What will they be teaching ?

Creationism and corporate worship ?

They are using the schools, displacing teachers, to provide a step up for their grads with 5 weeks teaching training.

The 'reform' continues apace.

I have been asked to write letters of reference for students applying to Teach for America. I won't and I explain why. I also tell them that if they are serious about teaching and they started late, there are great MAT programs.

thanks, Madfloridian, for your posts on education.

Good for you. Many alums are speaking out now. I have noticed that a TFAer is often hosting disillusioned TFAers at his blog.

http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2014/02/22/guest-post-series-part-one-how-interning-for-tfa-convinced-me-of-its-injustice/

The mass layoff of experienced teachers and their replacement by new and untrained college graduates is part of Anderson’s “One Newark” plan that seeks to expand charter school enrollments, close conventional neighborhood public schools, and sell off school property.”Right-sizing” staff and hiring “quality” teachers also are mentioned in the latest version of the plan.

The pattern is pervasive and undeniable.

Simple formula. And brutal...because their side has the money and power.

Newark Public Schools is run by the state--but somehow this is now Obama's fault???

I have written about it often. I would not post it if it were not true. Welcome to the thread, you were expected.

with the President, for what reason?

FYI--aren't the TFA people in NPS union members?

The first one about Bob Braun is from Oct.....I gave it as a reference point for who the guy is.

I don't mind criticism, but please read the post first.

Christie appointee, and you think the President is to blame???? This is an unsourced blogger's report, and I'd like to know if you actually have a budget proposal.


Downthread, you are supporting the idea that NPS is locally run, when it is in fact, state run, with a Christie appointee.

Also, you didn't answer my question--if TFA is working in NPS, then aren't they bound by the collective bargaining agreement to be in the union? I could be wrong on that, and I'd like clarification.

the President is responsible for Cami Anderson, Christie appointee, then why isn't he responsible for all the appointees in Bridgegate????

Always defending corporate education reform, msanthrope.

on Bridgegate????

It isn't about the bridge, it's about teaching.

That is exactly what happens just about every time I post about education reform.

appointee...

Is he responsible for Bridgegate?

appointee but not another.

Thank you for telling us about what's going on in education. These union busters have to be stopped.

is responsible for.

Madflo decided to bring up Duncan and Obama, and I am asking what they are responsible for.....you read her answer.

Masterful obfuscation. An example for us all!

He isn't even responsible for his own appointees. The buck stops somewhere over there.

But it is so obviously wrong to lay off all those teachers and hire temps like TFAers, that I really thought it would be understood.

Arne and Obama have both expressed highly favorable views of this group and the way it is helping the move to privatization and corporatization of education.

I find it hard to post without this happening.

I would swear they must have some kind of stake in the game. Maybe it's just their job to post and muddy the water with bullshit.

We all see it for what it is.

Last edited Mon Feb 24, 2014, 07:42 AM - Edit history (1)

Go to their website and look at the terrible compensation they receive for "teaching"

Guess you don't know how local school districts work. They are run by a local school board and receive money from Newark, the state and federal government.

Now that I think of it...it was.

Christie, Booker, Zuckerberg and Newark schools....questions of legality?

What you fail to miss is that this is a governor and a mayor essentially allowing the takeover of a major public school district by a private enterprise. That alone is illegal and in my view immoral. Anyone who thinks that shutting down public schools by a governor at whim is not a major threat to our democracy then they need to take off the blinders. This act goes against the very grain and foundation of what this country stands for. He is violating the law and doing it with supreme contempt. Today it may be a poor and failing district but trust me they will attempt to do this statewide. I hope he is ready because there will be major repercussions from what this governor and mayor are doing. I truly hopes this opens the eyes of voters to the fact that both republicans and democrats in this state are corrupt to the core and will violate every law imaginable to enrich themselves and their friends.

Facebook CEO names head of foundation to control Newark Schools

with years of training in working with students. It is doing great harm.

Last edited Sun Feb 23, 2014, 01:06 PM - Edit history (1)

If the equivalent of a BA in Education can be given in 5 weeks, and a year of continued, intensive professional development, then maybe that speaks more to what colleges offer than anything else.

My own personal experience of working with both traditional track teachers and TFAs in the Philly school system was that the TFAs came in with a lesser skill level than traditional track, but by 6 months in, that evened out, due to the continuing professional development courses TFA gave them.

What was striking, however, was that TFAs were better educated. Hands down, they were more erudite than the traditional track teachers, more open to technology, and more able to access culture and the arts for the benefit of the students. They were also far more willing to commit to poor schools.

Enough is enough.

personal experience, it does not make it either rude, or untrue.

This was my experience of these two groups. I dropped my Ed major in college for something more difficult, and took a MAT (easiest classes I ever took). Taught for a while, and then got my JD. (After picking up another M.A.)

I found the TFAs, to a person, to have gone to better schools and to be more interested in working in poorer areas. What was your experience with TFAs?

What grades? Were you unable to commit?

think I'll disengage, lest itchy fingers hit the button again!

Necessarily, and probably unlikely to be, trained to TEACH

just like health care and soon TPP. Anything The Messiah does must be the right thing.

a classroom and kids in professional development. You learn to do it well by practicing, more than 6 months. Is TFA your employer?

state run...the state, and a Christie appointee decides how to run it.

Look...TFA isn't going away. As long as they fulfill a market need---the neediest classrooms, their model will be here.

they need teachers who know the community. they need stability within the school. they need teachers who can follow students from one grade to the next.

hiring kids from colleges who have 0 experience in those neediest schools is boarding on the absurd. the teachers will move on to better schools and those neediest kids will be stuck with another graduating class of tfa teachers.

they move, and then, when layoffs hit, the neediest classrooms are hit disproportionately by the layoffs....

And then you get lawsuits like this, and settlements...

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/msanthrope

I was a teacher with tenure, a master's degree, and eleven years of experience when I left teaching. Every single teacher in my department (tenured or not) taught our fair share of the neediest classes (whether we wanted to or not). In a schedule of 5-6 classes every year, always two - and often three - of mine were the neediest classrooms. Tenure gives you certainty that you have a job from year to year (non-tenured teachers can be terminated for any reason at all at the end of each year). It does not inherently give you choice of classes you teach.

as determined by the district? When firings happened due to budgets, who was first fired?

I think you are missing the point of the lawsuit...layoff were not spread evenly, district wide.

The last hired, non-tenured individuals were fired first, followed by the last hired tenured individuals

That would have hit whichever buildings the most inexperienced teachers were in - which, in our district was not linked to tenure. Tenured teachers had no more right to cherry-pick where they wanted to work than anyone else.

file a grievance that to take a very long time to resolve. As you saw from the lawsuit, some of the poorest schools lost between 45 and 75 percent of their teachers.

The practice of allowing experienced teachers (tenured or not) select the most desired classes may be good for retention of experienced teachers, but it is lousy for getting good teaching staff where they need to be. That is why the department I worked in insisted that everyone - regardless of experience or tenure - teach some of the least desired classes every year. And nothing in the contract prohibited moving tenured teachers wherever they were needed.

Its a cliche now

It's like the President is micromanaging everything in every city and state. Yet, no one in that state is at fault.

Why would a union endorse Christie over Buono?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024553528

but only if they adopt charter schools as part of their plan
Arne Duncan has teamed with Bill Gates to create more charter schools, that are non-union (be cause Gates doesn't like them)
this is why the administration bears part of the responsibility. It teams with gates and Rhee and other anti-union, TFA hanging organizations.
This is part of the reason why they get blamed and why they deserve it.

It is consistent with the overwhelming corporate direction of this administration.

Only a Republican could go to China...and only a Democrat can dismantle public education for privatization and profit.

bet they will be on the stock exchange soon.

ref http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=4849403

Company Overview

Teach For America, Inc., a nonprofit company, provides teachers for low-income communities in the United States. It operates as corps of recent college graduates and professionals of various academic majors and career interests. The company’s corps members commit to teach in urban and rural public schools. It also offers early childhood education, math and science, and teach for all initiatives to address needs in education. The company was founded in 1990 and is based in New York, New York.

Teach For America, Inc. Key Developments


Teach for America, Inc. and Buffalo Public Schools Announce Partnership Agreement

Dec 12 13

Teach For America and Buffalo Public Schools have announced a partnership agreement slated to begin next fall. Under the agreement, Teach For America would recruit, train, and develop up to 30 new teachers per year for high-need schools and subject areas in the city's public schools.......... continues at above link.

Now TFA is Union busting and replaces 700 teachers with recent college grads?

but that matters not, since that is my back yard.



Yup, for some silly reason I am following that since it could set the pace for the destruction of California education.

Sorry, if it is not on CNN, or MSNBC, it is not news. My bad.

Oh and I just checked, it is in neither, so it is not yet news. It is not happening

I am not kidding.

You are right. That article is the only one I have seen about that. But not surprised. Remember all the anti-war protests with millions that didn't exist because the networks did not cover it?

Any time we protest the corporate agenda there is no coverage. That's the rule. Reading the article now.

Thanks for checking. I think your mail and others came in at a time when I was fighting off my 2nd potential browser hijacking from updating my regular programs. So tired of that. I probably hurriedly checked mail then promptly forgot. I do that a lot lately.

I used to post them here because msm garble, garble... But it has been made immensely clear the owners only want msm material. So do most posters all protestations to the side.

yup.

But it is in local news, so it is not happening. Sorry, I am to the point that I think this place is mostly useless.

Existing long term teachers will be blamed.

Who can justify hiring teachers who only plan on being there 2 years, then leaving? What sort of business does this? Only education, so far as I can tell.

They may go up because of younger, more energetic teachers that the students can better relate to, but that doesn't matter. It's the wholesale firing of employees that is morally wrong. It's their jobs that Christie is giving to other people.

But the corporatists know no shame. Yes Obama intended this. Yes Obama endorses this right wing privatization scam. Charters and all.

gonna be a lot of teaching going on in Newark....The key question might be - are the kids getting any?
Good luck, "right sizing" the teaching staff doesn't add up to giving the kids the "right stuff"....save the dime you idiots

he has supported duncan`s plan in chicago and he by appointing duncan he gave the go ahead to take it nationally.

then Obama would have fired the bastard during his first term.

fire him that is.

Check out New Orleans Public Schools. Louisiana came in, took over nearly all of the public schools and made them into for profit charters leaving New Orleanians with virtually no say over the schools their children attend.

Yes I know this actually happened under Bush but the plan that education "reformers" like Duncan are pushing will ultimately lead to this.

"The hurricane reference was made while he was in New Orleans Friday.

“I see the progress here in New Orleans and I ask, 'Why not Detroit?' We don't need to wait for a hurricane before we can reform schools. I even think Detroit can leapfrog New Orleans.”


AND here is what he said about New Orleans.

"ABC News' Mary Bruce Reports: Education Secretary Arne Duncan said today that Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans" because it gave the city a chance to rebuild and improve its failing public schools.

In an interview to air this weekend on "Washington Watch with Roland Martin" Duncan said "that education system was a disaster. And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better."

"And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better."

Then let the people of New Orleans vote on whether to restore control of all public schools in the city to the Orleans Parish School Board.

Education "reformers" never want their plans put to a vote of the people. Why is that?

Obama might as well have Bill Kristol running the Dept. of Education.

then I hope its implemented nationwide in all failing school systems:

I know people in my age group who are moving back into the city so their children have access to the charter schools. Every single one of those same people went to private schools or schools on the northshore / Jefferson.

The system before Katrina was dysfunctional, and had been for at least two decades.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-big-easys-school-revolution/2012/04/27/gIQAS4bDmT_story.html

A young woman whose grades earned her the distinction of valedictorian of her 2003 high school class, Green never gave the commencement speech or walked across the stage with her classmates. Despite five tries, she was unable to pass the math-competency exit exam required for graduation.

Green’s story is emblematic of the hopelessness that used to mark New Orleans’s schools. No matter how smart or hardworking or well-meaning the system’s leaders, there was no chance for sustainable improvement, given the enormity of its dysfunction. Then the levees broke and the city was devastated, and out of that destruction came the need to build a new system, one that today is accompanied by buoyant optimism. Since 2006, New Orleans students have halved the achievement gap with their state counterparts. They are on track to, in the next five years, make this the first urban city in the country to exceed its state’s average test scores. The share of students proficient on state tests rose from 35?percent in 2005 to 56 percent in 2011; 40?percent of students attended schools identified by the state as “academically unacceptable” in 2011, down from 78 percent in 2005.

American incarceration and rehabilitation, they are now permitted to 'invest' within the public educational system.
As your child enters the first day of kinder-garden, and for possibly the next twelve years, the utmost concern now is a
bottom line profit.
Between the corporate control of the prisons and the corporate control of the schools, one might very well assume these greedy money exchangers will have our society ruined within a generation at their own discretion.
It will be the investment trifecta - Schools....Prisons....War....good luck kids

back in the 1980s. Always liked and admired him.

Christie showed his true colors when he called NJ teachers "union thugs" several years ago. I suppose he thinks he learned to read and write and do math all on his own.

I don't think President Obama and Arne Duncan consider things to be "out of hand".

I suspect they think things are going swimmingly. I think they dismiss our concerns as so much liberal claptrap.

until they have destroyed every union, and they even get democratic presidents to go right along with them.

Another Bob Braun piece on the outrages of Newark and the hostile takeover that appears to be going on.

Cami to Newark parents: Don’t worry, we know best.

There's apparently a new way of assigning students, but the method is secretive.

Pity the parents of Newark’s public school children. Many are unsure where their children will attend school in the fall. They’ve had to fill out application forms and hope they get their first choices in an ever-changing program called “One Newark.” For many, if their first choice was a neighborhood public school, they’re out of luck. Now comes a new insult—if they want to know how their children were picked for this school or that, they can just forget it. That’s secret information. They’re not allowed to know.

But, hey, no worries. The decisions will be made by a NPS staff with lots of experience with organizations like the Broad Academy, funded by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. One worked with Barclay’s Capital, another with McKinsey & Co. Newark parents can feel comfortable their children are in the hands of people trained in business and by billionaires who understand completely what it’s like to be poor and live in Newark. Right.

The response from Anderson to CASA’s formal request under the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) was, yes, such an algorithm exists—but, no, you can’t have it. Why? Well, because it wasn’t developed by the Newark public schools. Rather it somehow came from that private sector giant—secretly–determining so much of what is happening, and what will happen, to Newark’s children: the Foundation for Newark’s Future (FNF).

Ah, yes, the FNF. Begun with money announced on a television show starring Chris Christie, Cory Booker, and Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire hero to school privatization efforts in Newark. He gave $100 million to Newark via his old pal Booker on an Oprah Winfrey show.

like adding more family members and cronies to the administrative payroll for well-paying bullshit jobs.

snip*New Jersey education reformers play their crafty game on historic legal turf. The state has extensive jurisprudence protecting poor students’ rights to a quality education. According to the Education Law Center (ELC) website (www.edlawcenter.org), the center won “Abbot v. Burke” in a 1985 New Jersey Supreme Court decision; it is the most important national legal decision regarding education equality after Brown v. the Board of Education in Topeka, KS 1954.

In Abbott, the ELC argued that unconstitutional funding disparities existed between poor urban and wealthy suburban school districts because of New Jersey’s method of school funding, and therefore poorer urban districts could not meet their students’ educational needs. A subsequent wave of decisions came after this initial Abbott decision. Abbott’s legacy applies today in urban districts included in the Garden State’s School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) of 2008. According to the ELC website, after the New Jersey legislature accepted Christie’s $1.1 billion in education cuts: “On May 24, 2011…the New Jersey Supreme Court found that the State’s failure to fund SFRA caused “instructionally consequential and significant” harm to at-risk students in districts across the state.” The Court also found that the funding cut’s harm is not a “minor infringement” to students’ right to a thorough and efficient education, but “a real substantial and consequential blow” to that right. In Abbott XXI, the Court ordered full funding for the 31 urban districts in 2012.

Well, guess what? That court-ordered full funding hasn’t happened. On January 21, 2014, the ELC posted a web article stating the DOE won’t fix New Jersey’s urban schools, but they have been on an administrative spending bender. The School Development Authority (SDA), which oversees New Jersey urban school district spending, is now headed by former United States Attorney for New Jersey, Charles McKenna. (One wonders how his work with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Office of Homeland Security prepared him for his new career in urban schools. But consider Janet Napolitano’s transition from Homeland Security to University of California president as a precedent: from the War on Terror to the War on Teachers. ) The SDA has $2.9 billion in unspent bonded financing for construction projects. The ELC website reports that: “…there is new evidence that SDA will continue on its present course of undertaking as little work as possible in order not to spend down the available funds.” ELC cites the SDA’s new Builders insurance policy as evidence of their backwards priorities.

ELC’s statement regarding administrative spending and the lack of real school improvement projects coincided with two other urban school improvement announcements: a January 20, 2014, announcement of $100 million for school improvement projects, and a January 21, 2014, announcement about remodeling plans for dilapidated Trenton High School. But don’t let these announcements fool you into thinking the DOE gives a damn about students.

Small Circles

The fat cats want to conquer New Jersey public schools by next year. And this has been the plan for a while now—in no small thanks to former Newark mayor and now U.S. Senator Cory Booker. Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford recently wrote: “By 2016, thanks to both Booker and Christie, charter schools will account for more than a third of Newark’s student enrollment.” Ford reports that Booker, a Democrat whose political career is largely due to his championing the private voucher agenda, will most likely “…back Republican Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander’s bill to transfer about 41 percent of federal public school moneys to the states, which could then turn the funds into vouchers.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/31/new-jerseys-education-cerf-dumb/

Turning those funds over to charter schools and vouchers for private religious schools.

And we are supposed to turn our heads and pretend we don't notice.

The method of crushing public schools is like getting rid of an unwanted dog by systematically starving it then pointing at it's weakened, emaciated body and saying "What a tragedy! There's no way to save it. It has to be put down."

but less than in Ark. This whole article sounds like payback - in their insidious little minds...doin' it cause they can

I don't think the president considers this "getting out of hand" - it's exactly what he as a far right corporatist has wanted ever since the day after the 2008 election

he appointed duncan and he knew what duncan was going to do. the president can`t hide that fact

That's the truth. Unfortunately.

absolving their guilt by spending a few months in a classroom filled with poor kids who they'll never see again.

Teach For America’s pro-corporate, union-busting agenda
How TFA uses its vast political influence to boost charter schools and drive down teacher pay (UPDATED)

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/teach_for_americas_pro_corporate_union_busting_agenda_partner/

PATCO, was one.

What a coincidence.

being perpetrated against NJ and spearheaded by the the corrupt Chris Christie. Another step in the privatization of government being promoted by the Koch Klux Klan.

Solidarity