No way public schools and public school teachers can compete with such vast amounts of money. The money makes them a media darling, and public schools are the target right now.
Teach for America charges schools to recruit their teachers who have been trained for five weeks. Local teachers waiting for jobs don't have to be paid a recruitment fee...they would be very happy just to get an interview.
Eli Broad, others pledge $100 million to Teach for America endowmentPhilanthropist Eli Broad and three other donors announced Thursday a $100-million endowment to make Teach for America a permanent teacher-training program. Broad's foundation pledged $25 million to the endowment, spurring three other matching donations from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Robertson Foundation and philanthropists Steve and Sue Mandel, officials said.
Education-reform efforts are a major thrust of the Southern California-based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Teach for America, which has a local regional office, currently has 270 teachers working in the Los Angeles area.
Be aware that recent federal legislation allows TFA teachers with only 5 weeks to declare themselves as fully accredited. Some groups are trying to fight that designation.
More recently, a coalition of groups has challenged the designation of TFA’s rookie teachers — who enter the classroom after a brief, whirlwind training regimen — as highly qualified. They assert that many hard-to-staff urban public schools and charter schools claiming to be staffed by highly qualified teachers are not.
On Thursday, these groups sent a letter to President Obama decrying a new federal law “lowering teaching standards” required under the federal No Child Left Behind Law. The legislation, supported by TFA, followed on the heels of successful litigation that challenged the designation of uncredentialed teachers as highly qualified.
Here are other donors to TFA, powerful ones indeed. They are with their money setting the standards for education in the future with their connections to Arne Duncan's DOE.
TFA donor listMany teachers, including me, feel that this and other new teacher projects are a way of replacing experienced teachers who have earned higher salaries with recent graduates with 5 weeks training....to break the back of the unions who negotiated those contracts.
A way to replaced higher-salaried teachers?Those who are thinking of participating in Teach for America with a social justice mission in mind should consider this. Although a far more daunting task for sure, those really interested in social justice should consider ways of solving problems like unavoidable unemployment and low-wage jobs.
On top of failing to make a dent in poverty, Teach for America actually detracts from social justice by hurting real teachers. Teach for America students take low, entrance-level pay while also receiving a government subsidy for their salary in the form of Americorps stipends. Schools lay off teachers and then hire Teach for America teachers to fill positions that real teachers would otherwise be filling. Teach for America teachers are undercutting the wage needs of real teachers and causing them to be laid off as a result.
Imagine this: a well-off college student takes a subsidized teaching position at an impossibly low wage and displaces actual teachers who might already be struggling to get by — all for social justice!
For anyone who has any concern for labor rights, this is extremely abusive. Not undercutting wage demands of often unionized workers is rule number one of how to be a serious social justice advocate.
It's called union busting, and it is gaining wide support from Democrats who don't want to criticize the policies of this administration.
These teachers are only obligated to serve two years as teachers. It will have a devastating effect on teaching as a career. There will be no job security, and the children will pay the price for saving money, sacrificing experience and longer training.
This suits Bill Gates a lot. He has a philosophy about experience.
Bill Gates said teachers don't improve after 3 years.Garrulous Mr. Gates
Teachers have intrinsic motivation Gates can neither measure nor (apparently) conceive of. I appreciate money, and I’ll say thanks to praise from almost anyone. But I especially treasure it from kids. Last month I told my class I’d miss them. They shouted, “We’ll miss you too!” They asked me if I’d teach them next year. I was honored, far more than by anything Gates could do or say.
But Gates proves things with charts, one of which says:
"Once somebody has taught for three years, their teaching quality does not improve thereafter."
That is pure BS. Of course they improve.
Congress was asked this last year to give 50 million dollars to TFA. Last I heard they did do that. I think of all this money going to TFA, and I find myself thinking what it would mean if it went to fund public education and hiring teachers locally....instead of paying to recruit them.
Why pay a private company 50 million of public money to recruit new teachersWendy Kopp, credited with founding Teach for America, brags about waltzing up to donors, time and time again, asking for a million dollars a pop and getting it. In what fantasy land does that occur? Her adoption by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the NewSchools Venture Fund has assured TFA’s success. Now it appears that Kopp and her billionaire sugar-daddies are doing the same dance in Congress, only a million dollars this time is chump change. It’s fifty million dollars of your tax money they want so they can supply poor kids with sub-standard teachers at a premium price. Read about their failed dealings with Sacramento.
If you campaigned for Democrats in 2008 thinking they would be the voice of reason and advocate for fully-funded, strong public schools and professional teachers, prepare yourself for more disappointment. The Democrats have prescribed “No Child Left Behind on steroids” for our nations poorest children of color. Teach for America is part of that plan. It believes that poor children don’t deserve professional teachers. Here’s what you should know about Teach for America: Teach for America harms children. From the letters:
We truly believe this is a worthwhile investment as we have seen first-hand the impact that Teach for America corps members have in communities across the country. A growing body of independent research confirms this and has shown corps members’ impact on their students’ achievement is often equal to or greater than that of other new teachers. Moreover, the most rigorous studies have shown that the corps members impact is on par with, or exceeds, that of experienced and certified teachers in the same schools.
Yes,
they got the money..50 million. So did KIPP Charter Schools.
Teach for America, the nonprofit group that recruits elite college students to teach in public schools, and the KIPP Foundation, which runs a nationwide network of charter schools, were big winners in a $650 million federal grant competition known as Investing in Innovation, the Department of Education said Wednesday.
Each group won $50 million. Two others won large awards for proposals the department said were backed by significant evidence of success with students.
People here at DU have said to me the last few days that teachers are not being laid off and being replaced by TFA teachers. Yes, they are.
Here are
several examples of that very thing.Sacramento:
Sacramento is a finalist for Teach for America, a program that sends highly motivated college graduates into troubled schools. As a community, Sacramento would have to raise $2.7 million within the next month to become one of three cities to which the program will expand next year. The Morgan Family Foundation has already pledged $600,000 over the next three years.
They could hire local, laid-off teachers without a recruiting fee.
.."Teach For America would require Sacramento school districts to take 30 of its teachers each year for three years for a total of 90 teachers. The $2.7 million would pay for the selection, recruitment and support of those teachers. Salary and benefits would be paid by school districts.
Sacramento City Superintendent Jonathan Raymond said he would use the teachers in the district's persistently struggling schools – specifically for science, math and special education classes. In spite of pending teacher layoffs, the district still needs more of those teachers.
Some groups are filing to keep those inexperienced teachers from being concentrated in the poorest schools. Those schools need the best, not the cheapest.
Delaware:
Don’t know why they need federal funding because Red Clay is paying up $300,000.00 for three-year contract for 6 TFA teachers. Get this. the $300,000.00 is on top of paying the TFA’s normal teaching salaries and benefits “and” participation in all Red Clay sponsored professional development. Wait one more thing ! After two years of teaching the TFA’s will receive $9400.00 from the federally funded AmeriCorps program.
Boston, DC, and the Charlotte Mecklenburg district.
Last summer, Boston Teachers Union President Richard Stutman met with 18 local union presidents, “all of whom said they’d seen teachers laid off to make room for TFA members,” according to an article in USA Today. “I don’t think you’ll find a city that isn’t laying off people to accommodate Teach for America,” Stutman said.
One district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, laid off hundreds of experienced teachers but kept 100 TFAers.
In Boston the union filed a complaint that the district was going to lay off 20 veteran teachers and replace them with Teach for America folks.
In DC Michelle Rhee, a TFA grad and school chancellor, laid off 229 teachers with experience but kept almost all of the 170 TFA recruits.
Yes, it is happening. And NYC is doing it also, just using a different "new teacher" company.
From NY Daily News:
Education Department wants $5M for teacher recruiters, despite layoffsThe city may lay off 8,500 teachers, but education officials still want approval for a contract of up to $5 million a year to recruit even more teachers.
The agency's Panel for Educational Policy will vote later this month on the hefty contract, but already critics are questioning the need to spend money to recruit during a time of layoffs.
"We should put a freeze on any spending related to new hiring. We should not even be going through the expense of negotiating a contract now," said Patrick Sullivan, the panel's Manhattan representative.
Since 2000, the New Teacher Project has contracted with the city to recruit New York City Teaching Fellows. For this school year, the group received $2.8 million for recruiting 705 teachers.
The New Teacher Project was, I think, founded by Michelle Rhee.
Laying off or firing established teachers while hiring teachers from new teacher projects with several weeks training.....this will come back to backfire on us later.
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