Good Kopp, Bad Kopp
Two months ago I wrote about Wendy Kopp stepping down and two new co-CEOs of TFA taking her place. As the weeks have passed, I’ve been able to get more of sense of who these CEOs are and what their views are.
Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva-Beard have been carefully chosen to be the faces of TFA. I am beginning to see how they each might embody one of Wendy’s two public personas: There’s Wendy the extreme corporate reformer who pals around with Joel Klein and who refers to TFA critics as ‘haters’ in commencement addresses. Then there’s Wendy the moderate corporate reformer who writes editorials about how teacher evaluations should not be publicly released and who wrote a thoughtful response to my open letter to her. Though I still don’t know a lot about either of them, it seems like Matt is the extreme reformer (Bad Kopp) and Elisa is the moderate reformer (Good Kopp).
Matt and Elisa have embarked on their TFA Listens tour. Based on what they are tweeting about, they are listening, but only hearing what they want to. And what they want to hear is that schools are plagued by non-TFA teachers who abuse students with their soft bigotry of low expectations:
Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva-Beard have been carefully chosen to be the faces of TFA. I am beginning to see how they each might embody one of Wendy’s two public personas: There’s Wendy the extreme corporate reformer who pals around with Joel Klein and who refers to TFA critics as ‘haters’ in commencement addresses. Then there’s Wendy the moderate corporate reformer who writes editorials about how teacher evaluations should not be publicly released and who wrote a thoughtful response to my open letter to her. Though I still don’t know a lot about either of them, it seems like Matt is the extreme reformer (Bad Kopp) and Elisa is the moderate reformer (Good Kopp).
Matt and Elisa have embarked on their TFA Listens tour. Based on what they are tweeting about, they are listening, but only hearing what they want to. And what they want to hear is that schools are plagued by non-TFA teachers who abuse students with their soft bigotry of low expectations: