How big can Teach For America get?
TFA founder Wendy Kopp
Even in school districts where teachers have been laid off because of budget cuts, Teach For America manages to keep expanding. An education blogger in Massachusetts who writes about corporate-influenced reform on the website EduShyster.com, writes about this in the following post.
From EduShyster.com:
When news broke this past summer that Teach for America was expanding its presence in Chicago amid the largest school closings in that city’s history and the layoffs of thousands of teachers and school staff, the reaction was swift, furious and extended well beyond the usual chorus of TFA detractors. At the time, I argued that the heated-back-and-forth, while welcome, missed the point. In city after city, TFA has largely abandoned its earlier mission of staffing hard-to-fill positions in public schools, serving instead as a placement agency for urban charters. In Chicago, however, TFA’s role appears to go far beyond providing labor for the fast-growing charter sector. An internal TFA document indicates that the organization has a plan to dramatically expand the number of charter schools in the city.
The document, a slide from Chicago TFA’s January 2013 Board of Directors meeting, is reproduced below. (You can view the original here or here). The five-year charter management organization or CMO growth plan forecasts a dramatic expansion of privately-run charters in the city. The 52 new schools projected below would serve more than 30,000 students.
TFA Chicago’s response
I shared the document with TFA Chicago’s executive director, Josh Anderson, both to
I shared the document with TFA Chicago’s executive director, Josh Anderson, both to
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