Larry Sand:

Assembly Bill 221 in California would prohibit school districts from entering into a contract with a third-party organization that employs teachers “who commit to teaching in the organization for less than five years.” This is an obvious bullet aimed at Teach For America, whose name was invoked but then removed from an earlier version of the bill.

Founded in 1990 by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, TFA chooses the best and the brightest college grads – only about 15 percent of applicants are accepted into the program – and trains them. These committed and enthusiastic young men and women who exhibit leadership qualities, get five weeks of teacher preparation, ongoing support once in the classroom, and must commit to teach for two years, typically in some the nation’s worst schools.

That’s not good enough for California’s teachers unions and their legislative toadies who, despite an ongoing whine about a teacher shortage, are angling to make it worse. California Federation of Teachers President Joshua Pechthalt claims the shortage is due to low teacher pay, and, referencing TFA, contends that “placing transient, untrained professionals in the state’s most vulnerable communities will just exacerbate existing problems.”

Sohrab Ahmari:

Has the most celebrated education-reform organization in the U.S. transformed itself into an arm of the progressive movement? Teach for America, or TFA, the national corps of recent graduates who commit two years to teaching in underserved classrooms across the country, was founded to help close the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But now it increasingly functions as a platform for radical identity politics and the anti-Trump “resistance.”

In remaking itself, TFA has subtly downgraded the principles that had won it allies across the spectrum. George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Chris Christie, and Meg Whitman are a few of the Republicans who championed TFA. The group attracted such boldface names, and hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the largest American firms and philanthropies, because it stood for a simple but powerful idea: that teacher quality is the decisive factor in the educational outcomes produced by schools.

Judging by its interventions in recent debates, it isn’t all that clear that senior TFA executives still believe this. These days, TFA’s voice on charters, accountability, and curricular rigor is decidedly muffled. Such education-reform essentials have been eclipsed in TFA’s discourse by immigration, policing, “queer” and transgender-identity issues, and other left-wing causes. TFA’s message seems to be that until numerous other social ills are cured—until immigration is less restricted, policing becomes more gentle, and poverty is eliminated—an excellent education will elude the poor. That was the status-quo defeatism TFA originally set out to challenge.

Wendy Kopp conceived TFA when she was a senior at Princeton in 1989. Unable to get a New York City teaching job without a graduate degree and state certification, Kopp wrote a thesis calling for the creation of a nontraditional recruitment pipeline that would bring America’s most promising young people to its neediest classrooms. TFA members would teach for two years, applying their energy and ambition to drive achievement at the classroom level. She speculated that some would stay in education, while others would go on to careers in law, medicine, business, journalism, etc. But all would remain “lifelong leaders in the effort to end educational inequity.”

Alan Borsuk;

And in the fall of 2013, she began teaching at Reagan High School, the International Baccalaureate school that has become one of brightest spots in the Milwaukee Public Schools system.

“I loved it,” she says. “I still love education.” After her two-year commitment to TFA ended, she stayed on. She is now an International Baccalaureate program coordinator and teacher at the school, and she envisions being there for years to come.

For good reason, hers is the kind of story TFA is eager to spotlight. There are others who have had less successful involvement and less kind things to say about TFA and its high-profile effort nationwide to attract bright college graduates to work at least two years in schools serving some of America’s most high-needs students.

Emerson collective:

In 2012, President Obama offered a bright spot with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. While limited in scope, the program grants temporary deportation relief and work permits to select immigrants brought as children to the United States—for some, the only country they’ve ever really known. Finally, these hardworking young people had the opportunity to flourish.

Recognizing the deep impact that immigration issues have on children, Teach for America became one of many organizations to stand up and invite DACA recipients to work as corps members. Today, young people with DACA status are teaching in communities across the country.

Alan Borsuk:

Five years later, a quarter-century later, what has been accomplished? What do we need to change to earn more success? Are we willing to do it?

A lot of people ought to be asking questions like that, both locally and nationally, as so little improves in educational outcomes. And maybe that’s a lesson Teach for America can model for everybody.

A quarter-century after its start, Teach for America is a major player in American education. It has helped shape debate over urban education and it has been a launching point for some of the most influential figures in education. But its core idea — get bright, idealistic twentysomethings to spend their first two years after graduation as teachers in high-needs classrooms — needs, at minimum, serious review.

Five years after its arrival in Milwaukee, TFA’s track record has positives. For one thing, it’s still committed to Milwaukee, while other efforts have come and gone. But TFA hasn’t been the big shot in the arm backers seemed to expect at the start.

If Teach for America needs change, it’s getting it. Leaders have been doing a lot of rethinking, and the resulting steps signal broader changes in coming years.

There’s a lot to like about TFA. I’ve been consistently impressed with the people involved. Even as it grew into a big business with hefty ties to a lot of the nation’s richest education funders, TFA remained fueled primarily by people who had this Peace Corps-like idealism.

But does TFA’s core idea work? Can you get good results by taking even the brightest, giving them a few weeks of intensive summer training, and placing them in challenging classrooms? If it’s well established (and it is) that the first year is usually a struggle for teachers and most don’t hit their stride until several years in, what can you expect from teachers who, by definition, are in their first or second year?

Stephanie Simon:

Teach for America is best known for sending bright young college graduates to teach for two years in poor communities.
But it’s much more than a service organization. It’s a political powerhouse.
With a $100 million endowment and annual revenues approaching $300 million, TFA is flush with cash and ambition. Its clout on Capitol Hill was demonstrated last week when a bipartisan group of lawmakers made time during the frenzied budget negotiations to secure the nonprofit its top legislative priority — the renewal of a controversial provision defining teachers still in training, including TFA recruits, as “highly qualified” to take charge of classrooms.
It was a huge victory that flattened a coalition of big-name opponents, including the NAACP, the National PTA and the National Education Association. But it barely hints at TFA’s growing leverage.
TFA has already produced an astounding number of alumni who have transformed the education landscape in states from Tennessee to Texas by opening public schools to competition from private entrepreneurs; rating teachers in part on their ability to raise student test scores; and pressing to eliminate tenure and seniority-based job protections. Convinced that quicker, bolder change is needed, TFA executives are mining their network of 32,000 alumni to identify promising leaders and help them advance.

Erica Green:

The Baltimore City school board has requested that the district follow through on a plan to assess the effectiveness of teachers who are alternatively certified through programs like Teach for America that for years have funneled teachers into the city’s struggling schools.
The city school board approved last week the $880,000 contract to hire and train 125 to 150 Teach For America teachers for the 2013-2014 school year.
The board also approved a $735,000 contract to hire the same amount of teachers from the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, a program similar to Teach for America that has more rigorous certification requirements.

Catherine Michna:

For the past nine years, I’ve been an instructor, a Ph.D. student, adjunct professor, and post-doctoral fellow in humanities departments at several different universities. During this time, many students have asked me to write recommendations for Teach for America. My students generally have little to no experience or training as teachers, but they are lured by TFA’s promises that they can help close the education gap for children in low-income communities. For humanities majors, TFA is a clear path to a job that both pays a living wage and provides a stepping stone to leadership positions in a cause of national importance.
I understand why my students find so much hope in TFA. I empathize with them. In fact, I’m a former Teach for America corps member myself. But unless they are education majors–and most of them aren’t–I no longer write Teach for America letters of recommendation for my students. I urge my higher-ed colleagues to do the same.
There is a movement rising in every city of this country that seeks true education reform–not the kind funded by billionaires, corporations, and hedge funds, and organized around their values. This movement consists of public school parents and students, veteran teachers, and ex-TFA corps members. It also consists of a national network of college students, such as those in Students United for Public Education, who talk about the damage TFA is inflicting on communities and public schools. These groups and others also acknowledge the relationship between the corporatization of higher education and the vast impact of corporate reform on our youngest and most needy children. It is these children who are harmed by the never-ending cycle of under-trained, uncertified, first- and second-year teachers that now populates disadvantaged schools, and by the data-obsessed approach to education that is enabled by these inexperienced teachers.

The Economist:

IT SOUNDS as uncontroversial as apple pie. Teach for America (TFA), a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1990, places young “corps members” at schools in poor areas to teach for two years. Recruits work in 35 states, most come fresh from college, and they learn mainly on the job. Fair enough; but TFA has many critics, particularly among teachers who have spent years becoming qualified and whose jobs are now contested.
Minnesota’s Board of Teaching caused a furore this summer when it refused to give a band of TFA members group permission to teach in the state. It had done so every year since the organisation first arrived there, in 2009. The state assessed 35 applicants individually instead–eventually granting licences to all of them.
Ryan Vernoush, a board member and a former Minnesota teacher of the year, believes placing inexperienced young people in front of “marginalised students” only serves “to perpetuate the status quo of inequity”. Elisa Villanueva Beard, the co-chief executive officer of TFA, counters that her organisation is just “one source” of teachers among others. She wants principals to have a choice when looking for employees.

Katie Osgood:

It is summertime, which for those of you newly accepted into Teach for America, means you are enduring the long hard days of Institute. I congratulate you on being accepted into this prestigious program. You clearly have demonstrated intelligence, passion, and leadership in order to make it this far.
And now I am asking you to quit.
Exacerbating Inequalities
Teach for America likely enticed you into the program with the call for ending education inequality. That is a beautiful and noble mission. I applaud you on being moved by the chance to help children, of being a part of creating equality in our schools, of ending poverty once and for all.
However, the actual practice of Teach for America does the exact opposite of its noble mission. TFA claims to fight to end educational inequality and yet ends up exacerbating one of the greatest inequalities in education today: that low-income children of color are much more likely to be given inexperienced, uncertified teachers. TFA’s five weeks of Institute are simply not enough time to prepare anyone, no matter how dedicated or intelligent, to have the skills necessary to help our neediest children. This fall, on that first day of school, you will be alone with kids who need so much more. You will represent one more inequality in our education system denying kids from low-income backgrounds equitable educational opportunities.

Anthony Britt:

As an African-American male born to a teenage mother, my future was bleak, but I had an extended family of teachers, mentors and coaches whose high expectations and support helped me grow from a young boy with an uncertain future to a young man with a college degree.
Although, I found a viable pathway, I remained agitated that we can predict a child’s life trajectory based primarily on their zip code. Teach For America (TFA), an organization on a mission to ensure an excellent education for all children by putting talented college graduates into teachingroles, seemed like the perfect fit, so I headed south to teach 8th Grade science in the Mississippi Delta just three days after graduating from Harvard University.

Robin Lane:

Since Teach for America has been so successful at solving the problems of education in our country, I’m proposing we take their model and apply it to other failing systems and issues at hand. If the biggest problem in education is a lack of quality teachers, and we can provide those teachers and thus solve the education crisis in just six weeks time, why not try this out in other professions?
1. Heal for America — The healthcare system in America is crumbling, and what we really need to solve it are quality doctors. Give aspiring doctors 6 weeks of training, then put them in the most overcrowded hospitals around the country. If successful, we can send them abroad!
2. Police for America — Let’s solve the problem of gun violence on our streets once and for all by getting rid of corrupt and inept police officers. We will give aspiring police officers 6 weeks of training and then put them in neighborhoods with the highest rates of violent crime.
3. Experiment for America — If we want to cure cancer, we need fresh voices in the scientific community. Obviously, the scientists who’ve been working on a cure for the past decades aren’t doing their job very well, as cancer rates are skyrocketing with no cure in sight. Aspiring chemists will get six weeks of training, and then be put in charge of experiments testing cancer-curing drugs.
4. Defend America — The war in Afghanistan has been draining resources from the American people. We need better soldiers on the ground, or this conflict will never be resolved. What we need are bright young soldiers to shake things up a little bit. We will give aspiring army officers 6 weeks of training, and then put them in charge of units in the most complex arenas of war.

Mark Naison:

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 becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service 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 impoverished 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 really rubs me the wrong way.
It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach For America recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in poor schools. I allowed TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, filled with urban studies and African American studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and most of whom came from the kind of high-poverty neighborhoods where TFA proposed to send its recruits.

Alan Borsuk:

Rodney Lynk grew up on the north side. He went to Frederick Douglass School and the Milwaukee School of Languages, both part of the Milwaukee Public Schools system. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in finance, but signed up for a two-year stint teaching in high-needs schools instead of going off into the business world.
That was almost four years ago and Lynk is still at it, working in education in his hometown. “It doesn’t feel right to leave something when it’s solvable,” he says. “It’s our duty to solve it.”
Frankly, I’ve seen so many people with praiseworthy determination come and go. Probably more important, I’ve seen so many organizations, campaigns and reforms with such determination come and go.
But I’m betting that Lynk is going to be in it for the long haul when it comes to working on better education outcomes in Milwaukee.
“This is where my passion lies,” he says. “When you get bit by the bug . . .”

Room for Debate:

When Teach for America entered the national stage it was applauded as a fresh, innovative approach to education. Now, well into its second decade of providing teachers to struggling schools across the country, is it still a good idea for our children? Has bringing in smart, young college graduates improved the education that American children are receiving?

Ben Wieder:

When Teach for America alumnus Bill Ferguson took on six-term incumbent George Della for a Maryland Senate seat two years ago, he benefited from the energetic support of his fellow Teach for America alumni–but he had to overcome the strident opposition of the teachers’ unions.
Ferguson upset Della in the Democratic primary and went on to win the general election, making him only the second Teach for America alumnus to secure a seat in a state legislature–following Mike Johnston, who joined the Colorado Senate in 2009.
Johnston and Ferguson aren’t likely to be alone for long: At least six TFA alumni are running for state legislatures this year, and many others are running for boards of education. Like Ferguson and Johnston, most of these former teachers likely will have to overcome union opposition to win.

Matthew Di Carlo:

There is a small but growing body of evidence about the (usually test-based) effectiveness of teachers from Teach for America (TFA), an extremely selective program that trains and places new teachers in mostly higher needs schools and districts. Rather than review this literature paper-by-paper, which has already been done by others (see here and here), I’ll just give you the super-short summary of the higher-quality analyses, and quickly discuss what I think it means.*
The evidence on TFA teachers focuses mostly on comparing their effect on test score growth vis-à-vis other groups of teachers who entered the profession via traditional certification (or through other alternative routes). This is no easy task, and the findings do vary quite a bit by study, as well as by the group to which TFA corps members are compared (e.g., new or more experienced teachers). One can quibble endlessly over the methodological details (and I’m all for that), and this area is still underdeveloped, but a fair summary of these papers is that TFA teachers are no more or less effective than comparable peers in terms of reading tests, and sometimes but not always more effective in math (the differences, whether positive or negative, tend to be small and/or only surface after 2-3 years). Overall, the evidence thus far suggests that TFA teachers perform comparably, at least in terms of test-based outcomes.

Seattle Education Association:

The Seattle Education Association Stands For A Stronger System of Universal, High-Quality Public Education in Seattle Public Schools!
Bringing Teach For America (TFA) to Seattle Does Not Make Public Education Stronger!
Commit to at least two of the following action items:

• Use the following points to craft your own letter to school board members. Click here to get contact information.
• Sign up to speak at the school board meeting on November 17, 2010. Information on what to do Monday, November 15 at 8:00 AM to get on the agenda is here.
• Attend the school board meeting with signs expressing your opinion about the TFA agreement that will be voted upon. To read the introduction and the agreement, click here.

Read up on Teach For America, inform yourself!

J K Wall:

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard has appointed Jason Kloth as deputy mayor of education, a new cabinet-level position that reflects Ballard’s recent shift toward taking a more active role in education, even though his office gives him little direct influence over schools.
Kloth, whose appointment still requires approval of the City-County Council, is a veteran of Teach For America, the New York-based not-for-profit that puts recent college graduates through two-year teaching stints in urban and rural districts around the country.
Kloth taught sixth-grade language arts in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley for two years and was named teacher of the year by his colleagues.
He later became executive director of Teach For American when the program first came to Indianapolis in 2008. Most recently, Kloth has been Teach For America’s senior vice president of public affairs, overseeing the group’s federal government affairs, media and communications, federal policy, research and evaluations, and community relations.

Scott Elliot has more.

Melissa Westbrook

m still doing research on Teach for America. I’m going to try to do a two-part thread on it and somewhat in reverse because of the urgency I feel about the situation. I’ll do the facts and stats later but I want to try to get to the meat of the issue now. But first…
What is the problem that TFA is trying to solve?
You go to their website and they talk about the lack “educational equity” for low-income students. This is true and most would not dispute it. Okay, but why create a teaching corps?
What is TFA’s “approach?”
Teach For America provides a critical source of well-trained teachers who are helping break the cycle of educational inequity. These teachers, called corps members, commit to teach for two years in one of 39 urban and rural regions across the country, going above and beyond traditional expectations to help their students to achieve at high levels.
Under History, they state:

Scott Bok:

But there are limits to what universities can do to address such matters. Physical safety concerns must come first, so at Penn we dramatically stepped up our police presence — that campus has never been more closely watched. And if you walked across campus as I did numerous times this semester, most often, you would have been struck by how normal life seemed.

Students are walking to classrooms and labs, hoping to win a place at a law or medical school or a job at Google or J.P. Morgan or Teach for America. On weekends they are going to fraternity parties and basketball games, just like I did.

There have been a handful of loud but otherwise peaceful protests where hateful things have been said, but it’s been a long way from the unrest of the 1960s, when the civil rights movement and Vietnam War inspired violent protests on a grand scale.

And yes, there have been some well-publicized acts of deplorable antisemitism.

Chris Stewart:

Last week I made what I thought was a simple request: for all of us to prioritize the question “how are the children?” as if our nation depends on it. This week I want to offer an example of why that request isn’t so simple after all.

It started as it often does in my world, with a tweet from a teacher who sees education reform as the enemy, and its advocates as a direct threat to teachers. Fighting for better student achievement is comparable to attacking teachers.

In this case, it was Gary Rubinstein, a New York City teacher who had all his buttons pushed when Teach For America tweeted a story in The 74 about a new PDK poll that shows declining morale among America’s teachers.

His response was to claim that a “big part of low teacher morale is anti-teacher propaganda by [The 74] and spread by TFA,” he said. I challenged that claim as “silly” to which he said, “Sorry you feel left out. Education Post also contributed to teacher morale crisis, but not as much as The 74.”
L

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 school districts – between $18.5k and 20k per student, depending on the district documents reviewed.

Jay Greene and Frederick Hess:

We tracked staff contributions to political campaigns in a sample of 73 education-reform organizations funded by the Gates Foundation, including Achieve, Teach For America, the New Schools Venture Fund, Alliance for Excellent Education, Jobs for the Future, Turnaround for Children, and Bellwether Education Partners. In total, we found 2,625 political campaign contributions from the staff of Gates grantees. Of those contributions, more than 99% supported Democratic candidates or the Democratic Party. Only eight (that’s eight, not 8%) of the 2,625 campaign contributions went to Republicans.

The political imbalance among Walton grantees was somewhat less pronounced. Our sample of 194 organizations receiving support from the Walton Foundation included Teach For America, KIPP, Education Reform Now, 50CAN, the 74 Media, Chalkbeat, and the Education Trust. In total, we found 3,887 political campaign contributions from employees of these organizations, of which 3,377, or 87%, went to Democrats.

The deep-blue hue of education reformers rivals that of famously Democratic precincts like Hollywood and public-employee unions. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that 78% of campaign dollars from the “TV, movies, and music industry” have gone to Democrats since 2000. Even the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher union, gives a larger slice of its campaign money to Republicans (7%) than do the employees of Gates education grantees (less than 1%).

Does the education-reform sector lean so far left simply because everyone in education is progressive? No. An Education Week poll shows that 41% of educators identify as Democrats while 27% identify as Republicans and 30% as independents.

The virtual nonrepresentation of conservatives has made school reformers more open about their political convictions, even on unrelated issues. Many school-reform groups, including KIPP, Teach for America and Education Trust, have energetically embraced the anti-Trump “resistance,” adopting outspoken progressive stances on hot-button issues like immigration, tax policy and gun control. The education-reform sector risks appearing as one more progressive lobby. This appearance undermines its authority when it pushes for crucial changes like school choice, transparency and experimental new learning methods.

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Yet, Madison spends far more than most, now around $20,000 per student.

Jakes Hagert:

Wendy Kopp was riding a train to New York one winter morning 17 years ago when a chatty older man sat next to her. She tried to cut the conversation short and get back to work on her laptop. He persisted. She finally told him all about the charity she founded, Teach for America, which sends teachers to work in low-income areas.

Giving away money became Mr. Lenfest’s mission after he sold the cable-TV company Lenfest Communications in 2000. He and his wife, Marguerite, preferred to give most of their wealth away in their lifetimes rather than creating a perpetual foundation whose trustees might stray from their vision. So far, their gifts total more than $1.2 billion.

Mr. Lenfest, who died Aug. 5 at age 88, relied on his instincts about people in making gifts. His wife was more deliberative. She kept a note on the refrigerator reminding him to remember two words when people asked for money: “no” and “why.”

In 2014, Mr. Lenfest acquired the ailing publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com for about $88 million. Two years later he donated that company to a nonprofit, now known as the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, charged with preserving quality journalism in Philadelphia and testing ideas that might sustain fact-based news reporting elsewhere.

“I can’t think of any cause that we support that’s more important than the support of the newspapers,” Mr. Lenfest said in 2014. He avoided interfering in editorial policy, other than by objecting when reporters described him as a billionaire. He explained to one editor that his purchase of newspapers had instantly deflated his net worth.

Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh:

“Advocates of a writing process tended to stress autobiographical narrative writing, not informational or expository writing.”

It sounds excessively dramatic to say that Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards threaten the study of history. In this essay we show why, in the words of a high school teacher, “if implemented as their authors intend, the Common Core will damage history education.”

But we first clarify how the study of history in K-12 ever got tangled up in Common Core’s ELA standards.

How Common Core Came to Include Study of History

The sad story begins with the reason for the contents of a document titled Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.

The bulk of the document is on ELA standards. But the last seven pages (pp. 59-66), titled Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, provide “literacy” standards for these subjects in grades 6-12. The introduction to the whole document explains why these standards are in this document.

The standards establish guidelines for English language arts (ELA) as well as for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Because students must learn to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively in a variety of content areas, the standards promote the literacy skills and concepts required for college and career readiness in multiple disciplines.

The College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards form the backbone of the ELA/literacy standards by articulating core knowledge and skills, while grade-specific standards provide additional specificity. Beginning in grade 6, the literacy standards allow teachers of ELA, history/social studies, science, and technical subjects to use their content area expertise to help students meet the particular challenges of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language in their respective fields.

It is important to note that the grade 6–12 literacy standards in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects are meant to supplement content standards in those areas, not replace them. States determine how to incorporate these standards into their existing standards for those subjects or adopt them as content area literacy standards.

As indicated, Common Core’s literacy standards are justified on the grounds that college readiness means being able to read, write, and speak in all subject areas—a reasonable expectation if the “all” doesn’t mean every subject taught in college or a level of proficiency beyond the level of the coursework in the subjects taught in a typical high school.

The first public draft of the ELA standards—in September 2009—made the standards-writers’ vision even clearer than the final version does. It expected students in English classes to “demonstrate facility with the specific reading demands of texts drawn from different disciplines, including history, literature, science, and mathematics.” As the draft explained, “Because the overwhelming majority of college and workplace reading is non-fiction, students need to hone their ability to acquire knowledge from informational texts…[and] …demonstrate facility with the features of texts particular to a variety of disciplines, such as history, science, and mathematics.” That is the basis for entangling the study of history in the final version of Common Core’s ELA document and for the standards-writers’ misconceptions about how students learn to read and write intelligently in other subjects.

The attempt to make English teachers responsible for teaching high school students how to read history, science, and mathematics textbooks relaxed during 2009-2010 after critics made it clear that English teachers could not possibly teach students how to read textbooks in other disciplines. This criticism was supported by the common sense argument that teachers can’t teach students to read texts in a subject they don’t understand themselves, as well as by the total lack of evidence that English teachers can effectively teach reading strategies appropriate to other disciplines and thereby improve students’ knowledge in that discipline.

Nevertheless, Common Core’s ELA standards still expect English teachers to teach “informational” texts about 50 percent of their reading instructional time at every grade level. At least, that is what K-12 curriculum specialists nationwide sees as the curriculum implications of 10 standards for reading “informational” texts and only 9 for reading literary texts at every grade level in the ELA part of the ELA document, even if “informational” texts are called “nonfiction.”

Research on Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum (RAWAC)

Although it is now agreed that English teachers can’t be expected to teach students how to read texts in other subjects in order to improve student learning in these subjects, is it possible that teachers of these other subjects can teach reading strategies that improve students’s knowledge of their subject? The lack of a reference to even one study in a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) 2011 research brief on RAWAC and in a review of the research titled Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices, issued in August 2008 by the Institute of Education Sciences, strongly implies that there is little if any research to support the expectation that subject teachers can effectively teach reading skills in their own classes in ways that improve student learning. Not only are subject teachers reluctant to teach reading in their own classes (as the research indicates), there’s no evidence that even if they do, student learning will be enhanced.

So how do secondary students learn how to read their history books or their science and mathematics textbooks? We will return to this hugely important question at the end of this section—after we look at some literacy standards for history in Common Core—to better understand the problem the standards writers created for the entire secondary curriculum—and at the reasons for the failure of the movement called RAWAC.

What Are Common Core’s Literacy Standards?

Common Core’s literacy standards are clearly not academic, or content, standards, as the introduction to its ELA document promised. They are statements of different purposes for reading and writing in any subject. Here are three standards for History/Social Studies in grades 11/12 as examples:

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.7
Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.8
Evaluate an author’s premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.9
Integrate information from diverse sources, both primary and secondary, into a coherent understanding of an idea or event, noting discrepancies among sources.

What is telling in the introduction to the whole document is the expectation that subject teachers are to use the content of their subject to teach students how to read, write, and talk in their subjects, not the other way around. Teachers are not to draw on students’ reading, writing, and speaking skills (i.e., their intellectual or thinking processes) to learn the content of their disciplines. Secondary school learning has been turned on its head without any public murmur in 2010, so far as we know, from history, science, or mathematics teachers or their professional organizations, probably because most subject teachers did not know they were being required to teach reading and writing in a document ostensibly designated for English and reading teachers. (The National Council for the Social Studies apparently knew what the ELA standards writers intended, according to this article, but did not communicate any concerns to its members, so far as we know.)

This stealth requirement should have sparked broad public discussion when the final version of the Common Core standards was released (in June 2010) and before state boards of education voted to adopt them. But, so far as we know, there is no record of any attempt by a state board or commissioner of education to hear from a broad range and large number of secondary teachers in all subjects (including English and mathematics teachers).

Why Earlier Efforts at RAWAC Failed

A major attempt to get subject teachers to teach reading and writing skills called Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) or Reading and Writing across the Curriculum (RAWAC) took place in the 1960s and 1970s at the college level and in K-12, and it had gradually fizzled out with little to show for it. There was no explanation in the Common Core document of how Common Core’s effort was different, if in fact it was. Perhaps the standards writers simply didn’t know about these failed movements and why they failed. As noted above, NCTE’s 2011 policy research brief did not reference even one study after boldly declaring that the “research is clear: discipline-based instruction in reading and writing enhances student achievement in all subjects.”

RAWAC failed for many reasons, and we suggest some of the most obvious ones first.

No systematic information available: On the surface, the effort to make secondary subject teachers responsible for assigning more reading to their students and/or teaching them how to read whatever they assigned sounded desirable and eminently justifiable. But there was no systematic information on what the average student read, how much they read, or why they were not doing much reading if that were the case. Why assign more reading and/or try to teach students how to read it if there were reasons for not assigning much reading to begin with (e.g., no textbooks available, students couldn’t read whatever textbooks were available on the topic, students wouldn’t do much homework)?

Misunderstanding of what history teachers do: Part of the demise of RAWAC in K-12 may be attributed to a misunderstanding by its advocates of what history teachers actually do in a classroom when teaching history. They might ask their students, for example, to describe and document Lincoln’s evolving political position on how best to preserve the Union from the beginning to the end of the Civil War—after giving them a range of documents to read or look at. Such a directive requires application of CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.7 (integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media in order to address a question or solve a problem) to a history lesson, which is how the general skill gets developed. But, in doing so, history teachers are not trying to teach a literacy skill; they are aiming to expand students’ conscious knowledge base.

Take another possible example—a lesson on totalitarianism. History teachers might assign and discuss a reading on a totalitarian state in the 20th century—how it controls resources and people’s behavior. They might then ask directly: “According to this reading, what is a totalitarian state like? What does it try to do? What were the weaknesses of the Soviet Union as an example of a totalitarian state? History teachers are unlikely to talk about (or think in terms of) “main idea” or “supporting details” in discussing what students have read about a totalitarian state, but they are clearly talking about a main idea and supporting details when they raise specific questions for discussion about a specific topic. They are asking students to apply these general skills in topic-related language for the classroom lesson and thereby develop the skills.

History teachers (like science teachers) use the specific content of their discipline in ways that require students to apply their intellectual processes and their prior knowledge to what they have been assigned to read or do. If students cannot answer the questions on the grounds that they couldn’t read the assignment, other issues need to be explored.

Less and less reading outside of school: The demise of RAWAC in K-12 can also be traced to the diminishing amount of reading and writing done outside of school hours. How much reading have students been doing on the topic under discussion? In other words, do they have any prior knowledge? Are they familiar with the vocabulary related to the topic? The two are related. Students can absorb some of the discipline-related vocabulary of a discipline-based topic by reading and re-reading the material carefully (as in history) or by working carefully with material named by these words (as in a science lab) without constantly consulting a glossary. But how to get students to do more reading (or re-reading) is not the purpose of a standard. Getting students to address questions about particular topics in a discipline with adequate and sufficient information (i.e., to develop their conscious understanding of the topics) is one purpose of a standard.

Reading and writing as homework is the student’s responsibility, not the teacher’s. This responsibility is not shaped by the words in an academic standard. It is dependent on a student’s self-discipline and motivation, elements of the student’s character beyond the teacher’s control. Teachers can set up incentives and disincentives, but these must be reinforced by policies set by a school board, parents, and school administrators. They are not governed by academic objectives.

History teachers’ self-image: Needless to say, the demise of RAWAC in K-12 can in part be traced to content teachers’ self-image, an issue highlighted in the research literature. The need for writing in subject-based classrooms makes sense to most teachers, but significantly more writing activities didn’t take place in the secondary school in response to RAWAC efforts in large part because content teachers, with large numbers of students to teach on a daily or weekly basis, did not see themselves as writing teachers. They continue to see English teachers as teachers of writing (and literature), and themselves as teachers of specific subjects like math, science, or history. Students who read little or read mainly easy texts are unlikely to be able to do the kind of expository writing their subject areas require because the research is clear that good writing is dependent on good reading. This points to another possible reason for the demise of RAWAC.

Stress on autobiographical, narrative, or informal writing: The emphasis on non-text-based writing in the ELA class beginning in the 1970s. Advocates of a writing process tended to stress autobiographical narrative writing, not informational or expository writing. Students were also encouraged to do free “journal” writing because it was shapeless and needed no correction. Subject teachers were fighting an overwhelming emphasis on non-reasoned and non-text-based writing in elementary classrooms, secondary English classes, and teacher workshops from the 1970s on and may have decided that asking for reading-based writing and re-shaping what students submitted was not worth the effort. We simply don’t know because there is no direct and systematic research on the issue.

Professional development on different history content, not discipline-based reading: There may be yet another reason that subject teachers avoided implementing RAWAC. There is little in-depth research on this issue, and for good reason. We know little about the quality of the professional development they received. The focus of professional development for history teachers at the time RAWAC was being promoted was often the content or view of the content that was being introduced in the name of critical pedagogy or multiculturalism. The workshops described in “The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers”
have a decided focus on teaching teachers and their students what to think about U.S. and world history rather than on how to read and write in a history class. Reading and writing activities were included in these workshops, but the development of “literacy” skills was not their goal.

Providing professional development is a huge and very profitable industry because most of it is mandated by local, state, or federal authorities. But it has almost no track record of effectiveness in significantly increasing students’ knowledge of the subject. This was the conclusion of a massive review of the research on professional development for mathematics teachers undertaken by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (NMAP) in 2008. There is no reason to consider the situation different for history teachers. Note that we are not talking about professional development to teach history teachers how to teach reading and writing in their own subjects; we are talking about workshops to teach teachers the content of the subjects they are already licensed to teach so they can better teach the content to their students.

No information on qualifications of workshop providers: Professional development to teach history teachers how to teach students to read and write in their disciplines presents an even bleaker picture. Not one study showing the effectiveness of the practice is cited in the NCTE report in 2011 or in an IES report in 2008 despite both reports lauding its benefits. None of the studies reviewed by the NMAP for its task group report on professional development looked at the adequacy of the academic qualifications of the professional development providers in the reviewed studies. Yet the qualifications of professional development providers was such a serious issue in implementing the state’s Education Reform Act of 1993 that the Massachusetts Department of Education required the involvement of historians in the “content” workshops for history teachers it funded even though it could not establish criteria for the organizers of these workshops.

How Common Core Damages the K-12 History Curriculum

The underlying issue is revealed by the titles offered in Appendix B as “exemplars” of the quality and complexity of the informational reading that history (and English, science, and mathematics) teachers could use to boost the amount of reading their students do and to teach disciplinary reading and writing skills. The standards writers do not understand the high school curriculum.

Inappropriate exemplars for informational reading: While English teachers in grades 9-10 may be puzzled about the listing for them of Patrick Henry’s “Speech to the Second Virginia Convention,” Margaret Chase Smith’s “Remarks to the Senate in Support of a Declaration of Conscience,” and George Washington’s “Farewell Address”—all non-literary, political speeches—history teachers in grades 9/10 may be even more puzzled by the exemplars for them. Among a few appropriate exemplars (on the history of indigenous and African Americans) we find E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, 16th Edition, Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, and Wendy Thompson’s The Illustrated Book of Great Composers. It’s hard to see any high school history teacher comfortably tackling excerpts from those books in the middle of a grade 9 or 10 world history or U.S. history course. Yes, these titles are only exemplars of the quality and complexity desired. But what would be appropriate for the courses history teachers are likely to teach in grade 9 or 10?

The informational exemplars in Appendix B for history teachers in grades 11/12 are even more bizarre. Along with a suitable text, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, we find Julian Bell’s Mirror of the World: A New History of Art and FedViews, issued in 2009 by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. These two titles clearly don’t fit into a standard grade 11 U.S. history course or a standard grade 12 U.S. government course. These exemplars are out of place not just in a typical high school history class but in a typical high school curriculum.

The standards writers wanted to make teachers across the curriculum as responsible for teaching “literacy” as the English teacher, which at first sounds fair, almost noble. But to judge from the sample titles they offer for increasing and teaching informational reading in other subjects, informational literacy seems to be something teachers are to cultivate and students to acquire, independent of a coherent, sequential, and substantive curriculum in the topic of the informational text. Strong readers can acquire informational literacy independent of a coherent and graduated curriculum. But weak readers end up deprived of class time better spent immersed in the content of their courses.

Inappropriate literacy strategies—a nonhistorical approach to historical texts: Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Common Core’s approach to literary study is the advice given teachers by its chief writer David Coleman, now president of the College Board, on the supposed value of “cold” or “close” (non-contextualized) reading of historical documents like the “Gettysburg Address.” Doing so “levels the playing field,” according to Coleman. History teachers believe doing so contributes to historical illiteracy.

Aside from the fact that “close” reading was not developed or promoted by Yale English professors Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren as a reading technique for historical documents, no history or English teacher before the advent of Common Core would approach the study of a seminal historical document by withholding initial information about its historical context, why it was created at that particular time, by whom, for what purposes so far as the historical record tells us, and clear language archaisms. Nor would they keep such information from being considered in interpreting Lincoln’s speech. Yet, David Coleman has categorically declared: “This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students.”

As high school teacher Craig Thurtell states: “This approach also permits the allocation of historical texts to English teachers, most of whom are untrained in the study of history, and leads to history standards [Common Core’s literacy standards for history] that neglect the distinctiveness of the discipline.” Thurtell goes on to say that the “study of history requires the use of specific concepts and cognitive skills that characterize the discipline—concepts like evidence and causation and skills like contextualization, sourcing, and corroboration. These concepts and skills are largely distinct from those employed in literary analysis. Both disciplines engage in close readings of texts, for example, but with different purposes. The object of the literary critic is the text, or more broadly, the genre; for the historian it is, however limited or defined, a wider narrative of human history, which textual analysis serves.”

Causes of Poor Reading in High School

Not only did the writers of the Common Core English language arts standards profoundly misunderstand how reading in a history class differs from reading in a literature class, they basically misunderstood the causes of the educational problem they sought to remedy through Common Core’s standards—the number of high school graduates who need remedial coursework in reading and writing as college freshmen and the equally large number of students who fail to graduate from high school and go on to a post-secondary educational institution.

The architects of Common Core assumed that the major cause of this educational problem is that English teachers have given low-achieving students too heavy a diet of literary works and that teachers in other subjects have deliberately or unwittingly not taught them how to read complex texts in these other subjects. This assumption doesn’t hold up.

High school teachers will readily acknowledge that low-performing students have not been assigned complex textbooks because, generally speaking, they can’t read them and, in fact, don’t read much of anything with academic content. As a result, they have not acquired the content knowledge and the vocabulary needed for reading complex history textbooks. And this is despite (not because of) the steady decline in vocabulary difficulty in secondary school textbooks over the past half century and the efforts of science and history teachers from the elementary grades on to make their subjects as text-free as possible. Educational publishers and teachers have made intensive and expensive efforts to develop curriculum materials that accommodate students who are not interested in reading much. These accommodations in K-8 have gotten low-performing students into high school, but they can’t be made at the college level. College-level materials are written at an adult level, often by those who teach college courses.

Higher levels of writing are increasingly dependent on higher levels of reading. Students unwilling to read a lot do not advance very far as writers. The chief casualty of little reading is the general academic vocabulary needed for academic reading and writing. The accumulation of a large and usable discipline-specific vocabulary depends on graduated reading in a coherent sequence of courses (known as a curriculum) in that discipline. The accumulation of a general academic vocabulary, however, depends on reading a lot of increasingly complex literary works with strong plots and characters that entice poor readers to make efforts to read them. The reduction in literary study implicitly mandated by Common Core’s ELA standards will lead to fewer opportunities for students to acquire the general academic vocabulary needed for serious historical nonfiction, the texts secondary history students should be reading.

Recommendations:

There are several possible solutions to the problem Common Core’s architects sought to solve—how to help poor readers in high school.

1. Schools can establish secondary reading classes separate from the English and other subject classes. Students who read little and cannot or won’t read high school level textbooks can be given further reading instruction in the secondary grades by teachers with strong academic backgrounds (like Teach For America volunteers) who have been trained to teach reading skills in the context of the academic subjects students are taking. It’s not easy to do, but it is doable.

2. A second solution may be for schools to enable English and history teachers to provide professional development to each other in the same high school. The context and philosophical/moral antecedents for our seminal political documents (e.g., Declaration of Independence, Preamble to the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) can be explained/taught to English teachers by their colleagues in the History department, while an analysis of their language and other stylistic features can be explained/taught to history teachers by their colleagues in the English department. ]

3. The most important solution to the problem of poor reading in high school is for state boards of education, governors, and state legislatures to require U.S. history courses in which all students, high- or low-income, native or immigrant, study together the common civic core spelled out in Paul Gagnon’s Educating Democracy. Surely the American Federation of Teachers could make this essay available in bulk to honor a historian who dedicated his academic life to advancing the education of the low-income students he taught in the Boston area.

We are left with an overarching question. Why were intelligent and educated people (state board of education members, state commissioners of education, and governors) so eager to accept the opinions of standards writers who had no understanding of the K-12 curriculum in ELA and were not literary scholars, historians or “experts” in history or English education, either? Why didn’t intelligent and educated people read Appendix B for themselves, especially in the high school grades, and ask how subject teachers could possibly give “literacy” instruction in the middle of content instruction? Self-government cannot survive if citizens are unwilling to ask informed questions in public of educational policy makers and to demand answers.

Will Fitzhugh @ The Concord Review.

microeconomicinsights::

A growing body of evidence indicates that many urban charter schools boost the standardized test scores of disadvantaged students markedly. Attendance at oversubscribed charter schools in Boston for example—those with more applicants than seats—increases the test scores of low-income students by a third of a standard deviation a year, enough to eliminate the black-white test score gap in a few years of attendance.
 
 The achievement gains generated by Boston charters are in line with those generated by urban charters elsewhere in Massachusetts, as we have shown in studies of a Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) school in Lynn, Massachusetts and in an analysis of charter lottery results from around the state. Similar effects have been found in New York City and in a nationwide study of oversubscribed urban charter schools.
 
 A defining feature of most of Massachusetts’ urban charter schools is No Excuses pedagogy, an approach to urban education described in a book of the same name. No Excuses schools emphasize discipline and student conduct, traditional reading and math skills, extended instruction time, and selective teacher hiring. Massachusetts’ No Excuses charters also make heavy use of Teach for America corps members and alumni, and they provide extensive and ongoing feedback to teachers.

Joanne Jacobs:

Teach for America‘s Education for Justice pilot, which trained would-be teachers in social justice and cultural competency, has been canceled, writes Stephen Sawchuk in Ed Week. College students took courses for a year to prepare to teach in low-income, minority communities.

TFA is cutting 150 positions, including its national diversity office, notes Sawchuk. “Still, this is somewhat surprising news. After all, the pilot was one that TFA CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard announced in 2014 to great fanfare.”

After nearly a year of E4J, Kailee Lewis, a future TFA corps member, believes telling teachers they’ll show low-income students “what’s possible when they work hard and dream big” is a false and dangerous lie.

Ryan Quinn:

The West Virginia Board of Education has approved alternative teacher certification programs for Kanawha and seven other counties, including a McDowell County program that will begin to bring Teach For America’s services to the state.

At the board’s meeting Wednesday, members also heard criticism from school administrators about their plans to start giving entire schools and counties A-F grades; approved significantly amending a construction and renovation plan at the Romney Schools for the Deaf and the Blind to drop the cost from $45.5 million to $16.5 million; returned control over personnel issues to the local school board in Gilmer County, one of the state’s last two takeover counties; and approved a plan for Kanawha’s St. Albans High to reduce student instructional time in order to incorporate 30 minutes of teacher collaboration into each school day.

Teach for America:

lively discussion, curated by Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World: and How They Got That Way, will explore in-depth how systemic change has been achieved in Ontario, Canada, and how this approach compares with others around the world that have driven dramatic improvements in student outcomes. Rather than offering a checklist of successful approaches, this session will introduce the people and stories behind the policies and inspire us to consider what meaningful application of these approaches could yield for children in the United States.

deutsch29:

n March 21, 2016, education historian and activist, Diane Ravitch, posted a communication dated March 17, 2016, from “a current high-level administrative employee at Teach for America.” The big news is that TFA will be cutting roughly 150 national and regional staff. The communication also notes that when TFA failed to reach its recruitment goals for 2015, jobs were cut, but not at the higher levels. This time (2016), TFA did not reach its recruitment goals for a second year, and this time, the job cuts are not just “rank and file staff.”

On the same day as Ravitch’s post, March 21, 2016, TFA posted news of the cuts on its own web site.

Matt Barnum:

So how is Denver trying to make the schools stronger? How are you trying to improve your schools?
First and foremost, we’ve elected a Board of Education that is accountable and committed to making sure that every young person in the city of Denver has access to quality schools, starting in their own neighborhoods. That’s been critical because we’ve attracted some award-winning programs to communities, many that have been underserved. Some today that were quite frankly mired in perennially failing schools five, six years ago now have some of the leading schools in the state and that has made a difference.

Secondly, as we grow, being able to recruit the best administrators and teachers to the school district makes an awful lot of difference. We certainly have seen that with the partnerships through Teach For America, and other innovative programs that are helping us to drive new energy and innovation to the classroom.

We’ve also had quite a few state and local laws that have passed that have aided innovation and injection of creativity into the classroom. Those things have made a difference in Denver.

Matt Bruening:

Conor P. Williams has a piece at 74 million that purports to be a simulation of what critics of Teach for America must be like. Apparently, in Wiliams’ view, they are coffee shop elite hipsters. As far as this genre of writing goes, Williams’ piece is not particularly funny, insightful, or well-executed. It comes off, like some of his other pieces, as Williams wanting to demonstrate that he and people like him are personally cool and heroic while those on the other side are actually the lame losers. It is a brand of ego-stroking akin to the guy who likes to play up the time he did a humanitarian spring break in Africa, not (only) because he wants to advocate humanitarian spring breaks to Africa, but also because he wants people to think he’s righteous for what he did.

I thought about doing a similar piece where I simulated what Teach for America enlistees are like. I knew people who signed up to TFA around the time that they did so, and so I have some ample material to work with. But instead of creating some fictionalized parody of the arch TFA participant, I’ll just tell you what I think directly. This account is based on people I’ve known and some speculation beyond that.

The Caucus Blog:

As the social justice caucus within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, we were surprised to see that you are coming to Philadelphia to speak alongside leaders of Teach for America (TFA). The Caucus of Working Educators (WE) is committed to racial justice in our schools and society, and we stand in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

We see Teach for America as working in opposition to the goals of publicly funded education for all students in Philadelphia and to the goal of increasing the number of teachers of color and teachers who are committed to building relationships with communities over the long term, which we see as an integral component of culturally responsive teaching. We view the hiring of cadres of racial, cultural, and geographical outsiders with very little teaching preparation as part of a larger neoliberal effort to privatize education and replace unionized teachers (many of whom are teachers of color) with young, inexperienced teachers (most of whom are white and do not intend to stay in the teaching profession and commit to the long-term improvement of their teaching practice).

This practice of displacing African American teachers, in particular, is already underway. While Philadelphia’s teaching force increased by 13 percent from 2001-2011, the percentage of Black teachers dropped by 19 percent. This has contributed to Philadelphia having the greatest disparity between the race and ethnicity of the student body and those who teach them. Only 31 percent of Philadelphia teachers are of color compared to 86 percent of the student body they are teaching. This is unacceptable.

Wall Street Journal:

A teacher’s first year in the classroom is never easy; creating lesson plans from scratch and learning the ropes requires long hours. It’s doubly hard when you start teaching at age 59, as Dora Currea did.

Ms. Currea recently finished her first year of teaching at High Point High School in Beltsville, Md., a school serving about 2,400 mostly low-income students. She was hired at High Point after participating in Teach for America, a nonprofit that trains people from diverse backgrounds to become teachers. In return, TFA participants make a two-year commitment to teach in high-need schools.

T. Jameson Brewer & Sarah Matsui

For the first two decades of its existence, Teach For America (TFA) could expect fawning media coverage and unremitting praise. With founder Wendy Kopp and her band of Ivy Leaguer grads, article after article glowed, education inequity in the US had met its match. But over the last several years, the near-universal adulation has begun to wane.

Several school districts have kicked out the organization. Some professors refuse to write student recommendation letters for TFA applicants. And TFA’s high-powered PR department now seems to spend much of its time churning out statements defending itself.

Not surprisingly, the uptick in public criticism of TFA — one of corporate education reform’s totemic institutions — has tracked with increasing opposition to neoliberal education reform. Teacher organizing has been key. Taking its cues from the Chicago Teachers Union, reform caucuses have sprung up in teachers unions across the country. Bill Gates and company, if still powerful, no longer seem indomitable.

Annysa Johnson:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ special Task Force on Urban Education will hold the first in a series of public hearings — this one on teacher recruitment, retention and training — at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the State Capitol, Room 412.

The panel will take testimony from the public after hearing from invited individuals and organizations. They include Jennifer Cheatham, superintendent of the Madison Metropolitan School District; University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross; the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction; Teach for America; the Leadership for Educational Equity; and Pablo Muirhead, coordinator of teacher education for Milwaukee Area Technical College.

Vos created the task force in August to address numerous issues affecting urban schools, including retention and training, poor academic performance among some students and low graduation rates. Public school advocates have criticized the panel, saying it is dominated by Republicans with little or no experience with urban schools and, in some cases, have received significant campaign contributions from voucher- and charter-school proponents.

Task force Chairman, Rep. Jessie Rodriguez (R-Franklin), who worked previously for Hispanics for School Choice, said those concerns had not come up in her discussions with educators and lawmakers.

Related: Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results.

Maggie Runyan-Shefa & Michael Stone, via a kind Deb Britt email:

Efforts to Recruit and Retain High-Quality Teachers
Currently, we see our schools and our partners engaged in three key strategies to address this looming teacher gap: 1) alternative pathway partners Teach For America and TNTP are maximizing the number of teachers they recruit, select, and place in New Orleans schools; 2) schools, charter management organizations, and other partners are coordinating efforts to recruit experienced teachers to teach in New Orleans; and 3) some schools have begun to experiment with pay scale adjustments and career ladders in an effort to retain their top performers.

An essential fourth strategy—creating additional pipelines of teachers ready to enter New Orleans classrooms by 2025—will require innovative partnerships and approaches. Fortunately, there is already significant momentum from a broad range of stakeholders who have begun to address this challenge.

Creating Additional Pipelines of Teachers
Over the next 10 years, New Orleans can differentiate itself as a national leader in innovative teacher preparation by creating new pathways to join the profession.
Strong urban residency programs will be one key to preparing new teachers. Evidence suggests that teachers prepared through these year-long residencies are more effective than traditionally trained teachers, and 80 percent remain in the classroom for at least five years.

Teach For All:

Teach For All network partners share the longterm goal of developing leaders who will positively impact their countries’ classrooms, schools, and, ultimately, education systems. To inform this work, we look to the world’s highest performing systems to understand what drives their success. Recently, representatives of Teach For All, Teach First, and Teach For America were joined by members of the British Council on a visit to Ontario, Canada, to learn from its education system and consider how to use those lessons to achieve systemic change in countries around the world.

LS Hall:

More than a decade ago, Milwaukee was ground zero of the education reform movement. Starting with a controversial private school voucher program launched in 1990, Wisconsin’s largest city went on to embrace not only vouchers, but charter schools and a series of reform initiatives in the Milwaukee Public Schools, one of the lowest-performing in the nation.

The Walton Family Foundation has been at the center of much of that work. Over the last decade, the funder has lavished more than $30 million in grants on school reform efforts in Milwaukee, supporting such organizations as Teach For America and Schools That Can Milwaukee, a nonprofit that promotes innovation and reform in private, charter, and traditional public schools.

But after years of such commitment, Walton is stepping back from Milwaukee. The funder announced it was redirecting its education grant-making activities to “places that we believe are most ripe for improving our education system.”

The Economist:

“IT’S not enough to have a dream”, reads a banner over the whiteboard in Nancy Sarmiento’s Baltimore classroom. Most of her 12-year-old pupils qualify for a free or cheap lunch. About 70% of the school’s new arrivals last September had reading and mathematical skills below the minimum expected for their grade. Americans call such schools “disadvantaged”. Whatever the label, most countries have schools where most children are from poor families, expectations are low, and teachers are hard to recruit. And in most, the falling prestige of the teaching profession makes matters worse.

But Ms Sarmiento, who graduated from a four-year biology degree course a year early, had to see off fierce competition to win her teaching spot. Teach for America (TfA), the scheme that placed her, accepts just one in six applicants. It looks for a stellar academic record and evidence of traits that distinguish the best teachers in tough schools, including leadership, resilience and motivation to help the poor. Recruits get five weeks’ training and pledge to work for two years in a disadvantaged school.

<A href=”http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/03/389282733/where-have-all-the-teachers-gone“></a>: <blockquote>“The question, and one that needs to be empirically investigated, is ‘Are we overproducing certain kinds of teachers school districts aren’t looking for and under-producing certain types of teachers that schools and other types of employers are desperately looking for?’ “

There are, of course, alternative teacher certification programs across the U.S. including Teach for America. But TFA, too, has seen large drops in enrollment over the past two years.

One possible path out of this crisis is to pay teachers more.</blockquote> Related: Graduating more teachers than required.   

April Bo Wang:

It’s one of those summer afternoons in Helena, Arkansas, where the sun is bright enough to wipe everything out in a glare of white. Even the breeze feels like a hairdryer on my neck.

I am sweating on top of Battery C. The last time I was here, I’d picked my way up an overgrown trail and had only a couple of ornery goats for company. Now, the goats have been supplanted by metal statues of Union soldiers aiming muskets down the kudzu-covered hill. Behind me, a concrete walkway leads to a pristine parking lot where a car is just pulling in. The development of Battery C is a good thing. It’s indicative of a small manufacturing town’s struggle toward economic recovery. But I just miss the damn goats.

The inequity and challenges facing my students were very real. There was nothing beautiful about their poverty.

“This land, this land … this Delta!” Even Faulkner was reduced to sentence fragments when he wrote about this place. Many great writers have tried, but it is just one of those places too immense for words. When I arrived in Helena after college for a job with Teach for America, my head was filled with romantic notions. My modest goal was to simultaneously teach 11th grade English, pocket some life experience, and write a novel. I relished the knowledge that I was living in Richard Wright’s boyhood town, on the banks of Twain’s mighty Mississippi, and 15 minutes down the road from Moon Lake, where Tennessee Williams drank himself into a stupor and wrote Blanche’s fiancé into a watery suicide.

Dave Zweifel:

Lafer’s report details how Rocketship teaches only basics like reading and math with “live” teachers, while the rest of the curriculum is taught online. There are no art, music or gym classes.

The teachers are recent education school grads who have volunteered for a couple of years with Teach for America, a private national program that was modeled after the Peace Corps, but aimed at American schools in poor and troubled neighborhoods.

Like many recently formed charter school companies, Rocketship uses the savings from its educational model to expand its schools throughout the country. Meanwhile, one of its directors runs a for-profit company that provides thousands of educational materials to the schools.

Indeed, it’s these kind of behind-the-scenes financial relationships that have raised eyebrows throughout the educational community.

To be sure, charter schools can be public schools if the school districts set them up to be accountable to the board and administrators. Madison has established three such charters — Wright Middle School, Badger Rock and Nuestro Mundo — that appear to have had good results experimenting with different educational methods and providing a different academic focus.

Related: The rejected Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School.

Chad Sommer and Jennifer Berkshire:

By Chad Sommer and Jennifer Berkshire
Last weekend, former Newark Star columnist Bob Braunpublished a bombshell column, arguing thatthe state-appointed superintendent of Newark, NJ schools, Teach For America (TFA) alum Cami Anderson, wants to waive seniority rules to fire upwards of 700 tenured Newark teachers and replace a percentage of them with TFA recruits. Executive Director of Teach For America New Jersey, Fatimah Burnam Watkins, quickly dismissedBraun’s assertions as *conspiracy theories*, while claiming TFA has a small footprint in Newark. But the heated back-and-forth misses the larger issue: TFA plays an increasingly essential role in staffing the charters that are rapidly expanding, replacing public schools from Newark to Philadelphia to Chicago to Los Angeles. In fact, newly released documents indicate that many charter operators won’t even consider opening new schools without TFA to provide a supply of *teacher talent.*
TFA a requirement
Emails sent by the Broad Foundation, a leading advocate of market-based education reform and charter expansion, and acquired through a freedom of information request, reveal that many charter management organizations consider TFA presence in a region a necessary prerequisite for opening new schools.
According to the documents, charter management organizations including Rocketship, KIPP, Noble, LEARN and Uncommon Schools all indicated that a supply of TFA teachers was a general pre-condition for expanding into a new region. The emails, which detail the Broad Foundation’s failed efforts to lure high-performing charter operators to Detroit, were released as part of a trove of thousands of documents requested as part of an investigation into Michigan’s embattled Education Achievement Authority.

Laurence Steinberg:

High school, where kids socialize, show off their clothes, use their phones–and, oh yeah, go to class.
Every once in a while, education policy squeezes its way onto President Obama’s public agenda, as it did in during last month’s State of the Union address. Lately, two issues have grabbed his (and just about everyone else’s) attention: early-childhood education and access to college. But while these scholastic bookends are important, there is an awful lot of room for improvement between them. American high schools, in particular, are a disaster.
In international assessments, our elementary school students generally score toward the top of the distribution, and our middle school students usually place somewhat above the average. But our high school students score well below the international average, and they fare especially badly in math and science compared with our country’s chief economic rivals.
What’s holding back our teenagers?
One clue comes from a little-known 2003 study based on OECD data that compares the world’s 15-year-olds on two measures of student engagement: participation and “belongingness.” The measure of participation was based on how often students attended school, arrived on time, and showed up for class. The measure of belongingness was based on how much students felt they fit in to the student body, were liked by their schoolmates, and felt that they had friends in school. We might think of the first measure as an index of academic engagement and the second as a measure of social engagement.
On the measure of academic engagement, the U.S. scored only at the international average, and far lower than our chief economic rivals: China, Korea, Japan, and Germany. In these countries, students show up for school and attend their classes more reliably than almost anywhere else in the world. But on the measure of social engagement, the United States topped China, Korea, and Japan.
In America, high school is for socializing. It’s a convenient gathering place, where the really important activities are interrupted by all those annoying classes. For all but the very best American students–the ones in AP classes bound for the nation’s most selective colleges and universities–high school is tedious and unchallenging. Studies that have tracked American adolescents’ moods over the course of the day find that levels of boredom are highest during their time in school.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried.
One might be tempted to write these findings off as mere confirmation of the well-known fact that adolescents find everything boring. In fact, a huge proportion of the world’s high school students say that school is boring. But American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country, according to OECD surveys. And surveys of exchange students who have studied in America, as well as surveys of American adolescents who have studied abroad, confirm this. More than half of American high school students who have studied in another country agree that our schools are easier. Objectively, they are probably correct: American high school students spend far less time on schoolwork than their counterparts in the rest of the world.
Trends in achievement within the U.S. reveal just how bad our high schools are relative to our schools for younger students. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, routinely tests three age groups: 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds. Over the past 40 years, reading scores rose by 6 percent among 9-year-olds and 3 percent among 13-year-olds. Math scores rose by 11 percent among 9-year-olds and 7 percent among 13-year-olds.
By contrast, high school students haven’t made any progress at all. Reading and math scores have remained flat among 17-year-olds, as have their scores on subject area tests in science, writing, geography, and history. And by absolute, rather than relative, standards, American high school students’ achievement is scandalous.
In other words, over the past 40 years, despite endless debates about curricula, testing, teacher training, teachers’ salaries, and performance standards, and despite billions of dollars invested in school reform, there has been no improvement–none–in the academic proficiency of American high school students.
It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents–it’s every single thing we have tried. The list of unsuccessful experiments is long and dispiriting. Charter high schools don’t perform any better than standard public high schools, at least with respect to student achievement. Students whose teachers “teach for America” don’t achieve any more than those whose teachers came out of conventional teacher certification programs. Once one accounts for differences in the family backgrounds of students who attend public and private high schools, there is no advantage to going to private school, either. Vouchers make no difference in student outcomes. No wonder school administrators and teachers from Atlanta to Chicago to my hometown of Philadelphia have been caught fudging data on student performance. It’s the only education strategy that consistently gets results.
The especially poor showing of high schools in America is perplexing. It has nothing to do with high schools having a more ethnically diverse population than elementary schools. In fact, elementary schools are more ethnically diverse than high schools, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Nor do high schools have more poor students. Elementary schools in America are more than twice as likely to be classified as “high-poverty” than secondary schools. Salaries are about the same for secondary and elementary school teachers. They have comparable years of education and similar years of experience. Student-teacher ratios are the same in our elementary and high schools. So are the amounts of time that students spend in the classroom. We don’t shortchange high schools financially either; American school districts actually spend a little more per capita on high school students than elementary school students.
Our high school classrooms are not understaffed, underfunded, or underutilized, by international standards. According to a 2013 OECD report, only Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. Contrary to widespread belief, American high school teachers’ salaries are comparable to those in most European and Asian countries, as are American class sizes and student-teacher ratios. And American high school students actually spend as many or more hours in the classroom each year than their counterparts in other developed countries.
This underachievement is costly: One-fifth of four-year college entrants and one-half of those entering community college need remedial education, at a cost of $3 billion each year.
The president’s call for expanding access to higher education by making college more affordable, while laudable on the face of it, is not going to solve our problem. The president and his education advisers have misdiagnosed things. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of college entry in the industrialized world. Yet it is tied for last in the rate of college completion. More than one-third of U.S. students who enter a full-time, two-year college program drop out just after one year, as do about one fifth of students who enter a four-year college. In other words, getting our adolescents to go to college isn’t the issue. It’s getting them to graduate.
If this is what we hope to accomplish, we need to rethink high school in America. It is true that providing high-quality preschool to all children is an important component of comprehensive education reform. But we can’t just do this, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. Early intervention is an investment, not an inoculation.
In recent years experts in early-child development have called for programs designed to strengthen children’s “non-cognitive” skills, pointing to research that demonstrates that later scholastic success hinges not only on conventional academic abilities but on capacities like self-control. Research on the determinants of success in adolescence and beyond has come to a similar conclusion: If we want our teenagers to thrive, we need to help them develop the non-cognitive traits it takes to complete a college degree–traits like determination, self-control, and grit. This means classes that really challenge students to work hard–something that fewer than one in six high school students report experiencing, according to Diploma to Nowhere, a 2008 report published by Strong American Schools. Unfortunately, our high schools demand so little of students that these essential capacities aren’t nurtured. As a consequence, many high school graduates, even those who have acquired the necessary academic skills to pursue college coursework, lack the wherewithal to persevere in college. Making college more affordable will not fix this problem, though we should do that too.
The good news is that advances in neuroscience are revealing adolescence to be a second period of heightened brain plasticity, not unlike the first few years of life. Even better, brain regions that are important for the development of essential non-cognitive skills are among the most malleable. And one of the most important contributors to their maturation is pushing individuals beyond their intellectual comfort zones.
It’s time for us to stop squandering this opportunity. Our kids will never rise to the challenge if the challenge doesn’t come.

Laurence Steinberg is a psychology professor at Temple University and author of the forthcoming Age of Opportunity: Revelations from the New Science of Adolescence.
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Madison Teachers, Inc. eNewsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF)::

In a recent post on her blog, Diane Ravitch shared concerns about alternative routes to certification; in particular Teach for America (TFA). Her post centered on a parent’s letter to Senator Tom Harkin after her daughter had a bad experience with TFA. Ravitch posted two responses: Harkin’s actual response to the parent; and a mock response crafted by Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig, University of Texas. Harkin serves as the Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and as Chair of the Education Appropriations Subcommittee. While Harkin “read” his constituent’s letter, it is apparent he did not incorporate Close reading strategies; his mind was made up. Harkin has supported funding for TFA and even tried to weaken the definition of “highly qualified”, so as to include teachers in training (thus enabling TFA teachers to be assigned to schools). Dr. Heilig points out several of the issues with TFA, primarily the turnover rate of the teachers in this program, which our federal government funds. He also notes that while these “teachers” don’t meet the standards of highly qualified, they are the teachers being disproportionately assigned to schools serving poor and minority children. Heilig also exposes the fact that TFA has access to and direct influence over the legislative process, as they provide cost-free education staffers for legislators on the Education and Workforce Committee. TFA lobbyists working inside the Capitol? No wonder Teach for America has been able to extend its reach so efficiently into so many districts around the country.

Alan Borsuk:

Whatever appeared to be coming together a week ago seemed to be reduced to splinters in the last few days when it came to pursuit of ideas for low performing schools in Milwaukee.
I think it’s contagious and my brain has splintered into thoughts about the fairly tumultuous recent developments. So instead of a single column, I offer fragments.
Fragment 1: Last week was a good one for fans of the status quo. Plans for Republicans in the Legislature to push through new and fairly dramatic steps came to a halt when the lead author said he couldn’t get enough votes.
Milwaukee School Board members went through much rhetoric on what to do in meetings two weeks in a row — and sent the whole issue back to committee. Maybe doing nothing is better than doing the things being suggested. In any case, “doing nothing” is ahead at the moment.
Fragment 2: It’s all about counting to 17. There’s a big roster of education ideas up for action in the Legislature — school accountability, including public and voucher schools; charter school expansion statewide; dealing with the future of the Common Core initiative.
But if 17 of the 18 Republican state senators don’t agree to get behind any of these, nothing will result, at least this year. So far, no one has counted to 17 on any of these fronts. What could change that? Maybe concerted involvement by Gov. Scott Walker. Maybe not. The Senate Republicans are not easy to unite.
Fragment 3: The hostility was strong in the large audiences at the two recent meetings of Milwaukee School Board members focused on low performing schools.
Much of it was aimed at anything to do with charter schools. At one point, mention by Superintendent Gregory Thornton of Teach for America, City Year and especially Schools That Can Milwaukee drew audible rumbling from the crowd.
These organizations are controversial to some folks, but I think they each are bringing positive, good energy and commitment to helping kids in Milwaukee. It’s one thing to disagree on approaches. It’s another to add so much anger to the environment.

Eleanor Barkhorn:

About one in five Harvard seniors applies to Teach for America. However, only a “minuscule” percentage of the class actually studies education, according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James Ryan.
What accounts for this difference? Why are so many of America’s brightest students apparently interested in teaching but not availing themselves of the training their school has to offer?
Part of what’s to blame is a long-standing institutional snobbery toward teaching. As Walter Isaacson put it at this year’s Washington Ideas Forum, there’s a perception that “it’s beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school to train teachers.”
Teach for America has helped change that perception. “I think TFA has done a lot in terms of elevating the profession of teaching and elevating the importance of public education and education generally,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in conversation with Isaacson, CEO of The Aspen Institute, and Ryan.
But Harvard and other schools like it haven’t made it a priority to encourage students to pursue teaching–and so students are looking for opportunities elsewhere. As Ryan put it, “There’s a tremendous demand for teacher training–and the main outlet is TFA.”

Tom Friedman:

Whenever I visit China, I am struck by the sharply divergent predictions of its future one hears. Lately, a number of global investors have been “shorting” China, betting that someday soon its powerful economic engine will sputter, as the real estate boom here turns to a bust. Frankly, if I were shorting China today, it would not be because of the real estate bubble, but because of the pollution bubble that is increasingly enveloping some of its biggest cities. Optimists take another view: that, buckle in, China is just getting started, and that what we’re now about to see is the payoff from China’s 30 years of investment in infrastructure and education. I’m not a gambler, so I’ll just watch this from the sidelines. But if you’re looking for evidence as to why the optimistic bet isn’t totally crazy, you might want to visit a Shanghai elementary school.
I’ve traveled here with Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, and the leaders of the Teach for All programs modeled on Teach for America that are operating in 32 countries. We’re visiting some of the highest- and lowest-performing schools in China to try to uncover The Secret — how is it that Shanghai’s public secondary schools topped the world charts in the 2009 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exams that measure the ability of 15-year-olds in 65 countries to apply what they’ve learned in math, science and reading.
After visiting Shanghai’s Qiangwei Primary School, with 754 students — grades one through five — and 59 teachers, I think I found The Secret:
There is no secret.

Valerie Strauss:

he Guardian newspaper in England published a post in its Secret Teacher blog, written by teachers who write anonymously, with this headline: “There’s an insidious prejudice against older teachers.’ The piece refers to a program in England called “Teach First,” which, it turns out, is a founding partner with Wendy Kopp’s Teach For America in a growing network of dozens of organizations in countries around the world that try to change the teacher corps. It’s called Teach For All, which I wrote about in this post:
Teach for All is a network of like-minded school reform organizations in countries around the world that, as the website says, “all recruit outstanding university graduates and young leaders of a variety of disciplines and career interests to commit two years to teach in high-need areas, providing a critical source of additional teachers who ensure their students have the educational opportunities they deserve, despite socioeconomic factors.”
Teach First, whose patron is Prince Charles, is having the same effect on many veteran teachers in England as Teach For America is having in the United States, at least according to this Secret Teacher blog post. Here’s part of it:
Until not so long ago I was a happy classroom teacher, with happy pupils in a happy school. A teacher who had been officially and consistently recognised as teaching successfully over a long period of time, by many different professionals – leaders and colleagues, visiting headteachers and Ofsted inspectors. Now, despite years of successful practice, I am feeling vulnerable and hunted….

Ilana Garon:

It happens a lot: I’ll introduce myself to a group of people I don’t know well, explaining that I’m a high school English teacher. And someone will invariably respond, “But you’re smart, what do you really want to do?” As backhanded compliments go, that one really rankles. What I find most irksome isn’t even the implication that my colleagues and I are typically mundane or that my work of the last decade has been a waste of my time. The most frustrating thing about hearing that I’m “too smart” for teaching is the counter-productive mentality about my profession that such a comment underscores.
In the early half of the 20th century, a bright woman’s best career option was to be a teacher. Now, thankfully, most every path is open to women, the only downside of which is the inevitable matriculation of top female graduates away from the field of teaching due to a plethora of other choices. This trend is compounded by the fact that teaching is now seen as a B-list job: Most top graduates of my college went into law, medicine, business, or academia. Those who did go into teaching, myself included, constantly encountered the assumption that this would be a short-term gig, the ubiquitous two-year foray (through Teach for America or the like) that would ultimately pad graduate school applications. For many, it was. Teaching wasn’t, and – 10 years later – still isn’t, seen as a “prestigious” career, even by liberal university graduates who would all agree that strong public education is an inviolable social good.

Leah Wasburn-Moses:

“An Industry of Mediocrity”–The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Teacher Training’s Low Grade”–The Wall Street Journal
“Are Teacher Prep Programs Worth the Money?” ­–Marketplace
Headlines were unanimous after the June release of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s national study of teacher-preparation programs. The study’s conclusions were precisely what the public had expected, bolstered by decades of critiques all adding up to the same conclusion: Teacher education is broken. Fortunately, there is a solution that can produce better teachers and do it faster and at less cost.
In the past, education schools were seen as the proverbial stepchild of higher education–a poor fit with the “more rigorous” academic disciplines, singled out for criticism, lowest on the scales of pay and prestige. These days, though, the criticisms leveled at teacher education have begun to resemble those aimed at higher education over all, including that it is too expensive and ineffective.
For example, a four- or even five-year education degree costs the same as other degrees, yet our field has failed to show that teachers who have these degrees are any more effective in the classroom than those licensed through alternative programs, or (in some cases) those who enter teaching with minimal preparation. Programs like Teach for America have capitalized on this point to their great advantage.

Related: The National Council on teacher quality recently rated teacher preparation programs.

Elisa Villanueva Beard

On top of it all, the most challenging piece for me was how underprepared I actually was. I graduated from high school in the top 10% of my class. But as a freshman at DePauw, I realized I was living the educational inequity that exists in our country.
I’ll never forget Intro to Philosophy. Some of my classmates would spend 45 minutes studying for a test and get A’s, while I would spend hours at the library studying every night, and still wound up with a C+ in that class. I started to lose confidence. Self-doubt began to haunt me.
But with the support and deep belief of my parents and my mentor, Joe Disque, I overcame it. In fact, I conquered it. I came out the other side with a newfound sense of social responsibility.
And that led me to Teach For America. In 1998 I joined the corps in Phoenix where I taught for 3 years. Getting to know my kids and their families inspired me to make this my life’s work.
Later–I saw alumni friends create a new normal in founding and leading schools where I grew up. These schools expected that 100% of their mostly first generation college students would go to and expected to get through college within 6 years. This inspired me, and I have never turned back.

Leslie T. Fenwick:

The truth can be used to tell a lie. The truth is that black parents’ frustration with the quality of public schools is at an all time righteous high. Though black and white parents’ commitment to their child’s schooling is comparable, more black parents report dissatisfaction with the school their child attends. Approximately 90 percent of black and white parents report attending parent teacher association meetings and nearly 80 percent of black and white parents report attending teacher conferences. Despite these similarities, fewer black parents (47 percent) than white parents (64 percent) report being very satisfied with the school their child attends. This dissatisfaction among black parents is so whether these parents are college-educated, high income, or poor.
The lie is that schemes like Teach For America, charter schools backed by venture capitalists, education management organizations (EMOs), and Broad Foundation-prepared superintendents address black parents concerns about the quality of public schools for their children. These schemes are not designed to cure what ails under-performing schools. They are designed to shift tax dollars away from schools serving black and poor students; displace authentic black educational leadership; and erode national commitment to the ideal of public education.
Consider these facts: With a median household income of nearly $75,000, Prince George’s County is the wealthiest majority black county in the United States. Nearly 55 percent of the county’s businesses are black-owned and almost 70 percent of residents own homes, according to the U.S. Census. One of Prince George’s County’s easternmost borders is a mere six minutes from Washington, D.C., which houses the largest population of college-educated blacks in the nation. In the United States, a general rule of thumb is that communities with higher family incomes and parental levels of education have better public schools. So, why is it that black parents living in the upscale Woodmore or Fairwood estates of Prince George’s County or the tony Garden District homes up 16th Street in Washington D.C. struggle to find quality public schools for their children just like black parents in Syphax Gardens, the southwest D.C. public housing community?

Pasi Sahlberg:

“To prepare young people for a more competitive economy, our school systems must have less competition.”
Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract “the best and the brightest” into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.
“Teacher effectiveness” is a commonly used term that refers to how much student performance on standardized tests is determined by the teacher. This concept hence applies only to those teachers who teach subjects on which students are tested. Teacher effectiveness plays a particular role in education policies of nations where alternative pathways exist to the teaching profession.
In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs. The range in quality is wide. In Singapore and Finland only one academically rigorous teacher education program is available for those who desire to become teachers.
Likewise, neither Canada nor South Korea has fast-track options into teaching, such as Teach for America or Teach First in Europe. Teacher quality in high-performing countries is a result of careful quality control at entry into teaching rather than measuring teacher effectiveness in service.
In recent years the “no excuses”‘ argument has been particularly persistent in the education debate. There are those who argue that poverty is only an excuse not to insist that all schools should reach higher standards. Solution: better teachers. Then there are those who claim that schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty causes in many children’s learning in school.
Solution: Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.
For me the latter is right. In the United States today, 23 percent of children live in poor homes. In Finland, the same way to calculate child poverty would show that figure to be almost five times smaller. The United States ranked in the bottom four in the recent United Nations review on child well-being.

Related: MTEL 90: Teacher Content Knowledge Licensing Requirements Coming To Wisconsin…..

Valerie Strauss:

A discussion on school reform in New York took a surprising turn this week when Paul Vallas, a pioneer of the current era of school reform, said, “We’re losing the communications game because we don’t have a good message to communicate.”
That’s something for Vallas, who is now superintendent of the public schools in Bridgeport, Conn., (earning $234,000 a year, according to this article). As a reputed expert in turning around failing school systems, he led the school districts in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans and was a champion of many of the reforms that critics believe are leading to the privatization of public education and doing nothing to actually improve schools.
Vallas has been at the forefront of modern school reform. For example, back in 2002 when he was in charge of Philadelphia’s schools, he oversaw what at that time was the largest exercise in allowing private managers — including for-profit companies — to run public schools. In New Orleans, where he was hired after Hurricane Katrina to supervise the reconstruction of the ravaged school system, he oversaw the creation of a collection of charter schools. Many of them were staffed with Teach For America recruits, who are given five weeks of summer training before being sent into classrooms with high-needs students.

Motoko Rich:

Not far off a scruffy boulevard lined with dollar stores and payday loan shops in a neighborhood of run-down brick bungalows, Corning Achievement Elementary School here is a pristine refuge, with gleaming tile floors and signs in classrooms proclaiming “Whatever it takes.”
In this Mississippi River town marked by pockets of entrenched poverty, some of the worst schools in the state are in the midst of a radical experiment in reinventing public education.
Last fall, Tennessee began removing schools with the lowest student test scores and graduation rates from the oversight of local school boards and pooling them in a special state-run district. Memphis, where the vast majority of public school students are black and from poor families, is ground zero: 80 percent of the bottom-ranked schools in the state are here.
Tennessee’s Achievement School District, founded as part of the state’s effort to qualify for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant, is one of a small handful of state-run districts intended to rejuvenate chronically struggling schools. Louisiana’s Recovery School District, created in 2003, is the best-known forerunner, and this year Michigan also set up a state district for failing schools. In February, Virginia legislators passed a measure to set up a similar statewide district.
The achievement district is a veritable petri dish of practices favored by data-driven reformers across the country and fiercely criticized by teachers’ unions and some parent groups.
Most of the schools will be run by charter operators. All will emphasize frequent testing and data analysis. Many are instituting performance pay for teachers and longer school days, and about a fifth of the new district’s recruits come from Teach for America, a program in which high-achieving college graduates work in low-income neighborhood schools. And the achievement district will not offer teachers tenure.

Mike Ford:

McShane’s point is one I heard Howard Fuller, former MPS school board member John Gardner, and others make many years ago. It’s a point that initially attracted me to the cause of education reform in Milwaukee. However, it’s also a difficult point to make sense of if you are not familiar with Milwaukee’s education system.
Consider the experience of Teach for America. Naturally when they came to town they were only interested in public schools (defined as MPS and charter), because their mission is to serve primarily low-income children. However, when MPS layoffs left many of their teachers searching for a school they discovered that Milwaukee private schools, by virtue of their participation in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), serve an overwhelmingly low-income population. Today many Teach for America teachers are placed in private Milwaukee public schools.
So what are the differences between MPS and the charter and choice sectors? In recent op-ed a wide group of Milwaukee advocates argued that “MPS is the only educational institution in this city that has the capacity, commitment and legal obligation to serve all of Milwaukee’s children.”

Scott Eidler:

Four years after the financial crisis, Wall Street hiring has remained weak, and many college graduates have searched for jobs and even careers in other fields. In the last several years, hundreds of such would-be finance professionals and management consultants have taken their high-powered ambitions and spreadsheet modeling skills to the classroom.
Teach for America, the 22-year-old nonprofit organization that recruits high-achieving college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s poorest schools for two years, in particular has garnered renewed interest among the business-oriented set. Teach for America says that its 2012 class contained about 400 recent graduates with a major in business or economics. Of those with professional experience, about 175 worked in finance.
Those participants include Zachary Dearing, 23, a recent graduate of M.I.T. Two summers ago, he was an intern at McKinsey & Company, and the year before, Goldman Sachs.

Nick Morgan:

Every now and then a speech comes along that reminds me why public speaking is still essential and why I said back in 2003 that the only reason to give a speech is to change the world.
Today, Mike Johnston is a state senator from Colorado, but his passion is education, and it was ignited as a Teach for America teacher in the Mississippi delta in 1997. From that came a searing book, In the Deep Heart’s Core, about the terrible challenges facing teachers and learning in that state. Johnston moved on to become the principal of a school for challenged kids in Colorado.

Teresa Watanabe:

A new study has found that inexperienced teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District are disproportionately more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students, perpetuating the achievement gap.
The study also found that L.A. Unified teachers “vary substantially” in their effectiveness, with top teachers able to give students the equivalent of eight additional months of learning in a year compared with weaker instructors.
Such findings raise “deep concerns,” said Drew Furedi, the district’s executive director of talent management, who oversees teacher training. “For us, it’s a call to action.”
The study by the Strategic Data Project, which is affiliated with Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research, analyzed the performance of about 30% of L.A. Unified teachers and presented findings based primarily on students’ standardized math test scores from 2005 through 2011 in grades three through eight. The study’s authors acknowledged that test scores were only one measure of teacher effectiveness.
….
The study also found:
Teacher effects vary substantially in LAUSD, more than in many other districts. The difference between a 25th and 75th percentile elementary math teacher is over one-quarter of a standard deviation, which is roughly equivalent to a student having eight additional months of instruction in a calendar year.
Teach for America and Career Ladder teachers have higher math effects on average than other novices in their first year by 0.05 and 0.03 standard deviations respectively, which is roughly equivalent to one to two months of additional learning. These differences persist over time
The performance of math teachers improved quickly in the first five years, then leveled off.
Those with advanced degrees were no more effective than those without, although L.A. Unified pays more to teachers pursuing such degrees.
Long-term substitute teachers — who have been employed more frequently to fill in amid widespread layoffs — have positive effects in teaching middle-school math

View the complete 1.4MB PDF study, here.
Related: Math forum audio/video.

Professor Baker’s Blog:

Beginning public school teachers who earn their credentials from alternative types of programs in Tennessee are as effective as veteran teachers in some subject areas and even more effective in a few areas, according to a state report released this morning.
The alternative programs, such as Teach for America, allow college graduates from other fields to teach while participating in a fast track to certification.
“In looking at both traditionally and alternatively licensed graduates, there are four programs that stand out,” said Jamie Woodson, president and CEO of the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, or SCORE.

Richard Whitmire:

The fight to upgrade the quality of the nation’s teaching force has just begun. Years from now, the Chicago strike most likely will be viewed as a canary-in-the-coal-mine incident.
The awkward fact is that teaching in America has become a quasi blue-collar profession mostly shunned by top college graduates. The countries with the best education systems recruit from top graduates. What about our top graduates? A good barometer is Teach for America (TFA), which in 2011 drew nearly 48,000 applicants for 5,200 teaching positions. Those applicants included 12% of the seniors at Ivy League schools.
Here’s the question that never gets asked: What happens to the 43,000 top graduates who wanted to teach but didn’t get an offer from TFA? Nearly all seek other careers.
For the best and brightest college graduates in this country, jobs offered by regular school districts lack prestige. Their accountability-free practices give the best teachers no way to stand out. These young TFA applicants rose to the top of their high schools classes and won admittance to the top tier colleges. They want a shot at shining on the job as well.