The Secret Blog Of Wendy Kopp

Oklahoma's Teacher Problems

2008-06-03T23:34:00.001-04:00

Some dear reader forwarded me an article from a publication called NewsOK. I thought it was some fluff piece rag until I realized the "O" and "K" stood for Oklahoma. The article is all about how Oklahoma wants to recruit the same great college grads that we do for new teachers. In fact, Oklahoma has actually tried to get us to start a corps region there.

They call us about once every few months and we yank them around. We thought they knew we were just yanking their chain, but someone at OK News didn't get it.

Every year, Teach for America receives requests to expand to at least 15 new places, but only two to three are opened every year, said Ify Offor, vice president of new site development... "We've received requests for interest from Tulsa and also Oklahoma City, and right now are just in the very preliminary, exploratory stages of whether it would make sense for Teach for America to come to Oklahoma.”

Get it, Ify Offor, wasn't sure if we would give Oklahoma an offer to be a region? Seriously? Hey Oklahoma, is your refrigerator running? Seymour Butz wants to know. Perhaps Ivana Tinckle can help you and Nebraska get regions, real, real soon.

My personal favorite quote from the story:

"Oklahoma has come up on our radar,” Offor said.

Yeah, as in like on every Friday when I make cosmos and mojitos for me and all the McKinsey monkeys I keep around. We all get sloshed and play that game where we have to name all the states from memory. Oklahoma is always the one we forget and have to look up online.

Look OKies, we've had our fun, but lets get serious for a second. You will never, ever, ever, EVER, get a Teach For America site. Get real, you are Oklahoma. There's no MOMA in Oklahoma. You think we get 4000 highly prized recent graduates to fail miserably for two years because they want to drive 40 minutes to the nearest cock fight on a Friday night because it is the only thing to do within a 365 mile radius? Look teaching disrespectful, disenfranchised youth is one thing - we can market that. But if we opened up a region in the O-K we'd have to market teaching kids that have whiskey on their breath before noon, and I am not sure any sign in AGaramond can make that seem cool.

My New Nome de Plume: "Editorial"

2008-05-20T22:48:00.001-04:00

I was writing this great post about how we rock. Only I didn't have any data, evidence, logic, reasoning, rationale, support or even a fundamental belief that we did in fact rock.

So I called up some of the consultants we keep around to crank and re-crank spreadsheets and asked them to provide me with some data that we do, indeed, rock.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Finally, one of them decided to dig up some flawed study that was vague on method, results and sample size. Great, like I am going to put my name on some post that has no data that can be verified, checked and re-checked, and reprinted in one of the trade magazines that pay to publish in. I mean if I didn't Darling-Hammond would wet herself in excitement as she took me to task. But man, I really wanted to write this post.

So I sent it over to our PR firm, the NY Times. But of course they wouldn't publish it under any credible byline. I asked about a pseudonym but after the Jayson Blair thing they are pretty skittish.

But hey, we don't pay them for nothing, and I reminded them of that. So they relented and decided to publish my post, unmodified as an "Editorial."

Whatever.

Read it here.

We Can't Pay For This Kind of Recruiting

2008-05-03T19:05:00.002-04:00

Great recruiting piece in the NY Times. Op-Ed contributer Colson Whitehead explains how difficult it is to be black and successful. It is a whole article about how tough it is to be black and successful. Not black and poor. Not black and in need of a good education. Black AND successful. From the article:

It makes the head spin, this talk of who’s elitist and who’s not. I’m confused, myself. For years, they said you can’t have this because you’re black, and then when you get something the same people say you got that only because you’re black. I mean, here I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, and yet the higher up you go in an organization, the less you see of me.

I'm not going to pretend that I understand that part of the article, but look, recruitment loves to take credit for our astronomical growth. And usually I am happy to go along with it. What else is going to keep a ton of overworked, underpaid young professionals toiling away to make some crazy-ass artificial numbers me and my husband make up when we get into a pissing contest over whose organization is better?

(Pissing Contest Aside: See, when Rich and I want to get out

for a while we drop the kid-oes off with a nanny and we do tequila shooters until the world starts to make sense. Usually this leads us to start talking about whose educational model will have the greatest impact. But since neither of us know too much about pedagogy, we end up just talking numbers. Invariably this leads to betting, and then the next morning Lisa gets a call about how our corps will be 4,000 in 2009 or else. I'm not saying it's a pretty process, but it works.)

But as much as our tequila benders shape the policy of Teach For America, the real truth is that this organization is built upon white guilt. Lots and lots of privileged white guilt. If we could place 5,000 corps members in regions, we could probably recruit them. In fact if we could just measure white guilt, we might be able to drop the selection rubric all together.

People feel guilty though, because they are doing better than others. And that spurs them to join Teach For America and try to help others to do better. However if white people are now supposed to feel guilty, even when minorities are doing good - whoo-eee! - we are never going to have recruitment problems.

Our 2020 goals are going to be off the charts. Suck-it KIPP!

Call Casey Kasem

2008-04-26T00:46:00.001-04:00

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!

2008-04-24T20:28:00.001-04:00

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

2008-04-19T23:06:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-10T10:32:00.001-04:00

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).

2008-04-06T13:17:00.000-04:00

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.

Traitors!

2008-02-01T23:15:00.001-05:00

Listen foot soldiers in the TFArmy, I understand that we do a pretty good job of ferreting out the closet Republicans in our midst. I have Gillian Smith watching and reading everything on McCarthyism and figuring out we can further refine the principles of the 1950s that led to the great smoke out of those 57 communists in our government and apply it to our situation to ensure an all Democrat workforce. We know there are still a few. They sulk with their heads down during the day but they contribute funds and blog during the night. Trust me, we are on it.

But almost as a bad as a Republican among our midst is a Democrat who votes for Obama. I see way too many Obama stickers on my beloved non-cubicles in the National Office. And don't think I don't hear your coffee-break conversations about Obama meet-ups and donations. (By the way 7th floor: Too many coffee breaks. Don't think I haven't noticed).

If you don't understand what I am talking about - and trust me, my hope is that it is your ignorance. Indeed, that is the only reason some of you still have jobs - it is time to read up. Not during our business hours (6a EST - 9p PST) but during your free time, of course. Read up on Obama's choice for "unofficial" educational policy advisor.

Darling-Hammond! My arch nemesis at Stanford, which is kinda like an Ivy league school - except it isn't. Not in the way that my alma mater is an Ivy league school.

The only thing unofficial about Darling-Hammond his her ability to understand educational issues facing our nation.

Also, Obama is supporting teacher pay tied to performance. If that ever passes you can kiss Teach For America goodbye. Two-thirds of our overworked workforce are underpaid former teachers. The only reason they work for us is because they would be even more underpaid (underpaider?) as teachers. Sure, a good one third of our staff comes from management consulting firms, and we pay them actual salaries, but otherwise the backbone of our organization is highly overworked, highly underpaid former teachers who think they are rolling in it because we start them off with an actual dental plan and they don't have to wait for a school bell to rush and take a 3 minute bathroom break! (Though listen up 7th floor, we are thinking about reinstating that if you all don't get your act together and back to your Outlook).

For us, a Democrat voting for Obama might as well be a Republican. You can be sure of that.

So I Read the Rest of the Article, sort of...

2007-10-05T16:24:00.000-04:00

Darling-Hammond from Stanford was quoted in the NY Times as saying:

If one takes the lowest possible standard and accepts that as a goal, then Teach For America is great."

At first I was like, "yes! she gets it. We ARE better than what is out there." Then I re-read it.

With Matt's help.

And a few other McKinsey consultants I keep around to fetch me coffee.

Whatever. Look, when it was explained to me in a different light, my reaction was "raarrr, someone's catty!"

I've sent her five signed copies of my book. I can actually sign my name in AGaramond so if that doesn't win her over I don't know what will.

Well, actually I do: we'll have to create a VP position and hire an ex-management consultant to fix ~~her~~, I mean this problem.

We Hired the NY Times to Run Our Marketing

2007-10-05T16:13:00.001-04:00

Did you see this article in the NY Times a few weeks ago? Apparently we have hired them to run our PR.

I'm glad the writer picked a Stanford grad: It shows we are still smart, but we aren't locked into just Princeton, Harvard and Yale. Apparently some people regard Stanford as good as Princeton; I can't say as I had never heard of it before this article. But it's probably good.

The article is a perfect piece on the Teach For America eco-system (that I built, despite everyone telling me I couldn't -- check out my book if you don't believe me). A TFA Alum starts an after school project which propels a minority student into Stanford who then joins Teach For America and is wildly successful in the classroom, propelling more students to Stanford (or Yale or Harvard or Princeton – I don't care which) who will then join Teach For America, and so on and so on, just like I predicted in my book.

I asked Melissa how we got the NY Times to write what amounts to 700 words of ad copy for us in the form of a journalistic article. She just smiled. I mean it is as if an alum wrote... wait maybe the writer is an alum. We are everywhere!

Perhaps there were other things said in the rest of the article. I didn't read past the fold – I was so inspired by Flores I had to put down the paper and just sign copies of my book for hours. I sent some to Flores and her family, but the rest I'll probably auction off at Sotheby's. There is a Hampton's house I have been eyeing, and no way Finance is going to approve it.

Branding

2007-10-01T12:24:00.000-04:00

I know, this site doesn't look right. I've begun to thought partner with Melissa on how to get this fixed, but tech doesn't return her emails either. Apparently their laser-focus is beaming somewhere else. Needless to say getting it branded is on both of our action plans–it will be done.

Join our movement!