From the Atlanta Journal Constitution, an article referring to the concerns of a blogger who was a Teach for America recruit, and who then became a recruiter for them. It's good to see major media noticing bloggers. Yay...hope they continue.
Teach for America alum and former recruiter: Group has gone from “mostly harmless” to “mostly harmful.”This is a doozy of a critique of Teach for America, and I suspect that it will generate a lot of debate about the elite teacher recruitment program.
Former TFA teacher and recruiter Gary Rubinstein writes about losing his respect for the movement that he joined 20 years to work in schools that desperately needed teachers. His long posting is not easily distilled, so try to read the full piece before commenting.
Rubinstein is writing about more than TFA. He is writing about a willingness to put untrained teachers – whether TFA or not – in the neediest schools with the neediest students. He writes about the role of TFA alums in a new school reform movement that emphasizes “threats of school closings and teacher firings. These leaders celebrate school closings rather than see them as their own failures to help them. These leaders deny any proof that their reforms are failing and instead continue to use P.R. to inflate their own claims of success.”
Thanks to Maureen Downey of AJC for noticing this blogger.
Here is more from his TFA blog which I read frequently.
Why I did TFA, and why you shouldn’tWhen I joined TFA twenty years ago, I did it because I believed that poor kids deserved to have someone like me helping battle education inequity in this country. At the time, there were massive teacher shortages in high need areas. The 1990 corps had 500 members and the 1991 corps had 750 members, with a third of us going to Houston. I was one of those Houston corps members, the first group to ever go to Houston. At the time, we knew that we weren’t going to be great teachers. It was unrealistic to believe otherwise. But we also knew that the jobs we were taking were jobs that nobody else wanted. Principals who were hiring these ‘Teachers For America’ or other paraphrasings of this unknown organization, were completely desperate. If not for us, our students, most likely, would be taught by a different substitute each day. Even if we were bad permanent teachers, we WERE permanent teachers and for kids who had little in life they can call permanent, it was something. The motto for TFA back then could have been ‘Hey, we’re better than nothing.’
..."I’m glad I ‘did’ TFA. Twenty years ago they filled a need. Putting a few hundred barely trained teachers into the toughest to serve schools was one of those concepts that was ‘so crazy, it might just work.’ We weren’t always doing ‘good,’ but we also weren’t doing much harm. Our five or six hundred teachers were pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.
..."Twenty years ago TFA was, to steal an expression from the late great Douglas Adams? — ‘mostly harmless.’ Then about ten years ago they became ‘potentially harmful.’ Now, in my opinion, they have become ‘mostly harmful.’
He mentions Michelle Rhee, Kevin Huffman of TN, and John White who runs the Recovery District schools in New Orleans. He points out that there is a lot of bragging about their successes. But:
Which sounds great except these leaders are some of the most destructive forces in public education. They seem to love nothing more than labeling schools as ‘failing,’ shutting them down, and blaming the supposed failure on the veteran teachers. The buildings of the closed schools are taken over by charter networks, often with leaders who were TFA alums and who get salaries of $200,000 or more to run a few schools.
Here is an interesting blog I found that points out that the cost of TFA to a school district is twice what they have been claiming.
From Geek Palaver:
Teach For America Costs Twice the Reported AmountThe Big Mistake
So that was one mistake that I made in underestimating Dr. Wardynski’s commitment to Broad Foundation funded programs. The second is actually much larger. You see, the contract doesn’t actually say that Huntsville City Schools will pay TFA $5,000 per teacher. What the contract actually says is on page 9 is:
With respect to each Teacher whose employment by School District is to commence in the 2012-2013 academic year, School District shall pay Teach For America an annual amount of $5,000.00 for each year in which such Teacher is employed by School District, up to two years from the date such employment is to commence
In other words, we’re not paying Teach for America $5,000 per TFAer. We’re actually paying them them $5,000 per TFAer per year for up to two years. The cost of this contract just doubled without anyone noticing. The cost of this contract just doubled without anyone on the board or in the central office drawing attention to this.
It is amazing how they do it with shameless propaganda. Double the cost to recruit trainees when experienced teachers are going without jobs.
That is the shame of our nation right now. There is no excuse for it.
The final comment at the blog is amazing...the cost of hiring TFA is staggering and no one is even noticing.
The Huntsville Times first reported the total cost on October 18th, as being $5,000 per TFAer for–at that time–a total of $550,000 for 110 teachers. They again reported the total cost on November 3rd as being 5,000 per TFAer for a total of $850,000 for 170 teachers.
The actual cost of the Teach for America contract is $1,700,000 for four years, not $850,000 for four years.
And the actual cost involves the loss of experienced teachers who have spent years learning how best to reach the children.
I read an article the other day about a parent who loved TFA because they used a lot of rhythm and clap clap to get the children's attention. There is so much more to learning than that. We all had little tricks we used that were similar....TFA is just borrowing from experienced teachers. But that is not teaching. That is simply getting the attention.
Real depth of learning is so much more than one can learn in 5 weeks of training.