Can HAL 3000 Take Your Class Notes For You (And Is EdWeek Starved For Story Ideas?)

Can a piece of computer software take notes for students in a K-12 classroom?

No.

Okay, we should be done here, but Benjamin Herold, staff writer,  has posted a curious article at EdWeek. The headline (Could Artificial Intelligence Automate Student Note-Taking?) might have alarmed you if you saw it, but I'm going to explain why you can relax. Here's how he leads off:

"I'm afraid I missed the part about fractions, Dave."

Artificially intelligent digital agents are being marketed as a way to automate note-taking in the workplace, raising a big question for K-12:

Are classrooms next?

You'll be relieved to know that nobody consulted for the article thinks that the answer is "yes."

Herold leans on EVA, a digital assistant from a Silicon Valley startup named Voicea (can't somebody give these guys company naming lessons) that can dial into corporate meetings and create transcripts of everything that's said. It can use certain cues to highlight portions, but we're talking transcript here-- not notes. But after explaining the Voicea sales pitch for corporations, Herold notes that  "even Voicea is keeping its distance from the education market." So the company that makes the stuff says "no."

Herold talks to a policy researcher at RAND "who has written about artificial intelligence in K-12. "I applaud attempts to think about applications of technology that can help students take more effective notes and highlight the key takeaways," said Robert F. Murphy. "I just don't know if this particular application is going to provide that." So RAND says "no."

Herold cites new research that suggests that taking notes on a laptop is not so effective, which is... irrelevant to this discussion. But he does spend some time discussing why note-taking on a laptop probably isn't helpful.

He does include the obvious common sense point here-- that the very process of listening and processing and deciding what is most important and physically writing it down-- all of that is why taking notes works in the first place. Plus, it provides a useful set of notes that can be used to study later. Having a complete transcript of everything-- not so much (this is exacerbated by the fact that in a classroom setting, the AI would have a nervous breakdown trying to process all the noise and voices and noise, producing something slightly more useful than that guy who accidentally texted his wife with his voice-to-text on while he was playing trombone).

That processing is critical in note-taking, and absent in the HAL 3000 Note Taker. The student could fall asleep. The student could stay home and send the AI to school. This suggests that the AI is probably not going to enhance learning.

Maybe Herold was just spitballing, or trying to get way out in front of a possible trend, or stuck with a pitch from Voicea and no hook to hang it on. I don't know. I'm just happy to report that as of right now, nobody seems to think this is really a thing.

Why Do Teachers Have Such Lousy Parental Leave?

At Working Mother, Amy Sherman asks a really good question-- It's a Mom-Dominated Profession. So Why Are Teachers Getting the Shaft on Maternity Leave?

Of course, we're talking about US teachers, because we rank at the very bottom of the barrel for developed (or in some cases, even semi-developed) countries when it comes to maternity leave. For all our noise about babies and motherhood and how parenting a small child is one of the most important jobs in the world, as a society, we don't do jack to support people who are actually parenting babies. We could make, as a country, the same deal that we make, for instance, with soldiers-- when duty calls, the employers just have to suck it up and the country makes sure to support them.

Just got home from Stock Photo Hospital

Instead, we leave it to individual businesses to decide how much support they will give parents of newborns (above and beyond the meager FMLA requirement). Some businesses do pretty well. For all their faults, Microsoft has a pretty good set of policies for parental leave. Many of the tech companies do, even though they are notoriously bad at hiring women.

So what does it say that one of the most female professions has uniformly lousy parental leave policies?

My wife and I were fortunate. The twins were born on the day after the last student day of my wife's year (a few days after my last day). As was the case with the woman in Sherman's story, my wife could have had paid leave-- by using up her sick days. This is a ridiculous bind to put new parents in-- what are the odds that a parent of small children will need a few sick days? A few years ago, my district finally negotiated a sick day bank, whereby teachers could "donate" sick days to other teachers-- the first big users were young women with newborns with health issues. Somewhere in administration the complaint was voiced that the intent of the day bank was not to lengthen maternity leave-- well, what did they imagine would happen? You have a staff with lots of young women who A) are starting families and B) have not worked long enough to accumulate a ton of sick days.

But why is this even a thing? Teaching is mom-dominated and child-centered.

Part of it-- a huge part of it-- is money. You're paying somebody who is not doing work, and schools don't have the private-sector choice of just sort of absorbing the new mother's workload until she returns. Somebody will have to be paid to fill in.

And in this day of low substitute supply, that sub may not be optimal. A teacher friend of mine just had a baby; her maternity leave is being covered by someone with Home Ec certification.

Add to that a new wrinkle-- testing. Two members of my old department are taking maternity leave this year, and the timing for the school is terrible in terms of testing. I can guarantee that test scores will dip next year, and it will be strictly because one teacher is home with her new baby instead of in her classroom doing her usual test prep for the weeks before the test.

Local unions share the blame as well. Unions could make parental leave a big issue, but in most cases they lack the will. First, while teaching may be mom-dominated, it's not exclusively mom-occupied, and there are always problems negotiating terms that only benefit some union members (e.g. in almost every local you can find someone single bitching about how they get essentially paid less because they don't have a family on which to use family health care benefits). On top of that, many women aren't willing to demand the union push hard because they feel guilty about the maternity leave-- they know it's going to disrupt their students, inconvenience their colleagues, and probably make their own lives miserable when they return and have to clean up the mess.

In the end, parental leave for teachers suffers from the same old factors-- it's expensive, it's disruptive, and it mostly benefits women. Teachers get lousy parental leave in part because almost everybody in the US gets lousy leave.

School boards ought to be leading the charge. School boards and teacher unions ought to be saying that we know those first months are critical, so we expect our teachers to take a full paid parental leave, because we know better than anyone how early support for a child pays off further down the line, so we're going to set an example-- not only that, but we're going to be vocal in pushing businesses in our community to offer full paid parental leave as well.

I mean, in the education space we've started talking endlessly about pre-K, about early intervention, about starting to give children the support they need from Day One. And yet somehow in all this brave new reformy wave, I have yet to see calls for a really important early intervention-- giving the mother the ability to stay home with her new child without risking the family's financial well-being. So where are the policy wonk voices? Where are the think tank voices?

Could it be that we still worry more about money than children? Could it be that we still think that policies that primarily benefit women just aren't that urgent?

Every time I think about maternity leave in this country, I get angry all over again. We scratch our heads and say, "Gee, how could we give children a better start in life," as we shoo poor new mothers back to work after a couple of weeks because, hey, her employer has needs. No single policy more clearly demonstrates that we value the sovereignty of the business owner, the financial impact on commerce, more than we value children and the women who give birth to them.

We should be demanding better, and education should be leading the way.

Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea

Florida's governor is planning to boost the state bonus program for teachers, even as Denver teachers walked off the job over their district's version of an incentive program. So it's worth taking a moment to step back and remember why teacher merit pay and bonus systems are just a bad idea.

First, they can't work like a private sector bonus system. In the business world, bonuses and incentives are based on a clear idea of success. Whether the definition of success at Widgetcorps this year is "We made a bunch more money" or "We increased the value of Widgetcorps stock this year" or even "We managed to strip a pile of dollars out of Widgetcorps this year," the end result is a pile of "extra" money (the end result, depending on the definition of success, may be a less healthy company, but let's set that aside for now). The bonus deal between Widgetcorps and its bonus-eligible employees is simple--if there's a pile of extra money here at the end of the year, you get to have some of it.

Public schools, on the other hand, don't make money, and school district success is hugely hard to define. More high school graduates? The football team won a championship? The school musical was really good this year? More students really got into Shakespeare? Larger number of students earned welding certification? The school's culture and atmosphere was so healthy that students really love attending? All of these might count as success, but none of them result in a school district ending the year with "extra" money to be split up for bonuses.

Instead, the pile of bonus money has to be pre-budgeted, and then teachers get to compete with each other for a share of a fixed pie. This may not establish the kind of in-house atmosphere you want for your school ("No, colleague, you may not see my materials for how I teach fractions--my child needs braces this year!") We already know this is bad news; this kind of internal competition is arguably part of what destroyed Sears.

"But, see, I think teachers should be paid more, but only the good ones. So I want merit pay so that we only have to give good teachers raises." This is an understandable impulse. The problem is that we have no universal agreement on who the great ones are or how to reliably measure their greatness. Settling that issue would involve a long and complicated discussion that we still haven't had. Instead, policy makers mostly just said, "Use scores from the Big Standardized Test."

Again, we could have a long conversation about the merits and demerits of this approach, but to understand how basing "merit" on standardized test scores affects teacher behavior, all we have to grasp is this-- from a teacher standpoint, judging teacher merit based on test scores is only slightly more reliable that having a horned toad toss dice under a full moon. Basing merit pay on test results divides the teaching staff into two groups who will hear two different messages. The non-English, non-math teachers hear, "You have no control over whether you get merit pay or not." This is not hyperbole; in many regions, teachers have been judged by the test results in subjects they don't teach from students they've never met. English and math teachers also hear the message, "You will be judged on how well you teach to the test." Merit pay based on test scores does not incentivize better teaching.

"Well, what if I want to use bonuses to push teachers in directions that help the district, such a teaching at hard to staff schools?" That was a big part of the goal for Denver, and it hasn't worked. Again, teachers feel at the mercy of forces outside their control (one batch of teachers lost their incentive pay for teaching in a high-poverty neighborhood when new luxury townhouses were built nearby). And a one-time pay incentive does not outweigh a bad boss or building culture.

A teacher bonus system is prone to other problems. To fund that pile of bonus money, districts often lower base pay for teachers. This is not just bad financial news if the horned toad who's tossing dice for your bonus comes up snake eyes; the base pay is what determines your pension, and what you write on applications for loans and mortgages.

And at its heart, a merit pay system is insulting. It imagines a world of teachers who sit at their desk thinking, "I have the perfect lesson for effectively teaching pronouns right over there in my filing cabinet--but I'm not going to get it out until someone offers me a bonus."

Here is a thing actual teachers have all said, more or less, at one time or another: "Today was awesome. I was on fire. The kids were right here, taking it all in. I could see lights going on all over the room as they got what we were doing. I taught the crap out of that unit. I am ready to get back in there tomorrow."

Actual teachers have also said, more or less, this: "Today was a thousand hours long. They wouldn't focus. They wouldn't stop hollering at each other. I couldn't find my rhythm. I sucked. It was awful. If I thought this was what it was always going to be, I'd think hard about quitting."

Here's what no actual teachers have ever said in any way, shape, or form. "Today was awful and excruciating. I was terrible. The lesson was awful. Mind you, I could have had a great day. I could have been awesome in there instead of suffering endlessly, but I won't do it unless someone offers me a bonus."

I would not go so far as to say that teaching well is its own reward, because teachers need food and shelter, too. But teaching badly is definitely its own punishment. No merit pay system--particularly not one based on small rewards for student test scores--is likely to exert more power over teachers than the immediate results in the classroom.

Merit pay for teachers has been tried many times over the last several decades. It never works. It doesn't raise test scores, or improve teacher attraction and retention. It doesn't improve morale. A district can garner better results by spending the money to raise base wages, or to decrease class sizes and provide other supports for classroom teachers.

Originally posted at Forbes.

The $5 Billion DeVos Money Laundromat

You have read by now that Betsy DeVos is finally going to get one of her favorite policy ideas floated past Congress. But what the heck is it, and why is it a problem? To understand, we have to look first at what's been happening in some states.

The financial device we're talking about is a Tax Credit Scholarship, and it's a bit of a clever dodge.

Let's say I'm the State of New West Virkota. The state would like to collect a tax of $100 from Bob and give it to Come To Jesus Academy, but there are rules in place that say that the state can't give taxpayer money to a private religious school. So instead, the state tells Bob that he can give $100 to the Good Neighbor Scholarship Fund instead of to the state, and then the Good Neighbor Scholarship Fund can spend the $100 to pay tuition for some child to attend Come To Jesus Academy. It is a transaction not unlike money laundering, or a fifteen year old paying a college kid to buy beer for him. In Georgia, your contribution can be earmarked for a specific school where "the funds will be equally divided among all approved, eligible students." So, yeah-- it's a donation  to the school, not a scholarship for a student. Georgia can't give Bob's tax dollars to a private religious school, so it just gives Bob credit for giving the money for them.

And it's not just the shadiness of skirting the law. In some states, like Virginia, by leveraging state and federal deductions and credits, you can actually make a profit on your contribution. Here's a wealth management firm explaining how to turn $10,000 into $10,960. The definitive research on just how crazy this stuff gets has been done by Carl Davis of the Institute on Taxation  Economic Policy (his name appears in virtually every article that has been written about the Trump-DeVos proposal). Here's a whole paper, or you can catch him in an informative interview here; I advise you to be sitting down while you're reading it. According to Davis, ten states have that little profit quirk, and they aren't shy about saying so:

"When you donate, you will receive both a Georgia state tax credit AND a federal charitable deduction," as Georgia's scholarship organization puts it on its web site. "You will end with more money than when you started, and you will be helping students receive a good education."

DeVos, via Ted Cruz's sponsorship of the bill, wants to up the ante.

Her proposal is a federal tax credit ("neovoucher" is also a word used for these). The price tag refers to the total amount of credits that would be allowed-- and they would be allowed at 100%. Rich folks can "donate" up to 10% of their adjusted gross income; businesses could give 5% of their net taxable income.

So why is this bill a problem?

Conservatives are, in many cases, not thrilled. If your dearest dream was for the Department of Education to go away, giving it another $5 billion program to run does not seem like a step in the right direction. It also looks like an example of federal overreach, the DeVosian answer to Race to the Top. And of course, any time the feds even get near money, they start trotting out regulations and rules and red tape and strings. So this proposal is not necessarily a slam dunk on the right.

The PR for the bill stresses that these scholarships would not take "a single dollar away from public schools and the students who attend them," which is technically true because under a tax credit scholarship system, the government never actually touches the money. But the argument is disingenuous. The federal government is going to be down $5 billion dollars, and that has to come from somewhere. You can argue the finer points all day, but the bottom line is that the federal government would spend $5 billion on vouchers, which means there are a bunch of other things it won't spend those $5 billion on. In other words, it sure as hell is taking $5 billion away from somebody.

Tax credits are a handy device for funding private schools, meaning that they can be not only religious but also exclusive and selective.

It is another way to shift toward a privatized system rather than a public one. DeVos has praised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his attempt to paper over that problem by simply calling private schools "public" and insisting that any school funded by public tax dollars is a public school. This takes us straight into Orwellian baloneyland, a place where we call charter businesses, private religious schools, and the kitchen table where you homeschool your child "public" schools, but somehow the kind of public school that isn't actually open to the public.

And as Adam Laats points out, history already tells us that there are real problems with an education system that depends on the largesse of rich folks to function. It's such a bad system that it drove us to come up with a system that was publicly funded, publicly run, and responsible for educating all of the public. If you want to see what depending on charity, luck and wealth looks like, just look at our medical system, which as Rep. Eric Swalwell observes, runs partly on luck, partly on wealth and partly on jars with sad pictures parked beside cash registers.

This proposal is about what DeVosian choice policy is always about-- getting wealthy folks out of having to foot the education bill for Those People.

Will this bill survive? Diane Ravitch says no, and points out that DeVos has scaled down her plan-- two years ago she wanted to repurpose $20 billion of Title 1 money for the same idea, and the GOP said no. This bill has tried to stave off some of the objections by not (directly and obviously) taking money from public school students, and by making state participation "voluntary" (much as Race to the Top and Waivers were "voluntary"), but it has the same basic problems-- federal overreach, tax dollars financing private, religious schools, and privatization of the public education system. It richly deserves to fail, but if you think your representative needs to hear that, don't hesitate to call him.

ICYMI: In Like A Snow-Covered Lion Edition (3/3)

Things to read from this week. Keep sharing. Keep posting. Keep putting the word out there. And don't forget to keep an eye on the bloglist in the right hand column. The more you read, the more you know.

When Will We Stop Blaming Teachers

Another look at TNTP's Opportunity Myth-- one more attempt to explain that education problems are teachers' fault.

Why Did Indiana Teachers Leave the Classroom

A survey looks at why Indiana teachers left the classroom. Zero surprises here, but one m ore confirmation that teaching conditions have finally gotten that bad.

Thoughts on the Graduation Exam Mess in New Jersey

New Jersey is wrestling with using the PARCC as a grad exam, something it was not remotely designed for. Let Jersey Jazzman sort out the foolishness.

Elementary Principal Reads Books To Students on Facebook Live

If you need a little lift, read about this principal who puts on her pj's and reads a story over Facebook live every Tuesday night.

In Many Charter Schools, Graduation Odds Are Slim

Another item from the Department of Unsurprising Results. Someone crunched some numbers and discovered that an awful lot of charter students don't make it to charter graduation day.

Invisible Champions of Student Justice 

Wendy Lecker takes a look at how black teachers in Georgia were instrumental in the pursuit of desegregation. If you don't know Horace Tate's name, you should.  

Virtual Charter School With 91% Failure Rate    

This was a surprise-- a cyber charter school with even worse results than I imagined. 10,000 students went in- 851 stayed.

Skype A Scientist 

More good news. Someone came up with a program that uses Skype and scientists to combat misinformation.  

Last Night We Lay Down In The Streets

As Philadelphia transitions from state appointed commission to local school board, a battle is shaping up over whose local voices will be heard. It's citizens versus corporate once again.

Newsome Fast-Tracks Bill For Charter Standards        

It looks like California may finally subject its wild-growth charter sector to some actual accountability.

The Hook of Standardization    

From Ohio, an argument that "an educational system driven by standardized testing has run its course."

Choice Is a False Pretext For Draining Money From Public Schools  

From Florida, the Sun-Sentinal editorial board calls out DeSantis' choicey plans as theft from the public system.            

Will Florida Abolish The Common Core

This post ran at Forbes three weeks ago. Anyone notice anything happening since then that would change my mind? Didn't think so.

Newly-elected Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced last week that he will, via executive order, remove every "vestige" of Common Core from the state.

Unless he changes his announced plan, he probably won't.

Yeah, probably not.

Florida is unique in the US when it comes to education reform; they have embraced almost every idea to come down the pike. According to a report issued by the pro-choice, DeVos founded and funded, American Federation for Children, $2.4 billion was put into the three major types of voucher programs in the US, and $956 million of that was spent in Florida. They have generally ranked only behind California, Texas and Arizona for total number of charter schools. But they have never warmed up to the Common Core Standards.

When Rick Scott was governor, he promised that the state would have its own Florida standards to replace the Common Core. It was a cheap political stunt. As was the case in many states, the change was largely cosmetic with the actual substance of the standards remaining largely unaffected.

Governor DeSantis is promising a much more thorough purge. He announced that he has directed newly appointed education chief Richard Corcoran to get the whole business ripped out and replaced within a year. That's a problematic choice; Corcoran is seen as someone whose main educational interest has always been dismantling public education and selling off the parts; the St. Augustine Record, mincing no words, called him a hack. The notion that he will be in charge of designing that standards that public schools must live by is concerning; certainly, if I wanted to cripple public schools, sticking them with a sudden need to replace all their English and math textbooks would be one way to do it. But it's not the reason that DeSantis's plan is likely to fail. That can be found in this quote:

DeSantis said his executive order also calls for Corcoran to “streamline some of the testing” 

Along with its love of other reform ideas, Florida has long belonged to the Cult of the Test. This is the state that refused to give a testing waiver to a dying child. This is the state that went to court to keep a third grader from passing on to fourth grade because although she had demonstrated mastery of reading, she hadn't done so on the Big Standardized Test. This is also the state that has had repeated problems getting a test adopted and functioning. But most importantly for DeSantis's initiative, this is the state where every school gets a grade based on its Big Standardized Test score (currently, in Florida, the FSA).

In Florida, as in all states, it is not the standards that drive curriculum--it is the Big Standardized Test. For example, the Common Core language standards include standards that address speaking and listening, but nobody worries about aligning to those standards because they won't be on the test. The standards about reading literature could be met by doing deep dives into complete works, but that's not how most schools are teaching those standards, because that's not how they're assessed on the Big Standardized Test.

If DeSantis and Corcoran do nothing except "streamline some of the testing," it will not matter a bit what they do to the standards. Florida schools live and die by the results of the FSA, and they will continue to teach to that test, the Common Core infused test, regardless of what the standards say.

If DeSantis really wants to rip out every last vestige of Common Core, here's what he needs to do.

End the test.

Don't streamline it, modify, shorten it or edit it. End it. Cancel it.

Then, completely change the way Florida evaluates schools. No letter grades, and certainly no school assessment based on student scores on a single standardized test.

Once teachers and schools no longer have their fates tied to that single standardized test, they will feel free to pay attention to a new set of standards or even--crazy idea here--use their professional judgment to chart a great curricular course for the children of Florida. But if DeSantis intends to leave the FSA and the school grading system essentially intact, then all his big talk about the Common Core is just another cheap political stunt.

Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching

Teach for America has always been a work in progress, an evolving enterprise in search of a reason to keep existing. Once upon a time it was all about teaching and plugging holes in the system. Then it was about supplanting traditional teachers (and trying not to say out loud that they needed to be supplanted because they sucked and the Best and the Brightest had better swoop in like a shining white cavalry to rescue the poor children). And then maybe were about building a resume and getting yourself prepped for your real career (their slogan at one point was literally "change and be changed"). And then, sensitive about that shining white cavalry thing, they decided to be a force for diversity in the teaching force.

Kudzu. 

But I recently was hanging about the TFA website and discovered that more morphing of a sort has occurred, and TFA is now leaning into what has always been one of their missions. It was just never a part of the mission that they expressed so directly.

Here's some copy from their front page:

Teach For America is looking for promising leaders to take on educational inequity.

The Challenge

In America today, the circumstances children are born into predict the opportunities they will have in life. Our education system was not designed to enable all children to realize their potential or achieve their dreams.

The Opportunity

While no single solution is enough to bring about an equitable and excellent education for all children, Teach For America has learned over three decades that dramatic progress is possible. Lasting change takes bold, grounded leaders working together, inside and outside of schools, fighting for the aspirations of children and their families.

Our Approach

Teach For America finds outstanding leaders who commit to expanding educational opportunity, beginning with at least two years teaching in an under-resourced public school. Working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, educators, and community members, corps members go beyond traditional expectations to support the academic and personal growth of their students. The impact corps members have in the classroom fuels a lifelong commitment to their students and shapes the trajectory of their lives and careers.

Impacting Lives & Communities

Since 1990, nearly 60,000 leaders have impacted millions of students as Teach For America corps members, many of them returning to teach in the communities in which they grew up. More than 84% continue to work in education or in fields that impact the communities where our students and their families live.

Teach for America is not creating teachers, but leaders. Bold leaders. Outstanding leaders. Leaders who can claim that they started out as classroom teachers, so that they can have instant credibility as they implement whatever piece of reformy awesomeness they've been hired to drop on people. And TFA subscribes to the "charter schools are public school" dodge, so their two years in "public" schools may actually be some time in a charter.

First, TFA wanted to be teachers' co-workers. Then they wanted to be teachers' replacements. Now they're focusing on their other goal-- they'd like to be teachers' bosses.

The "84% continue to work in education or fields that impact the communities where our students and their families live" is a meaningless stat-- I'm actually really curious what the other 16% are doing that has no impact on education or communities where students and families live. Astronauts? Video-game testers? Brazilian cattle farmers?

I know that the disclaimer has become cliche in TFA pieces, but it does need to be said-- some people who go into TFA do so with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts, and some who emerge from the program go on to become great teachers.

But TFA alums keep turning up in other places, like Lorain Ohio, where the turnaround CEO, two building principals, and the human resources chief are all TFA grads who are now responsible for running an entire troubled district even though they have less actual public school teaching experience than almost every single other person working in the district. You find them running districts, running state agencies, running education flavored businesses, with their biographies always making reference to the lessons they learned from "their time in the classroom."

The original TFA insulting pitch was that with five weeks of training, you were ready to run a classroom. The new insulting pitch (which was always there, but in the background instead of on the front page of the website) was that with two years in a classroom, you are ready to run a school, district or state. 

So when the new gunslinger comes to town, promising transformational change based on their insights from their time in the classroom-- check. They won't always list TFA on, say, their LinkedIn page (though they will likely have a LinkedIn page), but you can still ask three questions:

1) What's your actual college degree?
2) How long did you teach, and in which school?
3) What have you been doing between then and now?

Most importantly, remember that just because someone on a higher level put this person in charge, that doesn't mean this person knows what the hell they're talking about. There are so many TFA grads out there, leading their little hearts out and basing their decisions on favored reform theories of action (because if you have little or no real experience, what else do you have to go on except hat other reformsters have told you are winning policies). The TFA network has spread like kudzu, and where one gets a leadership position, they will tap the TFA network to find other like-minded folks to bring in.

Pay attention. A TFA connection is no reason to automatically assume that the person doesn't know what they're doing, but it is reason to make sure their decisions and choices hold up to scrutiny.