More Corporate Welfare: Teach for America's $350 million business getting $1 million more from you and me!!! Will someone take the taxpayer Wallet Away?

Just how much longer will those free market, "liberty" loving, small government, tightwad conservatives go before they say enough is enough to Scott Walker? This is amazing. 

jsonline: A state budget provision just approved by the state Legislature could bring a new stream of state funding to the organization, Teach For America … a budget provision giving the organization $1 million of state funding over the next two years.

Before any teabillies dismiss the following as bullying from the teachers union, think about Walker's welfare program for big business. TFA is all part of the privatization movement to pad profits and relax regulation,  all the while loosening standards:

Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association union President Bob Peterson said he disagrees with the budget provision that would send $1 million to TFA over the next two years.

"Wisconsin taxpayers should not have to subsidize a national organization with net assets of over $350 million that is essentially a job training program for privileged college students mostly from out of state," he said. School boards across the state could find better uses for $1 million.

The Illusion of Highly Qualified Teachers to continue.

Parents won’t know it, but that “highly qualified teacher” in their kid’s classroom, may be a teacher in training. Don’t get me wrong, this isn't a criticism of those dedicated new graduates learning the profession, it’s the idea that they would be considered “highly qualified” already.


But for years, parents weren’t told how loose that qualification had become. It essentially helps private training colleges like the controversial teacher mill, Teach for America, grow and prosper.

Even worse, state exemptions from the horribly conceived law NCLB, will by itself, lower the bar even further when it comes to who is “highly qualified.”

Edweek: A provision in federal law about who is considered a highly qualified teacher would be perpetuated as lawmakers take up new spending bills for the coming fiscal year … the Senate merely left the door open to extending a provision that allows teachers still working on their certification to be considered "highly qualified" … The law says teachers must already be certified to qualify, but Education Department regulations allowed for teachers in alternative routes to be considered highly qualified, even if they were still working on their certification. For example, people in the classroom as part of the Teach for America training program would fall into this category.

In a letter earlier this week, several special education and disability advocacy groups, urged Congress not to extend the alternative routes to being highly qualified beyond next year. "Allowing this temporary provision to sunset on June 30, 2013 would represent an important step forward in providing thousands of high need students and families across the country equal access to high quality teachers.

But the House panel did just the opposite. That didn't sit well with James Wendorf, executive director of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, who said the House action will keep parents from knowing their children are being taught by teachers with all of their required qualifications.

Here’s what teacher mill Teach for America offers unsuspecting parents in mostly challenged school districts:

Point 3...a spelling error, really?

Some corps members were educators prior to joining, but many do not have any prior experience in the education field. Your potential as a corps member can shine through whether you’ve led your student government, achieved academic honors, managed a complex project at work, served our country in the armed forces, or rallied support for a cause that’s important to you. (One member wrote) “I was PETA’s VP of Policy for 13 years, and I developed motivational skills that I used in my classroom.”

The label “highly qualified” is nothing more than an advertising slogan now, a fabricated con that many parents will believe to be true. 

Teacher mill “Teach for America,” Failing!!

Is anyone who knows anything about education surprised at this news?

Teach for America was the be-all, end-all answer to replacing “all the bad teachers that can’t be fired” in our public schools. It’s a private non-profit. It received early financing from Ross Perot, and worked out a partnership with Wachovia Corporation. Then came the taxpayer grants. That resulted in building teaching “institutes” across the country.  

And it’s failing.

With successful educational models abroad, like Finland’s much talked about system, we continue to build from the ground up a mish mash of politically driven policies that don’t work or just duplicate what we already have. Teach for America is one such effort that really never made any sense.

EdWeek: In a distressed neighborhood north of Miami's gleaming downtown, a group of enthusiastic but inexperienced instructors from Teach For America is trying to make progress where more veteran teachers have had difficulty: raising students' reading and math scores.

By 2015, with the help of a $50 million federal grant, program recruits could make up one-quarter of all new teachers in 60 of the nation's highest need school districts. The program also is expanding internationally.

That growth comes as many districts try to make teachers more effective. But Teach For America has had mixed results. Its teachers perform about as well as other novice instructors, who tend to be less successful than their more experienced colleagues. Even when they do slightly better, there's a serious offset: The majority are out of the teaching profession within five years.

Despite these gaping flaws, supporters dramatically understate their own failure:

"I think ultimately the jury is out," said Tony Wagner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an instructor to the first class of TFA corps members.

But it's this attitude that not only boggles the mind and contorts reality, but it also spends needless decades looking at "innovations" that never really pan out.

American Enterprise Institute (a right wing think tank): American K-12 schooling is a hotbed of dynamic problem-solving on this front. Non-profits like Teach For America, Florida Virtual School, The New Teacher Project, Carpe Diem, and Citizen Schools are showing new ways to recruit and utilize educators. For-profits like Wireless Generation, Tutor.com, Pearson, Discovery, and Rosetta Stone are offering up a range of ways to harness new tools and technology to support teaching and learning. Figuring out how to leverage these new problem-solvers is a place where our state systems, districts, and schools have fumbled badly. This is an area where would-be reformers have devoted far too little attention. Meanwhile, not only have the "best" performing nations not done any better on this count, but the schemes promoted by those covetously eyeing Finland inevitably entail oodles of regulations and rule-writing calculated to stifle such providers.

Did you catch the "Figuring out how to leverage these new problem-solvers..." caveat?