Open Letters To ‘D-List’ Reformers I Know. Part 1: Justin ‘Juice’ Fong
A little over a year ago, I wrote a series of open letters to ‘reformers’ I’ve known throughout the years. I was not surprised that the majority of them did not respond. On average, they each are making over $300K a year in the ed ‘reform’ game, and I would expect that it would be quite risky to write a public response and to even admit that you once knew a rabble-rouser like me.
A few months ago, I started a series of open letters to ‘B-List’ reformers I know. These were people making about $250K a year. For these I got no responses at all. Again, probably too risky to publicly write something that is surely going to get shredded by commenters.
So I thought I’d skip the ‘C-List’ reformers and go straight to the ‘D-List’ and see if I can get someone who wants to defend against serious challenges. My first recipient is someone I’ve met just once, but have sparred for about six months on Twitter, Justin ‘Juice’ Fong. Juice is the Vice President of internal communications of TFA. I don’t know his salary, but I’m guessing that it is around $150K. He can correct me on this if he responds.
I first became aware of Fong when he wrote a ridiculous response to the “Organizing Resistance Against Teach for America and its Role in Privatization” summit in Chicago this past summer. Near the beginning of his post, he wrote “Knowing that you have an anti-TFA assembly tomorrow morning, here is my advice to you: Teach For America isn’t going away anytime soon, so work with us to make the organization better.“ His post was generally smug, patronizing, and disrespectful.
Over the past six months, Fong has showed more nuance in his posts. He even wrote something about how standardized testing data can be used more fairly, which got some