TFA CEO’s Husband Heads One Of The 73 Lowest Rated Schools In Texas
YES Prep is a charter school network of sixteen schools in Houston. Founded by a TFA alum and staffed by many TFA teachers, it has been hailed as a TFA success story. Fueled by being the school to invent the invented ‘100% college acceptance rate’*, they received $1 million from Oprah in 2010.
In Wendy Kopp’s book ‘A Chance To Make History,’ she wrote (page 41)
When its fifty campus begins graduating seniors in 2014, YES Prep will be sending roughly the same number of low-income students to college as all of HISD’s other thirty-four high schools combined, unless HISD improves its outcomes (which, as I’ll describe later, it is working hard to do). In fact, Chris (Barbic) told me that if the YES network can maintain the quality and progress it has demonstrated so far, it will operate thirteen schools and produce nine hundred college graduates each year by 2020 — double the number of low-income college graduates currently generated by all of HISD each year.
Considering that they currently graduate something like 500 seniors a year and that HISD graduates 10,000, these numbers are pretty outrageous.
Elisa Villanueva Beard is the current CEO of Teach For America. Her husband, Jeremy Beard, is the ‘Head of Schools’ for YES Prep. I first became aware of Jeremy at the TFA 20 TFA CEO’s Husband Heads One Of The 73 Lowest Rated Schools In Texas | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:
