Dear Teach For America, What's Your Plan?

An Ordinary Teacher Talks to Teach for America

Dear Teach for America,

Allow me to appreciate you for your efforts for children. Okay. Now that we’ve done that, let me tell you why I don’t appreciate your efforts for children.

Let me start with an instructive story of being on the other side of the desk. This fall, I went into my 12 year old niece’s math class at parent’s night. Her math teacher, a 20 something, young Asian woman in a pert little dress stood in front of the classroom of parents (and one aunt) talking about the year in math. People were concerned because it was a new school with a new philosophy, one that did not believe in homogeneous grouping for math. It was worrisome. Would the children be positioned for high school advanced placement classes if they were expected to go at a pace that would serve everyone? Her teacher allayed our fears by saying, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to be like those public school teachers.”

I said, “But, you are a public school teacher.”

Her response? “Yes, but we’re not like them. We’re more like charters. We work hard.”

The rest is at stonepooch. Go read it.

TFA: A Failed Vision

Teach for America: A Failed Vision

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: “Sorry. Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way”

It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for American recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in high poverty schools and allowed the TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, which are filled with Urban Studies and African American Studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and several of whom came from the kind of high poverty neighborhoods TFA proposed to send its recruits to teach in.

Not one of them was accepted!

TFA Is Full Of Spin

...

The first thing that you should notice when looking at a stat like “one third of alumni are still teaching” is the careful choice of words. You’re only an alum if you don’t quit before you become an alum. And since somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of people who start in TFA do not complete their commitment and therefore become alumni, they are not considered in that stat. That alone would move the number down to 30%, but that’s just the beginning.

...
Gary Rubenstein in response to this annual TFA survey.

TFA Teacher Tells About His Horrible Experience (Video)

What Would You Ask A TFAer? Updated Again

I am interviewing a former TFA member tomorrow for a future post. What questions do you want answered? Let me know in comments.

Update: Some questions so far:

1. Was 6 weeks enough training to make you "Highly Qualified?"
2. Did Whitney Tilson ever hit on you?
3. What did you learn from the veteran teachers?  
4. What do you think the veteran teachers learned from you?
5. How were students characterized?
6. What was your worst fialure?
7. What was your greatest success?
8. Were you told that 2 years of teaching experience would prepare you for a career in education administration?
9. Did you get support from TFA?
10. Were you given a leadership role at your school?
11. Do you believe TFA teachers can do the job of replacing teaching as a career by cycling through new teachers every 2 years?
12. What is TFA's greatest strength.
13. What is TFA's greatest weakness?
14. What pedagogy/strategies most crucial in your content area?
15. What pedagogy & dev psych did TFA give?
16. What did you teach and why? 
17. Why did you join? 
18. Why not major in Ed?

Keep them coming!

Update II: Frank has written his own guest post at An Urban Teacher's Education blog because I am too slow to get his interview transcribed.  You need to read his take on TFA.

Highly Qualified Teachers? We All Know It's A Sham

Slipped at the 11th hour into the Continuing Resolution to fund the government, the provision at issue proposes to call novice teachers still learning how to teach in alternative preparation programs on nights and weekends "highly qualified" under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). That designation relieves districts of having to tell parents of the teachers' sub-par preparation and allows their continued concentration in poor and minority schools.

Pushed by Teach for America so that they can continue to operate business as usual, it appears more important to Congress to change the law to accommodate TFA than to ensure the equity provisions of NCLB operate as intended. Alternate route trainees (only a few percent of which are actually from TFA) are disproportionately concentrated in low-income, high minority schools despite NCLB's requirement that teachers lacking full credentials be equitably distributed across schools.

JA

TFA Teachers Not "Highly Qualified"

A federal court has struck down a regulation that allows Teach for America teachers and others working towards alternative certification to count as “highly qualified” teachers under NCLB. Joshua Dunn and Martha Derthick wrote about the case in the Summer 2008 issue of Ed Next. “When a law and social realities are seriously at odds, as in this case, administrators must employ flexibility and ingenuity to make the law ‘work,’ or appear to,” they wrote.

Education Next

TFA, KIPP Unsustainable According To Rick Hess

The eduformers like Gates and Broad as well as the edupreneurs like Tom Vander Ark, along with their puppet Arne Duncan, devised RTTT and in so doing made more than a couple states change their laws to get into the contest. Those laws made it easier for charter schools to get into the game, as they are supposedly the biggest part of the education solution.

Yesterday, Rick Hess admitted we can't count on TFA or charters to do the job. No shit, Sherlock.

...as much as I love TFA and KIPP, their models have an enormous appetite for hard-working, talented, passionate youth--the problem is, there's only so much of that to go around. This tends to create natural limits to their rates of growth....

TFA: The Real Story

From Barbara Miner at Rethinking Schools:

But what if one accepts TFA’s assumptions—that its purpose is purely to address educational inequity by recruiting the best and the brightest, training them briefly, and having them teach for two years in a low-income school? And that its model trumps the value of recruiting accredited teachers who view teaching as a career?

Given that the revolving door of unqualified teachers is a key factor in the poor performance of many low-income schools, what are the repercussions of those assumptions? Is TFA aggravating a problem that it claims to be solving?

It is Kopp herself who perhaps best answers that question. Speaking in a 2007 commencement speech at Mt. Holyoke College, Kopp said:

What I have come to appreciate is that things that matter take time. We live in an era when it is rare to meet people in their 20s and 30s who have stayed with something for more than a few years. And certainly, in some cases the right thing is to experiment and move on. But in many cases, the right thing is to stay with something, internalize tough lessons, and push yourself to new levels of knowledge and responsibility. Deep and widespread change comes from sticking with things.

h/t KL

TFA Takedown

Corporate Missionaries vs. Professionals

Denise Gelberg cuts right to the chase in this essay about TFA and the role of fast-track temps with Ivy League degrees. Gelberg is also the author of, "The 'Business' of Reforming American Schools," a worthwhile read detailing education reform efforts of the business community during the past century. From The Cornell Daily Sun:

Teaching: Missionary Stint or Profession?

By Denise Gelberg

Created Oct 9 2009 - 4:02am

In the past two months thousands of newly minted college graduates from our finest colleges and universities became teachers of our neediest children in urban and rural schools across the country. These novices entered the classroom via alternate, fast-track routes such as Teach for America, committing to teach for two years. TFA and its brethren are highly selective programs, screening applicants for disposition, intelligence, a premier education and a vision of social justice. The premise that underlies the movement to put the best and the brightest of our new college graduates into our most challenging classrooms is this: Smart, energetic, innovative novices will, during their two year tenure, be able to succeed where others have failed.

Bringing our brightest young people into the classroom is a compelling vision. Why then, do I worry about the ultimate effect of programs such as TFA?

35 years ago I was such a novice. A top graduate of an Ivy League college I was certain that the only thing I needed in order to become a good teacher was the opportunity to shadow an experienced teacher for a few weeks. I reasoned that if I could earn As in nearly every one of my courses at a highly selective, high pressure college, I could certainly figure out how to run an elementary classroom without breaking a sweat.
As is so often true, experience would provide the needed correction for my faulty thinking. Despite my best efforts during my first year of teaching I made many serious, fundamental errors and did not serve my students well. My second year, though better, was still a learning experience for the teacher. Those two years of teaching can be summed up as follows: I worked hard, did the best I could and was performing adequately for a novice by the end of the second year.

Two years comprises the entire teaching career of a typical Teach for America candidate. The vast majority of the TFA teachers complete their two year commitment and move on to things bigger and better; careers that pay more, earn higher status and allow bathroom breaks as needed. In a sense, the TFA experience is reminiscent of the two year mission young Mormons engage in when they reach young adulthood. Like young Mormon missionaries, the TFA candidates are called to serve through teaching and undergo a short training period before being sent far from home. The mission is a rite of passage. Once completed, the young Mormons begin their adult lives and careers.

In my case I chose to make teaching my life’s work rather than to leave after two years. In time I grew into a successful, and, reputedly, a master teacher. My journey from bright young novice to seasoned professional emboldens me to offer counsel to education reformers who aim to revolutionize teaching by bringing wave after wave of bright, well educated young people into the nation’s classrooms for limited stints.

First, two years does not a teacher make. The idea that teaching does not require professional expertise — just a top-notch education, a good heart and youthful enthusiasm — has somehow developed currency in the contemporary education policy debate. How else can one rationalize the idea of dropping novices into the most difficult teaching environments such as are found in our inner cities and poorest rural areas? I can say, after teaching some 28 years past my first two, that I continued to develop expertise throughout my career. There is no accelerated path to becoming a master teacher.

Second, the constant teacher turnover generated by programs such as TFA is not in the best interests of our most vulnerable children. Few middle class parents want the “new teacher” when class assignments are made for their child. Why, then, is it OK for poor kids to be assigned a novice teacher year after year after year?

Third, continual teacher turnover handicaps efforts to make schools more effective. After working in six schools and three school districts I can testify to the fact that it takes time to build a team of teachers that pull together to realize the overarching goal of improved student performance. Unremitting teacher turnover works against long term, sustained school improvement.

Finally, the job benefits that keep people in teaching — tenure, pensions, union contracts that provide medical insurance and other protections — are not anachronistic relics of a distant past as characterized by many reformers. Rather, they allow and encourage people to stay in a difficult career that provides many challenges and limited financial rewards.

Two year teaching stints may be gratifying for the bright, well-meaning young adults who sign up for them. They may learn important life lessons that will guide them for years to come. But if socially aware, good hearted, intelligent novice teachers really want to help our neediest youngsters I suggest they sign on for the long haul. Only by remaining in the classroom can they develop into the master teachers they may very well have the potential to become. And in time that may ultimately lead to a genuine revolution in the quality of our schools.

Denise Gelberg ’72, Ph.D., ’93 taught grades K-3 for 30 years in New York State. She is the author of The “Business” of Reforming American Schools (SUNY Press). Guest Room appears periodically.

h/t Schools Matter

Mike Rose On Education "Miracles": They Still Don't Exist

Mike Rose, a UCLA professor, author and blogger, writes about the reform movement's "miracles" and how they are dumbing down education:

We started off the new century with the Texas Miracle, the phenomenal closing of the achievement gap and reduction of dropout rates through a program of high-stakes standardized tests. (The Texas Miracle would then spawn the federal No Child Left Behind Act.) Politicians and media-savvy administrators have also found the miraculous; the governor of my state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, referred to an Oakland charter school as an “education miracle.” And the pundits have appropriated the lingo. A recent New York Times column by David Brooks on the charter school of the Harlem Children’s Zone was titled “The Harlem Miracle.” And so it goes.

Upon closer examination, some of these miracles turn out to be suspect, the result of questionable assessments and manipulated numbers. The Texas Miracle didn’t hold up under scrutiny. And some, like the Harlem Children’s Zone—which is a commendable place—gain their excellence through hard work along multiple dimensions, from teaching and mentoring to utilizing outside resources and fundraising. There’s nothing miraculous about their successes.

Along with talk of miracles, we have the belief in educational wonder drugs and magic bullets—single-shot solutions to complicated problems: high-stakes testing, standards, charter schools, small schools, alternative teacher recruitment, slash-and-burn CEO management and so on. Each of these solutions has potential merit. Standards can bring coherence to a curriculum; small schools can result in increased student contact; alternative recruitment and credentialing bring new blood into the teaching force; some districts need the serious administrative shake-up that managerial housecleaning can provide. All good. But for these efforts to work, to increase the quality of education, other factors have to be present as well...

Go read the whole 2 pages.

Corporate Culture At School

Jim Horn exposes the corporate mindset of charters like KIPP, programs like TFA, and also every staff meeting I've ever attended:

. . . . The driving ideology of corporate culture is a blind faith in the power and virtue of the corporate collective. All quotas can be met. All things are possible. Profits can always be raised. It is only a question of the right attitude. The highest form of personal happiness, we are told, is when the corporation thrives. Corporate retreats are built around this idea of merging the self with the corporate collective. They often have the feel of a religious revival. They are designed to whip up emotions. Office managers and sales staffs are given inspirational talks by sports stars, retired military commanders, billionaires and self-help specialists like Tony Robbins who tell them, in essence, the impossible is always possible. And when this proves not to be true it is we who are the problem. We simply have to try harder.

The belief that by thinking about things, by visualizing them, by wanting them, we can make them happen is magical thinking. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporation can never be questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. We can always make more money, meet new quotas and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking is largely responsible for our economic collapse since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as "negative." This childish belief discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. And it has perverted the way we think about the nation and ourselves...

Now go read the rest at Schools Matter.

Some KIPP Truth

h/t Jim Horn

Update: More here.

Michelle Rhee Is Trying To Be Nice, Now That The Devil Inside Her Has Been Exposed

Here she is. Michelle Rhee, trying to keep her job. She says she thinks teachers are great and not the problem! She is lying! She has said, since she got her Chancellor job, that teachers are the problem. Don't buy this new, improved Rhee. It's a facade, a sham, a trick, she's slippin' you a Mickey, just ignore her....

The Toughest Job

By Michelle Rhee
Monday, February 9, 2009; A17

Much has been said and written about education in our city recently, and I want to set the record straight with students, parents and, especially, teachers. My thoughts about teachers have not always come through accurately. Much has been lost that they should know.

I often speak of our district's performance data with sadness and outrage. The situation for our city's children is dire. Yet while I acknowledge the seriousness of the work we face, I want to be clear about something: I do not blame teachers for the low achievement levels.

I have talked with too many teachers to believe this is their fault. I have watched them pour their energy into engaging every student. I know they are working furiously in a system that for many years has not appreciated them -- sometimes not even paying them on time or providing textbooks. Those who categorically blame teachers for the failures of our system are simply wrong.

Rather, teachers are the solution to the vexing problems facing urban education.

In the coming weeks, we will submit a final proposal for a new teacher contract. Through it and other reforms, we can create, together, the most effective and highly compensated educator force in the country. Our key goals:

· Individual choice. Contrary to the rumors, nobody will be forced to give up tenure. All teachers will get a substantial raise. Some may wish to choose an option that includes pay increases and bonuses based on excellence in the classroom. This would result in many teachers doubling their pay, with some making at least $100,000 by year seven.

· Measuring excellence. We cannot rely on test scores alone. Good evaluations of teaching practices must be well rounded. Only some of our teachers work in grades or subjects in which tests are given, so we must use many assessments to measure student growth.

· A growth model of achievement. Many teachers inherit classes of students who are far behind academically. Yet some teachers, even with minimal support, move their students two to three grade levels ahead in a year. Teachers will not be evaluated on an absolute measure but on how far they take their students.

· Protection from arbitrary firings. Some teachers are concerned a principal may want to fire them for reasons unrelated to performance. While principals who do this risk their own jobs (firing effective teachers is a sure way to lower school achievement), we will ensure protections for teachers. We need a fair and transparent process, free from bias and haste, designed with teachers' input.

· Professional development and support. Teachers have told me that many of their hesitations about the contract -- and about me -- center on the pressures that teachers face: "What if my school does not support me? What if I am working my tail off and I still have weeks when my patience is thin and things beyond my control are causing problems?"

Our proposal will provide a framework to navigate these questions with strong programs to support and develop teachers as professionals. Neither will we forget the small things that can weigh down great teachers. For example, we want to reimburse those who buy supplies for their classrooms or use their cellphones to call students and families. We want to compensate teachers when they cover classes for others. I was a teacher. I know how these things add up.

Finally, we have to talk about ineffective teaching, which is not a popular subject. I am not referring to situations in which teachers are trying hard but are frustrated by their daily challenges. I am talking about teaching -- or the absence of teaching -- that shortchanges kids. Do not misunderstand: I do not believe that most of our teachers are shortchanging their students. But in the worst cases, we have teachers who put their feet on their desks and read the paper while students run around. Or they use corporal punishment. Or they intentionally abuse their current contract, leaving for three months at a time and returning for the one day that will keep their job active. We all agree that these people do not belong in the classroom, and we must be able to remove them expeditiously.

I am often asked to name the most important factor in this district's success. It is teachers. It is their classrooms and what happens there, the expectations they set as they push students to go further. Teaching is the toughest job there is: Doing it well can keep you up at night thinking about your students, their stories and your role in their lives. But as teachers know, this work is also sure to surprise and reward. Teachers deserve recognition and respect for their efforts.

Those who teach well deserve the highest compensation we can offer. All teachers -- especially those in one of this country's most challenging districts -- deserve the best professional development available. My hope is that a new agreement will support teachers to continue to love this hard work, to keep doing it and to become even better.

The writer is chancellor of D.C. Public Schools.

Maybe There Is Hope For Education Policy?

This could be very good news for education nationally:

Is Darling-Hammond Going to Be Duncan's Deputy?

Remember the controversy over Linda Darling-Hammond, Obama's campaign and transition adviser on education? Well, she's back. Rumor has it that Darling-Hammond might be getting the deputy secretary position at the Department of Education, which, as this graph shows, wields great power. "That's the person that really runs the agency," one education expert and reformer told me. It's a scenario that reformers, who favor tough new approaches to changing education and see Darling-Hammond as a traditionalist, had hoped wouldn't happen. "I guess we lost on this one," the reformer told me.

Calls to several education policy experts confirmed that word is circulating in the community that she might be tapped as second-in-command under Arne Duncan. "She's made the rounds talking to people, doing the kinds of things you do if you're expecting to stay in Washington," said Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank in D.C. He noted that, if she's not about to get the deputy gig, she could be getting another department position, perhaps one focusing on teacher quality.

In my conversations with them, education policy folks also said they've heard that Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, of which Darling-Hammond isn't a big fan, turned down an administration job. Michael Johnston, an Obama campaign adviser, TFA alum, and school principal who's working in the senior staffing process for the education department, declined to comment on who's getting which posts. "The team will be tremendous," he said in an e-mail, noting that an announcement about senior staff could come any day now.

Reformers are crossing their fingers that Darling-Hammond won't be named the No. 2.

--Seyward Darby

TFA And KIPP: $$$$$

A great piece by Jim Horn:

TFA and KIPP: Ivy League Temps and Corporate Missionaries Part I

In just a few years, TFA has established itself as one of the smart-people-who-just-graduated-with-liberal-arts-degrees-and-now-have-no-idea-what-they-want-to-do-with-their-lives-but-are-pretty-sure-it-isn’t-remain-in-the-spin-cycle-of-academia-or-move-on-to-the-next-preset-hierarchy-in-the-finance-world demographic. Used to be those poor souls could only go to law school or move to New York and “go into, like, publishing or something.” But TFA positioned itself in such a way that it gets the lost souls who have an impulse to do something to help the world immediately upon graduating.

It’s like the Peace Corps. But, you know, creepier.
-–David Chernicoff, Yale Daily News, 10-27-06

In 1990 Teach for America, the wildly profitable non-profit that skeptics often refer to as Teach For Awhile, received an initial grant from Exxon Mobil and, thus, began an organization whose avowed mission remains to place as many Ivy League would-be teacher recruits in poor public schools as possible. This year TFA has an operating budget in excess of $100 million, net assets of over $120 million, and a work force of over 6,000 bright, energetic, and, yes, clueless recruits engaged in on-the-job training in some of America’s most desperately-poor, low-achieving schools, where children, by the way, need most of all (beyond the need to end their poverty) the most highly qualified, experienced teachers with deep knowledge of the subjects they teach and knowledge of how to teach those subjects.

Despite what the grim reality calls out for, TFA, in contrast, places teacher trainees with zero years teaching experience and without qualifications from any accredited training program in schools with the least resources and the greatest need. Beyond a five-week pre-service basic training course and four visits during the first year, TFA leaves their primarily white, middle-class recruits (1 in 10 is African-American) to their own devices in providing poor, minority students with what these recruits quickly find out they do not have. And with the TFA public relations machine that is able to instigate media wars and think tank assaults against legitimate research that shows the advantages of certificated teachers when compared to TFA and other uncertified recruits, there is little to stand in the way of the new definition of teaching as, not a calling or even a profession, but as a job that the service oriented do for a few years before moving on. Sort of like the TFA model.

But nothing about this grandiose do-gooderism exercised at the expense of poor children in poor schools seems to matter to the growing network of individual, foundation, and corporate donors eager to write checks in support of this growing mission. TFA now includes groupings of contributors for the 5 and 10 million dollar categories. The Dells, the Fishers, and Eli Broad are listed among several others in the $10 million “Expansion Fund” list.

Nor does there seem to be any moral reservation or element of doubt expressed by these idealistic recent grads who would seem equally eager to sign up. Last May TFA announced that the new class of 3,700 recruits was drawn from a pool of 24,718 applicants. The air of exclusivity comes at a price, however, for despite the impression that top-performing Ivy Leaguers are beating a path to the recruitment office, TFA spent $2 million more in 2007 on recruiting and selection ($18.5 million) than it did on candidate training ($16.5 million). But then, Madison Avenue never came cheap.

And yet for all the sunny assuaging of white middle class guilt and the successful beefing up of law school resumes skimpy on service that TFA has enabled for its thousands of past and present recruits and donors, there are some dark elements of TFA that are incubated and grown by this movement.

First and foremost, TFA leaves unchallenged the urban reality of schools that are largely or entirely segregated by income and race, preferring instead to focus on interventions that do not challenge the poverty that is the root of test score gaps to begin with. Not unlike the vast majority of education reforms of the past century that have been divorced from social forces that are at work in perpetuating poverty, TFA focuses narrowly on changing instruction and on altering the organization and content of the child’s mind as the ready remedy for poor schools. In so doing, TFA barricades itself from the root cause of weak test scores, which is poverty, while necessitating, it would seem, a draconian kind of pedagogical treatment that we might expect of 19th Century missionaries in a heathen land. Ira Socol, in fact, refers to TFA as a colonial missionary project.

The most highly publicized of the prescriptive regimens for changing the poor, rather than changing poverty, has been developed, in fact, by two celebrated TFA alums, Mike Feinberg and David Levin, the founders of the KIPP Schools (Knowledge Is Power Program). Based on highly-scripted lessons, iron-fisted discipline, memorization, recitation and drill techniques, longer school days, longer school weeks that include Saturdays, and longer school years, this type of teaching is suited, if for anyone, for the young, energetic, single, and temporary social missionaries of TFA. As John Derbyshire noted,

I am sure there are some people who enter the teaching profession with the desire to crunch their way daily across the crack-vial-littered streets of crime-wrecked inner-city neighborhoods in order to put in 15-hour working days, but I doubt there are many such.

KIPP and TFA have formed, then, a marriage that is mutually supportive and sustaining, and both organizations are now fed by the same deep institutional revenue streams that flow toward social manipulation, privatization of public spaces, and limitless tax credits. Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of TFA, is married, you see, to KIPP’s CEO, Richard Barth.

Michelle Rhee: Liar? It Sure Looks Like It!

I want to thank The Daily Howler for all his work exposing Rhee for what she apparently is--a resume padding, story embellishing, misrepresenting, KJ loving, liar who is framing the whole conversation about education to the detriment of students, teachers, districts, and research:

This brings us to our topic today: The way Amanda Ripley profiled Rhee on the cover of last week’s Time.

Let’s be clear: Rhee may turn out to be an excellent superintendent of schools in DC. In our view, it’s OK that she’s inclined to bang heads (though she may be inclined to overdo it a tad); we think you should probably err on that side if you’re running a big urban system. But Rhee is a darling of press corps elites, who often know nothing about urban schools. That has led to some unfortunate journalism—as in this important passage from Ripley’s profile of Rhee:

RIPLEY (12/8/08): After Rhee graduated from Cornell University in 1992, she joined Teach for America. She spent three years teaching at Harlem Park Elementary, one of the lowest-performing schools in Baltimore. Her parents visited and were stunned by the conditions of the neighborhood. "The area where the kids lived reminded me of a scene after the Korean War," says her father Shang Rhee.

Rhee suffered during that first year, and so did her students. She could not control the class. Her father remembers her returning home to visit and telling him she didn't want to go back. She had hives on her face from the stress.

The second year, Rhee got better. She and another teacher started out with second-graders who were scoring in the bottom percentile on standardized tests. They held on to those kids for two years, and by the end of third grade, the majority were at or above grade level, she says. (Baltimore does not have good test data going back that far, a problem that plagues many districts, so this assertion cannot be checked. But Rhee's principal at the time has confirmed the claim.) The experience gave Rhee faith in the power of good teaching. Yet what happened afterward broke her heart. "What was most disappointing was to watch these kids go off into the fourth grade and just lose everything," Rhee says, "because they were in classrooms with teachers who weren't engaging them.”

Including its gratuitous slam at those bad fourth-grade teachers, that’s the classic foundational tale of the “Rhee is a Miracle Worker” myth. Except for one small fact: The miracle claims attributed to Rhee have been vastly downsized here. In Ripley’s telling, Rhee “started out with second-graders who were scoring in the bottom percentile on standardized tests”—but after two years of miraculous work, “the majority were at or above grade level.” But that is not what Rhee has said all through her flashy public career. Last year, the Washington Post’s Nikita Stewart actually quoted her long-standing, undocumented, boast:

STEWART (6/30/07): Rhee’s résumé asserts that the students made a dramatic gain: "Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”

On balance, that is a much more dramatic claim than the one Ripley described in Time. According to Rhee’s long-standing claim, she worked so major a miracle that ninety percent of her floundering students ended up “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.” That is a truly astonishing claim—and, in Ripley’s profile of Rhee, that claim has been massively downsized.

That’s right, readers! “A majority” of kids “at or above grade level” is a much more modest claim than the claim which helped Rhee get where she is. So how about it? Has Rhee actually changed her claim? Twice last week, we e-mailed Ripley through the “Contact” mechanism on her web site, hoping we could find out:

E-MAIL: I'm wondering about the following passage from your Time profile of Michelle Rhee:

"The second year, Rhee got better. She and another teacher started out with second-graders who were scoring in the bottom percentile on standardized tests. They held on to those kids for two years, and by the end of third grade, the majority were at or above grade level, she says."

I'm wondering if that is an accurate account of something Rhee said in your interviews with her. I ask because Rhee has made much stronger claims about her students' achievement in the past. For example, on her resume, Rhee was still saying this in 2007: “Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher." That is a much stronger claim than the one you report.

I realize that you don't quote Rhee in that part of your profile, but I'm wondering if that was an accurate account of something Rhee said about her students' test scores. This would be for further treatment at my web site, The Daily Howler.

With thanks for any help you can give, [etc. and so forth and so on.]

We don’t know if Ripley got our request. But we got no reply.

Does this question actually matter? Yes, it does. Here’s why:

Dionne’s “reformers” build their world around the idea of improving the stock of public school teachers. This is a perfectly valid objective—although, in some hands, it can quickly devolve into brainless, old-school union-bashing.

To these heroic “reformers,” Rhee is a leading figure. And if you believe her self-glorying tales, you might start thinking that the only problem in low-income schools involves those lazy teachers. According to Rhee (and others like her), when teachers roll up and their sleeves and get to work, even the lowest-scoring kids end up in the top ten percent. If you really believe such inspiring tales, it’s hard to see why we should waste our time with all those other types of “reform.” We should just send high-minded Princeton kids into the schools and let the miracles happen.

Rhee may turn out to be a good superintendent—but no, we don’t believe her tale. And we think Wendy Kopp should go to jail for that crap she told Charlie Rose last summer (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/16/08). But Charlie just sat there and let her blab, with nothing resembling a real question asked. And this morning, Dionne restricts the use of the loaded term “reform” to Kopp and her tellers of tales.

It matters if Rhee’s hero tale is correct. Tales like that have created bogus ideas about low-income schools for the past forty years now. Unfortunately, Time sent an unschooled scribe to profile Rhee, and through some process or another, she vastly downsized Rhee’s long-standing claim—perhaps without even realizing. Last week, we asked her how this change had occurred. But in the world the Dionnes and Roses have built, you don’t really question “reformers.”

Meanwhile, low-income kids can go hang in the yard; our journalistic world is built around pleasing tales, not the real search for “reform.” Press elites have always found it pretty to believe pleasing tales like Rhee’s. For ourselves, we don’t believe her inspiring tale—and we think the search for real success will surely be hard, and quite long.

This just in from the ivory tower: Uh-oh! Both camps in Dionne’s column have valid objectives. But read back through the two sets of reforms. Neither group mentions instructional practice! Such fluff isn’t mentioned at all.

TFA: A Colonial Project

I got an email from Open Education pointing me to this interview with Ira David Socol. The following is part of one answer. Go read the whole thing, and then check out Ira's blog.

Teach for America is a “colonial project.” It is a “missionary project.” It begins with the basic premise that the solution for the underclass in America is to make them ‘as much like’ rich white folks as possible. When you listen to the TFA leadership, they don’t really talk about “education,” probably because they don’t really believe in education. They talk about “leadership” instead. If they believed in education they would see education as important on the path to effective teaching, an idea they specifically reject, replacing it with the thought that since TFA corps members represent the elites (or, religiously, the “elect”), all they have to do is “lead” the downtrodden out of poverty.

This is essentially the British Colonial conversion concept. “We’ll fix Nigeria/Ireland/South Africa/India. We’ll just teach them to speak the Queen’s English, give them a Parliament, and make them wear powdered wigs in court. Then they’ll be civilized. And like the British Empire, this strategy is adopted because TFA’s board and supporters have no desire to ever relinquish power to a rising colonial population. If it’s all about “follow the leader,” the leader never changes.

Beyond that, TFA is a “cover up.” Rather than enlist our elite universities in the fight to reallocate resources, or improve democracy, or build equality of opportunity, or even simply to improve teacher pay, support, and status, we use them to offer the fig leaf of charity to deflect any actual movement within society.

And beyond that, TFA is a “good enough for those kids” effort. I say, over and over, that if TFA wants to prove itself, replace the faculties of the schools in Scarsdale, NY or Greenwich, CT, or at Groton and St. Bernard’s, with TFA corps members. And let those teachers – holding their current salaries – go to the TFA placements. If TFA improves the education in those wealthy places, it will have proved itself. If the teachers from those top schools have better impacts than TFA teachers do in the impoverished districts, we’ll know that better teacher training, better teacher pay, and redistributing resources is the way to go.[emphasis mine]

Teach For America: Makes For Bad Teachers!

From The Daily Howler:

The little reform that doesn’t: On the front page of Saturday’s Post, Megan Greenwell penned a long piece (1380 words) about the Teach for America program. One paragraph struck us as very important. It was paragraph 12 in her long report—out of 27 in all:

GREENWELL (12/7/08): Research into Teach for America's effectiveness has been inconclusive, but at least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by its teachers score significantly lower on standardized tests than do their peers. A small handful of other studies, and the organization's own research, contradict that claim.

Say what? “[A]t least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by [Teach for America] teachers score significantly lower?” Greenwell said this research isn’t conclusive. But we thought that paragraph (paragraph 12) was remarkable—really quite striking.

Why did we find that passage so striking? Because of the way the Washington Post—and the upper-class press corps generally—loves pimping Teach for America. Indeed, someone should quickly introduce Greenwell to her paper’s editorial board! Just two days before her piece appeared, the board produced this high-minded editorial; the editors begged Obama to “opt for boldness”—for bold “reform”— in selecting his Secretary of Education. And in the mahoganied world of our upper-end press corps, “educational reform” almost always means Teach for America! The Post didn’t even feel the need to explain what TFA is, or why it’s a useful “reform:”

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (12/5/08): The choice of Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond to head [Obama’s] education policy transition group, along with speculation that she is a candidate for secretary or deputy secretary, is not reassuring to those in the reform movement. Ms. Darling-Hammond has been more critical than supportive of the No Child Left Behind law, dislikes linking teacher pay to test scores and is no fan of Teach for America. It would be a mistake to retreat from the accountability that No Child Left Behind has brought in improving learning and narrowing the achievement gap for minority students. And the next secretary should encourage the kind of innovation and entrepreneurship typified by Teach for America's success in attracting top college graduates to inner-city schools.

In that passage, the Post listed three markers of “reform;” TFA was one of the three, and it was quickly pimped again. But then, David Brooks had promoted the same connection—TFA means reform!—in the New York Times that same morning:

BROOKS (9/5/08): There is only one education secretary, and if you hang around these circles, the air is thick with speculation, anticipation, anxiety, hope and misinformation. Every day, new rumors are circulated and new front-runners declared. It's kind of like being in a Trollope novel as Lord So-and-So figures out to whom he's going to propose.

You can measure the anxiety in the reformist camp by the level of nervous phone chatter each morning. Weeks ago, Obama announced that Darling-Hammond would lead his transition team and reformist cellphones around the country lit up. Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford, is a sharp critic of Teach for America and promotes weaker reforms.

Brooks offered only one marker of “[strong] reform.” And sure enough—it was TFA! When Greenwell sits down with her newspaper’s board, maybe Brooks can audit the course.

Endlessly, Teach for America gets ballyhooed by a largely know-nothing, upper-end press corps. For that reason, we thought that one paragraph—paragraph 12—was striking in Greenwell’s piece. But Greenwell’s piece was not an attempt to warn that TFA may be ineffective “reform.” Quite the contrary: In its basic format, Greenwell’s piece was the latest attempt to spread the good news about TFA’s “success!”

Greenwell does deserve lots of credit for including that one lonely paragraph. But when Teach for America appears on page one, its treatment—by law—must be upbeat. In fact, Greenwell was writing about TFA’s latest triumph—about the way a tough economy has encouraged even more college grads from the very best schools to join the program’s ranks. Within that framework, here is the longer passage in which Greenwell explains that this ballyhooed reform doesn’t quite seem to work:

GREENWELL: The program's success in attracting top talent such as [Georgetown senior Olubukola] Bamigboye has not silenced its critics in the world of education, many of whom say teachers need more than a summer's worth of preparation before taking jobs in inner-city schools. Lorri Harte, a 20-year teacher and administrator in New York City who writes a blog called Debunk TFA, argues that placing the least-experienced teachers with the highest-risk children is a potentially harmful combination.

"Teaching is a job where you get better as you go along, so for the first two years, people are generally not good teachers," Harte said. "The public relations blitz for the program does not address the real problems in education.”

Research into Teach for America's effectiveness has been inconclusive, but at least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by its teachers score significantly lower on standardized tests than do their peers. A small handful of other studies, and the organization's own research, contradict that claim.

The latest spike in applications is only the most recent high point for the program...

The program doesn’t seem to work. But so what? Bamigboye is still described as “top talent”—even though the evidence suggests that she won’t perform like “top talent” during her two years in the program. (Meanwhile, in a weird construction, Greenwell notes that TFA’s success in attracting such college students “hasn’t silenced its critics.”) It’s the law! By the rules of the game, the fact that even more elite grads are signing up simply has to represent another “high point for the program!”

Readers, even more of our brightest grads will be failing to help low-income students! It takes a deeply disordered world view to keep churning such upbeat narratives about a “reform” that doesn’t seem to work. Teach for America doesn’t work. But long live Teach for America!

Greenwell deserves a lot of credit for including paragraph 12. But nothing seems to stop the pimping of The Little Reform That Doesn’t. What could be driving such puzzling work—the insistence on such upbeat frameworks?

Could it be Satan? the Church Lady asked. Tomorrow, we’ll suggest a different possible answer, after reviewing this borderline comical piece about Obama’s quite-elite helpers.

There are no quick fixes for education. Why? Because the problem is poverty and our culture. Let teachers teach, let kids learn, stop trying to save the world with experiments. TFA is a failure. Sure, a good teacher or two will emerge from any program, but it is because of that teacher, not the program, as anyone who has ever succeeded at anything can tell you.