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…

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…

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…

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,…

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’?

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…

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…

A few weeks ago I was invited by Matt Barnum to discuss various issues in education reform through a series of letters.  Matt is a TFA alum who is now in law school.  He has written several articles in various newspapers about the complexity of improving education.  Most recently he wrote something about how it…

So the first season of Blackboard Wars has ended and, as I expected, it reached the conclusion it was created to.  Yes, ‘reform’ isn’t easy.  The community resists radical change, even when it is what is best for it.  The early ‘success’ of this school and its teachers validates the idea that all you need…

I recently learned through one of my Twitter followers about a series of videos from an organization called RESET in Minnesota.  Minnesota is a place that has a large TFA and TFA charter school presence.  Even one of the new co-CEOs has several relatives involved in Minnesota charters.  TFA, as well as several charter organizations,…

My sister’s friend is a first grade teacher in a ‘challenging’ school in New York.  People who know about education know that poor students often enter kindergarten, already a few years behind their more affluent peers.  Good teachers, when given the freedom to teach their students at an appropriate level for their incoming skills, are…

With two more episodes in this first season of Oprah’s Blackboard wars, they do not have a lot of time left to complete a successful ‘turnaround.’  I can’t say how good this school was before the charter takeover, as I wasn’t there.  I also can’t say how good the school system was in New Orleans…

I read an article yesterday about a new study which ‘proves’ how effective TFA teachers and TFA alumni teachers are.  The study, which can be accessed here, claimed that middle school math TFA corps members get an extra half year of learning than non-TFA novice teachers, that middle school reading TFA alumni get an extra…

A few days ago The Pope of the Catholic church and The Pope of Teach For America, Wendy Kopp, both stepped down. I was not always thrilled with the direction that Wendy Kopp was steering the organization in, and I publicly aired my grievances in my open letter to her.  I was pleased with her…

Yesterday I watched, for the first time, an episode of Oprah’s new reality show ‘Blackboard Wars.’  The show chronicles a first year ‘turnaround’ high school in New Orleans which has been taken over by a charter company.  New Orleans is ‘ground zero’ for the corporate reform model with a TFAer as state education commissioner and…

I’m going to make a few top 10 lists over the coming weeks since I know from reading other people’s blogs that I don’t often go back and read old posts.  But some of the older posts from me and others are not ‘stale’ in any way.  So in addition to this list, which will…

For the first 19 years of my 21 year struggle to help TFA improve, my issue with them was quality of the training for the new corps members.  It has been frustrating since sending untrained TFAers into the neediest schools is unfair to the kids and also unfair to the corps members.  As the organization…

In New York City schools get an annual ‘progress report’ grade from A to F.  Schools with an F, D, or three consecutive Cs can be slated for closure, and many school have suffered this fate, with about twenty more fighting for their lives this year.  The progress report is based on test scores and,…

Wendy Kopp announced that she is stepping down as CEO of Teach For America, and around that time on The Huffington Post, a TFA alum named Kate Casas wrote an open letter to Wendy.  This letter was in stark contrast to the one I wrote which I was pretty proud of and which actually got…

Though there was a recent article by Mike Petrilli about how people on Twitter generally only ‘follow’ people who they agree with, I try to follow a few ‘reformers’ to stay on top of what is going on.  So I follow Michelle Rhee, StudentsFirst, John White, and others.  I’ve only been blocked once, to my…

It has been a while since I caught up on some TFA ‘Pass The Chalk’ blog entries.  I read two interesting ones, one just published, and one published a few months ago that I must have missed. In “Who are the ‘So-Called Reformers’” staffer Heather Harding writes about how it is too bad that people…

I’ve posted a link here that will take you to all eight open letters and two (so far) responses: click here to see them

I came across, recently, as I’ve been scanning in some of the ‘clutter’ I’ve had in boxes in storage, the the cover letter and the two essays I wrote for my TFA application.  The deadline for applying to become a part of the second ever Teach For America cohort was in January of 1991.  As…

Teach For America recently launched a new initiative to recruit military veterans to become TFA teachers.  With the catchy slogan “You Served For America Now Teach For America,” this campaign has gotten attention in various news sources like The Huffington Post. Just the way college students do TFA as a way to do something ‘good’…