Change: School Reform's "Red Envelope" Problem
There'll be lots of shiny young MBA types looking for jobs at the 2011 Yale SOM education conference later this week -- and lots of TFA and KIPP and New Leaders recruiters looking for new hires (87 pp Chrome-crashing PDF here). But is that really the right thing for them to be doing at this particular point in the game? I'm not so sure.
Hard as it might be for them to contemplate pivoting away from the programs they've dedicated their lives to and made a name creating, reformers might need to do just that to a much greater extent than they seem willing to do thus far (despite lots of lip service to the importance of movement creation and advocacy that's going around).
The logic is this: programs like TFA and KIPP have shown what can be done, established a certain degree of credibility, and incubated a bunch of potential leaders. But now those direct service programs are legacy operations -- sinkholes for money, time, and talent whose outputs however
