Sacramento may pay Teach for America 2.7 million to bring them to their city..

[madfloridian]

If the deed happens, then Teach for America will require the city to take 30 of its teachers each year for 3 years.

Sounds like TFA will be having a lot of control over the public school system there.

The Mayor, Kevin Johnson, is engaged to DC's school chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who is "reforming" the DC school system.

Sacramento vies for Teach for America teachers

Sacramento is a finalist for Teach for America, a program that sends highly motivated college graduates into troubled schools. As a community, Sacramento would have to raise $2.7 million within the next month to become one of three cities to which the program will expand next year. The Morgan Family Foundation has already pledged $600,000 over the next three years.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has been pulling for Teach for America to expand to Sacramento. Johnson was on the national board, and his fiancée, Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, taught with Teach For America in Baltimore.

Teach For America would require Sacramento school districts to take 30 of its teachers each year for three years for a total of 90 teachers. The $2.7 million would pay for the selection, recruitment and support of those teachers. Salary and benefits would be paid by school districts.

Sacramento City Superintendent Jonathan Raymond said he would use the teachers in the district's persistently struggling schools – specifically for science, math and special education classes. In spite of pending teacher layoffs, the district still needs more of those teachers.

All of this money going to a private company when so many teachers are going to be laid off. Arne Duncan expressed concern recently about the effect on the economy of so many teachers being laid off. Perhaps someone should let him know what's going on in Sacramento, or in Red Clay district in Delaware

Don’t know why they need federal funding because Red Clay is paying up $300,000.00 for three-year contract for 6 TFA teachers. Get this. the $300,000.00 is on top of paying the TFA’s normal teaching salaries and benefits “and” participation in all Red Clay sponsored professional development. Wait one more thing ! After two years of teaching the TFA’s will receive $9400.00 from the federally funded AmeriCorps program.

or in Boston, DC, and the Charlotte Mecklenburg district.

Last summer, Boston Teachers Union President Richard Stutman met with 18 local union presidents, “all of whom said they’d seen teachers laid off to make room for TFA members,” according to an article in USA Today. “I don’t think you’ll find a city that isn’t laying off people to accommodate Teach for America,” Stutman said.

One district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, laid off hundreds of experienced teachers but kept 100 TFAers.

In Boston the union filed a complaint that the district was going to lay off 20 veteran teachers and replace them with Teach for America folks.

In DC Michelle Rhee, a TFA grad and school chancellor, laid of 229 teachers with experience but kept almost all of the 170 TFA recruits.

But I imagine Arne already knows all that.

[sam sarrha]

1. they wont get it, drop out rate is 40%'s, not enough people can read and write there.. schools SuX

[Nikki Stone1]

2. Looks like the Eli Broad infrastructure is being put in place.

.

[madfloridian]

6. And Gates, Skillman, and Walmart...

all in place.

[Nikki Stone1]

7. yep

.

[tonysam]

3. Disaster capitalism comes to education

Nobody can ever persuade me to believe that putting unprepared and unqualified "teachers" in at-risk schools does one thing to improve "achievement" for those students.

Those students REQUIRE the most experienced, veteran teachers and not the cheapie bimbos.

We are looking at educational segregation based not just on race but on socioeconomic class.

[Starry Messenger]

4. Ugh. Broad power couples? Just what the world needed.

And CA just laid off 23,000 teachers. This move to hire TFA teachers in this state is a slap in the face.

[madfloridian]

5. I agree it is like a slap in the face to the 23,000 laid off teachers.

It really is.

[LWolf]

8. k&r

[LeftyMom]

9. My kid sister is graduating from CSU Sacramento with a teaching degree.

Next year she's going to sub and do a Master's program at night, because nobody's hiring fully qualified teachers.

[madfloridian]

11. "nobody's hiring fully qualified teachers." 86 Dems support funding TFA

Now that is a sad statement. Hiring cheaper teachers or paying a private company to recruit them.

Where are all the Democratic leaders protesting this?

There are none at all. In fact they are lining up to continue giving money to TFA from the government.

86 Dems waiting in line to give them more government money.

"TFA would likely be able to get funding from the grant program, but the concern is more about uncertainty, said Daniel Sellers, executive director of TFA in the Twin Cities.

“The issue is actually about timing,” Sellers said. “We weren’t aware when we began the fiscal year that we were going to have to compete for funding, and for a company as large and expansive as ours, it’s difficult to plan without a sense of how much money we’ll have.”

Sellers said TFA has been encouraging program alumni, lawmakers, communities with TFA participants in addition to corporate and individual donors to ask the federal government to fund TFA.

“We’re really trying to rally support, because Teach for America has a lot of stakeholders,” Sellers said. “We’re trying to get support anywhere and everywhere we can get it.”

A total of 86 representatives and senators, all Democrats except for one, have expressed written support for direct funding to TFA, including U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.

“At the end of the day, we have to invest in education,” Ellison said. “Teach for America is helping us to eliminate inequity by getting our nation’s most promising young leaders on the case.”

Did you read that? Ellison says TFA is helping America eliminate the "inequity".

[joeybee12]

10. 2.7M to just recruit them...then the district pays them...what a scam...nt

[elehhhhna]

12. 30K EACH for selection & recruitment? SHIT! Headhunters only get 25%

tops, of 1st year earnings. What's that? 10K maybe?

RIPOFF!

[Nikki Stone1]

13. 70 billion potentially from cuts in teacher salaries.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are almost 7 million teachers employed in the US. If you take 10K off of each teacher's salary (through union busting and charter schools), that leaves 70 billion dollars for hedge funds and Wall Street profit. That is your tax money and ours--70 billion--going to Wall Street.

In 2004, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) released an analysis of charter school performance on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as The Nation's Report Card. The report found that charter school students, on average, score lower than students in traditional public schools. While there was no measurable difference between charter school students and students in traditional public schools in the same racial/ethnic subgroup, charter school students who were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch scored lower than their peers in traditional public schools, and charter school students in central cities scored lower than their peers in math in 4th grade.

NAGB looked at the impact of school characteristics and found that:

Charter schools that were part of the local school district had significantly higher scores than charter schools that served as their own district.
Students taught by certified teachers had roughly comparable scores whether they attended charter schools or traditional public schools, but the scores of students taught by uncertified teachers in charter schools were significantly lower than those of charter school students with certified teachers.
Students taught by teachers with at least five years' experience outperformed students with less experienced teachers, regardless of the type of school attended, but charter school students with inexperienced teachers did significantly worse than students in traditional public schools with less experienced teachers. (The impact of this finding is compounded by the fact that charter schools are twice as likely as traditional public schools to employ inexperienced teachers.)
In a study that followed North Carolina students for several years, professors Robert Bifulco and Helen Ladd found that students in charter schools actually made considerably smaller achievement gains in charter schools than they would have in traditional public schools.

http://www.nea.org/charter/index.html