2009 TFA rated in top 7 of best places to launch a career.

[madfloridian]

Using teaching as a way to launch a career and transitioning to a corporate job instead of making it a choice for a career...that is not a good idea. That really makes the students secondary to launching a career.

And this group is pushing into more and more public schools while hundreds and thousands of teachers are laid off for lack of funds. It's mostly being ignored.

The list is from 2009, and it is from Business Week. It was mentioned in this article from Rethinking Schools in 2010.

"In a cover story last fall, Business Week put TFA at the number seven spot in its top 10 listing of “The Best Places to Launch a Career,” just after Goldman Sachs and just before Target.

TFA, meanwhile, actively promotes the value of joining its teaching corps, especially for those thinking of graduate school or immediately transitioning to a corporate job. Its website boasts of TFA’s partnership with over 150 graduate schools offering TFA alumni benefits such as two-year deferrals, fellowships, course credits, and waived application fees. The most popular schools for TFA alumni are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, and the University of California-Berkeley—with Harvard the overall top choice. Its employer partners, which actively recruit TFA alumni, are equally prestigious and include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, KPMG, Credit Suisse, McKinsey and Company, and Google. TFA partners in its School Leadership Initiative for alumni, meanwhile, include the for-profit Edison Schools. (TFA founder Kopp has nothing but praise for Edison in her memoir. She is also open to the idea of vouchers.)"

..."Anecdotally, and from conversations with various TFA staffers, it’s clear that the pay for TFA staffers is significantly higher than for similarly qualified classroom teachers. But it is not something the organization likes to talk about. Marcello Stroud, for her part, wrote in response to an email request about TFA salaries, “We consider compensation information to be confidential.” I knew there was no point pressing the matter but muttered to myself, “Thank God for the 990.”

..."Marcello Stroud sent me TFA’s 990 for fiscal 2008. It shows that TFA had revenues of $159 million in fiscal year 2008 and expenses of $124.5 million. CEO and founder 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 through the TFA-related organization Teach for All. Seven other TFA staffers are listed as making more than $200,000 in pay and benefits, with another four approaching that amount.

TFA Looking Past the Spin

The article appears to have gone subscription only, but I put the pertinent parts in the quote. I have another link to the whole article and will try to find it.

Teach for All is the international version of Teach for America. It was launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007. It's a worldwide movement to change teaching from a profession to a temp job with private companies supplying the resources.

Global Effort to Recruit Teachers Expands

Teach for All, an international network of educational nonprofit groups modeled on Teach for America, has grown rapidly since its founding four years ago and now has some 1,500 teachers heading classrooms in more than a dozen countries, with recruiting under way in many more, the group’s founder, Wendy Kopp, said on Wednesday.

..."Bill Clinton and former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain announced Teach for All’s founding at the 2007 meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, but the group has gotten little media attention. On Thursday, Ms. Kopp is to review the network’s growth in a speech at this year’s New York meeting of the Clinton initiative.

Clinton and Blair still hanging around together. That article is from a September 2011 New York Times.

The major media loves Wendy Kopp and TFA, and public school teachers are constantly bashed by both....and by our own party.

Many of us have tried to bring attention to the danger in these reforms, but our voices are just not powerful enough to slow down the steamroller of privatization.

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I am also posting about education at Daily Kos

[Exultant Democracy]

1. TFA is a juggernaut at this point and the darling of the Americorps. I think the wise question is

how to both mitigate the harm while also harnessing the good that are both rooted in a level of shortsighted idealism.

If we take it as a given that TFA will continue to grow what changes in the program can we lobby for to improve the situation?