Tag Archives: KIPP

Minneapolis Public Schools Hosts Teach for America Recruiting Event

March 5, 2018

A Teach for America recruitment event was held March 2-3 at the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Davis Center headquarters, just as schools across the district are being hit with a familiar reality: budget cuts.  

The district is grappling with a $33 million budget shortfall for 2018-2019. Cuts to teaching staff, along with increases in class sizes, are expected to be part of the answer to this large deficit. Although details are still being finalized, some Washburn High School community members, for example, are reporting a projected loss of 16 full-time positions for the coming school year.

Minneapolis’s other large high schools, South and Southwest, are also expected to lose key staffing positions, on top of years of previous cut backs. As tough budget decisions hit schools, parents and staff are expressing concern on public Facebook pages, noting that classes of 27 kindergarteners and 30-40 middle and high schoolers are already the norm in many schools across the district. 

This is partly why the Teach for America recruitment event raised ire for the Minneapolis Public Schools staff who happened upon it while attending training sessions on March 3. First, the event was held at the district’s Davis Center, a sleek, taxpayer-funded building on the city’s north side. Second, the Minneapolis Public Schools was listed as one of TFA’s “School Partners,” with Human Resources (and TFA alum) employee Daniel Glass identified as the hiring “point of contact.”

Glass’s LinkedIn account indicates that he was a 2015 “Leadership Fellow” for KIPP, one of the charter schools featured at the March 2-3 TFA recruiting event. At the time, he was also working for the Minneapolis Public Schools as a Special Projects Coordinator, leading to recent, controversial “fox in the henhouse” allegations from the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers.

Communication Breakdown? 

Several other MPS employees were also listed as being part of the event, including administrators and teachers from Roosevelt High School, Green Central Community School and Andersen United Community School. They were joined by a roster of charter school operators and TFA employees, as well as state legislator and education reform advocate, Carlos Mariani.

Many district staff and school board members privately reported feeling caught off guard by the TFA event, saying that they had no idea it was taking place at the Davis Center. In an official statement, however, Minneapolis Public Schools Human Resources staffers (including Glass and HR director, Maggie Sullivan) confirmed that they agreed to host the TFA event for free, in exchange for being allowed to attend without paying a registration fee.

Waiting for the action at MPS

While confirming that MPS representatives were at the TFA recruitment event, the statement noted that, “All candidates will be considered through the same pool process for potential teacher vacancies for the 2018-2019 school year and MPS does not set targets for specific recruitment pathways.” 

The statement touched on the district’s current financial straits, saying, “…we anticipate the recruiting class may be smaller than in previous years.” Still, it read, “MPS is committed to actively recruiting talented and diverse teachers, especially in difficult to staff areas such as special education and bilingual education.”

An update to MPS’s response made it clear that, while they will continue to attend a wide variety of recruiting fairs, they are not “hiring any current TFA members this year.”

Elite Teaching Corps?

It is no secret that TFA corps members are not expected to embrace teaching as a profession. A Minneapolis-based job posting for the group includes these recruitment talking points: 

  • As a Teach For America corps member, you’ll be a full-time teacher for two years at the preschool, Pre-K, kindergarten, elementary, middle, or high school level, with the opportunity to lead real change and make an immediate impact on your students and the community you serve. 
  • You’ll gain access to numerous graduate school and employer partnerships that will help you advance your career and leadership trajectory. 
  • To be considered, the posting advises, applicants must have at least a 2.5 college GPA. 

The TFA recruitment posting also states that the organization is looking to “actively recruit a highly diverse corps.” This is a point made by Minneapolis’s HR staffers as well, in response to my request for information. “At the event yesterday,” the statement read, “35% of the attendees were people of color and 29% were looking for positions in high need areas.”

This may not be comforting to the parents of special education and “high needs” students, as the job description for TFA makes it clear that recruits are only expected to stay in the classroom for two years, after receiving just six weeks of training. While it is undoubtedly true that some TFA recruits make excellent, long-term teachers, the group has also excelled at providing a cheaper, more temporary pool of workers. (Many TFA supporters like to point out that traditionally trained teachers also leave their jobs at a relatively high rate. With recent strike threats in St. Paul, West Virginia and now Oklahoma, perhaps more people will understand why.)

Teach! Or, Help Spread Charter Schools

This is less about the Minneapolis Public Schools than it is about fueling the expansion of charter schools in the Twin Cities. It is easier to defend TFA when the organization can be brushed off as a minor player in district schools, where just a handful of recruits help staff hard-to-fill spots. (And perhaps provide a more diversified, if temporary, pool of workers.)

The bigger picture, however, is more troubling. Nationally, the expansion of highly segregated charter school networks, like KIPP, has been closely tied to a similar expansion of TFA. In 2014, for example, internal documents obtained by New Jersey blogger, Bob Braun, and published here, reveal that “many charter management organizations consider TFA presence in a region a necessary prerequisite for opening new schools.”

What’s more, according to the documents, “charter management organizations including Rocketship, KIPP, Noble, LEARN and Uncommon Schools all indicated that a supply of TFA teachers was a general pre-condition for expanding into a new region.”

In other words, TFA is part of a long game, designed to facilitate the spread of publicly funded, privately managed charter schools. Those schools must come with a more pliable (inexperienced), non-unionized (mostly) workforce of recruits who have been told that their often temporary presence is the way to help foster greater “educational equity” in the United States.Image result for school privatization

It must be made clear that TFA is a polished, billionaire-backed seat of “innovation,” with an expansive PR network. They have become skilled at positioning their organization as the seat of change for marginalized students of color, and many high level policy makers and financiers from across the political spectrum have bought into this pleasing narrative. It is pleasing, I suspect, because it seeks to disrupt teachers unions and traditional, taxpayer-funded, democratically run school boards and districts while simultaneously not asking for systemic change.

Affordable housing? Not on TFA’s radar. Income inequality and the gross hoarding of wealth? Not a good way to build a “weighted revenue pipeline.”

Segregate for Best Results?

We can find evidence of TFA’s target audience in the list of schools present at the Davis Center recruitment event. Here are a few examples, with data provided by the Minnesota Department of Education:

  • Northeast College Prep. Ninety percent of students live in poverty, according to federal guidelines. Close to ninety percent are students of color.
  • Prodeo Academy: Eighty-seven percent of student live in poverty; ninety-eight percent are students of color.
  • Loveworks Academy. One hundred percent of students live in poverty. Not one white student attends the school. 

Only one school on the list, Breck, is a private school. Besides MPS, the rest are charters. But none of the charters listed serve a significant percentage of white students. There were no representatives from the Twin Cities German Immersion School, for example, or Seven Hills Classical Academy–both charter schools that serve a majority of white, wealthier students. (Why is this a problem? Read Nikole Hannah Jones’s work, or watch this John Oliver video.)

The TFA recruitment event included sessions on whether or not ALL (their caps) students are being served in Minnesota’s schools. This is the wedge issue that groups like TFA use to draw comparisons between “schools of choice” (charters) and public school districts. It is a narrative of competition, with some kids and schools “beating the odds” while others go on struggling. This is market-based education reform dressed up in progressive clothing, where wealthy investors pick winners and losers rather than insist that the state of Minnesota fully fund its public schools.

Is this really the type of organization, or event, that the Minneapolis Public Schools should be hosting, for free?

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*For those of you who have continued to ask for an update on the district’s enrollment director, to my knowledge, student placement decisions are still being handled by Bryan Fleming, the MPS Enrollment Manager with a side, school choice consulting business.