Teach for America: A Failed Vision

Teach for America: A Failed Vision

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: “Sorry. Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way”

It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for American recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in high poverty schools and allowed the TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, which are filled with Urban Studies and African American Studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and several of whom came from the kind of high poverty neighborhoods TFA proposed to send its recruits to teach in.

Not one of them was accepted! Enraged, I did a little research and found that TFA had accepted only four of the nearly 100 Fordham students who applied. I become even more enraged when I found out from the New York Times that TFA had accepted 44 out of a hundred applicants from Yale that year. Something was really wrong here if an organization who wanted to serve low income communities rejected every applicant from Fordham who came from those communities and accepted half of the applicants from an Ivy League school where very few of the students, even students of color, come from working class or poor families.

Since that time, the percentage of Fordham students accepted has marginally increased, but the organization has done little to win my confidence that it is seriously committed to recruiting people willing to make a lifetime commitment to teaching and administering schools in high poverty areas.

Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach for America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make, and encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career. Indeed, the organization does everything in its power to make joining Teach for America seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher paying professions.

Three years ago, the TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” To me, the message of that flyer was “use teaching in high poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only profoundly disrespectful of every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume padding” for ambitious young people.

In saying these things, let me make it clear that my quarrel is not with the many talented young people who join Teach for America, some of whom decide to remain in the communities they work in and some of whom become lifetime educators. It is with the leaders of the organization who enjoy the favor with which TFA is regarded with captains of industry, members of Congress, the media, and the foundation world, and have used this access to move rapidly to positions as heads of local school systems, executives in Charter school companies, and educational analysts in management consulting firms.

The organization’s facile circumvention of the grinding, difficult but profoundly empowering work of teaching and administering schools has created the illusion that there are quick fixes, not only for failing schools, but for deeply entrenched patterns of poverty and inequality. No organization has been more complicit than TFA in the demonization of teachers and teachers unions, and no organization has provided more “shock troops” for Education Reform strategies which emphasize privatization and high stakes testing. Michelle Rhee, a TFA recruit, is the poster child for such policies, but she is hardly alone. Her counterparts can be found in New Orleans ( where they led the movement toward a system dominated by charter school) in New York ( where they play an important role in the Bloomberg Education bureaucracy) and in many other cities.

And that elusive goal of educational equity. How well has it advanced in the years TFA has been operating? Not only has there been little progress, in the last fifteen years, in narrowing the test score gap by race and class, but income inequality has become greater, in those years, than any time in modern American history. TFA has done nothing to promote income redistribution, reduce the size of the prison population, encourage social investment in high poverty neighborhoods, or revitalize arts and science and history in the nation’s schools. Its main accomplishment has been to marginally increase the number of talented people entering the teaching profession, but only a small fraction of those remain in the schools to which they were originally sent.

But the most objectionable aspect of Teach for America–other than its contempt for lifetime educators—is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged, in the rapidly expanding Educational Industrial Complex, which offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well connected. An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham's Urban Studies Program. He is the author of three books and over 100 articles on African-American History, urban history, and the history of sports. His most recent book White Boy: A Memoir, published in the Spring of 2002.

Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Most in Need

Money Trail in Education Reform Leads to Everyone But Those Most in Need

by Mark Naison | Fordham University

special to NewBlackMan

"The Public Education-Industrial Complex is the latest sector of the Misery Industries. The Public Education-Industrial Complex works hand in hand with the Prison-Industrial Complex to turn the misery of inner city residents into profit-making businesses that owe both their existence and profits to the misery found in these communities."--Henry Louis Taylor

In the last ten years, tens of billions of dollars have been spent to reform America’s schools—some of it coming from the Federal Department of Education, some of it from state legislatures, some of it from private foundations. This money has gone to fund research on Common Core Standards, to close failing schools and open up new ones, to create new protocols for assessing schools and teachers, to create new batteries of tests to evaluate students learning, to bring management consultants into school systems and in some cases into individual school and to fund charter schools and educational maintenance organizations.

In New York City, Education Reform funding has spawned a variety of new public sector careers, ranging from “accountability officers” in the Department of Education, to the heads of charter school companies making multiple six figure salaries, to management consultants on the payroll of the DOE, to scores of new principals whose jobs have created in small schools created when large, allegedly “failing” ones have been broken up. When you add this the tens of millions of dollars spent to create new computer systems for the DOE, and the hundreds of millions of dollars given to publishing companies like Mc Graw Hill to create new tests for almost every subject and every grade, you can see the opportunity for profit making and career building this movement has inspired among aspiring professionals.

But how much of this funding has gone directly to the people this reform movement was supposedly created to help, working class and minority students and their families? How many jobs for students, or their parents, have Education Reform funds created, either in school programs or after school centers. Has this money helped keep families in their apartments, allowed them to secure medical care or access better sports, arts and recreation programs?

The answer to this is a resounding no! In New York City and around the nation, the funds have created a whole new layer of middle class professionals in the schools, most of them white and helped create opportunities for profit to a number of private corporations, but have done nothing to ease the burden of poverty on the nation’s working class and minorities.

As of 2011, the child poverty rate in the United States had reached 25 percent, the highest level since the Depression, and Black Unemployment had reached 16 percent. Given this, how can the supporters of test driven education reform, whether they are in Washington, state houses, city halls, or the offices of major foundations, justify spending tens of billions of dollars to ( allegedly) improve schools without one cent of it going into the pockets of poor people.

While people are losing their homes, their jobs, their medical care, their recreational opportunities, and are experiencing daily fear and stress, new school professionals are flooding their communities with programs that to date have offered no return on their investment to the people they were allegedly designed to benefit.

What we have in America, put forward by those who claim to put “Children First,” is a cynical round of profit taking and career building reminiscent of the Gilded Age. It’s time that people serious about ending poverty in America take a serious look at the Education Reform movement and FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL!

From what I can see, it leads directly into more profits for the haves, and more hardship for the have nots.

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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Test Driven Educational Reform: A Desperate Response to A Society Rotting at the Core

Test Driven Educational Reform: 

A Desperate Response to A Society Rotting at the Core

by Mark Naison | Fordham University

special to NewBlackMan

The breadth of support for tying teacher evaluations to student test scores is something which cuts across all parts of the political spectrum. It is something which unites  Barack Obama with Newt Gingrich,  Bill Gates with the Koch Brothers, Andrew Cuomo with Scott Walker, and Al Sharpton with Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly.  While those of us who have spent our lives in the classroom regard this as ill-advised and counterproductive, it is important to examine why test driven educational reform is virtually the only policy initiative which commands this kind of bi-partisan support.

To do so, we have to take an honest look at what has happened to America’s working class and poor in the last thirty years, particularly in those portions of the country which were once part of America’s industrial heartland. Looked at from the vantage point of once proud industrial centers like Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo, Newark, Bridgeport, Gary, Youngstown, and Philadelphia,  the United States is a society literally rotting at the core.  Whole stretches of these cities lay abandoned ever since their factories closed, with only piles of bricks and metals left as reminders of industries that once employed millions of people. Often, the only new building in the most decayed sections of these cities are schools and prisons, with the former often serving as recruiting grounds for the latter. 

With more than 2 million people now in prison in the US--as compared to less than 400,000 in 1980-- and with over 10 million people having spent time in prison and  been rendered virtually unemployable, there are  huge stretches of urban America, and more than a few small towns, where the streets are filled with  men, and more than a few women, who have no secure connection to the legal labor market and whose pessimism and despair creates an atmosphere that literally sucks the energy out of everyone around them.  

As someone who has walked these streets, as well as driven through them in most of the above mentioned cities, it is hard not to feel like a whole section of the American population has been abandoned by their government. No one talks about these people, no one does anything for them, no one discusses the conditions they are living as problems central to the future of the society. Needless to say, these conditions have been immeasurably worsened by tax policies and industrial policies, adopted in the last 30 years, which have frozen working class incomes and concentrated wealth in the top layers of the society to an unprecedented degree.

So where does school reform come in?  Some  time during the last ten years, a  broad spectrum of groups in American society, some of them elected officials and community organizers, some of them business leaders, decided that the way to bring America’s most devastates communities into the economic mainstream was by radically transforming schools.  If we somehow turned schools into places of energy and optimism, where young people learned skills necessary to compete in a global economy, then maybe the children of the poor could escape the fate of their parents and we could achieve a more equal society without changing tax policy or redistributing wealth.

It was an extraordinarily seductive vision. It appealed to parents and community leaders living in poor neighborhoods because it  appeared to show, for the first time in decades, that the nation was willing to invest in the future of their children. It appealed to political conservatives because some of the reforms proposed--school vouchers and charter schools--involved the application of market principles to the public sector. And it appealed to the very rich, because it promised a path to greater equality that left the tax system that allowed them to acquire great wealth untouched.

In the beginning, school reform appeared to be a “win win:” for everybody. But after the first few years, when dramatic reforms, including vouchers and founding of charter schools, appeared to show few significant gains in test scores, or changes in the atmosphere of neighborhoods where the experiments took place, the discourse of reform started to center on the “problem of bad teachers.”  With cruel cynicism, reformers began arguing that their brilliant plans were being sabotaged by poorly motivated and recalcitrant teachers, and that elevating children out of poverty through schooling could only be effective if teachers were  forced to work much harder and be fired if they refused to produce.

This conclusion resulted in a determination to use test scores, not just to rate the progress of students, but to motivate teachers and administrators. Across the nation, with the encouragement of educational foundations funded by some of America’s wealthiest people, school systems began tying the salaries and careers of teachers and principals to the test scores of students they worked with, and began systematically attacking teachers unions for standing in the way of these motivational schemes.

When teachers resisted giving up seniority rights to allow such accountability plans to be put in place, they were demonized as the major obstacle, not only to educational reform, but to the achievement of economic and even racial equality.  Public school teachers, and leaders of teachers unions, were lambasted in the media, and by public officials in Washington and State Capitals, as selfish and pampered.  If school systems could replace teachers at will the way business did with employees when they didn’t perform, than school performance would improve over night and the US would become economically competitive and egalitarian with one wave of the magic wand.  The key was to constantly rate student learning by measurable criteria and determine the status of teachers, administrators and entire schools on the basis of such “data.”

By the time Barack Obama was elected, the momentum of this accountability frenzy was well nigh irreversible.

There was only one problem. There was no place in the entire United States where such strategies achieved any of the intended results. There was not one school system in a low income community where test scores were significantly raised by tying teacher salaries and tenure to student test scores, nor was evidence anywhere that such reforms had a measurable effect on income distribution or economic development in depressed communities.   To put the matter bluntly, if you applied the same accountability criteria to educational reformers that were are being used to rate teachers and principals, they would all be fired.

What  test driven school reform turns out to be, when all is said and done, is an initially well intentioned, but now cruelly deceptive effort to reduce poverty and inequality without addressing any of its root causes in taxation, industrial policy and the distribution of funding for housing, health care and community economic development. Because of that, it can never succeed in achieving its professed goals, but along the way, it can suck the life out of schools and demoralize a generation of students and teachers.

In school systems around the country, that is exactly what it is doing.

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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

Prepping Parents for Education Reform

Lofty plans for overhauling the education system are all very well and good. But parents have to be ready to take advantage of change.

Prepping Parents for Education Reform
by Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele

As a member of the burgeoning movement to improve public education, I believe that for education reform to happen, advocates need to focus their efforts on equipping parents with the appropriate mind-set to succeed in the rapidly changing school landscape.

Many parents will need help transitioning to and operating under the new paradigms proposed by school-choice advocates, primarily because -- well, public education has never been viewed as a commodity. Not all parents are aware of their options, and if they are, not all parents have the time to commit themselves to take full advantage of a sudden abundance of choice.

A few months ago, I attended a media-training seminar for school-choice advocates. There, one of the attendees described his laissez-faire ideal for America's schools: The public education system would function as a shopping mall, with parents picking and choosing from an array of public schools. As he saw it, parents wouldn't be forced to send their children to a school based on geographic zoning restrictions. Instead, mothers and fathers would be the consumers; school leaders would be the vendors. The vendors would be motivated to increase their products' efficiency to attract customers, thereby increasing the quality of all goods (think schools) sold -- and so on and so forth as the Business 101 supply-and-demand principles go.

While that proposed model is not bad or ill-intentioned, it is drastically different from the way that parents, particularly mothers, have traditionally gone about securing -- if that is even the appropriate term -- public education for their children.

Read the More @ The Root.com

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Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele is a multimedia journalist specializing in political thought and introspective narratives. She works in education reform. Follow her on Twitter.

'Waiting for Superman' Won't Fly with Some Audiences

'Waiting for Superman' Won't Fly with Some Audiences
by R. L’Heureux Lewis

Waiting for Superman is a powerful film about educational reform and the potential of our schools from the same team that brought us by director Davis Guggenheim and producer Lesley Chilcott, the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Unfortunately the filmmakers leave the audience hoping for a change that is as likely as a caped crusader appearing in real life.

While the film taps into the concerns that many of us have towards a failing educational system, it fails to provide a full portrait of what is really happening in the nation's schools. If you're interested in heart wrenching stories, see this film. But if you are interested in changing education make sure you bring your x-ray vision so you can see beyond the veil of what the filmmakers are advocating.

The film opens with an interview of Anthony, a young black boy enrolled in a Washington, D.C. school. We learn that Anthony's father died years earlier from a possible drug overdose and his grandmother is now raising him in a poverty stricken neighborhood. With poise he answers math questions and in his eyes you see the glimmer of potential and high educational hopes. Unfortunately Anthony is slotted to attend a failing middle school that feeds into a high school nationally known as a "dropout factory" where 40 percent of students fail to graduate. This is an all too common reality many black, brown and poor students in the United States.

The happy ending to this story is to come by Anthony being rescued by an innovative new D.C. charter boarding school. The catch is that this salvation is only available to a few via a lottery. The lottery exists because when more people enroll in charter school than they can accommodate they must use a lottery system to determine admission. Guggenheim and filmmakers lament this point and stress "we know what works" but we leave success up to chance for our young people.

The story of Anthony and the other families that are followed are touching but do not tell the full reality of schooling, particularly in charter schools. Behind the heart tugging narrative lies an inconvenient truth, that charter schools on average actually perform no better than traditional public schools and often perform worse! In the nearly two-hour film this reality is tucked in a sound bite where the film confesses only 1 in 5 charter schools is excelling. Yes, you read that right, 80 percent of charter schools do no better or fare worse than traditional public schools. It is clear this research finding does not deter the filmmakers, but viewers should not be so quick to skip it. The Stanford's CREDO National Charter School Study has done the most comprehensive work on charter schools and found that they are far from a cure all for educational woes.

Read the Full Essay @ theGrio