Two months ago I wrote about Wendy Kopp stepping down and two new co-CEOs of TFA taking her place. As the weeks have passed, I’ve been able to get more of sense of who these CEOs are and what their views are.
Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva-Beard have been carefully chosen to be the faces of TFA. I am beginning to see how they each might embody one of Wendy’s two public personas: There’s Wendy the extreme corporate reformer who pals around with Joel Klein and who refers to TFA critics as ‘haters’ in commencement addresses. Then there’s Wendy the moderate corporate reformer who writes editorials about how teacher evaluations should not be publicly released and who wrote a thoughtful response to my open letter to her. Though I still don’t know a lot about either of them, it seems like Matt is the extreme reformer (Bad Kopp) and Elisa is…
read more »One of the most annoying phrases uttered in ed reform is some version of ‘poverty is not destiny.’ Occasionally they mix it up a little with something like ‘zip code is not destiny.’ The implication is that there are some people out there who think that every person born into poverty or born in a…
read more »Dear Gary, I’ve often heard teachers complain about the latest reform “fad.” It’s understandable insofar as veteran teachers have been around for many rounds of “reform,” only to see each and every one swept abashedly into a locked closet in the back of the class (right next to where I surreptitiously put those pre-tests I…
read more »StudentsFirst has raised tens of millions of dollars on the lie that they, alone, care about students who need to be defended from all the teachers who only care about themselves. The biggest distortion of their numbers is their claim that they have 1.3 million members. Many of these ‘members’ are people who are completely…
read more »On Letterman the other day, the top 10 category was: Top 10 reasons I’ve decided to become a teacher. Reading the reasons were ten brand new 2013 corps members. So of course it is pretty ironic that out of all the perspective teachers in the country who could have been chosen from various education programs,…
read more »Geoffrey Canada recently did a TED talk entitled ‘Our failing schools. Enough is enough.’ Canada is the president and CEO of The Harlem Children’s Zone and star of ‘Waiting For Superman.’ The premise of Harlem Children’s Zone is a good one. It serves to provide school and complete wrap-around services (health, mental health, nutrition, etc.)…
read more »Riding the Subway today I saw this poster about the Common Core tests. I won’t analyze it at length here. Just take a look at how far away the basket is from the kid. If he can’t make that shot, would it mean that his basketball coach is ‘ineffective’?
read more »When I was a kid, around ten years old I guess, my father told me a joke that began with the question “What are the three biggest lies?” I said I didn’t know and he proceeded to tell me that the first biggest lie is “The check is in the mail,” which as a ten…
read more »A few weeks ago, fellow TFA alum Matt Barnum invited me to a public ‘discussion’ about education reform. Though Matt seems to consider himself further to whatever direction ‘reformers’ are in the spectrum, I’m not so sure I’d place him there. Still, based on the massive number of comments (72, though a lot are from…
read more »I’ve written a bunch of posts about my visit to the KIPP high school in New York city over the past few months. The first was a general summary and, since then, I’ve gotten more deeply into some of the things I learned there. I thought the school was just OK. As we always hear…
read more »By a somewhat frustrated 1991 alum
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