Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Closing the Teach For America Blogging Gap

A few months ago, I got an interesting email from TFA:

From: alumni.teaching.awards
Subject: Teach For America Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching
Date: Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:16 AM
Dear Gary,
As a teacher who has been recognized for your tremendous accomplishments in the classroom, we believe you could be a strong candidate for the new Teach For America Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching. We are writing to encourage you to apply for the award as we are eager to learn more about your work and impact.
The Teach For America Alumni Awards for Excellence in Teaching will be presented annually to alumni teachers who are having a transformational impact on their students’ lives. In addition to providing us with a means of recognizing the exemplary work of our alumni teachers, these awards will also allow us to learn from the best practices and approaches of these outstanding educators, thus advancing the work of…

Two years ago I first heard about a new Charter School in New York City called The Equity Project, founded by a TFA alum named Zeke Vanderhoek. There was an article in The New York Times about how they were going to pay their teachers $125,000 in return for more work and accountability. Teachers could…

In today’s New York Times there was a story about a research study which supposedly proved that students who had teachers with good value-added scores were more successful in life. This inspired me to complete something I have been working on for several months, off-and-on, a detailed analysis of the raw data supplied in the…

Superman has arrived and he takes Visa. As districts get more and more desperate trying to reach 100% proficiency by 2014, they begin to turn to a new breed of ‘experts.’ These experts claim that they hold the secrets to turning around failing schools. Proving that ‘poverty is not destiny’ with case studies of successful…

It’s a lot more satisfying showing that a ‘failing’ school is being unfairly closed than showing that a ‘miracle’ school is getting accolades it doesn’t deserve. I applied the same analysis I recently did for Jamaica High School to the just announced closure of a New York City school since 1913, Washington Irving High School. …

The New York City reform model is centered upon closing ‘failing’ schools and opening new ones. Some of these ‘failing’ schools have been pillars of their communities for decades. One such school I read about in The New York Times is Jamaica High School in Jamaica, Queens. This large high school opened in 1925. But…

New Orleans is definitely the ‘ground zero’ for education reform. The corporate reform model is conducting their ‘great’ experiment there as 80% of the schools in the ‘Recovery School District’ are charters. If the experiment works it will be replicated throughout the country. Already, Memphis is starting to copy it. If the experiment fails, the…

The most famous teacher in the United States right now is Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a collection of nearly 3,000 online youtube tutorials mainly about math and science. Bill Gates watches the videos with his kids, and has made Khan a household name. Because of Khan, a new buzz-word in…

The current education reform battle is a bit like a boxing match. The corporate reformers had a lot of momentum until April 2010, when Diane Ravitch came out with ‘The Death And Life Of The Great American School System.’ This was like a giant upper cut to Bloomberg, Klein, Rhee, and Gates. Six months later,…