There is no question Mrs. Juarez Smith is smart and successful however when it comes to her credibility we can have several questions. A few months back she told Kent Justice on his morning show that she worked at a local independent school. That school turned out to be the Bolles School, a school every resident in Jacksonville has heard of but for some reason she wanted to keep quiet about.
Example number two comes from the Chartrand Foundation home page. If you didn’t know it Mrs. Juarez Smith is the executive director of the Chartrand foundation.
When talking about Teach for America, they write: The most recent Policy Studies Principal Survey found that 83% of Jacksonville principals reported that Teach For America teachers’ impact on student achievement was equal or better than the overall faculty at the school, even when compared with teachers.
What a great statistic justifying the Chartrand Foundation bringing TFA to Jacksonville, the only problem, is it is not quite true or as you are about to learn even close to true.
This is what Gary Rubinstein said about above on his blog, Teach for Us:
The National Education Association recently passed some kind of resolution to oppose TFA sending corps members to cities that are not suffering teacher shortages. This, of course, was the original intention of TFA. We are not supposed to take jobs away from people who are planning to become career teachers — just to go where we are most needed.
Here is the wording of New Business Item #93 from their website: “NEA will publicly oppose Teach for America (TFA) contracts when they are used in Districts where there is no teacher shortage or when Districts use TFA agreements to reduce teacher costs, silence union voices, or as a vehicle to bust unions.”
In response to this decision, a former corps member named Laura Cunliffe, who now works for the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote a scathing critique. Near the end, she writes:
“Policy Studies Associates, Inc. recently published a report that may explain why the NEA is kicking up such a fuss about Teach for America. “Ninety-five percent of the principals rated corps members as effective as other beginning teachers in terms of overall performance and impact on student achievement; sixty-six percent rated corps members as more effective than other beginning teachers, ninety-one percent of the principals reported that corps members’ training is at least as good as the training of other beginning teachers, sixty-three percent rated corps members’ training as better than that of other beginning teachers, and eighty-seven percent of the principals said they would hire a corps member again.”
I was a struggling first year corps member 20 years ago. Now I’m a veteran teacher and I still feel like I’m struggling many days. Teaching is hard. For a new teacher it’s nearly impossible. So I decided that I’d look at the report and see if there was anything in the report that could help put those fabulous numbers into some kind of context.
So I clicked on the link and it did not get me to the actual report, but to the one page summary by TFA. At the top of the report, it referenced the source as “Teach For America 2009 National Principal Survey,” Policy Studies Associates, July 2009. So I looked up the company and went to their published research reports and the report was nowhere to be found. So I emailed the company and they referred me to TFA to get the report. I emailed the TFA contact, and she was away for a few days. I was starting to fume. Then someone did get back to me. She was actually very helpful in providing what I needed so the tone of this post will not be so angry this time.
I learned that I could not get the actual report for several reasons. The main one is that the purpose of the survey is partly a contractual obligation that TFA has to certain school districts. Also, the data is provided to TFA funders. It is not intended to be used as a way of proving that TFA teachers are miracle workers, as Laura Cunliffe of the Progressive Policy Institute does.
In short, as I suspected, the numbers are misleading. The survey was send out to about 2,200 principals who had a first year CM at their school that year. Already, this is a biased sample since there might be plenty of principals who had bad experiences who don’t hire TFAers anymore, who are not part of the survey. Then, the response rate was just 60%, which may or may not be good. I’m not a statistician to know if that’s a good return rate. I do think that this is a self-selecting group, though. So if a principal is fed up with TFA since they’re not satisfied with their people, maybe they won’t do the survey — or maybe they are more likely to. The TFA researcher offered that even though the principals are instructed to just consider the first year CMs, it is possible that they have second years too (who, I think are generally excellent teachers) which they could have considered which would certainly bump up the numbers. Finally, I learned that this was one of those 5 choice surveys where you disagree strongly through agree strongly. If the principal picked 3, 4, or 5 it counted as ‘agreed.’ Most schools that have new CMs have several. So if a school has five CMs and two of them quit, they may very well pick a 3 on this survey, and they are included in the 95% who are satisfied.
This puts these numbers, I hope, into proper perspective. Remember that only 89% of CMs even finish the 2 year commitment so when you see that 95% of principals say that new CMs are as effective as other beginning teachers, that number seems a bit high.
Being as good as other first year teachers, of course, isn’t saying much. First year teaching is incredibly hard. I struggle when I have to teach a new course. If I had to switch to a new school, that would be another challenge. Being a first year teacher, teaching at a new school, teaching new topics. It’s crazy. The difference though between TFA teachers and non-TFA teachers is that, at least in theory, the non-TFA teachers are planning to have long careers so the tough first year gets averaged out with a bunch of good ones.
Exaggerated claims of success are rampant in this current ed reform debate where there is a lot of money to be made off the backs of poor kids. NEA is a great organization and does not deserve to be attacked by a TFA alum.
Now the question becomes why does Mrs. Juarez-Smith want to keep the public in the dark about her past and why does she feel the need to exaggerate or use dubious information to get her points across.
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