This post is a follow-up to my previous post, in which a friend of mine described her personal experience with Teach For America. Here, she discusses research and hard facts surrounding the effectiveness of this program, its suspicious financial position, and its political agenda.

Her words:

It is due time that Teach For America becomes a topic for public discussion. After all, Teach For America is growing at an unprecedented rate, what with Obama endorsing the organization and offering government funds to again hasten its growth. Thus, I think it is the duty of American tax payers to decide if this is a program that we want to be funding.

That said, I think it’s important to state that I do not feel my ordeal alone substantiates destroying Teach For America’s reputation. Rather, it has led me to start questioning and digging deeper into what the research is really saying about TFA. Having spent the last few weeks studying the matter, I still have a few outstanding questions.

1.      Are Teach For America teachers effective?

2.      What impact is Teach For America having on students’ lives?

3.      What is the organizations political agenda?

4.      Where is all the money going?

So, firstly, let’s address the effectiveness of TFA teachers. In asserting their teaching effectiveness, TFA most commonly turns to the 2004 Mathmatica study, using it as evidence that TFA teachers are indeed achieving significant academic gains in comparison to other teachers. However, that study is not comparing TFA teachers to traditionally certified teachers, rather it is comparing them to other alternatively certified teachers – ones who have gone through a training similar to those that TFA teachers go through. And even within that comparison, TFA does not pull that far ahead. In fact, in math, TFA students were shown to be only a month ahead of students taught by other novice teachers. That’s a far cry from the two years of growth TFA claims to accomplish.

In my understanding, there is yet to be a study comparing TFA teachers to their traditionally certified counterparts. Why that research is yet to be done baffles me. I know this sounds cynical, but I can’t help but wonder if it has something to do with TFA not willing to be involved in such a study. TFA is known for being remarkably closed lipped about its operations. Multiple media outlets have commented on this. And I know that within my region, we were repeatedly told that if anyone from the media contacted us for an interview, we were to refer them back to our regional office rather than answering their questions. So really, it would not surprise me if TFA had been approached about participating in such a study but declined. But that is pure speculation.

However, in terms of teacher effectiveness, a case was argued in San Francisco last month which ruled that the training TFA teachers are given does not constitute enough for the provisional/emergency certifications they are being handed. What does that mean? Well simply that TFA does not give enough training to build effective teachers. This point is well brought out in Dr. Barbara Torre Veltri’s recent book, Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher. Dr. Veltri has spent the last decade teaching grad school courses to TFA teachers and documenting the experiences of those teachers. Having been an emergency certified teacher herself and now having a PhD in education, Veltri creates a strong and well researched argument against the effectiveness of TFA teachers. I would refer you to her book for further details.

The next question, as to what impact TFA teachers are having on student lives, is extremely hard to answer. Yes, there are those Jason Kamras within the corps. But not every corp member goes on to be a national teacher of the year. According to Veltri’s research, by the fourth year, 90% of corp members have left teaching. This statistic stands in contrast to TFA’s statement that 60% of corp members stay in education related fields. Why the difference? Because TFA considers graduate school, law, non-profit work, and social activism as education related fields. When talking specifically about the classroom, its clear that most TFA corp members do not stick around long after their commitment. What does that mean for students? For one thing, it contributes to the instability of urban life. Teachers are dropping out just as quickly as students in some districts.

For example, since TFA alum Michelle Rhee was appointed as Chancellor of the Washington D.C. School District in 2007 she has laid-off hundreds of teachers and replaced them with TFA teachers. The result? According to Leigh Dingerson’s Fall 2010 article in Rethinking Schools, 40% of the teachers in that district are now TFA teachers and the test scores are falling. And believably so. Afterall, if 40% of all the teachers are TFA, that means that each year, 20% of the teachers are brand new. According to Veltri’s research, the most effective TFA teachers are ones who are able to secure a veteran teacher within their school to mentor them or who turn to their own teachers for help. However, in schools that are highly saturated with TFA teachers who come in for two years and then leave, veteran teachers have little incentive to invest so much time into the development and mentoring of non-professional teachers.

What does that mean? Simply, teaching used to be seen as a career – something that you trained to do for four years in college. Something that you planned on doing your entire life. However, with the advent of TFA, teaching has began a transformation – changing teaching from a career to a job, thus earning TFA the nickname “Teach For a Resume.” Thus, in claiming to close the achievement gap, TFA is exploiting the populations most in need of experienced teachers. It is perpetuating teacher turn over and overlooking the needs of students.

Question 3: What’s this about a political agenda? Well, let’s rewind and take a look at the root of TFA. As is well known, Teach For America grew out of founder Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis. As a sociology major at Princeton, she came up with an idea to end educational inequity in America. However, it is interesting to note that she wrote her thesis and made the plan without ever having set foot in an urban classroom. And she did not plan to act on her thesis until she did not get any of the jobs she wanted coming out of college. Then, in 1990, even before a single TFA teacher had set foot in a classroom, the media began its love affair with the organization, according to Barbara Miner’s Spring 2010 article in Rethinking Schools. Since then, TFA has, for the most part, continued to entrance America as the all-American organization. And of course, no one wants to challenge an organization that is almost as American as apple pie.

You see, to further protect and promote themselves, TFA has founded a branch off organization, Leadership for Educational Equity. What’s their goal? Have 100 TFA alums in elected office in 2010. Why? So that TFA alums can seize control of school districts like in DC? Who knows. But it definitely is interesting to see TFA positioning themselves in a position of political power at a time when the corps is growing and yet hundreds of certified teachers are being laid off. As a side note, yes some of those teachers are not doing their job and should be laid off, but others are excellent teachers, such as in the case of Sacramento’s teacher of the year who had actually been laid off just prior to receiving her trophy.

So, last question. Where’s all the money going? Last year TFA received $165 million in donations. That’s a large chunk of cash. Yet, a lot of that never sees the students. According to Miner, in 2008 Wendy Kopp made $265,585, with an additional $17,027 in benefits and deferred compensation. She also made an additional $71,021 in compensation and benefits. Seven other TFA staffers are listed as making more than $200,000 in pay and benefits, with another four approaching that amount. An interesting side note is that Kopp is married to Richard Barth, the leader of KIPP. In 2008 he made more than $300,000 in pay and benefits. Thus, this couple who applauds themselves for brining education to the poor are pocketing over $600,000 a year. That’s nuts!

Seriously though, I can’t help but wonder where TFA spends its money.  After all, the school I taught in had no money for school supplies. I asked TFA.  They had no funds to offer either.  So I ended up using my own money to buy just the basic things like paper and pencils. Shouldn’t an organization that collects millions of dollars to help impoverished children get an education be spending some of that money on the students?  So maybe I am a little fanatical, but I think the $165 million each year could be better spent.  Rather than recruiting and training teachers, who for the most part, will leave education in two years, funds could be used to support professional educators working in the toughest schools in this nation.

Underlying this entire discussion is the understanding that the American educational system is broken and needs to be fixed.  However, Teach For America is not the means of addressing that issue.

Think for a moment about the school district you grew up in.  What do you think would happen if the superintendant one day announced that the district was going to lay off the teachers who taught you and replace them with kids, straight out of college, who have had only five weeks of training?  The superintendant then assures everyone that it’s going to work just fine.  After all, these college grads aren’t just average – they graduated from 500 of the top universities in the nation and are guaranteed to be really good teachers by a woman who has no background in education.

I know that in my community, an announcement like that would be met by an angry mob.  People would protest and call for the superintendant’s resignation.  Community members would rally around the teachers they love.  All in all, it would not be accepted.  Yet, that is what is happening in disadvantaged school districts throughout the nation.  And somehow it would be okay, since it is just the poor kids, the ones who are behind in school anyway, who are being impacted.  So maybe in communities where students are used to being warned that the cops are coming, we should spend more time warning them that the Kopp is coming.  After all, Teach For America is not the solution; rather, it is the nation’s most prestigious temp agency.

My good friend Terry Smith tipped me off on this excellent commentary of Obamanized political expediency at its finest. Broken campaign promises are a way of life for Obama.

Maybe THIS is why I’m not a millionaire at 24.

“Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he’s carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he’s carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you’re drunk.”

-Jack Handey

This is my first stride towards getting back into blogging. Enjoy.

I’m currently in the early stages of starting a web company, and when I came across the article below (no, unfortunately I can’t claim it as my own) it really resonated with me. Lots of helpful advice for anyone involved in a web startup.

Oh, and it was written by Evan Williams. He started a little thing called Blogger. And also a little thing called Twitter. I’d say he knows what he’s talking about.

10 Lessons of a Web Startup

#1: Be Narrow

Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there’s less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there’s a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.

#2: Be Different

Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist’s butt. Third, consider doing something that’s not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have “blog” in their name, RSS companies “feed,” or podcasting companies “pod” or “cast”? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.

#3: Be Casual

We’re moving into what I call the era of the “Casual Web” (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people’s everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they’re just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.

#4: Be Picky

Another perennial business rule, and it applies to everything you do: features, employees, investors, partners, press opportunities. Startups are often too eager to accept people or ideas into their world. You can almost always afford to wait if something doesn’t feel just right, and false negatives are usually better than false positives. One of Google’s biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.

#5: Be User-Centric

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it’s sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don’t get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

#6: Be Self-Centered

Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don’t trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you’re small and they’re big, it’s hard to say no, but see #4.

#7: Be Greedy

It’s always good to have options. One of the best ways to do that is to have income. While it’s true that traffic is now again actually worth something, the give-everything-away-and-make-it-up-on-volume strategy stamps an expiration date on your company’s butt. In other words, design something to charge for into your product and start taking money within 6 months (and do it with PayPal). Done right, charging money can actually accelerate growth, not impede it, because then you have something to fuel marketing costs with. More importantly, having money coming in the door puts you in a much more powerful position when it comes to your next round of funding or acquisition talks. In fact, consider whether you need to have a free version at all. The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.

#8: Be Tiny

It’s standard web startup wisdom by now that with the substantially lower costs to starting something on the web, the difficulty of IPOs, and the willingness of the big guys to shell out for small teams doing innovative stuff, the most likely end game if you’re successful is acquisition. Acquisitions are much easier if they’re small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn’t cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow). Besides the obvious techniques, one way to do this is to use turnkey services to lower your overhead—Administaff, ServerBeach, web apps, maybe even Elance.

#9: Be Agile

You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr’s company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That’s why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.

#10: Be Balanced

What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can’t be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I’ve found than David Allen’s GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you’ll have a secret weapon.

#11 (Bonus!): Be Wary

Overgeneralized lists of business “rules” are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything.

Source: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/4giAnf/davidhieatt.typepad.com/doonethingwell/2010/01/10-lessons-of-a-web-start-up.html/r:t

I’ve seen this too many times and in too many different places to believe it holds any validity, but it’s still worth a good laugh. Enjoy.

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At a recent computer expo Bill Gates compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated “if GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $2500.00 cars that got 100 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought “CarNT”, but then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would only run on five percent of the roads.
7. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “General Protection Fault” warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same sized butt.
9. The airbag system would ask “are you sure?” before deploying.
10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (Now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the cars performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Dept.
12. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

Via Political Wire:

“Perhaps the greatest measure of Obama’s declining support is that just 50% of voters now say they prefer having him as President to George W. Bush, with 44% saying they’d rather have his predecessor. Given the horrendous approval ratings Bush showed during his final term that’s somewhat of a surprise and an indication that voters are increasingly placing the blame on Obama for the country’s difficulties instead of giving him space because of the tough situation he inherited. The closeness in the Obama/Bush numbers also has implications for the 2010 elections. Using the Bush card may not be particularly effective for Democrats anymore, which is good news generally for Republicans and especially ones like Rob Portman who are running for office and have close ties to the former President.”