Question: What is educational inequity and how has it changed over the years?
Kopp: The most salient lesson of our work is actually that we can solve this problem. Maybe it sounds a little trite, but I think… I mean, when I came to this, and I think I would speak for, you know, thousands of people who have joined Teach For America who’ve come to this feeling like the world should be a different way, you know? It isn’t fair that we have 13 million kids in our country who are growing up below the poverty line, who, you know, by the time they are in fourth grade are, you know, already three grade levels behind fourth graders in high income communities, half of whom will not even graduate from high school. The half who do who will have an eighth grade skill level. You know, one out of ten of our kids in low income communities will actually graduate from college, so we’ve all come to this saying this shouldn’t exist. Like, we have to do something about this. And I think what has happened to us is that we’ve come to realize not only should we do something about it, we actually could do something about it, and really, we could attain a world where all the kids in our country have the chance to attain an excellent education, and I think what’s led us to that, initially, was what we saw from initially a fraction of our core members who go into their own learning curves, figured out how to actually put their kids on a different trajectory. You know, so now, today, because we’ve learned so much from the initially small fraction of teachers who are affecting dramatic gains in their kids’ achievement, you know, we’ve learned a lot from them and have fed those lessons back into our training and support models, and they’ve reached a point where now many more of our teachers are extremely successful with their kids, and so, now, we see evidence across any sort of community, from remote rural areas to our hardest pressed urban areas, you know, at the elementary level, at middle school level, at high school level, we see just hardcore evidence that when kids are given the opportunities they deserve, they excel, you know, kids facing some of the greatest challenges of poverty in our country. So, seeing that at the classroom level, and now seeing through, you know, a number of our alums would teach very successfully and see their kids going off into nearby middle schools or whatever and would see that those schools weren’t giving the kids the opportunities, really, that they deserved to continue on the new trajectory, and that led a number of them to go out and pioneer these very high performing charter schools, you know, and there are many others in the country now as well who are, you know, growing this generation of schools in low income communities that are taking, you know, whole schools full of kids in low income communities and putting them on the track to graduating from college. And so, now, we see not only at the classroom level but at whole school levels that it is completely possible to do this. And so, whereas, you know, I think back to 15 years ago, you know, I think the public evidence we had that it was possible to take kids growing up in urban and rural areas and actually put them truly on a level playing field was the movie “Stand and Deliver.” Remember? You know, Jaime Escalante, the teacher in South Central Los Angeles who took a class of kids and got them to pass the AP Calculus exam? I mean, incredibly inspiring story, but I think, at some level, I think the movie served the purpose of making it seem like here was this one person who is, who’s just a hero, you know, and many, many people concluded that, you know, it’s something, you know, that we couldn’t figure out, like something magical or elusive about that teacher’s impact, and I think, you know, you could probably count on one hand, and even that is generous, the number of schools, 15 years ago, that were taking whole schools full of kids and putting them on a level laying field, and I just think, wow! You know, how far we have come in 15 years, where, you know, we ourselves, just within the context of Teach For America, and certainly they have many successful teachers outside of Teach For America, but we could point to hundreds of teachers who have affected just dramatic gains in their student’s achievement levels and we could explain exactly how they do that. We know today that there’s nothing magical and nothing elusive about attaining real success with kids in low income communities. You know, it’s about all the basics, you know. There’s no, there’s no way around the very hard work of getting it done, but there’s nothing elusive about it, and today there are thought to be 200 schools in low income communities that are really accomplishing this at a whole school level, so the conversation today is completely different, you know, whereas before we were trying to figure out can this be done on any sort of scale? Today, we know this can be done, and the question is really just, okay, how do we affect the system level changes necessary to truly ensure that all kids have access to teachers and schools that will put them on a level playing field.
Discuss
Will Ray on March 22, 2009, 9:59 PM
My kid was in a program sponsored by the ACLU. They went on a trip visiting California schools. The reports were just terrible. They visited schools in LA that had 6000 students rotating on 3 schedules in a day. They had lanes for different aptitudes. How did they measure intelligence? This is the worst kind of social crime. On the other hand, the idea of literacy that alienates you from your family and culture is sick. How do you deal with discrimination and bias in employment After School (a College Degree)… After College is the next great non-profit idea.
Jesse Alred on April 18, 2009, 9:06 PM
I am a veteran teacher in Houston seeking a dialogue with Teach for America teachers nationally regarding policy positions taken by former Teach for American staffers who have become leaders in school district administrations and on school boards. I first became aware of a pattern when an ex-TFA staffer, now a school board member for Houston ISD, recommended improving student performance by firing teachers whose students did poorly on standardized tests. Then the same board member led opposition to allowing us to select, by majority vote, a single union to represent us.
Having won school board elections in several cities, and securing the Washington D.C Superintendent’s job for Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp’s friends are pursuing an approach to school reform based on a false premise: that teachers, not student habits, nor lack of parent commitment or social inequality, is the main cause of sub-par academic performance. The TFA reform agenda appeals to big corporations who see our public institutions as inefficient leeches. This keeps big money flowing into TFA coffers.
The corporate-TFA nexus began when Union Carbide initially sponsored Wendy Kopp’s efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize its responsibility at the time it embraced Ms. Kopp. TFA recently started Teach for India. Are Teach for India enrollees aware of the TFA/Union Carbide connection?
When TFA encountered a financial crisis, Ms. Kopp nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved by their managerial assistance. The Edison Project sought to replace public schools with for-profit corporate schools funded by our tax money. Ms. Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, was an Edison executive before taking over as CEO of KIPP’s national foundation, where he has sought to decertify its New York City unions.
In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was pivotal cover for Bush, since as Governor he had no genuine educational achievements and needed the education issue to campaign as a moderate and reach out to the female vote. KIPP charter schools provide a quality education, but they are application based, so they start with families committed to education.
D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s school reform recipe includes three ingredients: close schools rather than improve them; fire teachers rather than inspire them; and sprinkle on a lot of hype. On the cover of Time, she sternly gripped a broom, which she presumably was using to sweep away the trash, which presumably represented my urban teacher colleagues. The image insulted people who take the toughest jobs in education.
TFA teachers do great work, but when TFA’s leadership argue that schools, and not inequality and bad habits, are the cause of the achievement gap, they are not only wrong, they feed the forces that prevent the social change we need to grow and sustain our middle class.. Our society has failed schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It’s not the other way around. Economic inequality and insecurity produces ineffective public schools. It’s not the other way around.
Ms. Kopp claims TFA carries the civil rights torch for today, but Martin Luther King was the voice of unions on strike, not the other way around. His last book, Where do we go from here?, argued for some measure of wealth distribution, because opportunity would never be enough in a survival of the fittest society to allow most of the under-privileged to enter the middle class.
Your hard work as a TFA teacher gives TFA executives credibility. It’s not the other way around. Your hard work every day in the classrooms gives them the platform to espouse their peculiar one-sided prescriptions for school improvement. I would like a dialogue about what I have written here with TFA teachers. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.
Robert Sperry on September 12, 2009, 5:16 AM
The department of education ran a large study called Project Follow Through that demonstrated that an instructional method called Direct Instruction can take an existing public Title 1 school from the bottom 20% and move it to the 50% in a broad range of student achievement metrics. The DI folk did this with about 44 schools and sustained it for 8+ years, and they did this without hire/fire ability over teachers. Contrary to TFA the solution is not to get ivy graduates to make stuff up as they go along, but to carefully engineer the curriculum and interaction between the teacher and the students so that the vast majority of teachers can succeed in educating students. And to have quality control feed back loops to correct problems when they develop.
http://www.zigsite.com/PDFs/chapter5-6intro.pdf
TFA is not about solving educational inequality. Look at their web site and notice how many jobs they have open for engineering better educational practices (I found none) versus jobs for people to raise money and angle for political power (lots). TFA is an attempt to transfer the IVY model of group loyalty to a organization that wants to gain political power over education. By this I mean they get top motivated people tell them they are doing great important things and make them work really hard so they feel invested…and oh when you go get wealthy and powerful or just get your inheritance remember us and give us some.
The proof is in the data, DI has it, TFA does not. Go look at thier site for longitunical data that says they can boost student performance on a large scale. They have none, what they do have is a bunch of great stories about impressive people that do things that aren’t scalable. Their inspiration is Stand and Deliver.. what happened to that teacher and his program? How long did it last after he left the school? Why didn’t it spread to every school? If your educational solution requires 140+ IQ teachers working 80+ hours a week for nominal money, then congratulations you have an inherently non-scalable program.
So the question is why is DI not being used in under-performing schools? My belief is that its a function of the political systems drive to reduce its accountability, and DI requires accountability.
Education indeed has deep problems. But the problem is not discovering how to teach children or get them to learn at grade level. DI solves that problem (though no doubt in can be continuously improved).
The deep problem is how do you get entrenched power structures to accept accountability and place improved performance as one of their goals (not just increasing their power and vanity)
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