(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
David Gergen on Teach for America
March 27, 2012
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teacher quality | Tagged: Bob Bowdon, David Gergen, Teach for America | 
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Posted by matthewladner
Hey, Ed Schools, Leave Those Kids Alone!
April 12, 2010
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Interesting piece by Jay Schalin on an internal study by the University of North Carolina on teacher preparation. Part of the UNC study involved a comparison of the value added scores of UNC ed school grads compared to those of Teach for America teachers. Money quote:
In some cases, the Teach for America participants’ results were quite dramatic. For instance, middle school math students with Teach for America teachers tested as if they had an additional 90 days of instruction—when the entire school year is only 180 days of instruction.
Let’s just say if Ed Schools were publicly traded companies, I’d raise billions in a hedge fund to short their stock.
5 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: Jay Schalin, Teach for America, University of North Carolina | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
TFA goes hillbilly nuts
October 19, 2017(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
This has been an open secret for a long time now, but now a TFA alumni has gone and spilled the beans.
If, as implied in the article, the organization adopted the habit of lefty virtue signalling in the hope of immunizing itself from criticism from Dianne Ravitch and the pool of AFT interns being whipped with a cat-o-nine tails to run her twitter feed, they chose poorly. Going hillbilly nuts in response to criticism from someone who has herself gone hillbilly nuts does not leave you as fellow hillbillies. It leaves you as both nuts.
How can she expect us to tweet any faster?
The interests of Ravitch’s puppet-masters remain in crushing alternative paths to reaching the classroom and talent pipelines for charter schools. So long as she continues to yearn for AFT’s adulation and receives enough cigarettes and pizza to keep the intern pool tweeting around the clock with a manageable level of grumbling, Ravitch seems unlikely to even pause to take notice of TFA press releases on freeing Mumia or the various lefty cause du jour.
Alienating yourself from most others however is a much easier task than getting AFT to stop pursuing what they believe to be in their interest. TFA’s leadership might want to think a little harder on the cost-benefit analysis of this “strategy.”
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