TFA CEO’s Recent Podcast Interview
For the past six years, Elisa Villanueva Beard has been a CEO of Teach For America. Over the years I have followed her various speeches and interviews to get a sense if TFA is evolving at all about its historically distorted view of education in this country.
In a podcast called SwampED, hosted by former Obama staff members, and leaning heavily in the ‘reform’ camp and Arne Duncan idolizing, they interviewed Villanueva-Beard the other day.
Villanueva-Beard starts with a story I’ve heard before about how she was the number one student in her high school in Texas yet she struggled to adjust to DePauw University. She uses this story to support her claim that she makes in nearly every speech and interview that teachers in this country have low expectations for low-income students. Her own high school teachers had low expectations for her and that’s why she was not prepared. Those teachers, apparently, don’t deserve any credit for the great success that she has enjoyed throughout her life with the exception of maybe her first semester in college.
As always, Villanueva-Beard gets some ‘status quo’ references. In response to a question about how TFA corps members fit in with the staff at their schools, she says:
We are bringing a type of person who is unafraid to challenge the status quo, whose on a mission to deliver for children and brings an energy to that.
Later on she get’s her second ‘status quo’ in:
You emerge from this … with a deep personal commitment to want to do something about this and then just really resolved to be part of the solution, challenge the status quo.
About TFA, she repeats the misleading claim that 85% of alumni are still working in CONTINUE READING: TFA CEO’s Recent Podcast Interview | Gary Rubinstein's Blog
