Is Teach for America, Inc. morphing into Leadership for Educational Equity?

Is Teach for America, Inc. morphing into Leadership for Educational Equity?

Is there an image problem or are they just playing a shell game?

Or are they doubling the money?

A job posting in the idealist:

Job posted by: Leadership For Educational Equity

 Senior Director, Supporter Relations

About Leadership for Educational Equity

Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE) is a nonpartisan leadership development organization that inspires our members towards civic engagement. LEE is dedicated to empowering Teach For America corps members and alumni to grow as leaders in their communities and help build the movement for educational equity. For more information on LEE’s mission, vision and core values, please click here.

LEE is a high-growth, results-oriented organization that operates in an entrepreneurial environment and is committed to continuous improvement.

Check this out from the website:

Policy and Advocacy Summer Fellowship

LEE’s Policy and Advocacy Summer Fellowship is an opportunity for corps members and recent alumni to get their foot in the policy or advocacy door by working directly with an influential organization…

The ultimate goal of Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, Inc., is to keep the million dollar money mill going by ensuring that reforms that suit her business model remain in place.

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For more on Teach for America, Inc., here is the following information from our page on Teach for America, Inc.:

What started out as a possibly altruistic idea of going into small towns in the South where it was difficult to staff schools and instead bring in lightly trained recent college graduates to populate the classrooms, has now become a multimillion dollar business relying on charter schools to use these recruits to staff their charter franchises.

These recruits contract with TFA, Inc. for two or three years then most move on to graduate school, law school or another chosen profession leaving schools and creating churn.

Another aspect of this that is overlooked is that with the new teacher evaluation system that is being pushed by Arne Duncan and his army of privatizers, the performance of the TFA, Inc. recruits will never be evaluated over time so there would be a steady stream of these young people teaching under the radar of the evaluation system.

Wendy Kopp charges school districts anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 per recruit each year for the “privilege” of having her recruits staff the most under-performing and impoverished schools or charter schools that do not hire union teachers.

And what does Wendy Kopp make each year from her endeavor to staff our schools with recruits after 5 weeks of “training”? We can take a look at her 990 form, the form that is submitted by tax exempt organizations, to get an idea.

According to the tax form that was submitted for 2009, at the end of that year there was a sum of almost $300M in net assets for TFA, Inc. Most of this cash came from wealthy donors such as Eli Broad and the Gates Foundation.

If that wasn’t enough, in 2010, Arne Duncan, through the Department of Education, provided Ms. Kopp with a $50M grant to help her teach the most impoverished children in our country. To explain this a bit, Wendy Kopp is on the Broad Foundation board.Arne Duncan who has close ties with Eli Broad from his days in Chicago as CEO of the Chicago school district, keeps the “Broad Prize” in the offices of the Department of Education, are you starting to see how this all works?

In a previous post, you can see that Ms. Kopp then charges the school district for the training of these recruits as clearly described in the contract that she has with the Seattle Public School system but at the same time, she considers that as an expense on her tax form.

Ms. Kopp paid herself that year a little over $375,000 and along with her staff, the total came to over $2M.

Not too shabby for a “non-profit”.

In Mr. Bilby’s words:

My name is John Bilby and I was a TFA teacher in the New York region from September 2009 until March 2010. I left the organization because I felt that it does not adequately prepare its people to serve the poorest children in public schools. I also think that TFA is more interested in power, access, and influence in the federal game of education than it is concerned with resolving educational inequity. Its “corps members” are merely a means to this end, providing the organization with a front while it pursues the goals of its donors, namely to remodel public education in this country in order to favor a high-turnover, non-unionized workforce in charters run by hedge-fund managers for tax breaks. I foresee this further stratifying our current system into one in which children with disabilities, children who don’t speak English, and children who do not do well on standardized tests are funneled into substandard schools in a constant state of crisis due to continuous budget cutting.

I still believe, however, in the democratic power of education and the right of the people to vote out those who might infringe upon it. I am beginning a traditional route teacher certification program and I am looking forward to getting back into a city classroom soon.

For more on Teach for America, Inc., see:

• Parents Across America, Seattle: Part of Protest at Apple Store
• How Interning for TFA Convinced me of its Injustice
• Why I did TFA, and why you shouldn’t
• TFA: The International Brotherhood of Corporate Interests
• Teach for America Exposed in Seattle
• HELP WANTED? McTEACHING WITH TEACH FOR AMERICA
• A new look at Teach for America
• Teach For America: A False Promise a policy brief from the Education and the Public Interest Center and the Education Policy Research Unit
• Tell-All From A TFA and KIPP Teacher: Unprepared, Isolation, Shame, and Burnout
• Why I Oppose Teach For America Coming To Sacramento
• Learning On Other People’s Kids – an important book on Teach for America
• Looking Past the Spin
• Money From Donors, iPads for Free: How Is it That Teach For America’s Struggling Corps Are Broke?
• Reconsidering TFA
• Seattle’s Education Reform Hypocrisy

From Students Resisting TFA:

Written by TFA Alumni/former corps members:

• Gary Rubinstein: Why I did TFA and Why You Shouldn’t
• Owen Davis: Teach for America Apostates: a Primer of Alumni Resistance
• Jesse Hagopian: Seattle Public Schools should avoid ‘Teach for Awhile’ program
• Alex Caputo-Pearl: Teach for America Shows the Downside of Quick Fixes in Education
• Camika Royal: Swift to Hear; Slow to Speak: A Message to TFA Teachers, Critics, and Education Reformers
• True Confessions of a TFA Dropout
• Julian Vasquez Heilig: Teach for America: Feel-good Spin vs. Dose of Reality From a Corps Member
• Why I’m Quitting TFA
• The Atlantic: I Quit Teach for America
• Jameson Brewer: Hyper-accountability, Burnout and Blame: A Former TFA Corps Member Speaks Out
• Matt Barnum: It’s Time for Teach for America to Fold –former TFAer
• Noam Hassenfeld: This Former TFA Corps Members Thinks You Should Join City Year Instead

Growing TFA Resistance: 

• Zach Schonfeld: Meet the Teach for America Resistance Movement that’s Growing from Within
• Valerie Strauss: TFA Critics Gather To Organize Resistance
• John Thompson: How Can Teach for America Stop Making Enemies?
• James Cersonsky: A Break in TFA’s Ranks, TFA’s Deep Bench, TFA’s Civil War

General Issues around TFA:

• Megan Erickson: A Nation of Little Lebowski Urban Achievers
• Rachel Smith (student)’s Poetry on TFA Teachers: “Hallelujah the Saviors Are Here”
• Joanne Barkan:  Got Dough?
• Michael Paul Goldenberg:  Why Progressives Distrust KIPP and TFA
• TFA: Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders | Jacobin
• Stephanie Rivera: A Student Critique on TFA

Messages to Prospective TFA Corps Members:

• Katie Osgood: An Open Letter to New TFA Recruits
• College Seniors Should Reconsider Teach For America
• Lois Weiner: An Open Letter to TFA Recruits in Chicago
• Gary Rubinstein: Why I did TFA and Why You Shouldn’t
• Camika Royal: Swift to Hear; Slow to Speak: A Message to TFA Teachers, Critics, and Education Reformers

Blogs

• Gary Rubinstein
• Reconsidering TFA

Similar Actions

• University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development
• University of Minnesota Students Protest Teach for America
• Organizing Resistance to Teach for America Wiki

Submitted by Dora Taylor

For more go to: http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/