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Does TFA and Kopp have no shame? Can you not recognize that TFA exists not to serve our schools but to serve Kopp’s ambition? Her intention and inclination has never been to do something for schools (you have to be an educator to understand what that entails). Her goal has always been to build a successful business. If you can not understand the world of difference that lies between these two entities, then you are perhaps a TFA candidate. Darling-Hammond is the real deal in terms of an educated person who CARES and KNOWS about teaching and learning. Kopp is a cheap copy. Stop pretending the problem of America’s schools can be solved with quick fixes. Unless you want to teach for the long run (the literature says it takes 3 years to get competent as a teacher — that happens one year after TFA participants are long gone — and 7-10 years to reach a level of excellence), then do our schools a favor and stay out of the classrooms. Get involved, by all means, just don’t do it through teaching. It doesn’t help kids learn, which is what matters in the long run.

I completely agree with Beth. Joe Klein, Michelle Rhee and Teach for America are all in the same boat and cut from the same cloth. Klein’s complete dependence on high stakes tests (which encourages cheating to stay alive as a teacher and principal), his manipulation of school principals, his packing the schools with unprepared teachers, his Draconian approach to budget making, his consistent lies about serious matters like the NYC drop our rate (close to 70% for African Americans and Latino’s according to the best respected expert–Gary Orfield), and his utter disrespect of parents by excluding them completely is a partial list of why making him Secretary of Education is the worst possible move for Obama on education. I suggest Linda Darling Hammond or almost any other talented educator–we don’t need a lawyer.

It is also to be noted that under Klein’s watch, the NYC Department of Education:

>>Adopted an unproven literacy program that ran contrary to federal guidelines;

>>Set up new bus routes in midwinter that left children stranded;

>>Failed to prevent schools from lying to parents who were told (falsely) that their children had to transfer to GED programs because the youngsters hadn’t accumulated sufficient credits in high school;

>>Set up an accountability system that failed to articulate with Federal and State standards;

>>Spent millions on a data-analysis system that is so overloaded that most teachers can’t access data unless they get online in the middle of the night;

>>Continues to hire new, inexperienced teachers while forcing experienced, skilled and highly-paid senior teachers to serve as substitutes and hall-monitors;

>>Spends five-million dollars a year on couriers;

>>Failed to keep tabs on a Deputy Chancellor who pressured a school district into giving her unqualified husband a high-paying job.

Last week, the City’s Comptroller charged the DOE of submitting misleading numbers when reporting cost-cutting efforts.

Chancellor Klein’s leadership is questionable, to say the least. I’ve never heard a teacher speak well of him. President-elect Obama won the election because he is an inspirational leader. Joel Klein has drawn the ire of teachers and parents alike. Choosing him as Secretary of Education would be a provocative move.

If Linda Darling-Hammond has Obama’s ear, which it is clear that he does from statements that Obama made on education just this past friday, it is highly unlikely that Joel Klein will be offered the position as Secretary of Education. It will most likely be Darling-Hammond herself, or someone like former Rhode Island Education Commissioner Peter McWalters. Or what about Dan Drmacich, Principal of School Without Walls and who has been instrumental in fighting against NCLB and standardized tests. If Obama wants to make change he will lean more toward an educator rather than making this position a political appointment.

100 NYC public school parents signed this letter protesting Klein as a potential head of the Department of Education, and asking for educational leadership with real experience in schools.

The idea that Klein/Rhee et al represen “change” is not entirely bizarre. After all, some changes are bad. To abandon entirely the tradition of public education, the idea of democracy as the soundest form of accountability would be change of a sort; the concept that those who must implement policy should have a voice in making it and that we need above all to change the schools, classrooms and pedagogies that influence our children’s future IS “old-fashioned”–it’s been at the center of only very partially successful reform efforts for a century. In fact, democracy itself is an old-fashioned idea. Klein/et al want to firmly establish a view of schools as instruments of economic policy and parents and teachers as ultimately weak and unreliable guides. There are plenty of wise business analysts who would argue that Klein/Rhee thinking has led us into bad economics as well. It leads to fakery not facts.
Darling-Hammond has been a steady, hard working agent for change of quite a different order. If we want to deepen our citizenry’s capacity to “rule”–she is indeed maybe even a radical reformer, hardly a defender of the status quo!!

I am a former TFA corps member. I quit TFA just two weeks into Institute, the summer training program. Below I have provided some interesting information about certain aspects of Institute. Corps members are expected to work with very little sleep, often just a couple of hours a night. This is not conducive to effective training. The year before I joined, one corps member from my city was hospitalized during Institute as the result of exhaustion and pneumonia. At my Institute, another was forced to quit after developing a severe kidney infection. I felt that Institute would almost certainly have a negative impact on my physical health, and as a result would have a negative impact on my effectiveness as a teacher. When I brought up my concerns about health to my TFA School Director, he told me, “Sacrificing our health is something we do at Institute.” Besides the extreme physical demands, certain aspects of the content of the training are lacking or useless. At Institute, corps members are required to write every single one of their lesson plans word for word. For example, if you plan to say, “Good morning class. Today we are going to learn about fractions,” and then hang up a poster, you would have to write in your lesson plan, “Good morning class. Today we are going to learn about fractions,” and then note that you then plan to hang up a poster. I could never see how this was a good use of the extremely limited training time. Though corps members spend countless hours typing lesson plans word for word, Teach For America spends very little Institute time helping corps members become acquainted with the subject material that they will be teaching after Institute. This is likely because many corps members are not given their school or grade assignments until several weeks or even days before the beginning of the school year. I finally came to the conclusion that Teach For America was actively preventing me from becoming an effective teacher, which was why I had joined in the first place, and I made the decision to quit.

I am still teaching, in a way. Since leaving TFA a year and a half ago, I have taken a position at a gymnastics center managing the girls recreational program, which has an annual peak enrollment of approximately 180 students. I spend 21 hours a week teaching. The other 19 hours are spent hiring and training staff, writing lesson plans, following up with parents, evaluating new students, etc. I plan to start an MBA program in the fall. Also, changing topics ( can’t figure out how to use the “enter” key to make paragraphs), I question sleep deprivation as a mark of professionalization. I pray that, should any of my loved ones ever fall ill, they are never placed under the care of a sleep-deprived resident. Changing topics once more, I can imagine that scripting might be useful for certain individuals in certain situations. I don’t think I needed it, and I think it kept me from doing other more valuable things with my Institute time.

In response to Ashley Perez’ comments:
I attended the Los Angeles Institute in 2007. I have a friend who attended the 2007 Houston Institute. He likes TFA. What follows is a direct excerpt from an e-mail he sent me while at Institute:
“yesterday, after logging
4, 3, and .75 hours of sleep on three consecutive nights, i lost it. i
was bright and coherent and full of this amazing inhuman energy on
wednesday…until right after i finished teaching my class and went to a
tfa session.

suddenly i realized that the work i had been doing was COMPLETELY wrong
and i had followed directions about as well as a kindergartener. i also
realized that i didnt understand one word of what had been said in the
last half of an hour. and then it occcured to me that i had been
attempting to zip up a perfectly functional zipper on my tfa standard
issue lunchbag for about a minute but wasnt making significant progress.
my coordination was totally off. everyone stood up to leave, and when i
joined i lost peripheral vision for a scary amount of time. then i
somehow got a second wind and managed to go to another hour of class, 5
hours of meetings, and 3 hours of paperwork before catching a deliciously
luxurious (by tfa standards) 5 hours of sleep. i feel amazing now. fully
rejuvinated.”
Perhaps this is the sort of thing you were referring to when you used the term “martyring.” I think this is a poor use of the word. A martyr makes a voluntary sacrifice. The sleep deprivation of those at Institute generally is not voluntary.

’m a recent TFA drop-out and I’m still reeling quite a bit from everything that happened to me. In a nut shell, I joined Teach For America in the 2010 school year as part of the new Detroit Corps. I got off to a fine start – survived Institute just fine (was actually an all-star of sorts – although I thought it was virtually worthless in terms of preparing us to actually teach), met great fellow Corps members, was placed in a great, manageable, small 5th grade class at a really cool, brand new charter school, but then things quickly spiraled out of control about a month into the school year. The school I was placed at didn’t meet their enrollment goals as a first-year school, so they couldn’t make their budget and as a result (despite doing a great job – I was still a first-year teacher), I was switched from my 5th grade class to a 2nd grade class within the school, which was horrible. The kids hated me for replacing their beloved former teacher, acted out like crazy every day and I had no clue what to do with a bunch of savage 7-year-olds (although I tried everything I knew how to do, which wasn’t very much). After an exhausting, saddening month of failing miserably and wanting to quit every day I was pretending to teach in this classroom (I was trained for high school math during Institute by the way and told all along I would be teaching high school), the charter school decided to let me go and bring back the old teacher (which was definitely 1,000,000 times better for those students so I’m glad for that). Two days later with only a few hours notice, I was thrown into an even worse 7th grade classroom environment in a Detroit public school (a class that had already driven out multiple teachers with their unmanageable behavior). I had no control or choice over this replacement as I went on my own to DPS HR to see what positions were available and I was denied efforts by TFA to defer for a year so I could teach 6th grade at the original charter school I was at. Having been utterly worn down by my 2nd grade experience, this class felt like walking back into a war zone and I guess my body/mind just couldn’t take anymore and saw no light at the end of the tunnel. At this point, I stopped sleeping for several days straight and started having major anxiety attacks from the stress and things just got worse and worse. After multiple hospitalizations, getting on numerous anti-anxiety medications (which I had never, ever taken before in my life) and a trip to the Detroit psych ward (where I was locked in for 7 hours), I finally resigned from TFA and began my recovery process.

TFA and my PD through this whole process were worthless and did little except spout TFA-isms at me. I have many other problems and questions with what transpired in my TFA experience, including: “Why TFA thought it was ever a good idea to place Corps members at a first-year charter school that had a chance of not making its enrollment numbers hence guaranteeing they wouldn’t keep their original class no matter how great of a job they were doing?” and “Why TFA refused to let me defer for a year and come back to teach 6th grade at my original placement when this is what the school wanted, what I wanted and what would have been best for the 5th graders I was teaching?” These are just a couple of the questions pertinent to my experience that I wonder about on a regular basis. I’m definitely incredibly saddened and disheartened by my experience and resignation, since I very much thought I wanted to teach and be involved in education (I had worked for a college-access non-profit organization for the two years prior to joining TFA and loved it) and felt this was my pathway to do so. I certainly never had the mindset of “two years of this and then law school.” However, my situation obviously quickly became incredibly unhealthy for me and I know that if I am honest with myself, I am a million times happier now (I deliver pizzas and work with a special-needs kid in Detroit) than I was trying to teach in those 2nd grade and 7th grade classes…and that’s a reality that I’m still trying to grapple with and accept (although my having had a brief taste of teaching success in my original 5th grade class placement makes it all that much more bitter/sad to think about).

In terms of what happened when I resigned, I wrote TFA a very honest, straight-forward, no-holds-barred resignation letter detailing how I was furious with them and felt that the organization repeatedly put me into awful situations through no fault of my own and that I had done everything I could and pushed myself to a very unhealthy psychological place and now needed to leave for mental health reasons. It also detailed how I could no longer support the organization as an education reform movement (a position I still absolutely hold, although I love and respect many of my fellow Corps members in Detroit – they are wonderful, hard-working people doing the best they can, but I know many of them are miserable and stressed out all the time and I doubt very many of them are more effective than traditionally trained teachers). The letter was bothersome enough to TFA staff that it earned me a meeting with the Director of TFA Detroit and other staff members –a meeting where they brought in physical print-outs of emails my PD had sent to me (as if that somehow proved how they actually had supported me enough) and asked me to re-write my resignation letter (I assume because they thought it looked bad and they had to send it on to national staff or something?). I also sent my story/resignation letter to several newspapers here in Detroit, started a “recovering from TFA” blog and am still on most TFA email lists. That was about it. I haven’t been in contact with anyone from TFA staff since my meeting although I imagine if a story about my experience gets published in a Detroit newspaper anytime soon, I will be hearing from them pretty quickly – can’t wait.

Anyway, I would love to converse more with you or anyone else who reads this blog. My new website is “recoveringfromTFA.wordpress.com” (my resignation letters are posted there) and my email address is j.asher.williamson@gmail.com. I’m still pretty furious/upset/discouraged about everything that happened and it will doubtless take some more time to recover, but life goes on and I refuse to let this experience keep me out of being involved in education in some aspect in the future.