Give the Democratic Party Your Two Cents

Yes, there's every reason to believe that the Democratic Party is pretty thoroughly run through with corporate shills, oligarchic toadies, and neoliberal tools. It is also true that a party platform is like the line-up for an all-star game-- hotly debated one day and completely forgotten a month later.

However.

Sometimes it takes a hundred hits of the hammer to crack open the stone. Sometimes it takes a trillion drops of water to smooth the edge of the mountain. Sometimes it takes the voice of one more Who in Whoville to get the message across. So even if, like me, you have your doubts about making your voice heard in the midst of all this foolishness, in a political season in which education should have been a major issue but instead was ignored once again, in the midst of this hopeless hoopla-- well, let's go ahead and speak up if for no other reason than it will make it impossible for the politicians to later say, "Well, gosh, we had no idea y'all felt that way about that thing."

For supporters of public education, it's easy-- the Network for Public Education has created an easy-to-sign-on petition directed to the Democratic Party. Here are some of what NPE calls on the Democrats to support:

Eliminate high stakes testing. Let experienced professional classroom teachers develop the tests they need and use multiple measures for students. Stop using the Big Standardized Test to evaluate teachers and close schools.

Opportunity Gap vs. Achievement Gap. Instead of using a standardized test score gap as an excuse to visit all manner of reformy nonsense on non-white, non-wealthy schools, let's drop the no excuses and zero tolerance approaches and instead give struggling schools the resources they need. Furthermore, let's leave the governance of all schools in the hands of local community members.

IDEA. Finally fund IDEA properly. Finally.

Funding. Do it. And while you're at it, prioritize public school funding over charter funding. And when you fund charters, require them to accept the same proportion of high-needs, high-cost students as the local public schools.

Student privacy. No selling of student data. Keep it safe. Keep it protected. And let parents know what you're thinking about doing before you try to do it.

The Danger of Venture Philanthropists and Big Business Interests. American public education is being broken down and sold off so that rich, powerful people can get their hands on a piece of the $600 billion pile of education money in this country. The Democratic Party should be standing up for local control and quality public education for all students. Do that.


Yes, I know. If it's going to go along with all of this, the Democratic Party will first have to have its lips surgically removed from the buttocks of some rich and powerful folks. But-- and (I can't stress this enough-- a year from now I would much rather be saying, "This is what we told you, and you ignored us, You said no." than to be saying, "Well, we didn't say anything because we figured you'd ignore us."

Sometimes you just have to speak up not because you anticipate a particular reaction or payoff, but because something just needs to be said (now that I think of it, that's kind of the whole philosophy behind this blog). The Democratic Party has largely abandoned public education and the people who work there. We need to tell them what they should be doing, what policies they should be backing.

So follow this link, add your name, and let NPE do the rest. Give the party your two cents. GOP folks-- give your party the message, too. Make some noise. Speak up. It may take a few million more drops before we see results, but we have to say something. If I speak up, I know that I can look at myself in the mirror tomorrow. If Democratic leaders can't, that's not on me. Do what you can. Make a little noise. Say what needs to be said.

Does High GPA = Low Creativity?

In April, research was released that suggests that students with higher grades are actually less innovative than their lower-graded peers.

The research comes from Matthew Mayhew, assoiciate professor of higher education at New York University, working with grad student Benjamin Selznick. The two surveyed over 10,000 undergrad and grad students at colleges and universities in four different counties (USA, Canada, Germany and Qatar) from a wide variety of majors.

To learn more, we asked students about their innovation intentions and capacities, their higher education experiences, and their background characteristics. We also administered a “personality inventory” to address the question of whether innovators are born or made.

I'll admit that I have my doubts about a researcher's ability to measure innovativity, but let's press on and look at the findings. Oh, that's right. I already told you the broad swath here, which is that good grades are not a predictor, in fact are arguably anti-predictors of creativity and innovation.

The researchers suggest that actual innovative capabilities come from two main places:

1) Classroom practices make a difference: students who indicated that their college assessments encouraged problem-solving and argument development were more likely to want to innovate. Such an assessment frequently involves evaluating students in their abilities to create and answer their own questions; to develop case studies based on readings as opposed to responding to hypothetical cases; and/or to make and defend arguments. 

2) Faculty matters – a lot: students who formed a close relationship with a faculty member or had meaningful interactions (i.e., experiences that had a positive influence on one’s personal growth, attitudes and values) with faculty outside of class demonstrated a higher likelihood to be innovative. When a faculty member is able to serve as a mentor and sounding board for student ideas, exciting innovations may follow.

The researchers also found that networking was hugely important, that getting the undergrad plugged into a network of like-minded peers as well as using those connections to see their ideas connected to the real world-- all that helped, too.

And why did the researchers think that as GPA went down, innovation went up?

From our findings, we speculate that this relationship may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their college environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates.

So if you're more interested in taking on new and different challenges, collaboration, and cool new stuff than in just jumping through the right hoops to score that grade, you might just be a future innovator. Those strategies, however, may not be the best move for your GPA.

Also, this:

Additionally, findings elsewhere strongly suggest that innovators tend to be intrinsically motivated – that is, they are interested in engaging pursuits that are personally meaningful, but might not be immediately rewarded by others.

Getting grades is about jumping through hoops and getting a cookie for your troubles. If you don't really care about cookies, the hoops start to look less interesting. And if you, as above, happen to connect with teachers or friends who also find some things more interesting than hoop-jumping, you become even more primed for innovation.

They also hint that the students most likely to be rewarded and encouraged for non-hoopy behavior are white males. In a culture where women and non-white folks are taught to toe the line, behave themselves and color within the lines, that makes sense. In a world where some folks think that what non-white non-wealthy students need is a strict, strict environment, it naturally follows that such an environment would produce fewer innovators.

Peter Gray at Psychology Today (never a fan of hoop jumping) took a further look at this research, pulling in quotes from an interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, who opens by noting that GPAs are truly worthless when making hiring decisions.

I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Gray also notes the oft-mentioned negative correlation of the Chinese, who are laser-focused on passing that damned standardized test, and who lag miles behind other countries like the US in terms of creativity and innovation (a phenomenon also clearly noted by Yong Zhao).

There are plenty of caveats here-- selection bias for subjects, the question of how one measures innovative tendencies, the fact that Google says nice things about thinking outside the box but also loves TFA. So as much as this fits what I think I know about humans, I take it with a grain of salt.

Still, it's worth paying attention to because it is further proof that reformsters are getting things exactly completely dead wrong. They've tried to center education around a testing situation where students have to find the One Right Answer from a group of answers that someone else supplied for them. Reformsters have justified test-driven education by claiming that only external measures can tell students (and their parents, and their teachers) whether they are succeeding or not. And they have launched charter chains built on the premise that non-wealthy non-white students do not need to have their creativity unleashed, but rather must have all of their nature leashed so that they can better learn to give the One Right Answer.

We are doing everything backwards, aiming our students directly away from the education methods best suited to nurture and build their creativity and innovation. It's backwards, and it's wrong.

Norms vs. Standards

I've found myself trying to explain the difference between norm and standards reference multiple times in the last few weeks, which means it's time to write about it. A lot of people get this distinction-- but a lot of people don't. I'm going to try to do this in plain(ish) English, so those of you who are testing experts, please forgive the lack of correct technical terminology.

A standards-referenced (or criterion-referenced) test is the easiest one to understand and, I am learning, what many, many people think we're talking about when we talk about tests in general and standardized tests in particular.

With standards reference, we can set a solid immovable line between different levels of achievement, and we can do it before the test is even given. This week I'm giving a spelling test consisting of twenty words. Before I even give the test, I can tell my class that if they get eighteen or more correct, they get an A, if they get sixteen correct, they did okay, and if the get thirteen or less correct, they fail.

A drivers license test is also standards-referenced. If I complete the minimum number of driving tasks correctly, I get a license. If I don't, I don't.

One feature of a standards-referenced test is that while we might tend to expect a bell-shaped curve of results (a few failures, a few top scores, and most in the middle), such a curve is not required or enforced. Every student in my class can get an A on the spelling test. Everyone can get a drivers license. With standards referenced testing, clustering is itself a piece of useful data; if all of my students score less than ten on my twenty word test, then something is wrong.

With a standards-referenced test, it should be possible for every test taker to get top marks.

A norm-referenced measure is harder to understand but, unfortunately, far more prevalent these days.

A standards-referenced test compares every student to the standard set by the test giver. A norm-referenced test compares every student to every other student. The lines between different levels of achievement will be set after the test has been taken and corrected. Then the results are laid out, and the lines between levels (cut scores) are set.

When I give my twenty word spelling test, I can't set the grade levels until I correct it. Depending on the results, I may "discover" that an A is anything over a fifteen, twelve is Doing Okay, and anything under nine is failing. Or I may find that twenty is an A, nineteen is okay, and eighteen or less is failing. If you have ever been in a class where grades are curved, you were in a class that used norm referencing.

Other well-known norm referenced tests are the SAT and the IQ test. Norm referencing is why, even in this day and age, you can't just take the SAT on a computer and have your score the instant you click on the final answer-- the SAT folks can't figure out your score until they have collected and crunched all the results. And in the case of the IQ test, 100 is always set to be "normal."

There are several important implications and limitations for norm-referencing. One is that they are lousy for showing growth, or lack thereof. 100 will be and has always been "normal" aka "smack dab in the middle of  the results" for IQ tests. Have people gotten smarter or dumber over time? Hard to say-- big time testers like the IQ folks have all sorts of techniques for tying years of results together, but at the end of the day "normal" just means "about in the middle compared to everyone else whose results are in the bucket with mine." With norm referencing, we have no way of knowing whether this particular bucket is overall smarter or dumber than the other buckets. All of our data is about comparing the different fish in the same bucket, and none of it is useful for comparing one bucket to another (and that includes buckets from other years-- as all this implies, norm referencing is not so great at showing growth over time).

Normed referencing also gets us into the Lake Wobegon Effect. Can the human race ever develop and grow to the point that every person has an IQ over 100? No-- because 100 will always be the average normal right-in-the-middle score, and the entire human race cannot be above average (unless that is also accompanied by above-average innumeracy). No matter how smart the human race gets, there will always be people with IQs less that 100.

On a standards-referenced test, it is possible for everyone to get an A. On a normed-referenced test, it is not possible for everyone to get an A. Nobody has to flunk a standards-referenced test. Somebody has to flunk a norm-referenced test.

What are some of the examples we live with in education?

How about "reading on grade level"? At the end of the day, there are only two ways to determine what third grade "grade level" is-- you can either look at all all the third graders you can get data for and say, "Well, it looks like most of them get up to about here" or you can say "I personally believe that all third graders should be able to get to right about here" and just set it yourself based on your own personal opinion.

While lots of people have taken a shot at setting "grade level" in a variety of ways, it boils down to those two techniques, and mostly we rely on the first, which is norm-referencing. Which means that there will always be people who read below grade level-- always. The only way to show the some, more or all students are reading above grade level is to screw around with where we draw the "grade level" line on the big bell curve. But other than doing that kind of cheating with the data analysis, there is no way to get all students reading above grade level. If all third graders can read and comprehend Crime and Punishment, then Crime and Punishment is a third grade reading level book, and the kid in your class who has trouble grasping the full significance of Raskolnikov's dream of the whipped mare as a symbol of gratification through punishment and abasement is the third grader who gets a D on her paper.

And of course, there are the federally mandated Big Standardized Tests, the PARCC, SBA, PSSA, WTF, MOUSE, ETC or whatever else you're taking in your state.

First, understand why the feds and test fanatics wanted so badly for pretty much the same test to be given everywhere and for every last student to take it. Think back to our buckets of fish. Remember, with norming we can only make comparisons between the fish in the same bucket, so the idea was that we would have a nation-sized bucket with every single fish in it. Now, sadly, we have about forty buckets, and only some of them have a full sampling of fish. The more buckets and the fewer fish, the less meaningful our comparisons.

The samples are still big enough to generate a pretty reliably bell-shaped curve, but then we get our next problem, which is figuring out where on that bell curve to draw the cut score, the line that says, "Oh yeah, everyone above this score is super-duper, and everyone below it is not." This process turns out (shocker) to be political as all get out (here's an example of how it works in PA) because it's a norm-referenced test and that means somebody has to flunk and some bunch of bureaucrats and testocrats have to figure out how many flunkers there are going to be.

There are other norm-referencing questions floating out there. The SAT bucket has always included all the fish intending to go to college-- what will happen to the comparisons if the bucket contains all the fish, including the non-college-bound ones? Does that mean that students who used to be the bottom of the pack will now be lifted to the middle?

This is also why using the SAT or the PARCC as a graduation exam is nuts-- because that absolutely guarantees that a certain number of high school seniors will not get diplomas, because these are norm-referenced tests and somebody has to land on the bottom. And that means that some bureaucrats and testocrats are going to sit in a room and decide how many students don't get to graduate this year. 

It's also worth remembering that norm referencing is lousy at providing an actual measure of how good or bad students are at something. As followers of high school sports well know, "champion of our division" doesn't mean much if you don't know anything about the division. Saying that Pat was the tallest kid in class doesn't tell us much about how tall Pat actually is. And with these normed measures, you have no way of knowing if the team is better than championship teams from other years, or if Pat is taller or shorter than last year's tallest kid in class.

Norm referencing, in short, is great if you want to sort students, teachers and schools into winners and losers. It is lousy if you want to know how well students, teachers and schools are actually doing. Ed reform has placed most of its bets on norm referencing, and that in itself tells us a lot about what reformsters are really interested in. That is not a very useful bucket of fish.

Moskowitz Schadenfreude

Eva Moskowitz, the super-well-paid queen (almost a cool half million) of Success Academy, finally had more than just a lousy day. She flat out lost one. I know it's not nice, but let's share a little schadenfreude over the defeat of a woman whose defiant hubris has been a bamboo shoot under the fingernails of educators all across New York.

The plan has been to expand the SA empire by adding Pre-K. But in an unexpected twist, the city of New York, rather than simply handing Moskowitz a pile of money and saying "Have a nice day," actually insisted that she sign a contract and agree to use the money in particular ways.

You might think that this does not sound terribly unreasonable, that virtually all vendors who want a chunk of public money have to enter some sort of contract in which they agree to do certain things in certain ways according to certain rules. Even the long-existent military-industrial complex does not work by having contractors say, "We'd like a million dollars to just do some stuff." Heck, plenty of charter advocates propose a system in which charters contract to hit certain marks and have their success or failure measured accordingly.

But we're talking Eva Moskowitrz here. Moskowitz who successfully told the state of New York that they had no right to audit her. Moskowitz who simply went over the head of the mayor of New York City and had the legislature overrule him so that she could have more schools.

Not only did Moskowitz want her pile of Pre-K money without conditions, but she offered the argument that it was illegal to require anything contractually of her when the money was handed over. The contract may have been okay for every other provider of Pre-K services in the city, but Moskowitz answers to no one. Check out her op-ed here, where among other things, she says that whether or not the city's requirements are reasonable is "beside the point." Her reading of charter law is that charters should get tax dollars without having to answer to anybody.

How much is at stake here? About $720K. As Politico wryly notes, that's slightly less than the $734K that Moskowitz spent on her big rally in Albany.

And so, after repeated defeats and denials, after not getting her way from anyone, Moskowitz declared that she would take her ball and go home. Because while providing quality Pre-K For The Children may be a noble goal, it's not as important as Moskowitz getting her own way. Any oversight that the city wanted to exert in order to make sure that all programs are high quality? That's just  an uinfair burden. Her entitlement shows through the open letter to Mayor DeBlasio that she reportedly circulated to SA parents, in which she accuses him of "stealing" an opportunity from children. In other words, she doesn't have to prove to anyone that her program is good-- she is entitled to those tax dollars and to deny her is to steal what is rightfully hers.

Politico laid the story out in pretty fair and balanced terms, and the Daily News picked it up a day later, but mostly it appears that Moskowitz threw a press conference to raise a chorus of outrage and anger, and mostly nobody showed up.

So she tried again yesterday with a "rally" at city hall, covered just by the charter-loving New York Post-- and even they said that Moskowitz "fumed." It seems that Moskowitz just can't draw a big crowd any more, nor can she as easily convince folks that her outrage should be everyone's outrage. And the press keeps asking if she's running for mayor-- almost as if they don't think she's entirely serious about this whole charter school thing. This has to be the unkindest cut of all-- not just that she can't get her way, but that she can't draw a sympathetic crowd of people to amplify her dismay. Imagine a day when Moskowitz has become, not just less of a threat to public education, but actually irrelevant to the discussion. Won't that be a day?

How To Blackmail a Teacher

This is not a post about some reformster program or educational policy. This is about just how low someone can go. This is about one of the worst websites I have ever come across.

TeacherComplaint.com is a site that looks clunky, but makes an offer that seems appealing:

TeacherComplaints.com - A Unique Web Site which allows Students & Parents to take control of what goes on in school!

Do you feel that your child is treated unfairly in class? Do you feel that your child gets to much home work? - Do you feel that your teacher doesn't understand your child / student? Do you feel that the school staff could care less about your problems, feel neglected? - Here, You can give an in depth report of how a school and teacher uses his/ her classroom and how they treat you as a parent and student.. Why Rate A Teacher or school (which can be maniputalted) When you can File A Teacher Complaint!

They claim to have been mentioned on major news networks. Ed Week took a look at it back in 2011; it has been around since 2009 ("This site has officially went online today- March 11, 2009"). It ranks around 368,000 on alexa.

So why am I picking on a site that exists to give students and parents a voice, which provides them with a chance to speak up about injustice they see at school? Isn't that a good thing, even if it is a site that is rife with spelling and usage errors? Certainly lots and lots of folks are using it-- with new complaints posted as recently as yesterday. Why am I calling this the worst thing ever.

The answer can be found in this paragraph on the site, which gives us a better picture of the business model involved:

To bad teachers who have made a big mistake in the teaching profession, we recognize that you may have learned your lesson from a student or parent posting a complaint.  The First Amendment - Free Speech law protects students and teachers rights as long as what was done by the teacher was correct.  To remove a complaint from this web site and the search engine takes time and someone to remove them with sophisticated tools, so for those teachers that want the complaint removed and will abide to improve their teaching and not make the same mistake again, we can remove your complaints within a short period of time with a Remediation Removal Fee of $400 per complaint per person.  Each additional complaint by another student or parent will be an additional fee of $50 payable through PayPal 

It's a blackmail site, pure and simple, a nifty cross between old school blackmail and new school ransomware. There's no reason to believe that the site actually gets relief for its complainers. They suggest that the power of social media will accomplish things, and complainers can certainly "choose to have your complaint submitted to the school." They list one case from in 2010 where someone filed a complaint about (maybe) a teacher later in trouble with the law for sexual harassment.

Should there be an avenue for students and parents to pursue action against teachers who they believe are bad actors? Certainly. Is this site that avenue? Doesn't look like it. This site looks like somebody has found a way to abuse the trust of students with a complaint as a means of running a tidy blackmail business, thereby both abusing teachers, students and parents. After all, what good does it do to place a complaint at a rando website where the object of your complaint can just pay $400 to make your complaint go away?

It's a vile racket, with no indication of who is actually behind it. But somewhere out there is a person with little shame and even less ethical guidance.

Death Notice for Neoliberalism?

Neo what? You may not be paying enough attention to political labels and categories, particularly when they don't seem to fit any of the standard Dem-liberal vs. GOP-conservative model.

Neoliberalism was born in the thirties in Europe (where it was also known as the "Middle Way" or the "Third Way"). Its central tenet is that private corporations ought to be free to do whatever they want, and neo-libs love free trade, deregulation, privatization, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Wait-- why does this thing even have "liberal" in its name? Because 1930s Europeans were wacky that way, I guess. Or maybe it's because it wants to "liberalize" the movement and accumulation of money.

Neoliberalism is about the idea that the private sector can do everything so much better than the public sector, that competition is the secret to excellence, that a truly free market will create excellence and wealth for all. And as we can immediately recognize, it has been embraced by prominent members of both parties.

It is well-positioned to sell to both right and left. On the right, you can take solace that it makes the government smaller and directs lots and lots (and lots and lots) of tax dollars to private sector interests. On the left, you can take solace that neolibs preserve government programs-- they've just hired some private company to take care of the programs. If something's worth doing, it's worth paying some private company tax dollars to do it.

Groups like ALEC, the legislation mill where private corporations get to tell elected legislators what bill they ought to pass-- well, that's just a natural outgrowth of the neolib philosophy. The public sector really ought to be working for the private sector, not getting in their way, telling them what regulations they must follow, and telling them how to play fair. The worst horror stories you've heard about the TPP, like the secrete tribunal where companies can sue countries for interfering with the company profits-- that's how a neolib thinks the world should work.

For thirty or forty years (depending on who's counting) thought leaders and political leaders and leaders of leaders in shadowy rooms have supposedly been embedding neoliberalism in everything. That group of embedders would include the people who run the world's financial systems, all the way up to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has been a huge fan of neoliberalism.

Which is why it is big news this when the IMF publishes a report entitled "Neoliberalism: Oversold?" and comes damn close to saying, "Yeah, we were totally wrong on that one. Sorry for the last forty years of economic inequality and mess."

Their simplified explanation of neoliberalism is that there are two planks-- plank one is increased competition, and the other is less government via privatization and shrinkage.

Mind you, they are not doing a complete 180-- the report says that neoliberalism has delivered on some of its promise through international trade that helped poverty in some areas, foreign investment that transferred tech to emerging economies, and privatization that increased efficiency cheaply in some places. But all is not rosy. For instance, the report uses this as a big fat pull quote:

Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion.

They could be quoting virtually any not-a-neolib of the past four decades, but no-- that's the IMF. And here's another shocker of a pull quote:

Governments with ample fiscal space will do better by living with the debt.

There's a lot more to it in several reports which are actually kind of hard to get to on the web, and which also require a certain level of eco-wonkery skill. But you can read the astonished reactions everywhere, from the people who want to say "I told you so" to the people who are a little more detached. The refrain is the same-- if the IMF thinks maybe neoliberalism is not actually working, then something is up.

Of course neoliberalism is the secret sauce that explains why Barrack Obama and Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and Whitney Tilson and the (supposedly left-leaning) Center for American Progress and the (theoretically right-tilted) Fordham Institute all appear to be singing in the same choir from the same hymnal when it comes to education. I'm not a huge fan or student of political theory labels, but there is a name for what unites the vast majority of reformsters, and the name is neoliberalism-- the belief that a free market filled with privatized providers (of both education, schools and teachers) and scraped free of as many government regulations as possible (including those damned unions) will bring us all to a shiny promised land.

That, my brothers and sisters, is the technical wonky political theory name for what ails us, and now one of its most staunch believers, defenders, priests and acolytes is suggesting in what qualify as loud tones for the economics wonky world that maybe it doesn't actually work after all.

After all these years, neoliberalism has not spread the wealth, not lifted up the poor, not provided excellence, not made government more effective or efficient, not done much of anything except make a small group of people very, very rich-- rich enough to start running governments and telling elected officials what to do. Lots and lots and lots of people noticed long ago that it wasn't working-- and have said so repeatedly. But to have the IMF notice something and say something out loud, in print-- that is a new thing. 

Yes, there are caveats, hedges, fine print, details and a world of quibbles. But the foundation has cracked. It may be years before that does us any good in public education-- the idea that privatized competition breeds excellence has, despite all clearly visible evidence to the contrary, grown strong roots in our culture. The body may keep kicking long after the head has died. But for all that, for all the time me have to wait for the street dancing, this is still good news. I'd suggest we bow our heads for a moment, but there's nothing in this news to be sad about.

 

The New Teach for America-- Now With Less "Teach"

Teach For America likes to reinvent itself from time to time, searching for whatever is currently the sweet spot in the market. And as Emma Brown explains in yesterday's Washington Post, TFA has stepped into the transmogrifier once again, and has emerged with a bit of mission creep.

The latest shift is prompted by a notable drop in TFA's recruiting juice. As Brown reports, applications are down 35% over the last three years, plummeting from 57,000 in 2013 to 37,000 this year. There are a variety of explanations for this including the general drop of everyone going into teaching through traditional paths or made-up paths like TFA; there's an irony in that TFA has itself been part of the movement denigrating and deprofessionalizing the teaching profession. TFA itself is no longer as shiny as it once was, partly because of bad press, but also, I'd bet, because after twenty-five years, TFA is part of the status quo and not some Hot New Thing.

But TFA, always looking to keep itself a viable business, has a plan for combating the lag in applicants and selling the program to a new generation. Part of it is a tactical tweak-- recruit students while they are underclassmen and no longer wait until they are seniors and know better and have a different focus. But that's just procedure and not the heart of the new sales pitch.

The secret? Emphasize how Teach for America really isn't about teaching at all.

Here's a TFA rep talking at a recruitment event:

“We believe that this is far bigger than teaching,” Kimberly Diaz, of the organization’s D.C. regional office, told a group of prospective applicants from Georgetown and George Washington universities in April. They had just visited an elementary school in suburban Maryland and heard from alumni working outside of classrooms. “This is about dismantling systems of oppression.”

Far bigger than teaching. Your two years struggling in a sixth grade classroom will actually be part of dismantling systems of oppression ("No, Pat, I can't help you with your algebra right now. I'm busy dismantling a system of oppression")

Of course, if dismantling isn't your thing, a day-long recruitment event offered college students other incentives.

Then they were treated to lunch and a panel of TFA alumni speaking about how their classroom experiences had translated into marketable skills in fields including law, politics, education advocacy and nonprofit entre­pre­neur­ship.

TFA still pitches itself as the group that is going to close the achievement gap (despite the utter absence of any evidence at all that they can do it, or that they even know how to do it). But they have amped up what was always one of their avenues of appeal-- those two years in a classroom make a super resume builder. They are, of course, not lying. The ed reform industry (as well as the test manufacturing business and the textbook company sales force) is just packed with people calling themselves "former teachers" based on two years of TFAing it up in a charter somewhere.

As Brown summarizes it, it's a one-two punch:

First, by signing up for TFA, they can help solve some of the most in­trac­table social problems in America, including institutional racism and educational inequity.

And second, by signing up for TFA, they aren’t consigning themselves to working in a public school, but to opening doors to a set of opportunities and a professional network that can help achieve career goals, whatever they might be.

You can change the whole world. But you don't have to be "consigned" to a classroom in a public school.

What a great introductory speech that must make on a first day of school. "Hello, boys and girls. My name is Miss Deauxgud, and thank God I'm not actually going to stay at the job long. In fact, since this is my second year at Troubled Elementary School, as soon as I finish up with you guys, I am out of here. Thank goodness. I mean, nothing personal, but I have real work to do, work that's way more important than teaching you guys. I hope we have a good year together, but hey, if we don't, no biggy, because by next year this is all just going to be a bad memory for me anyway."

You know, in a way, the five weeks of training makes sense. If you are trying to lay the foundation for a lifelong teaching career, then five weeks isn't remotely enough. But if you are just trying to learn a couple of techniques so you can get through two years of being in a classroom and then just scoot-- well, you don't need a whole four year degree for that. You don't need to learn to swim if your plan is just to float around for a little bit until the yacht comes to pick you up.

Remember how Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their brand name to KFC because the word "fried" just had bad connotations in the marketplace? If this initiative works, and Teach For America can get recruitment for the business back up with the "Change society and get a good start on your real career" sale pitch, I look for them to rebrand themselves as TFA. After all, the whole "teach" thing seems to be weighing them down-- it makes perfect sense to identify themselves less with the job that is no longer what they're even pretending to be about.