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Tuesday, November 6, 2012

UPDATE: Jersey Jazzman: Yet Another TFA Alum Puffs Up Her Resume

Jersey Jazzman: Yet Another TFA Alum Puffs Up Her Resume:


Yet Another TFA Alum Puffs Up Her Resume

It's a fine TFA alumni tradition started by none other than Michelle Rhee:

Sell yourself as a teaching genius by gussying up your two or three years in the classroom with statistics showing your "success."

Rhee used to make this dramatic claim: "Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher." Unfortunately for this modern day saint, G.F. Brandenberg got hold of her actual test scores and exposed her as a serial exaggerator. It's a sad comment on our national media that the woman continues to be treated as an expert on education when she clearly dissembled about her own accomplishments.

Now, we have TFA alum Allison Serafin, who is running for the Nevada State Board of Education.
During her time with Teach For America, she taught 6th and 7th grade English and Social 


More TFA Alumni Resume Puffery

I'm beginning to suspect that, if I wanted to, I could spend most of my blogging time debunking claims made by Teach For America alumni about their "successes" during their two or three years of teaching.

The most famous TFA resume puffer is Michelle Rhee, whose outrageous claims were debunked - hard - last year. Then we had Allison Serafin, candidate for the Nevada BOE, who bragged on her test scores without mentioning she taught at a selective magnet school.

Let's look at another TFA alum running for a school board seat: Josh Reimnitz, a 26 year-old candidate for the Minneapolis school board. EduShyster gives us the lowdown:
The school board race pits TFA alum Reimnitz against an actual life-long educator who is at a distinct disadvantage as she is not known to have ever high-fived a minority student. Reimnitz is running on the grounds that the achievement gap is the civil rights issue of our time. (Note: If you are playing the EduShyster drinking game at home, sip now). But