Call Casey Kasem

Have you seen this? If not you can see it here, here, or here. I'm in the top 40. It is hard to describe what this means to me. Maybe it is best if you just read it yourself here.

I'm actually ranked above Obama. Which, when you think about it, makes sense. Has Obama started a movement that recruits recent college graduates to become teachers in our nation's most under-resourced schools? No, but I have. So why would he be ranked above me? He wouldn't. And he isn't. Good call Time.

But clearly this isn't a perfect system. It is a democracy where everyone can vote and I do mean everyone. How else can you explain Matt Damon at #27? Was that thing with Sarah Silverman funny? Absolutely. Did it make a difference in countless children's lives? And not just any rich kid's life, but I'm talking about really cute, poor kids. I think not. If I can beat out Barack, how can I not beat out Beckham? Is having an amazing free-kick vital to this nation's future? Bad call Time.

Feel free to go here and vote. Or go here.

We Are National Champions!

That is right. One of our "teammates" just won the Women's College Basketball National Championship. See here. And if your teammate wins a national championship that means you have won a national championship, right? I thought so.

At first, when I set an organization goal of having one player from each of the top college sports championship teams join the corps, there was a lot of resistance. People wondered aloud whether there was a correlation between being physically gifted at a sport and of course spending your entire life training for that one sport and teaching in an under-resourced classroom. Is there any correlation between a leader who has never taught and organization that recruits new teachers? Does correlation even correlate to success? It is times like these -- when I hear fallacious arguments -- that I am glad I took those philosophy classes at Princeton.

Anyway, back to my championship. Most people have congratulated me for netting such a high performer. But, truth be told, the whole thing is kind of a failed mission by our Admissions department. See, Nicky did pretty good on the rubric, but the whole point of accepting her was to get her to convince Candace Parker to join the corps. We dropped a lot of hints, like starting out her phone interivew with, "Hi, may I speak with the person who is going to convince Candace Parker to joint Teach For America," and we also had our in-person interviewer just call her "Candace" throughout the entire interview. Sounds sleazy, I know, but come-on, Candace-freakin-Parker! She's 6 foot 4 and has a 28 inch vertical leap. With that kind of physical presence she could have taught high school algebra through interpretative dance! The kids would have loved it.

Supposedly we lost out to the WNBA, or as we spell it here in TFA headquarters - WTF? The new collective bargaining agreement just signed by the owners allows for your own hotel room after you've played in the league for five years! Again, WTF? Trust me, we would have hooked C-Park up with a single at institute. No problem.

Anyway, I've got some management consultants from Bain building a display case for my NCAA trophy. I'm going to ask Nicky to send her piece of the net to me and showcase it here for a few weeks and then let it tour the regions. We'll have a ceremony with a video montage of her season in place of one of those boring regional learning team meetings that all of our corps members have to go to.

I like it when we show other corps members what it means to be a superstar. It's motivating.

Gourmet

There is a hilarious article in the NY Times by a Michael S. Sanders about how universities are upping their dining hall's food quality to compete for admissions. See here.

Great lead quote:

As recently as 10 years ago, a typical campus dining experience was a cafeteria offering overcooked meat, canned vegetables and instant mashed potatoes

Try as many as 2 days ago, Michael. But as sad as the state of this country's newspaper of record is, the redeeming aspect of all of this is that we've got some really good selection criteria out of this article for our 2012 corps. From the article:

“I didn’t apply to Bates, because, well, I ate there, the meal was not very good,” said Lucas Braun, a 17-year-old senior at Westtown School, outside of Philadelphia, who has been accepted at several colleges in the Northeast. “There’s something subliminal from the food you see in the dining hall and the meal they give you that influences your decision.”

Ooh, subliminal. Really, Lucas, subliminal? I asked around some Northeast colleges I know about, and none of them had heard of a Lucas Braun. Of course, I didn't page my contacts at Westchester Community College, or other schools of that ilk like Boston University or Fordham University, so maybe those were the schools the sublime Lucas had gotten into. Of course, I don't really have contacts at those community colleges so I am really guessing here. Lets just say there is a new column on our selection rubric that says "Is this applicant named Lucas Braun?" Answer yes, you aren't getting in; we don't need any of that primadonna BS in our male corps members.

Anyway, my point is this: College cafeterias still suck. I know, because every summer Matt and I have to tour around the various institutes and slum it with corps members to show our support and connection to the mission. I've pretty much got it down to a science where I just fly in about 45 minutes before my Opening Ceremonies speech, phone that tired ol'schtick in like usual, and then I have to rush out because my assistant just had to book me on a flight that leaves, like, you know, 20 minutes ago. The funny thing is none of these institute staff members realize that my charter flight doesn't leave without me. If I'm late they just re-file the flight plan. Whoooppe-do. Most of these staff members are so busy asking for my autograph and trying to have some of my greatness rub off on them that they act like they've never flown charter before.

I've pretty much got Matt doing the overnights and cafeteria meetings. But I've done them enough to know that the food isn't getting better, no matter what Michael Sanders heard. And trust me our institute staff knows this too. Invariably we meet with the institute's Managing Director at the cafeteria and sure enough we load this crap up on our plate like we're not above it all while the MD just gets a salad. "Oh, I ate a big breakfast" she'll say but in reality, the casserole I'm eating was really four separate dishes the night before, and of course the MD knows this, but she wants to see me shovel this crap in for at least one day, since I make her shovel it for the whole summer.

So Matt and I oblige, and then we purge, and rush to our charter where Dean and Deluca - great corporate sponsors of TFA - have our proper meals waiting for us.

Go Hillary - Experience Counts

Had to watch CNN gush over Obama yesterday. I needed a break from the office, and I couldn't find the remote, and my kids had my stay-at-home husband had apparently been watching CNN to sound smarter at cocktail parties. Some speech Obama gave he mentioned "Hillary is a smart woman, but she doesn't see the problem with Washington lobbyists." Since when is experience in your chosen profession a bad thing? Obama is basically saying "I don't have experience, therefore I should lead." It is ridiculous.

I think about American Airlines and all their problems, and I knew, the second I heard of these delays, that the CEO of American Airlines had never flown a plane. Sure enough, his bio says he started out as financial analyst. Might as well been a management consultant. You've got to have people at the head that know what it is like to be on the ground. Hillary knows this from her years in the White House and the Senate.

For all the TFA Foot Soldiers in Pennsylvania, your leader says VOTE HILLARY!

Teach For America - Not just for philosophy majors. (No really, we are serious. We'd like some Math people too).

See this NY Times article. Folks, this is not good news. Back in the 1990s when being a corps member meant nothing more than sleeping with your CMA and your collaborative, we would have welcomed philosophy majors, because, and lets be honest, student achievement did not mean anything to us.

But it does now! And despite what colleges are saying, being a philosophy major prepares you for little more than smoking pot on your parent's couch. See this guy:

Don't worry my TFA foot-soldiers, this neck-beard has been banned from Teach For America. We've adjusted the selection rubric to include an automatic rejection if you even know this guy.

Young people in America, allow me to say this only once: We don't want philosophy majors. They aren't closing the achievement gap, and quite frankly play right into the stereotypes our critics hold of our corps and our organization. From the article:

But Ms. Onejeme, now a senior applying to law school, ended up changing her major to philosophy, which she thinks has armed her with the skills to be successful. “My mother was like, what are you going to do with that?” said Ms. Onejeme, 22. “She wanted me to be a pharmacy major, but I persuaded her with my argumentative skills.

Listen your Mom might have gone for that soft-science rhetoric, but when your staring down a class full of slightly angry, marginalized, 13 year-old minorities in room in Compton, your latest diatribe on Kant isn't going to get them to sit down. Trust me, I've tried. Well I haven't actually tried, but there are still a few former corps members on staff who we haven't been able to replace with management consultants, and they tell me it wouldn't work (the management consultants think it might, so we've formed a committee with bi-weekly conference calls, but that is another post). Even if you wrote as your objective "SWBAT understand why Descartes wants you to sit the fuck down" the kids wouldn't do it.

The article seems to say that this trend is really taking off at schools like Texas A&M, University of Pittsburgh and some other school in Massachusetts that isn't Harvard. So, phew, right, I mean we haven't started recruiting at community colleges yet, so I think we are safe for the near future. But I've got 10 McKinsey associates making sure this trend doesn't jump the fence into one of the 13 accredited colleges we care about like some mad cow outbreak.

We are on it.