.@TeachForAmerica Ground Offensive Stalling Spectacularly in California
The media (social or traditional) has not reported on the Teach For America ground offensive going on in California. The traditional media has also missed that school boards are turning them away! It all started with an email from a San Francisco Unified School District classified staff member at Everett Middle School a few weeks ago. He notified me that TFA was working behind the scenes in San Francisco to expand their corps there from a base of 15 recruits. I discussed the San Francisco context in the post Will San Francisco Cancel TFA?. That same day, a former California TFA corps member contacted me on Facebook just hours after I received Jose’s letter. Since she was a Bay Area TFA special education teacher, I asked her to write a post describing her experience, she summed up her recent experience (in the same post) teaching special education for TFA as threats, depression, and debt. What did the San Francisco School Board Decide? The SF Gate reported
After a heated debate and a two-week delay, the San Francisco school boardTuesday decided to stick with the status quo, voting to hire 15 Teach for America interns for the next school year, the same number as last year. The vote was a compromise. Superintendent Richard Carranza wanted the board to boost the amount to 24.
Some people have said that the San Francisco decisions was a disappointment, but note that TFA was lobbying to increase their corps from 15, they weren’t able to do so. Why is Teach For America expanding? Because Arne Duncan and Barack Obama gave them $50 million to do so. From the Mathematica report (which btw the way their study actually inadvertently skewers TFA— though they really don’t want you to know that):In 2010, TFA launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up grant of $50 million from the U.S. Department of Education. Under the i3 scale-up, TFA planned to increase the size of its teacher corps by more than 80 percent by September 2014, with the goal of placing 13,500 first- and second-year corps members in classrooms by the 2014–2015 school year and expanding to 52 regions across the country. While TFA ultimately fell short of the growth goals set in its scale-up application (Mead et al. 2015), by the 2012–2013 school year, the second year of the scale-up, it had expanded its placements by 25 percent, from 8,217 to 10,251 first- and second-year corps members.
In fact, the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet reported that TFA has fallen short 25% on their recruiting recently. As a result— I suspect— TFA has pursued an offensive in California. Not surprisingly this has occurred under the radar .@TeachForAmerica Ground Offensive Stalling Spectacularly in California | Cloaking Inequity:
