officials and alumni.

TFA’s most infamous public faces don’t even pretend to be interested in students’ academic achievement. It’s all about race, tweets and marching on the streets.

She goes on to give accounts of recent civil rights activism by TFA members and alums, including popularizing and promoting the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She links this to TFA's recent initiative to include more men and women of color. She stops just short of saying that TFA has been taken over by a bunch of uppity black folks who don't know how to stay in place-- but only just short of that.

Look-- nobody is ever going to mistake me for a TFA supporter. I've explained numerous times why the organization, which has morphed into one more corporate-stoogery corporation, is bad for education. They started out with one simple foolishly naïve idea (any Better Person from the Right School can become a teacher in five weeks) and built on that foundation a structure of even worse ideas (our Better People can replace the inferior professionals and help charters cut the legs out from under public education). And they have long carried the smell of "white man's burden" colonial-style racism in their operation.

But here's two things about TFA. One is that their initiative to recruit men (and women) of color for the classroom is a response to a real problem. It might be a cynical marketing response, but g's still a response to a real problem. The other is that while I have no love or respect for the organization itself, I have always recognized that many folks join TFA with pure hearts and good intentions (yes, many are just looking at their resume, but not all). That to me one of the great evils of TFA-- they take young people with an interest in teaching, who might have been good teachers, and give them the worst possible introduction to the classroom.

And it's really those TFA recruits that Malkin is going after. She connects the corporate dots, but she's using that to work her way to the big reveal-- our tax dollars are supporting Black People Who Won't Sit Down and Shut Up.

TFA deserves a lot of things, not the least of which is to go away forever, but they don't deserve to be the excuse for a racist rant, and they certainly haven't earned the right to be painted as a training ground for Naughty Black Activists.

I know there are folks whose attitude is that we should attack our enemies whenever the chance presents itself  and that we should embrace anybody who wants to attack the people we want to attack. But what Malkin and the people who have followed her lead have constructed is a racist lie, and that's just not okay.

This is just one more reason to define oneself by what you stand for, not what you're against. There are plenty of folks out there who are against Common Core and high stakes testing who are also against public education (particularly when it spends tax dollars on Those People). I am not on the same side as those folks.

TFA deserves to be attacked for many reasons, but it's just wrong to support an attack on them that is based on inflammatory foolishness and which feeds the fires of racism.

TFA 5.0: Charters for Children

We have discussed the evolution of Teach for America before. Its ever-changing business plan mission has been a work in progress through several iterations:

TFA 1.0: The Best and the Brightest will help solve the teacher shortage, kind of like the Peace Corps.

TFA 2.0: Take a year or two off before grad school to beef up your resume with some non-court-ordered community service.

TFA 3.0: Traditional public school teachers pretty much suck. We are smarter and better.

TFA 4.0: We are here to bring diversity to the teaching force.

Teach for America has been having trouble with recruiting, though in all fairness, the entire teaching profession has been having trouble recruiting. It's almost as if young folks had heard nothing but how rotten the profession is, or had grown up seeing teachers reduced to automatons. Go figure.

But here comes a new pitch, a video and slogan that might signal TFA 5.0. The slogan "One Day, All Children" is a throwback to TFA founder Wendy Kopp's book by the same name (published, believe it or not, way back in 2001). The pitch-- well, the pitch will sound familiar.

"America's educational system should provide all children with opportunity," the clip begins. "Opportunity to succeed, to thrive."  But the voice-over lady goes on to tell us that depending on where a child is born, these opportunities may not exist. Because of race and poverty, a child may be subject to the tyranny of a zip code. The dream falls through "the cracks in an unfair system. For too many children, their zip code becomes their destiny."

At this point we are watching a little animation child plummet through empty space-- but here comes the logo of Teach for America to rescue the child, to lift it up (as the music shifts into a more hopeful major key).

TFA has seen too much progress to believe that your education has to be determined by where you live. TFA mission (this month) is to make sure "that every child has access to the same opportunities and choices."

TFA recruits from a group of "diverse thinkers and leaders" (so, you know, none of those sucky regular teacher types) from all backgrounds (not in the script, but a graphic saying 50% of TFA recruits identify as people of color). TFA shows them how to teach and supports them (here three adult stick figures gather around the child-- first they fill up with color, then so does the child, and then the child grows up and puts on a cap and gown while the teachers stance proudly, though of course TFA temps would mostly never be around by the time a small child graduated from high school).

Now, here comes a cool new way to parse the temp part of TFA--

They understand that their schools are part of a larger system, "so after two years, our teachers have a choice." They can stay in education (cue weasel-statistic that counts every vaguely ed-related job as "staying in education") and "continue to have a profound impact," or they can move on to "another career path" and lead in ways that "help our kids and help our country." Those leady roles include "advocates, policymakers, innovators and entrepreneurs."

As their network grows (cue web all over the US), TFA builds a movement. New TFA factoid-- 84% of alumni are working full time in "roles impacting education or low-income communities" and boy, isn't "impacting" a nice, broad all-purpose word here. It doesn't even carry a value judgment; if you're busy chasing poor people out of a neighborhood as prelude to gentrification, you are totally impacting a low-income community. Hurray! As long as you're making a difference, right?

So back to the child (who I now see is disturbingly handless). "Good for kids. Good for everyone."

Final slogan as we shift to logo-- "Change and be changed. Teach for America."

Residual traces of old, beloved sales pitches are still visible, but we have upped our helping of For the Children and completely dropped public education from the pitch. With almost no tweaking, this could be an ad for a charter chain. It already includes many of the choice crowd's favorite pitches. Each child should have choices and opportunities (not a great community school). Each child should be freed from the tyranny of the zip code (and policymakers should be freed from the problem of trying to make that zip code less of a place one would want to escape). And, of course, this is not work you want to commit to for a lifetime; it's simply the first step in your larger career of creating a network of educationny stuff (because, you know, the US public school system is not already a network devoted to educating America's children).

TFA has never looked less like an organization interested in helping the public school system pursue its mission, and it has never pitched itself more clearly as an educational network/empire separate from US public education. And of course its central fallacy remains unaddressed-- that anybody can be a teacher, as long as she is the Right Sort of Person from the Right Sort of Background. It's unfortunate that well-meaning college grads continue to be sucked in by this snake oil. The clip is embedded below, just to keep me honest. Not sure you really need to watch it.

Whitney Tilson Is Better Than You

When we're talking about the kind of hedge-fund managing, faux-Democrat, rich fat cat, anti-public ed reformsters who are driving much of the modern ed reform agenda, we're talking about guys like Whitney Tilson.

The Tilson Story

Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.

Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He's a big backer of KIPP, TFA and DFER. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.

He recently surfaced in an article by The Nation about how the billionaire boys club is remaking the New York City Schools in their own chartery profit-generating image. Tilson, in his weekly-ish ed reform newsletter, dismissed the article as "a silly hatchet job" and told his own version of how a bunch of Very Rich White Guys have commandeered the biggest apple of them all.

The true story here is very simple and the opposite of sinister – it’s inspiring to me: a number of very successful New Yorkers – believing in the power of education and that every kid deserves a fair shot at the American dream, and disgusted with an educational system that does just the opposite, in which the color of your skin and your zip code pretty much determine the quality of public school a kid gets, an unjust reality that goes on, year in and year out, not because the system is broken, but because it operates just the way it’s supposed to, to serve the economic interests of the adults in the system and the political interests of the gutless weasel politicians who kowtow to them – decided to donate millions of dollars, despite having absolutely nothing to gain personally, to create a counter-weight to the status quo, in which the unions historically said “Jump!” and the governor and legislature would respond, “How high?!”

Tilson likes to characterize himself as a scrappy underdog.

I’m very proud to say that we’ve been enormously successful. Despite being outmanned, outspent, and outgunned 100:1, a small group of incredible people – in part the funders, but more importantly the people on the ground – have turned the tables on the entrenched powers, in part by, yes, finding and strongly supporting a courageous ally in Gov. Cuomo. 

I am not sure in which alternate reality these billionaires have been outspent or outgunned, but it is a standard part of the reformster narrative that they are heroic fighters, fearlessly taking on entrenched and powerful forces who are bent on imprisoning students everywhere in dark dungeons of desperation and failure.

It's not about the greed

I have long believed that those who explain reformster motivation by resorting to greed are likely wrong. From techno-system guys like Gates to value investors like Tilson, there's something else working. Here's a quote from that same Tilson letter

We are winning this titanic struggle (albeit in a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back way), not because we’re all-powerful billionaires, but because, to quote MLK, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Or this quote from Sir Michael Barber, head of Pearson, commenting on the challenge of remaking education into a global digitized system:


Be that as it may, the aspiration to meet these challenges is right

Or the Lyndsay Layton interview with Bill Gates, in which Gates is truly thrown by the mere suggestion that he's in this for the bucks. 

These are all people who believe they are serving a higher moral purpose, that they personally understand how the world should be reshaped in a way that other people simply don't. And they have an obligation to circumvent democratic institutions, traditional systems and the disagreeing humans who stand in their way because they know better.

They are armed with vast fortunes and wide-ranging connections, and just like the robber barons before them, they sense that these powers are not the result of random good fortune, but the validation and proof that they really are better than other people, that they have some better, wiser grasp of the world and how it does, and should, work. They do not necessarily revel in the power; in fact, they often use the language of obligation-- it's a thing they have to do. It's, you know, a burden that this rich white guys must pick up.

Will their reforms bring them more money and power? Sure. But that's not the goal-- it's just the proof that they were right. After all, if they weren't smart and strong and better than the average person, they wouldn't be so rich and powerful.

Now, does greed help drive the ed reform engines? Certainly. But that's because once these super-powered elite form their vision of how to remake the world, there is a ton of money to be made by helping them do it, and so a whole swarm of people interested in that money travel in their wake. Philosophically, it really does mirror the symbiosis of 19th century European colonialism. Nobody could sell conquering Africa as baldfaced conquest and exploitation-- but once that colonization was sold as a way to give lesser people the benefits of superior European culture, knowledge, worldview, pants, and religion, the profiteers could adopt the proper language and spread over the continent like locusts.

In the "meritocratic" universe, there are The Right Sort of People and The Wrong Sort of People. The Betters are successful and wise, and this is evident in their success and wealth and innate superior character. They should run things. The Wrong Sort of People need accountability to keep them in line, to guide them to do the correct thing (you will note that we never call for accountability for the Betters-- they don't need it, and their success proves they don't need it).

So what's does Tilson really think?

Tilson's education views seem to have coalesced fairly early in the current ed reform cycle; in 2009 he gave a presentation in DC that was his attempt to create An Inconvenient Truth for the education biz. "A Right Denied" exists as a website, a set of power point slides, and a documentary. I worked my way through the slide show, which I think is an excellent summary (although, at 292 slides, not a very brief one) of the DFER corporate Democrat point of view.

The problem

Tilson starts by documenting the correlation between education and employment, earnings, and long-term health. I don't think many people dispute the correlation-- the argument is about what it means. The DFER/Duncan position is that education is the cause of everything else. I think it's far more likely that lower educational results come from the same place as the other issues-- poverty.

Tilson also notes that scores on some tests have stagnated, and there's lots to argue about there (can you really compare SAT results when the population taking the test has been steadily changing as we try to convince every student that she must go to college), as well as the question of what standardized tests actually measure. But it is a critical element of the DFER view that schools must be accountable, by which they mean the Help must show their Betters what they are up to.

Tilson also wants us to know that we've been spending more and more on education (he does not address the question of "on what," and consider issues such as increased mandates for more special ed teachers in schools). That's okay-- his basic point is clear. We've been spending tons of money on education and not getting bang for our buck.

Tilson knows why-- three reasons:

1) Teacher quality has been falling rapidly over the past few decades.

2) Our school systems have become more dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and unaccountable.

3) As a nation, we have been so rich for so long that we have become lazy and complacent. Our youth are spending more time watching tv, listening to iPods, playing video games.

Tilson illustrates this with two photos-- one showing neat, well-dressed Chinese youngsters politely lined up, and the other an unruly crowd of shirtless frat boys. Kids these days! He then shows some data to support his last point. Points 1 and 2 get no supporting evidence at all right now.

Some critical gaps

Gap #1. We don't send enough students to college, and too few of those finish. No idea why that completion rate is low. It would be interesting to see the numbers on students who drop out of college because they can't afford to finish it.

Gap #2. The achievement gap, by race and poverty. Starting in kindergarten and through college (this is where he shows some numbers about college affordability). But the bottom line here is that "the color of your skin and your zip code are almost entirely determinative of the quality of public education this nation provides. This is deeply, profoundly wrong." I have no beef with Tilson on this point.

The solutions

Here's where it just gets very weird, random, and profoundly intellectually sloppy.

There are too many systems "dominated by the Three Pillars of Mediocrity." Quick-- before you scroll down, can you think of three policies that make it hard to improve poor schools. Did you guess systemic underfunding, lack of support, or absence of fundamental infrastructure and resources? Incorrect. It's those damn teachers. They have tenure, a pay scale, and seniority.

Tilson says if you want to fix any broken system (because how different could schools be from any other system), you take these four steps:
           1) Adopt the right strategy and tactics
           2) Hire and train great leaders and then empower them
           3) Measure results
           4) Hold people accountable

A patronizing patrician approach is embedded here, too. Note that there is no step for consulting with the people who are already in the system. Our assumption, once again, is that some people are better than others, and you need to put those who are better in charge.

Tilson holds up Florida as an example of this type of system overhaul. And it's here that we hit a point that the Nation article really did get wrong. They accused Tilson of not wanting to spend any money on schools, but in slide #90, he makes it clear that spending more money is not a solution-- unless the money is tied to reforms. It's the fetal form of the reformster adage "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and test publishers is awesome."

Of course, you might not be able to reform the system, in which case you need to replace it, and here come a slew of slides about the miraculous miracle that is New Orleans, featuring the usual selective slices of data (incidentally, we also get the prediction that by 2016 there will be almost no failing schools in NOLA. So that's a win).

And now for a word...

Next up-- an advertisement for charters, especially the KIPP system for which Tilson sits on the board.

Those damn teachers

Did you know that teachers are the most important in-school factor in student achievement (aka test scores)? Well, here come a bunch of pull quotes from the infamous (and unsupportable) Chetty study to tell you so. And we'll throw in some Eric Hanushek baloney about firing our way to excellence as well.

Tilson boils the teacher problem down to two factors-- teacher quality has been declining for decades, and talent is unfairly distributed.

So here we are back at one of the fundamental assumptions of the DFER/Duncan worldview-- some people are just better than others, and that betterness reveals itself in All the Right Places. They will be better at school, they will get better jobs, they will do better on standardized tests, and ultimately they will make more money. So when we look for these markers, we aren't really measuring anything in particular-- we're just looking for the markers of success that signal one of the Chosen Few (and yes-- astute readers will note that modern corporate meritocrats have a great deal in common with our Puritan forebears).

So-- we "know" that we aren't getting the Right People into teaching because they don't mostly graduate at the top of their class or get the best SAT scores. Meanwhile, the schools of education lack accountability-- and in the meritocratic view of the world, accountability is what we need in order to make the Lesser Humans behave properly.

Implicit in this world view is that being a Better or a Lesser is fairly hard to change. It's wired in, like good breeding. That's why Lessers need "accountability," because only carrots and sticks (and mostly sticks) will get them to overcome their fundamental Lesser nature. This is also the rationale behind testing for students (no fourth grade for you until you pass this reading test, kid)-- only by strong actions can we force them to overcome their inherently lesser natures.

In the meantime, we need to sort out the Right Sort of People from the Wrong Sort of People in teaching and fire our way to excellence (by removing the Wrong Sort of People). This is why DFER types love Teach for America-- it selects teachers by using the markers of true excellence (wealth, good grades, the Right Schools) so that The Right Sort of People will be put in the classroom. TFA even systematically addresses one of the inherent contradictions of the DFER view-- if you really are the Right Kind of Person, you'll be doing something more successful and wealth-making than merely being a teacher, so it's okay if you only do it for a while.

Unfair distribution is more of the same. We know that the Bad Teachers are ending up in poor schools because none of the markers of Being Better are there. No high tests scores, degrees from the Right Sort of School.

And behind it all-- the damn unions, which are composed of the Wrong Sort of Person and try to protect the Wrong Sort of Person from having to be accountable to their Betters.

Goofus and Gallant

Tilson finishes with some action items, some things that you should or should not do.

You should join DFER. Ask questions of the ignorant, gutless politicians (clearly the Wrong Sort of People who have been elected by the Wrong Sort of People-- stupid democracy, anyway).

Don't allow reform opponents to define the debate (I have to tell you-- viewing myself through Tilson's eyes, I am a freaking giant). Also, don't think advocacy is cheap.

And stay positive, and don't get lost in fantasy:

It's nice to fantasize about an 18-day, Egypt-style revolution that throws out the old order, that's not going to happen. The system is much too big, too entrenched, and too decentralized to fix quickly.

Is it really nice to fantasize about public education being completely removed in a violent revolution? Interesting thought, that.

Here's one thing that is not on Tilson's to-do list-- empower the people who actually live in poor and minority neighborhoods by getting systemic barriers out of their way so that they can better have a voice in their own governance and local education. In fact, even listening to those voices is not on the list. 

Tilson and the Worst Kind of Democrat Caricature 

So what's the real problem? The Wrong Sort of People are in charge, and Kids These Days have turned into miserable slackers. Poor and minority students are being abandoned in the mess that comes from letting The Wrong Sort of People be in charge. We need to put the Right Sort of People in charge through any means possible, so that they can take care of the Lesser Folks who need their largesse and assistance. Having things like a Race to the Top make sense because we can then separate out the Right Kind of People from the Wrong Kind of People. The Betters will raise expectations, hold peoples' feet to the fire, and get a warm glow of satisfaction from knowing that they made life better for people who were, of course, incapable of making life better for themselves. And in doing so, they will be acting as a force for good and justice and truth in the universe (and they will be richly rewarded because virtue always leads to great rewards).

Yes, this all dovetails beautifully with the goals and aims of profiteers, the folks who just want a chance to crack open the golden egg of education and feed on the giant omelet of money that can be made from it. But when you separate the DFER-style agenda from the profiteering, you can see the kind of paternalistic elitist we-know-better-than-you cartoon Democrat that Tea Partiers and other hard-right folks deeply hate.

This is what you get when you cross real needs, real issues and real concerns (like the need to provide better schooling to poor and minority students in this country) with a particular wacky worldview that is more old-world aristocratic than American. But I'll remind you that Tilson's slides are from 2009, and they contain pretty much every single talking point we've heard from the current administration since Race to the Top was launched. While I may have Whitney Tilson outnumbered and outgunned, I'm just a high school English teacher with a blog and he's an investment whiz with the ear of world leaders. I'm pretty sure I don't represent a very big threat to him, but without ever having met me or knowing who I am, he's ready to kick my ass.

The Work We Have To Do

Even if you've only read this blog once or twice, you're aware that I am a noisy supporter of traditional public education in this country. But that doesn't mean my loyalty is unquestioning.

As much as it pains me to say it, as much as I hate what modern reformsters have brought us in public education, if I'm being honest, I must admit that we asked for some of it. Well, maybe we didn't ask for it-- but we certainly left the door wide open for it to come waltzing in.

It's worth talking about these things because even if the entire reformster movement dried up and blew away today, tomorrow we would still be facing these issues.

Teacher Training

Much of what passes for teacher training is a joke. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that teacher training is in the hands of not-teachers. How many co-operating teachers help their student teacher stage a fake lesson to make the visiting drive-by supervisor happy? How many future teachers' careers have been decided for good or bad by the random luck of the student teaching draw? How many college hours are wasted studying teaching "techniques" developed but untested by somebody who has no idea what he's talking about? How many college ed programs wouldn't flunk a candidate unless he was caught on video feeding chopped up puppies to orphans?

How many teachers are good teachers in spite of their college training instead of because of it? The door for some foolish program like TFA has always been standing wide open.

Quality

Everybody knows that some teachers are better than others. But our line in the profession for decades has been, "That's hard. We aren't going to talk about it."

It's true that assaults on tenure and pushes for stack ranking teachers are all about the money, about making a school a more profitable enterprise for an investor. But those assaults would never have gotten traction if there were not a great untapped well of resentment and frustration out there over a system that doesn't seem to do anything about differentiating or improving when it comes to less-than-awesome teachers.

Equity and Justice

When civil rights groups spoke up last week in favor of keeping a federal testing mandate in ESEA, many folks were shocked and upset. But civil rights groups and community leaders in poor black neighborhoods have been supporting the reformster agenda for years.

Instead of exclaiming "How can they do that" rhetorically, we should be asking, "Why do they do that" critically and sincerely.

The promise of reformsters has been, "We will create a program that gets every kid ready for success, and we will make it federal law that every school in every city must have that program in place. We'll have a test that proves whether that program is in place or not, and we will give exactly the same test to every student, white or black, rich or poor, in this country."

Do not dismiss that promise because it's empty. Recognize that the promise is powerful because our country includes a whole lot of people to whom no such promise has been made before.

Look. If you offer someone a piece of spoiled tofu sculpted to look like a bad piece of fish, and they eat it up quickly, and then you start lecturing them about can't they see it's not really fish and the tofu is actually spoiled and did somebody pay them to eat that awful stuff-- you are missing the most important piece of information. That person was hungry enough to be excited about a bad tofu fish. You can take away the bad tofu fish and feel good about how you're protected that person, but she's still hungry, and until you get her some actual food, you're not helping.

Poor and minority schools need resources and support, the kinds of programs and materials that wealthier schools take for granted. They need support. Their students need to see teachers who look like them in the building (and, I would argue, people who live and grew up in the neighborhood). They need to be in a system that respects their culture and background. They need to be in a system that is neither overtly nor subtly racist.

We can bitch and moan about the reformsters and privateers and charteristas all pretending to care about equity and civil rights as a way to grab some power and money, but we should look in the mirror and ask what it means that Pretending To Care about Equity is enough to make someone stand out these days.

We can sweep the reformsters and their faux solutions away, but unless we're prepared to look for real solutions, we won't be moving forward. We supporters of public education must remember that even if the reformsters are thrown out and shut down, there are still problems in our schools-- problems that nobody was particularly working on when reformsters stepped in to take advantage of real needs. We must always remember that even when the conflict with reformsters is over, there is still work we have to do.

CAP and Teacher Retention

The Center for American Progress got another quick lesson in How the Internet Works. In their haste to prove that beginning teachers are sticking around for years and years (well, six years, anyway) they slapped up a lovely picture of a TFA temp who finished her two year stint and headed off to her real career in a corporate office. They helpfully included her name (Gabrielle Wooden) so that her actual job history could be found by anybody with an internet hookup and access to google. Joe Bower (in Canada) worked out this tricky research problem as well, and in the last fifteen hours a very long list have people have emailed and messaged me to join this particular swimming party in the warm waters of Lake Schadenfreude.

Did somebody in the photo department just not bother to tag carefully? Did the editor who attached the photo not pause to think things through? Was their googler broken? Did they not know the difference? Did they just not care? Can we expect more great headers from CAP such as the following:

Strong Conservative Contenders Expected in Republican Primary Race

Selecting Best Cuts for a Successful Barbecue

Honoring the Great Champions of American Public Education

All right. That concludes the Taking Cheap Shots portion of this post. 

If we look past CAP's unfortunate photo choice for the article, does it contain anything useful?

Essentially, CAP wants to challenge the conventional wisdom that half of all new teachers are leaving within the first five years, and I agree that it's a stat that bears examination. The Grand Mac Daddy of this sort of research is Richard Ingersoll, and his work on the subject of the changing face of the teacher force is rigorous and nuanced-- far more nuanced than the various soundbite-sized data tidbits that are generally pulled from it.

CAP raises a couple of legit concerns beyond the not-shocking news that media do not always report scientific research accurately.

One is that the existing work on teacher retention is old, that we are talking about data from seven or eight years ago. Most importantly, we are not far enough down the road to see the effects of Common Core on the teacher force. Not to do obvious math here, but there's no way to know what percentage of teachers are staying past five years when looking at teachers who entered the profession after 2009.

Another is that this data can be highly local. My theory is that it's even worse in the most teacher-hostile states. In North Carolina, a state that has gone out of its way to make teaching non-viable as a lifetime career, it would appear (via CAP) that a good local administration can make the difference between losing 10% or 20% of the teaching staff. When there's a terrible storm blowing, what you do next depends a lot on whether you're in a tumble-down shack or a solid brick structure. This is a problem with plenty of educational research and almost all education policy-- every school is different in distinct and important ways (kind of like human children-- go figure).

CAP also notes that, hey, we don't want to retain 100% of beginning teachers because some of them probably should be seeking employment in other fields, anyway. Fair enough.

Not that CAP didn't also say some stupid things in the article.

Given what is known about how much teachers improve their classroom practices during their first few years, the fact that more beginning teachers stay could actually mean that many more students today have access to more effective teachers. 

Yes, since second year teachers are the very best, a system that puts mostly first and second year teachers in front of students would be the very best one. Perhaps Gabrielle Wooden left the classroom after two years because she knew she had peaked. But CAP's use of TNTP "research" does not speak well of their research-using skills. Perhaps it's time to look at how they came up with the figures they use to dispute Ingersoll's work.

The Center for American Progress calculated this much-higher statistic of new-teacher retention using several national surveys from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

Oh. They used some federal reports and just sort of crunched those puppies up themselves. 

I think we're done here. CAP has raised some important and legitimate questions-- our knowledge about teacher retention is always lagging by several years, and in today's climate, those years can make a huge difference. I'm not sure that there's a great deal of practical use in national knowledge other than to generate talking points for those of us who debate policy; it seems like that local districts are perfectly capable of knowing what they need to know in order to tweak their own hiring and mentoring processes.

But the article is a reminder to not just toss things around without reflection. It's easy to grab a 50% departure statistic or a picture of a pretty young woman teaching because they seem to fit whatever point we're trying to make, but a little reflection and thought and additional research never hurt anybody, and might save you an embarrassing mistake.

Duncan Chases Teachers Away

Arne Duncan's new policy initiative is a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences in action.

Duncan proposes that teacher prep programs be evaluated by looking at the test results of the students of the graduates of the college. If that seems like a twisted sentence, that's because it's a twisted program. We can make two early and easy predictions about what effects it will have.

The first is simple. It will mean the college education departments will cut spending on programs so that they can afford whatever administrative assistant has to be hired to spend all their time chasing the numbers necessary to make the report to the feds. Some bunch of adjunct professors are going to have their hours cut so that somebody else can spend his days wending through the labyrinthian process of tracking down alumni, then tracking down their scores.

The second is, well, also simple. We already know that the best predictor of good student test scores is family income. Every college education department that doesn't want to get spanked by the US Department of Education has to do one simple thing-- they must do everything in their power to keep their graduates from getting jobs in poor urban schools.

Urban school districts that have tried to foster good relationships with college ed programs will find that they can't get their calls returned. College ed departments will screen school districts carefully and be cautious about which job openings they pass along to their grads.

If one of Duncan's goals is to put great teachers in poor urban classrooms, he could not have better designed a policy to do the exact opposite. This new policy is just one more step in the process of labeling some schools and some districts as career-killers, schools to be avoided at all costs if you wish to devote your life to teaching. This new policy will just add one more voice to the conversation saying, "Whatever you do, don't get a job at Poor Kid High School."

This is good news for TFA (or at least, it would be if they weren't suffering recruiting woes of their own) because Duncan's policy will help create more artificial teacher shortages in poor urban schools. But it is nothing but bad news for the schools themselves, branded with big scarlet F's and surrounded by signs screaming, "Whatever you do, don't come here to teach!" It is one of Duncan's poorest policy choices yet.

Access Costs $500 Cheap!

Teach Plus, yet another arm of the Gates-funded reformy octopus, is a fan of several fictions. They believe that test scores measure teacher effectiveness, yet they fail to understand how that model of evaluation guarantees that students in high-poverty schools will always be taught be "ineffective" teachers (I explain it many places, but this one works pretty well).

Teach Plus also wants to be out there helping the feds with their initiative to somehow get great teachers to volunteer to have their test-based ratings gutted by moving to high-poverty schools. They are creating special teams of "turnaround" specialists (because some schools are just determined to drive the bus into the weeds, so they require wiser teachers to re-steer them? The term "turnaround" always puzzles me, suggesting as it does that some schools are actually doing every single thing wrong, which in turn suggests that some administrators must be stunningly incompetent, in which case how will it make a whit of difference to change the teachers?) Teach Plus is also one of many reformster groups to resolutely ignore that special cognitive dissonance involved in saying 1) teachers don't really start to get good till three years in and 2) TFA is just swell.

At any rate, as we enter the holiday season, Teach Plus wants your money.

Your donation will support our leadership programs, helping to ensure that every student gets the education he deserves.

Super! Like any good money-soliciting not-actually-a-charity, they offer levels of giving. $5K helps support one of their turnaround specialists. $2.5K sponsors a teaching fellow for 18 months of stuff. $1.5K helps train a teacher to indoctrinate his fellow teachers in Common Core whiz-bangery. And $500-- well, this is special.

$500 enables a teacher to meet with state or federal policymakers.

What? That's it. Access is that cheap? All of the millions of teachers who have been ignored by policymakers, and all we need was $500 for admission to an Important Office.

Now, at first I was offended that I needed to spend money to meet with one of my elected representatives, but then I realized that's not what it says. Policymakers are not necessarily actual elected officials. So maybe, I don't know, the money gets me a seat in the gallery at the next ALEC convocation? A meeting with David Coleman? Or maybe it really will give some lucky teacher a chance to meet with an actual elected official, which would be exciting since those are two sorts of people who almost never meet. The possibilities are endless.

Now, I caution against premature exuberance. It's possible that Teach Plus got some sort of deal by buying bulk, and $500 will not get access for ordinary civilian teacher persons. But if $500 is even ballpark, we could finally get teachers in some meetings with people who, you know, actually get listened to when laws are passed.

Let's all ask Teach Plus how this works. Is the admission fee handled by the policymaker's office, or is this something you buy at, like, Ticketron or Expedia? Do we have to book way in advance (like Price Is Right) or can we make an impulse buy when we have a chance to take a trip?

I realize it isn't a Seat at the Table, but we already know it takes a cool millions of dollars to buy in at that game. But still. Meeting with a policymaker-- it could be a start. My biggest question is this-- $500 is great to meet with a policymaker, but how much more do I have to pay to get him to actually listen to me?

TFA vs. Harvard Students

Valerie Strauss reports an exchange between the TFA mother ship and members of the Harvard chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops. Strauss presents the letters from this back-and-forth in their entirety, and you should click on over there and read them. It's worth noting that both sides are extraordinarily polite and civil. But I want to highlight just a couple of details from the TFA missives.

In reply to the USAS charge that TFA no longer follows its original mission of relieving a teacher shortage:

To your question about shortages, our program exists to meet local demand for teachers and long-term education leaders. In many of our partner districts, this demand stems from a severe shortage of available candidates for low-income schools generally. In others, the shortages are specific to certain subject areas or grade levels. In some, we serve as an additional source of teaching talent for principals to choose from.[Emphasis mine]

So, note that the program has as its stated purpose creating long-term education leaders. The teaching thing is just a training program for future edubosses, edupreneurs, and edubureaucrats.

The TFA writer also notes that TFA only applies for open positions, which is probably wise because back when I was job-hunting, I found that applying for occupied positions wasn't very helpful. The writer does not make any particular distinction about how those positions became open (say, through mass firings instituted so that the position could be filled with TFA members). And then we revisit the point made above:

We believe that students are best served when principals have access to the most robust possible talent pipeline – whether through our program, other alternative certification routes, or the schools of education that continue to prepare the vast majority of our nation’s teachers. We aim to be one small part of a well-trained, supported and celebrated national teaching force.

So-- it's not that there's a teacher shortage, or even (per the newest iteration of TFA) a teacher of color shortage. It's that principals need more choices, because what's coming through the traditional pipeline just isn't good enough. It's as straightforward a TFA statement as I've ever seen saying, "We fully intend to beat out new teacher school graduates for these jobs. You don't need us because there are too few teachers. You need us because there are two few teachers who are as awesome as we are."

After a USAS response, the next TFA letter comes from co-chief Matt Kramer. Kramer offers this interesting statistic:

Compared to first year teachers in general, they [TFA bodies] are more likely to teach a second year.

Not clear how he figures this one. While the USAS letters come with footnotes for their allegations. Kramer just says stuff. He also addresses the TFA Just Passing Through criticism by saying that the problems of education are larger than a classroom teacher can fix so he deplores the idea of judging any teacher based on student test results. Ha! Just kidding. He says that since these problems are too big for classroom teachers, many TFAers do education the favor of becoming "principals, community activists, district administrators, policy makers, elected officials and parent advocates." Thanks, guys!

The whole thing is an eye-opening exchange, particularly in the ways USAS find to say gently, firmly and politely, "You are full of it. Here are the facts. Stop lying." But totally civilly and respectfully. I could probably learn a lesson or two from them.

Should We Embrace Charter Districts

First in USA Today, and a few days later, a bit more expansively in the Hechinger Report, Richard Whitmire argues for the embrace of charter growth, particularly since charters are starting to look like school districts.

We'll look at the Hechinger Report version, because it allows Whitmire to lay out his complete argument. It's an impressive compendium of almost every pro-charter argument ever made, and it manages to get very little correct.

More than twenty years ago when charter schools first got launched in Minnesota no one envisioned that one day we would see charter management networks growing to resemble medium-size school districts.

Probably not true. I think plenty of people called this one. More importantly, I think plenty of people interested in the charter business were absolutely banking on it.


Whitmire goes on to applaud the greenlighting of fourteen more Success Academy branches in NY. He cheers that the rapid expansion of the chain doesn't seem to have hurt the quality, and that even students in freshly opened branches have gotten swell test results.

"Regardless of your personal opinion of charter schools versus traditional schools," says Whitmire, "that’s remarkable."

Well, no. It isn't remarkable at all. If Success Academies, say, retained all of a starting class to the point of graduation instead of losing more than half, that would be remarkable. And if that wholly retained batch of eighth graders qualified for one of NYC's top high schools, instead of having to just move into another Success Academy berth, that would be remarkable. But it's not what happened. Raising standardized test scores is not the same thing as providing a quality education-- particularly if you drop the educating to focus on weeks and weeks of preparatory drilling. There is nothing remarkable about creaming a select student population and training them to get better test scores to the detriment of everything else.

Of course, there are larger chains than Success. Others reach greater states of hugification, but Whitmire is thankful that "only the best charter networks were allowed to grow to this size." It begs the question who, exactly, is "allowing" the growth, but okay. All of these large chains are, he claims, able to catch these students up with a year-and-a-half of learning for every year in the classroom. Measuring student learning in years? Not an ounce of support that that is actually a real thing.

Whitmire knows the secrets that allow charter chains to scale up. For instance, there's this:

...their ability to attract some of the nation’s brightest college graduates as teachers. Many of those teachers move on to other careers, but they stay long enough to make a difference.

So, TFA temps make charters better (I am curious-- how long exactly is "long enough to make a difference"?)  Sure, they may have little or training, and contribute nothing to the stability of the school. But at least they're cheap, easily replaced, and don't draw a pension. Whitmire has that stability thing covered-- charters are also great because they establish a common classroom culture. In other words, if you have a strong policies and procedures manual, you can plug any warm body into a classroom without making a difference.

Whitmire will trot out the old canard that charter schools are public schools. I've explained what four requirements must be met to earn the name "public" and I don't think the charter chains are meeting any of them (including Success Academy, which went to court to keep their finances secret).

He notes that charters have waiting lists out the whazoo, and cites Success as an example. Interesting choice, given Success's well-documented high-priced recruitment/marketing campaigns.

Whitmire does admit that charter networks don't take as many special education students. He also allows as how charters drain resources from public districts, forcing them to downsize "to meet diminished demand," which is incorrect. Public schools downsize to meet diminished funding, which would be easy if there were, in fact, a diminished demand. But when one kid leaves a classroom a charter, the students left behind still demand a fully resourced classroom.

When a charter kids leaves public school, she takes 100% of her funding with her, but she does not take 100% of the costs that she incurred for the district.

Whitmire proceeds to sign a song of many charter successes. Except they aren't successes. Tennessee's ASD is a mess. He claims that charter vs. public competition in DC benefits students on both sides. And he spends a whole paragraph touting the miracle of New Orleans, which appears to be only a miracle of PR. Like many hotbeds of charterfication, New Orleans' success has been in getting tax dollars directed to corporate pockets. Educating children? Not so much.

And why is it that no charter advocates want to talk about one place that is really working on implementing the New Orleans model? Where are the songs of praise dedicated to One Newark? Could it be that in New Jersey, charteristas have been freed to Do As They Please, and what they've created is a horrible, horrible mess. (If you want a link, read the collected works of Jersey Jazzman-- this is a mess so large that one blog post can't hold it.)

On the home stretch, Whitmire admits that some charters aren't pulling their weight, and he thinks that the authorizers should be all over their chartery butts.

But the growth of high performing single charters, as well as these larger CMOs such as IDEA, KIPP and Uncommon Schools, should be welcomed, not stonewalled or smeared with conspiracy theories about “privatizing” education.

"Conspiracy theory" is a polite and classy way to dismiss somebody as being crazy wrong. But when the state legislature of New York passes special laws requiring New York City schools to hand over real estate to the private company that runs Success Academy so that they can rake in the money (but not account for it, even as they pay their boss a cool half million) -- well, I'm not sure what that is, if not "privatization." I mean, it might come up short of "privatization" because it is being paid for with "public tax dollars," but other than that "splitting of hairs" I'm not sure what Whitmire is "talking about."

And as a last shot "These charters are successfully educating thousands of students destined to fail in traditional neighborhood schools." I'm impressed that we can tell the destinies of these students in alternate universes. I would like to peek over there and see how many of the students left behind in thanks-to-charters underfunded schools would have been destined to succeed more easily. Nor do I understand why charters, with their special destiny-o-vision, send so many students back to public schools.

But that's the whole compendium. Whitmire has sandwiched in just about every piece of marketing copy ever used for charters, while simultaneously answering none of the legitimate criticisms of the modern charter movement. He also manages to avoid the very question he raises-- why exactly is a larger charter chain better than a single charter? More layers of bureaucracy? A central office far away from your child's actual school? He never did tell us why size matters here.

It's a herculean effort, and a good piece to bookmark if you want access to All the Pro-charter Arguments. But for me, I'm going to hold off on the whole embracing thing, thanks.
It's an impressive compendium

Google Hearts TFA in Worst Way

People looking to get a job at Google might first want to spend a few years as a teacher.

That is the lede for what appears to be a serious imitation of the classic Onion send-up of Teach For America. Business Insider has written a glowing portrait of how TFA can be a great stepping-stone to a career at Google.

A company spokesperson tells BI writer Aaron Taube that the tech giant loves people from TFA because the program "requires new graduates to think on their feet and achieve success in a challenging new environment..." Google in fact has a partnership with TFA that allows Googlers to defer a job offer until they've served their two years with TFA. How liberating it must be to walk into that classroom knowing that your real job is already waiting for you.

Taube's interview was with Meghan Casserly, Google head of culture communications, and A. T. McWilliams, TFA alum and current Googler.

"TFA graduates have to coach their students in an environment where motivation isn't always a given ... and solve very complex problems that require patience, perseverance and commitment — things we really value at Google," said Casserly. "It's difficult to find talented professionals with this kind of intense experience at such an early stage in their career."

McWilliams offers his own experience as an example. He was placed in Brooklyn (in one of the "coveted" TFA openings).  

There, McWilliams learned a handful of skills that he says have helped make him more effective at his job at Google, where he became a full-time member of the company's New York corporate communications team this past summer.

Taube actually frames TFA's infamous five weeks of training (hey-- how much do you need to be a teacher, really) as a plus. It forced McWilliams to learn on the job and come up with creative solutions. See, if he had actually been trained to be a teacher, he would have wasted his time just implementing proven professional instructional techniques, and lord knows he wouldn't have gotten any business training out of that.

It's an astonishing article. There's this sentence--


Perhaps most importantly, TFA forced him to think long and hard about how people learn, and to use that knowledge to solve difficult problems. 

Followed, without a trace of irony by this phrase--


During his two years in the classroom

Yes, two whole years of long, hard thinking. Oh, the hard thinking. It must have been exhausting, but worthwhile because it built him some big, strong thinky parts. I know that in my decades of teaching, two years was about all I spent thinking about how students learn (of course, I had the disadvantage of taking courses about that in teacher school).


McWilliams says that all of this experience will help him with managing people, although he is not in charge of anyone yet, and I am wondering why the heck not?? He was a 2012 grad, which means he finished his two years about four months ago, or at least triple the time he needed to become an awesometastic teacher-ish guy. If it takes five weeks to make a teacher, surely Google can turn him into a Leader of Men in four months!

"At Teach for America, you're not only learning how to teach someone else, you're also learning what factors help someone learn the best," McWilliams says.

Oh, for the love of God!! You know what else you might just accidentally do occasionally at Teach for America-- you might take your head out of your own rectal cavity and TEACH SOME CHILDREN!! Or did you think that all those children in your classroom were just gathered together so that you could have an educational experience to better prepare you for your real career. Do you think those children got up every morning and thought, "Boy, I just hope that today I can help Mr. McWilliams become the best Googler in the whole world! I just want him to be really succesful!" Is that what you think was going on??


Sigh. It is McWilliams who has the last word in the article. "I think the Teach for America experience is really applicable in any place that requires you to be smart and creative," he says. Because, yes, that's what TFA is apparently supposed to do-- provide college grads with an experience that they can apply to their real jobs later. Those children are just your own personal ladder to success.

I often discuss TFA as if it is dismissive of teaching as a profession, that it belittles the whole idea of teaching. But this is actually worse, because teaching isn't even on the radar in this article. It's just one more life experience for a college grad who's just passing through, unable to see the children for all the visions of Googlebucks. Sorry, Onion. Real life has passed you up.

An Open Letter to My Alma Mater Re: TFA

Dear Allegheny College:

I was reading your latest alumni email with its nice batch of "Hey, you're great" quotes. It was nice in the usual boostery way, but when I saw an endorsement from Teach for America, it brought me up short. I'm sad to see Allegheny link itself to TFA. Let me explain.

I came to Allegheny in 1975. I enrolled because the school was not too far from home in NW PA, it was a comfortable size, it was a liberal arts school, and most importantly, it offered a stand-out non-traditional education program.

Let me deliver a rough reminder of how that program worked, because I doubt that many folks there remember it. My major was actually English-- Allegheny believed that Step 1 in becoming a classroom teacher was being an "expert" in your subject area. When it was time for student teaching, I had taken only a few ed courses, but like my cohort, I lived in the college's block of rooms in downtown Cleveland, where the college maintained a field office. As we student taught, we took methods courses at that field office in the evenings (down a floor and up the hall), including a course that we took from the professor who supervised our field work. He saw us in the classroom for about one to three hours about once a week, while we student taught in urban districts that challenged our small town selves to the max.

About two days after I had my diploma, I was in classes for my MA in Education, balanced with looking for a teaching job within forty miles of that field office. I needed to be there because the same professor who saw me through student teaching would supervise me through my first year. The state of Ohio issued a provisional teaching certificate, and while my school district considered me a teacher, the college considered me an intern. I took courses at that same field office, and was observed, less often, by the same man who had watched me student teach and who was familiar with my style, my strengths and weaknesses, my ongoing issues.

Few teacher prep programs provided such an intense level of subject matter study combined with serious mentoring, support and methods instruction that is directly responsive to the real situations the teacher is facing. Allegheny did not provide a traditional teacher background; it provided something far more.

So how the heck did you end up in bed with Teach for America?

I suspect that you may have been attracted by the social justice sales pitch. Teach for America has cycled through several versions of what its mission is supposed to be, but they have all been centered on some vision of social justice. And yet none of those visions have been rooted in reality.

Fix the teacher shortage? There isn't one, actually, and in places like Chicago, New Jersey and Cleveland, actual teachers are being shown the door to make room for TFA recruits. In New Orleans the district actually lost a lawsuit for summarily firing 7,500 teachers, many of whom were replaced with TFA bodies.

Improve high-poverty schools? One of the problems of high-poverty schools is a lack of stability. How exactly does it help to bring in people who have no intention of sticking around for more than a few years?

Teacher diversity recruitment? Studies of the teacher pool show that we do not have a diversity recruitment problem. Minority teachers are actually entering the field at higher rates than white teachers. The problem is that they are also leaving the field at a faster rate than white teachers. And remember those thousands of unjustly fired NOLA teachers? Three quarters of those were black.

There are additional problems with the TFA model. Most notable is the frontal assault on professionalism. Allegheny has been a pre-professional college for decades. Most of my fellow freshmen were pre-med, and the ones who weren't pre-med were pre-law. I can't imagine Allegheny ever supporting a program predicated on the notion that with five weeks of training, any undergrad would be good to go for providing legal or medical services out in the world. Allegheny's teacher program only allowed undergrads to become teachers with the understanding that they would be heavily supported, carefully supervised, and required to complete graduate-level studies of education within five years.

But TFA is founded on the notion that teaching isn't really so hard-- any smart person can basically walk into a classroom and do just fine. This is turn has dovetailed with the agenda of those who want to turn teaching jobs into high-turnover, short-term, easily replaced and therefor low-paying positions. Additionally, TFA buys into and sells the notion that the only measure of educational achievement is standardized test scores, as if raising those scores is the only important work that a teacher does.

Why would Allegheny support a program that claims that any reasonably bright college grad with no educational training beyond a five week summer session is ready to fly solo in a classroom?

Admittedly, fair Allegheny, you and I have had words yonder on the hill, most especially back when you gutted the education program that produced me. There were some nice-sounding words about ending one of the most forward-thinking and sound teacher training programs in the country, but the bottom line appeared to be the bottom line-- it was an expensive program to run (the word on Cynic Street was also that teacher alumni don't contribute the kind of big bucks that doctor alumni and lawyer alumni do).

TFA may well have started out with the best of intentions, but today they have become the shock troops in the push to dismantle public education and de-professionalize teaching. I am very sad to see Allegheny on TFA's list of top supporters, and even sadder to see Allegheny bragging about that connection. Read some of the TFA critics, such as former TFAer Gary Rubinstein, or look at why Pittsburgh schools terminated their TFA contract. It's an unfortunate choice, a bad choice, and I urge you to do your homework and drop your connection to the TFA program.

Sadly, I have no large piles of money to threaten to not give you, but I would gladly talk to campus leadership about this issue further if anyone wishes to do so. My alma mater, you can do better than this.

Sincerely,

Peter Greene, '79

TNTP Proposes New Tenure Plan

TNTP, the Reimagine Teaching people and generators of plenty of fancy-looking reformy nonsense, have some more ideas for the post-Vergara world. They have decided to stake out a middle ground on the tenure wars, claiming that we don't need to eliminate it-- just fix it. And to that end, they have eight proposals to create "a more balanced system." It's all in this very fancy "paper," which I am now going to "respond to" in this "blog post."

1. Lengthen the Tryout Period

Awarding tenure after two years is too fast, say the reformsters. Let's make it five years.

Well, let me blunt. If your administrator can't tell whether someone's a keeper or not after two years, your administrator is a dope.

But why five years? Could it be because that will guarantee a more steady turnover, allowing us to pursue our goal of fewer (or none) career teachers, thereby reducing the costs of our school business (goodbye pay raises, and goodbye pension costs). As always, I'm really waiting for fans of the longer tryout period to wrap up their argument with, "...and that's why nobody should hire TFA short-timers ever."

2. Link Tenure to Strong Performance

Today, the only performance requirement for earning tenure is not being fired. In most districts, any teacher who remains on the payroll for a given amount of time is automatically tenure.

First of, depending on what you think constitutes being fired, this is basically saying that the only way to not get tenure is by not getting tenure, which is either very zen or very dumb. At any rate, I can tell you that my own small district has let teachers go prior to awarding tenure. But look-- there's a hugely weird hole in this argument. If your problem is that your district doesn't get rid of teachers during the years they don't have tenure, what possible good will it do to have more years of teachers not having tenure. If your administrators are too dopey to let poor tenureless teachers go, how will you fix that with more tenureless teachers??

Teachers should earn tenure only after showing they can consistently help their students make significant academic progress.

How dopey is this statement? Let me count the ways

1) Do you seriously want to claim that when it comes to your seven-year-old child, the only thing you want out of her teacher is to drag better test scores out of your offspring? That's it? Are you saying that when parents, particularly parents of small children, use the phrase "great teacher" that has no meaning beyond "teacher who got my child to score higher on those tests."

2) You have no idea how to tell if a teacher consistently helped students make significant academic progress. What you mean is, "teacher got standardized test scores to generate, via some invalid disproven VAM method, numbers that look good."

3. Make Tenure Revocable

"Teachers who earn poor evaluation ratings for two years in a row should not be allowed to keep tenure." So this suggestion means either A) tenure should not actually be tenure, which is absurd, or B) teachers with tenure should still be fireable, which is already the case. Next?

4. Focus Hearings on Students' Interests

This one starts out rather bizarrely. The argument is that while "just cause" hearings say they mean the district has to prove a good cause for dismissal, in practice, "districts have been held to a much higher standard." You would think a fancy thinky tank style paper might offer some support for that assertion, but you would be wrong.

TNTP claims that arbitrators often consider the possibility of remediation as a factor, and TNTP says that's like requiring courts to convict only if they think the defendant is both guilty and likely to  repeat. It's an odd complaint, given that the justice system is just riddled with places where punishment and rehabilitation wrestle for the upper hand. From the juvenile justice system (predicated strictly on rehab) up to three strikes laws (too many repeats and the punishment increases), the justice system is absolutely loaded with considerations of both rehab potential and recidivism. But TNTP is in a hurry to draw a line between not raising student standardized test scores and becoming a convicted criminal, so there we are.

TNTP wants the hearing to focus on the potential harm to students if the teacher went back to the classroom. So, um, wait-- the arbitrator should consider how likely it is that the teacher will do a bad job again? As the argument ouroboros disappears into its own mouth, TNTP does note that superintendents should come down hard on any principal abusing the process through incompetence or bad intent.

5. Make Hearings More Efficient

Quicker is what we're looking for here. I don't think anybody at all disagrees with the notion of speedy hearings. "I'm so happy that I get to wait even longer to find out what's going to happen to my entire professional career," said no teacher ever. TNTP wants hearings to take a day, because screw complicated situations or a need for either side to present all of their information. But keep the proceedings aimed at producing speedy results? I think we can all get on board with that in principle.

6. Hire Independent Arbitrators

Arbitrators depend on school districts and teachers' unions for their employment, and so might be inclined to keep everybody happy. TNTP suggests using hearing officers such a judges to hear cases, because those guys never come with any biases, and because the court system is bored and empty with hardly any other work to do.

TNTP's complaint is not without merit, but as with much of the tenure argument, it assumes that unions have a real interest in preserving the jobs of bad teachers. That's generally not true. Teachers' unions have an interest in preserving the process, in making sure that there's no precedent by which a district can fire a teacher just because, you know, everybody knows he ought to be fired. The union's interest is in making sure that the district does its homework. That's all. It's not unheard of for unions to be quietly happy that they lost one and that Mr. McAwfulteach is out of there. But the process must be preserved, because contrary to reformster lore, there are not a gazillion bad teachers clogging schools nationwide.

7. Stop Tolerating Abuse and Sexual Misconduct

Well, other than framing this as a "When did you stop beating your wife" fallacy, there's nothing to argue with here.

8. Lower the Professional Stakes for Struggling Teachers

We should be able to fire teachers without taking away their licenses. That way, presumably, principals won't be so reluctant to fire teachers, and they will do it more often because they won't be "concerned about ending the careers of teachers who might perform well in other circumstances."

Which is an odd phrase to throw in there. I'm just trying to imagine a situation in which a tenured teacher deserves to be fired from one school, but would be a great addition at some other school. I'm having trouble.

Unless what we're hypothetically fixing here is the problem of high-poverty schools being career-enders under the reformster system. Because if you teach in a high-poverty school, you will have students whose standardized test scores are low, which means you will be judged to be ineffective, which means you will not get tenure or, perhaps, you will be fired for being ineffective. Given all that, nobody who understood the system would ever take a job in a high-poverty school ever. But if they knew that after they were inevitably fired, they could still get a job somewhere else, that would make it more appealing, maybe?

While TNTP's proposal has some worthwhile components, it still contains the basic outline of a system that throws out tenure and replaces it with a teacher employment system based on test results. That serves the interests of nobody (not teachers, students, taxpayers, citizens, or parents) except for folks who want to reimagine teaching as the sort of job that never becomes a lifetime career.

TFA 4.0 & Minority Teachers

Teach for America is nothing if not flexible.

In the oft-told tale, TFA was a targeted response to a specific problem-- inner-city schools that could not find enough qualified staff to fill their teacher positions. TFA would create an American teacher version of the Peace Corps, making it cool to put in a couple of years in a classroom before heading on to your real job.

In fact, TFA 2.0 came fairly quickly on the heels of Original Flavor-- logging some time in a classroom as a TFAer was a good stepping stone into the education management industry, a nice supplement to your business degree and a nice resume builder for people headed for government work or the ever-growing field of edubusinesses (charters, etc).

But that Fill in the Classroom Blanks mission was over. In Vox last week, Dana Goldstein was even giving Wendy Kopp credit for helping solve the teachers shortage crisis. You remember the teacher shortage crisis that happened...um... some time?

At any rate, the crisis was averted. But TFA did not announce "Mission Accomplished" and head off. No, instead they morphed into TFA 3.0, which on reflection was probably their least nimble move. The organization was already losing its pretty shine as people realized that, in places like Chicago and New Orleans, TFA wasn't merely filling teaching positions, but shoving the original actually-trained-in-teacher-school occupants of those positions aside.

The message of TFA 3.0 was that they were here to save education. The crisis was no longer a shortage of teachers, but a shortage of teachers who didn't suck. In ways that began to leak regularly as disenchanted recruits dropped out of TFA, the organization was pushing the message that public school teachers had just failed miserably to do their jobs and what was needed was a cadre of the Best and the Brightest to get in there, to rescue the children that nobody but TFA teachers could rescue.

TFA 3.0 was not a winning marketing strategy. The organization looked like a bunch of drive-by do-gooders, at best charity tourists heading uptown for a resume and self-esteem boost, at worst condescending White Man's Burden colonizers. TFA 3.0 was what the Onion famously lampooned in a piece that continues to be passed around on twitter.

TFA read the writing on the wall and started morphing into TFA 4.0.

They would try to be less arrogant. They would entertain the possibility that five weeks of summer camp were not sufficient for prepping inner city teachers. And they would identify a new problem to address-- minority teachers.

Somebody did their homework on this one. This is the year that white students make up less than half the student population nation wide, and yet, the makeup of teaching staffs have headed in the other direction. Some of the stats are mind-boggling-- California has a 73% non-white student population, but teachers are only 29% non-white. And no state comes close to coming close.

This counts as a real issue. Students ought to see some people who look like them in their school buildings (and the issue extends to gender-- the US teaching force is now overwhelmingly female).

And so TFA 4.0 is now a group devoted to the mission of getting non-white teachers into the classroom. They have promoted the new version of themselves well. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center Teaching Tolerance project has hired on a TFA grad to praise the new TFA. You can read the article here, but read the comments as well to see just how spirited the defense of TFA 4.0 gets.

Teacher diversity is not a bad cause to fight for. But it underlines the true nature of TFA. This kind of shifting about is not what a service organization does. If cancer is cured today, the American Cancer Society does not announce tomorrow that they will now lead the fight against obesity. No, this kind of shift is what a business does. If the product stream from our old merchandise starts to dry up, we find a new thing to sell so we can stay in business. If TFA wants to be a business, that's fine. Just don't pretend to be anything else.

The other problem with TFA and its spirited recruitment of non-white people to teach is that it addresses the wrong part of the problem. Minority teachers are actually entering the profession at a higher rate than white teachers-- but they are also leaving at a far higher rate. Nobody really knows why, though guesses include the idea that non-white teachers choose poverty-affected schools and the general chaos, lack of resources, and absence of autonomy to deal with their work all combine to chase them away.

But the big takeaway? Recruitment is not the problem. Retention is.

Unfortunately, retention issues have never been part of TFA's business model, which is centered on the Just A Few Years model of a teaching career. Given their model, TFA would be the absolute last people we would want working on the problem of retaining minority teachers. Emily Chiariello, the Teaching Tolerance TFA hire says this

More recently, TFA has focused on diversity and made deliberate changes to its recruiting techniques. First on their “who we look for” list as characteristic of successful teachers and desirable in applicants is “[a] deep belief in the potential of all kids and a commitment to do whatever it takes to expand opportunities for students, often informed by experience in low-income communities and an understanding of the systemic challenges of poverty and racism.” 

But changing recruiting isn't the issue, other than it might help to start tweaking the system so that it's checking for people who will be lifetime teachers instead of two-year temps. And that's teachers-- not educational paper pushers of some sort.

If TFA wants to really make a go of helping to solve this problem, they need to look at preparing and supporting those teachers so that they can build a foundation of success that will carry them into a teaching career. But that would make the distance from TFA 1.0 to TFA 4.0 an awfully huge gap.

The lack of non-white, male teachers in the teaching force is a real issue, and it demands attention. But TFA 4.0 is not the answer.