Zephyr Teachout's Thank You Letter

Further proof that Teachout gets it. Here's the email that arrived today (I gave money to the campaign, so I'm on the list). I'm just putting it here in its entirety because it's a class act. And if you'd like a nice analysis of the results, read this piece for the New Yorker.

Thank you.

Last night, we exceeded all of the pundits expectations, keeping Andrew Cuomo at barely 60% of the vote, and won 24 New York counties outright. In three months, with no money for TV or even mailers, we punctured the illusion that Andrew Cuomo is a popular incumbent Democrat.

Tim and I want to thank the teachers and parents, the fracktivists, the immigrant rights activists, the public employees, and all New Yorkers who shared our vision.

You have been heard.

You were part of a people-led, inspirational campaign, waged against all odds against an establishment prince. And by doing so, you empowered countless others to see possibilities where they might only have seen obstacles.

We are going to take a few days off, but we are not done. This campaign demonstrated the rise of a new force in our politics, the rise of fearless 21st century Democrats who believe in #AllofUs, and are willing to fight for it.

To fight, we need to shed our fear. When the Moreland scandal broke, the silence among Democratic elected officials was striking, but not surprising. Albany is in the grips of politics of fear.
I think what we've shown here is that its alright to speak up. Democrats don't need to be scared anymore. When the Governor is pushing tax cuts for the wealthy or trying to cut education, the Mayor and other leaders ought to stand up and call him out. It can't just be the advocacy groups --- elected officials have a duty to criticize the de facto leader of the Party when that leader is no longer advancing our values.

We ran to win, but this campaign was also about speaking truth to power. Our state hasn't seen more truth delivered to power since the outbreak of the Occupy movement three years ago. Listening to you, it's clear that we've broken the logjam. I can't wait to see how it all unfolds now that so many have found their voice.

Consider the wins we've achieved since we started, three months ago:

• Two days ago, for the first time ever--in a campaign stop--Governor Cuomo talked about income inequality and why it is a critical issue.
• Because of this campaign, Andrew Cuomo has promised to back Democrats for the State Senate, and pass a comprehensive public campaign finance system. We can continue to use our voices to hold him to that promise.
• Andrew Cuomo was boasting in campaign literature that he had increased school funding.
• Yesterday, at the polling booth, after years of silence, Andrew Cuomo promised to visit a Pennsylvania fracking site. We can continue to use our voices to hold him to that promise.
• We made cable mergers and monopolization a campaign issue.
• Because of our campaign, Governor Cuomo is now actively campaigning on the Dream Act and has said he will put his full weight behind it. This commitment would not have happened without our campaign.
• We held the line that we will not compromise on a woman’s right to choose. Governor Cuomo has followed our lead and committed to actually fight to win the full 10 point plan. We can continue to use our voices to hold him to that promise.
• We took an unequivocal stance in support of marijuana decriminalization. In response to our campaign, Governor Cuomo has committed that he too will support marijuana decriminalization.

Every person who carried a petition, or wrote a letter to the editor, or voted for us today should be proud that our campaign won these commitments. All of us should be proud of the long-lasting impact this campaign has had, and will have.

Some people have asked me why I decided to run, and when I made that decision. It happened when we saw that no public campaign financing was passed in Albany. "They" said no one would care about it, but in the face of what just happened, I want all incumbents to understand there is a big electoral cost to refusing to push for publicly funded elections.

I know I will not rest until we ban fracking, fully commit to renewables, end common core and fully commit to full public funding of schools, end anti-immigrant fear and commit to New York state citizenship, and end tax giveaways to the rich and fully commit to a more equal, open democracy and economy. I won't be satisfied until we start breaking up the new monopolies that are choking our economy and democracy.

We have seen through this campaign that the political system does respond to pressure. We have seen that when you raise the issues, when you speak truth to power, when you rely on honest and grass roots democracy, the system moves. These must be our principles going forward. We have a come a long way in this campaign, we did not make it to the top of the mountain, but together we all see the bright light that guides our vision. As I said at the WFP convention, quoting Maya Angelou: "We must confess that we are the possible."

The possibilities are just opening up.

Again -- thank you.

Zephyr Teachout

Common Core 2.0?

Over at the Washington Post. Lindsey Layton is reporting on a survey by the Education Commission of the States about the Common Core. The ECS bills itself as a non-partisan research group, headed by a different governor each year, with a history stretching back to mid-sixties. They've produced a handy list that shows all the cool new names states have come up with for their states standards.

Layton posits that this is Common Core 2.0-- the same old wine in brand new skins. Nineteen states have found bold new ways to hide the fact that they are signed onto the Core Standards, because it turns out that-- gasp-- the Core have become political kryptonite (sorry about that, ex-future-President Jeb Bush).

An example of CCSS 2.0 in action

I can tell you a little about how this is playing out in Pennsylvania, because just this week, Governor Tom "Uphill Election Battle" Corbett issued a press release in which he sternly intones that he will continue on his nearly-completed mission to chase the Common Core out of the Keystone State.

“Though Common Core began as a state-led initiative to ensure our public schools met the educational standards needed in the 21^st century economy, the process has been overly influenced by the federal government,” Gov. Corbett said.  “Common Core has become nothing more than a top-down takeover of the education system.  It is nothing more than Obamacare for education.”

Not entirely accurate history there, but when you're politically distancing yourself from something, you sometimes have to be both pro-active and retro-active. But fear not.

“Pennsylvania has a long tradition of local control of public schools,” Gov. Corbett continued. “Our children deserve every educational advantage, and I want to thank the educators and the State Board for their hard work in getting us to this point. I am now asking the State Board to continue the process we began at the start of my term and to ensure that any final influence of the national Common Core State Standards is eradicated from Pennsylvania.” 

Yes, this process of eradicating the Core has been going on for three years now, I hear. 

How has the separation been progressing?  

It's true-- in PA we have been rigorously pursuing the Pennsylvania Core Standards (which, up until a year or two ago, were called the Pennsylvania Common Core Standards), which are totally different from the CCSS. Let's check some examples.

CC.1.2.11-12.A
Determine and analyze the relationship between two or more central ideas of a text, including the development and interaction of the central ideas; provide an objective summary of the test.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.2
Determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the text.

Different as night and later that same night. (The PA Core standard is first there). Let's try again.

CC.1.2.11-12.E
Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument, including whether the structure makes points clear, convincing and engaging.


CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.5
Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument, including whether the structure makes points clear, convincing, and engaging.

If you want to play this game yourself, you can find the PA Core Standards here and the CCSS here.

What else have you got, Tom?

One of the fun things about declaring your state independent from the Common Core is that you can take credit for things you don't even have to do. "It's just standards, not a curriculum, and local control stays in place," is always fun as an apologia for the Core, but when you're pretending to dump the Core, you can declare that this represents a change.

It is important to note that Pennsylvania’s standards do not mandate curriculum, teaching methods, materials or instructional strategies to be used in the classroom.  These decisions are made by local school officials in consultation with parents and the community.

See how cool that is? Instead of pretending that these are features of the Core, we can pretend that we are installing them as a change from the Core. 

Testing?

In PA we are also refusing to go with a national test. It's worth noting that several years ago we were badly burned by an attempt to handle our standardized testing online. That week-long fiasco ought to be burned into the memories of at least a few Harrisburg bureaucrats. 

So we take our own Keystone Exam, on paper. Now, where the Keystone comes from is a bit of a mystery. The official word is that it was produced by the PA Department of Education, and the data seems to come by way of Data Recognition Corporation.

Maybe we do create the tests in house. But I do know that I sat through a training in which the trainer used materials from the PARCC tests, and we were told, with a state ed department in the room, that the PARCC material would work fine for our training purposes. Not a surprise- if the PA Core standards are cloned from the CCSS, then the testing must follow the same pattern as PARCC or SBA.

Other things that aren't happening

Nobody from the state and nobody who watches the state on educational issues is telling local districts, "Just wait up until we can see what radical changes the governor is going to make to the standards."Nobody seems to think that we don't already know what we need to know to move forward. And nobody is saying, "Be careful not to look at any Common Core materials because they will be totally incompatible with the Pennsylvania standards."

Also, no threatening letters from Arne Duncan saying, "Youse guys are playing wit fire. Put down that eraser and rewrite pen, and just pick up the Core." No, nobody on the national scene seems to think that the Core's hard work is in jeopardy here in the Keystone State.

Does Common Core 2.0 work?

I cannot tell you how many of my conservative friends and acquaintances have been cyber-passing about copies of Corbett's message with their own cries of, "Hurray! At last the governor is going to do the right thing." He's taking heat from his own party for "undercutting sound policy" So far I've seen no analysis to suggest that he's getting a boost from this, but Corbett is an incumbent whose prospects are not great for re-election. Now he's become one more example of how running from the Core-- sort of-- is becoming a popular election strategy.

Pennsylvania is just one example of this sort of shenanigans in action. The moral of the story--as I've told my conservative friends-- is read the fine print. Putting new lipstick on a pig is no more transformative than the original coat of Revlon was. Do not become distracted by an argument about the relative merits of Midnight Blue and Rapscallion Red; just check to see if the beast oinks.
It probably will. Common Core 2.0 will still eventually find its way to a platter where, apple in its mouth, it will be far more at home by a relaxing beach party than in any of America's schools.

  

Arne Takes Search for Clues on Road

Arne Duncan took a three-or-so day swing through the south, and along the way her reminded us about the many things he doesn't really get. Let's take a look at what comes up in coverage by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Not Answering Questions

AJC.com reported that in a meeting with a small, select audience, Arne was asked an excellent question by a student:

Noting how often Duncan cited the critical need for “effective teachers” during the roundtable, the student asked, “What does that really mean? How do we define effective teaching?”

Arne's answer included the observation that teaching is hard. Then he moved on to the notion that it involved head and heart. If you teach chemistry, you need to know stuff about it, he noted. But he also noted that the teacher who most "impacted" (gah) his life knew stuff, but cared about him. Did Arne address how the various forms of teacher evaluation required by the DOE include heart? Did he explain that Washington State lost its waiver because its teacher evaluation system did not properly evaluate the heart of the teachers? Sadly, Arne veered off from that to the old talking point of multiple measures, but did not explain which of the multiple measures might be useful for determining how much heart the tin teachers of the education forest are displaying.

Mirroring Students

No talking point tour would be complete without a mention of how the teaching force does not mirror the majority-minority of our teacher population. So Arne got that one out there.

A student asked how we can get more black and latino men to pick up the challenge, and Arne worked his way sideways into the real answer, which is that we don't need to up recruiting-- we need to improve retention.

What would keep more non-white male teachers in the field? More money isn't really the problem, says Arne. It's mentors, support and good administrators. Might be interesting to consider how much "good support" is a function of fully funding certain schools, and how much retaining good administrators might also be connected to schools that have enough resources for a leader to feel like she could do her job. But Arne's not going there. Instead, he's going to blame colleges that deliver unprepared teachers to the classroom (but he's NOT going to call out certain alternative programs that deliver "teachers" with only a few weeks of training under their belts).

Credits

“You give me the poorest kids in the toughest community, put them in a great early childhood program, great elementary and middle schools and great high schools with AP courses, and I am very optimistic about that child’s chances in life,” he said.

Give him credit for staying the course. Poverty is cured by pre-K education and lots of AP classes. It's as simple as that.

Duncan rued the lack of urgency around education, starting with a Congress that treats education as an expense rather than an investment.

I'll give him credit for this. That's actually a decent line. And I also rue the lack of urgency around education, because it leads to the notion that we might as well let a bunch of amateurs tinker around with it.

Just Plain Wrong

The AJC obligingly buries Arne's dumbest statements far down the article.

“As a nation, we are going to educate our way to a better economy. Companies are going to go to where the skilled workers are. Hopefully, it is here in the United States.” If not, he said, America will lose skilled jobs to India, China or Korea.

Really? So, the loss of jobs to India and China is not about their workers great skill in willingly accepting teeny-tiny wages for work in unregulated industrial sites? Again, kudos for the consistency involved in insisting that having more trained and educated people in this country will magically cause jobs to appear. Because everyone who knows an American in their twenties has heard the heartwarming story of how college graduates  over the past several years have walked out into a world of employers saying, "What!? You have a college degree?!! Wait just a second while we create a job just for you!!"

Then someone asked what a young teacher (why "young"? I have no idea) should do when confronted with students operating below grade level. Can you tell what's special about Arne's answer?

 “A lot of kids below grade level haven’t been challenged in the past. Having high standards for kids who are one to two years behind is exactly what they need. They need more time, they need after-school programs, they need work on Saturday and Sunday and they need summers. But if you have a class of 25 kids and 17 of them two or three years behind and that is what you are getting every single year, you have to look downriver.”

No, it's not that he proposes a bunch of bogus explanations for why the child is behind. Because, yes, students who have trouble learning simply need to be pushed harder. Also, students who are short need to be challenged to grow taller-- maybe put their meals on the top shelf of a bookshelf. And when faced with something that's hard for them, who doesn't dream of devoting all their spare time to doing it some more?

But no-- it's none of that. What's special about the answer is that it doesn't actually answer the question at all. When you have students are behind, go look at their previous teachers. Maybe give 'em the stinkeye. Because that will totally fix the students' current academic problems.

It may be that Arne, as NEA-president-elect Lily Garcia suggests, sincere and well-meaning, but he's so intensely and consistently wrong. Congratulations, Atlanta.

Adding Insult to Injury

It's a fair question. There have been plenty of reform movement imposed on education-- why is the current wave of reforminess evoking such a severe reaction among teachers.

It's not just the injuries that NCLB, RttT and Waiverism (RttT Lite) have inflicted on education. It's the insults that have gone with them.

First, there's the professional insult.

Imagine a family member is having car trouble. You're a trained, experienced mechanic, but instead of asking you for help, your family member calls your sibling, the butterfingered one who has never done anything with a car but drive it. That's more than just a snub-- that's an insult to your professional skills.

That sort of insult has been the story of reforminess every step of the way. Really Important People decided that it was time to bring some standardization to education in this country, and so they made certain NOT to call on the large body of professional educators that work their whole lives in the field. And when teacher dared to speak up about brilliant reformy bits like the Common Core, they were dismissed, as if their professional acumen was a detriment to a discussion of American public education.

That's a huge professional insult. It's the kind of thing a wise person would never, ever do to someone whose cooperation they needed. Think about it. If you need your boss's support to accomplish a project at work, the last thing you ever say to your boss is, "No, I don't want any input from you. There's nothing you know that could possibly be any help." Lord, no. Even if you plan to ignore every piece of advice that boss gives, you still make your boss feel included in the process so that you can get the necessary cooperation.

So the professional insult of reform is not just a slam on teachers' ability and experience, but a sideways statement that teachers are not important to education, that their cooperation will not be needed to make all these nifty reformy gimcracks run properly.

So, a double professional insult.

Then, the personal insults.

But reformsters went beyond the professional insults. With the various "accountability" systems, they have repeatedly made one point abundantly clear-- they consider teachers to be terrible human beings.

Yes, it may look like teachers have devoted themselves to a relatively low-paying often thankless job because of some sort of devotion to the ideals of American public education, but reformsters know the truth-- teachers are lazy slackers who don't particularly like children and only took a teaching job because they felt certain they'd never have to actually do it.

Tenure, we are told, must be destroyed because teachers will only do a good job if they know that they can be fired at any time. If we have job security, the reasoning goes, we will kick back and do nothing, because apparently that is our aspiration as teachers.

High stakes testing must be used, we were told, because schools have been lying to parents about how well students are doing, because schools are all about being big lying liars.

The accountability systems are all built around one simple premise-- that teachers will not do a decent job unless threatened and co-erced and outed to the public through regular revealing of our scores. Without the threat of job loss and the prospect of public humiliation, teachers would crawl under their desks and let chaos reign. One can only conclude from these systems that teachers are the most indolent, incompetent, unmotivated, uncommitted people who ever walked the earth.

So there you have the source of the extra anger over and above the anger about the dismantling of American public education. But please keep in mind, teachers, that as we are being routinely insulted both professionally and personally, reformsters would like us to respond in dulcet, measured tones of civility. And please don't be insulting. That would be rude.

John Oliver, Student Debt, and the Edubiz Marketplace

I really have nothing to add to this, but boy do you need to see it.

.
Okay, I have one thing to add to it. He actually missed the part where the fed bailed out Corinthian.

This is what twisted market forces look like when they hit education. When the government sets up a system with the main function of using students to funnel loan dollars to education based businesses, this is what you get. You are using students as a conduit where they allow the feds and banks to channel big money to schools, generating a profit by charging the conduits interest! The providing of an education is completely secondary to the providing of a big payday for the corporations involved.

Is it going to look any different in the K-12 world? Of course not-- choice systems are a way to funnel tax dollars to edubiz corporations. The only difference is that we're not making the people who use vouchers pay for the privilege. Yet.

But the big fat student loan packages that are being shoved through various students in need are simply another form of voucher. If I were a voucher fan, drooling over the prospect of the day when I could shop around an all-charter, all-private world of schools, I would take a good long hard look at what's going on in the world of college finance today. And I would have a good hard think about what these kinds of market forces, twisted by crony capitalism and government money-funneling, would do in that world.

As we like to say in cyberia, if you aren't paying, then you're the product. And that means your interests are not paramount. But here we see revealed the great humungus fallacy in the idea of a free market school system. Fans of that systems imagine "I will be the customer, so I will be in charge." Brzzzzt! Wrong. The customers are the schools, profiting through you. You will have no more market power than a wallet.

The College Bias

It's not new and it's not hard to explain. After all, virtually all teachers are college educated. We're pre-disposed to a collegiate bias.

Add to that the correlation between more education and more money, and add to that the manner in which DC (by way of CCSS) has institutionalized college as The Goal, and it's no surprise that in education, we have a decidedly pro-college bias.

In many high schools, it's built into the curriculum. College prep courses are for the smart kids. Non-college prep courses are for the not-so-smart ones. Non-college prep courses are not supposed to be anybody's deliberate choice, but a sort of academic safety net one falls into if one is not capable enough to hack it in the college prep classes. Sometimes we are extremely explicit about this. In her article for NEA (Ten Soul Saving Tips for New Teachers), Susan Anglada Bartley offers this tip:

8. Start with the assumption that all students wish to pursue a college or post-high school education. If you walk into your room assuming that some kids can make it to college, while others can never walk that path, they will know. Resentments will build. They will feel discriminated against and they won’t listen to you. You will lose their trust. But if you chose to empower them all by sharing resources and encouraging them all toward college, they will appreciate the opportunity. Shine the light. If you are in a high poverty environment, remember this second mantra: As a teacher, I am a guide toward a brighter future. 

Well, no. Bartley, like way too many people, has conflated "won't go to college" with "be a big dumb loser at life."

I teach an honors class at my school, but I also teach our non-college prep class. I do not start the year by telling them that they can totally go to college (and thereby imply that they should want to); what I tell them is that they are in the class designed for people headed toward life "out there" and other students in that other class are headed for college. And both are equally valid and valuable.

I know, I know. All those charts showing that the more education you get, the more money you have (of course, articles touting that data rarely ask if it might be the other way around). And my President exhorts students to dream big and shoot for college. And I sent my own kids to college, and felt strongly enough about it that I'll be paying for it for years to come.

But at the same time, I am troubled by our attitude about blue collar work, our tendency to treat good solid labor as if it's some sort of bronze medal, proof that you weren't good enough to come in first place.

As Mike Rowe said repeatedly, these are the people who make civilized life possible for the rest of us. We devalue them with our low regard and with our lack of honor and attention. And we especially devalue them by telling our young people, "Oh, gracious, no. You don't want to become one of those."

We try to justify it as steering students away from types of work that are drying up and disappearing, and yet while we are still cranking out a gazillion college professor wannabe's for the two remaining college teaching jobs (part time) left in the country, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a ten million person shortfall in trained laborers by 2020. If you prefer anecdotal support, I can tell you that my brother, who manages a medium-sized industrial operation, is always looking for welders, because there aren't enough. I'd rather we didn't, but if you must measure success in dollars, I can tell you that good welders make good money.

And job (and money) prospects aside, we are perfectly willing to tell students to pursue their dreams no matter what. We tell them to go for it-- unless their dream is working at a modest labor job and hunting and fishing and sitting on the front porch.

It's not just that we have to stop pushing the notion that getting some sort of post-secondary degree is the only way to make a living. We have got to stop pushing the notion that people who get a college education are somehow better people, people more likely to win at life. My non-college classes over the years have included their share of students who are smart, hard-working, and decent men and women of considerable integrity. I have watched them grow up and take their places as productive citizens, loving parents, and fine members of this community. I would never, ever, tell them that they failed to "dream big" by going to college, and consequently their lives are meager and small.

And yes-- there are children who need to escape their circumstances, grow bigger than the world that grew them. But college is not the only worthy escape hatch.

In education, we need to walk a fine line between equipping students to follow their dreams and helping them aspire to greater dreams than they may come up with on their own. We need to do our best to give our students the tools to pursue the dreams they choose for themselves, whatever those might be. It seems so obvious, and yet the umpty-bazzillion dollars in college debt now being carried by twenty-somethings (and their parents) suggests that it is not-- not all roads to a happy and productive future lead through a college campus.

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.