By T. Ultican 1/13/2018
When TNTP comes to town, public school is targeted for education disruption. Clayton Christiansen probably thinks that is a good thing, but rational people who never went to Harvard correctly recognize that children need stability. TNTP tills the soil of privatization by undermining teacher professionalism and preaching a gospel of test-centric pedagogy.
Originally called The New Teachers Project, but like American Telephone and Telegraph becoming AT&T, they fancy TNTP.
In 2001 the TNTP web page described their founding:
“The New Teacher Project was formed in 1997 as a spin-off of Teach For America, …. Teach For America (TFA) has successfully recruited thousands of individuals into teaching in urban and rural areas, …. Wendy Kopp, the Founder and President of Teach For America, recognized the need for school districts to be able to replicate these effective recruiting and training practices. In this way, school districts could fill their classrooms with high quality teachers and begin to reduce teacher turnover. She established The New Teacher Project to address these very needs and promptly recruited Michelle Rhee to head up the new company.” (emphasis added)
In order to believe this, one must believe that a five-week course in the summer trumps a year at a college of education with at least a semester of supervised student teaching. It is also unlikely that significant numbers of these five-week wunderkinds will do much to reduce teacher turnover.
It is curious that TNTP reports their founding in 1997 but their tax returns show the year of formation to be 1995. Whatever the case, TNTP has struck gold.
The Money is Flowing
The big education philanthropies like the work TNTP is doing and are lavishing them with cash.
Cash Flow Compiled from Tax Forms and Foundation Reports – by T. Ultican
In 2013 Mercedes Schneider reported on government grants to TNTP:
“Some TNTP initiatives also benefit from the support of federal grant programs and/or private funding. In 2010, TNTP was one of 49 organizations and institutions nationwide to win a federal Investing in Innovation (i3) grant.”
Schneider also wrote about the TNTP 2015 leadership shakeup in a post she called, “New TNTP President Among the First to Have Her NYC School’s Charter Revoked.” She shared:
“The TNTP bio blurb on Belcher includes a quick mention of her as founder of a New York City charter school: ‘Karolyn Belcher was one of TNTP’s first employees after its founding in 1997. After leaving for several years to found the John A. Reisenbach Charter School, one of the first three charter schools in New York State, she returned to TNTP in 2007.’
“What Belcher’s TNTP bio blurb does not mention is that Reisenbach, which operated only three years, from 09.2000 to 06/2004, has its charter revoked for its low test scores, teacher turnover, and financial issues.”
However, in a country dominated by big money education philanthropy, failure is not a big deal. In fact, by 2016, Belcher and several fellow early TFA cohort members were making big money at TNTP claiming to be education experts. Eleven of them were “earning” more than $200,000 yearly.
Snip Page 30 of TNTP Latest Form 990 filed in 2016
I suspect that most billionaires financing the DPE movement are true believers in their privatization and market theory of education reform. It is likely that they only talk with one another and have their damaging ideology ever further reinforced.
For the carpetbaggers from TFA, it looks like an old story. Reality is hard to recognize when your personal income is at stake; especially when that income is so grand.
Propagating the Billionaire Sponsored Education Ideology
Lubienski and Lubienski published “Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools” in 2014. David Berliner a much published and widely respected scholar from Arizona State University, wrote of their paper:
“The Public School Advantage is a complete and thorough analysis of America’s many different kinds of schools—secular, charter, and public—and should end the arguments about which kind is better. Chris and Sarah Lubienski provide both the data and the clear explanations needed to understand the many false claims made about the superiority of schools that are not public. The result is a ringing endorsement of public school achievement.”
An excerpt from the Lubienski’s book was published by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) in an anthology called “Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms.” Writing about researchers supporting market based reform and privatization they observe, “These … groups … having quite often declined or failed to pass their pro-market research findings through established, peer-reviewed academic journals, instead create alternative venues publishing and promoting their work – a strategy not unlike what is employed by corporate-funded deniers of climate change.” They also note that many authoritative claims about education are often little more the press releases with no evidence.
TNTP produced quasi-academic research papers like those described by Lubienski and Lubienski. A 2012 example is called “The Irreplaceables.” The paper defines the “irreplaceables” as the “top 20% of teachers in studied districts, as gauged by district data.” The gauge used is value added measures (VAM).
VAM has been widely discredited. By 2014, even the American Statistical Association weighed in with a paper concluding,
“The VAM scores themselves have large standard errors, even when calculated using several years of data. These large standard errors make rankings unstable, even under the best scenarios for modeling.”
“The Irreplaceables” was not peer reviewed, but Bruce D. Baker a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers wrote a review for the NEPC. Professor Baker asked, “Among those 2005-06 Irreplaceables, how do they reshuffle between 2006-07 & 2007-08? His answer is in the graphic below.
Professor Bruce Baker’s Graph
Professor Baker amusingly explains,
“Hmm… now they’re moving all over the place. A small cluster do appear to stay in the upper right. But, we are dealing with a dramatically diminishing pool of the persistently awesome here. And I’m not even pointing out the number of cases in the data set that are simply disappearing from year to year. Another post – another day.
“From 2005-2010: Of the thousands of teachers for whom ratings exist for each year, there are 14 in math and 5 in ELA that stay in the top 20% for each year! Sure hope they don’t leave!”
Another poor paper by TNTP was called the “Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness.” This paper made a significant contribution to the attack on teachers. The authors define the “Widget Effect:”
“The Widget Effect describes the tendency of school districts to assume classroom effectiveness is the same from teacher to teacher. This decades-old fallacy fosters an environment in which teachers cease to be understood as individual professionals, but rather as interchangeable parts.”
It was a follow-on report from the earlier “Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming the Staffing Rules in Urban Teachers Union Contracts.” That report had generated a wide spate of teacher bashing in California as the following headlines and comments demonstrate.
September 29, 2006
Los Angeles Times
Escape Hatch for Incompetent Teachers Closed
“The New York nonprofit group New Teacher Project found in a November 2005 study of five districts including San Diego Unified that administrators had little discretion in filling roughly 40% of their vacancies because of union rules. Researchers also found that poorly performing teachers were transferring from school to school.”
September 10, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle
California Schools May Get Break from Bad Teachers
‘”There are a lot of states watching what’s happening in California, and I think it’ll have significant ramifications nationwide,’ said Michelle Rhee, chief executive officer of the New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit group that worked on the Scott bill.”
September 1, 2006
San Jose Mercury News
“Scott’s bill could slow down the “dance of the lemons” — the annual migration of a minority of veteran teachers who either were burned out or who didn’t get along. They agreed to take voluntary transfers and gravitated to low-performing schools, where principals were desperate and parents less vigilant.”
The “Widget Effect,” faulted the fact that less than 1% of veteran teachers in America were evaluated as ineffective. The report called for multiple teacher evaluation inputs including the use of VAM. Arne Duncan, the new US Secretary of Education made the VAM component a requirement for winning Race to the Top school grants.
In 2017, two researchers looked into the effect of widely implementing the “Widget Effect” policy recommendations. In Revisiting the Widget Effect – by Matthew A. Kraft, Brown University and Allison F. Gilmour, Vanderbilt University, they state:
“In 2009, The New Teacher Project (TNTP)’s The Widget Effect documented the failure to recognize and act on differences in teacher effectiveness. We revisit these findings by compiling teacher performance ratings across 24 states that adopted major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. In the vast majority of these states, the percentage of teachers rated Unsatisfactory remains less than 1%. However, the full distributions of ratings vary widely across states with 0.7% to 28.7% rated below Proficient and 6% to 62% rated above Proficient.”
Nothing changed with unsatisfactory ratings, but TNTP had clearly shown to be a major player in the world of education policy. They seemed to have gained greater influence on teacher evaluations than UCLA, University of Texas and Columbia University’s Teachers College combined.
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley is a former middle- and high-school mathematics teacher who received her Ph.D. in 2002 from Arizona State University in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies with an emphasis on Research Methods. She commented in a blog for NEPC about the “Widget Effect” driven policies in New Mexico. Writing:
“While Kraft and Gilmour assert that ‘systems that place greater weight on normative measures such as value-added scores rather than…[just]…observations have fewer teachers rated proficient’ …, I highly doubt this purely reflects New Mexico’s “commitment to putting students first.”
Professor Amrein-Beardsley’s Graphic
“I also highly doubt that, as per New Mexico’s acting Secretary of Education, this was ‘not … designed with quote unquote end results in mind.’ That is, ‘the New Mexico Public Education Department did not set out to place any specific number or percentage of teachers into a given category.’ If true, it’s pretty miraculous how this simply worked out as illustrated… This is also at issue in the lawsuit in which I am involved in New Mexico, in which the American Federation of Teachers won an injunction in 2015 that still stands today ….”
During my fifteen years as a classroom teacher, I observed that the students do a pretty good job of getting rid of poor teachers. Teaching is a demanding job and the ability to deal with students is not a gift that everyone has. Fifty percent of teachers quit the profession within the first five years and that significantly reduces the number teachers who should not be there. Good administrators get rid of the rest before they achieve full contractual rights. It makes perfect sense to me that less than 1% of teachers are evaluated as unsatisfactory.
Besides Pseudo-Academic Studies TNTP Undermines Teacher Professionalism
By 2001, TNTP was humming along. On its web site the advertising stated:
“We leverage the highly successful strategies of Teach For America to recruit, select and develop new teachers for difficult-to-staff school districts.”
“We create and run high-quality alternate routes to attract and prepare exceptionally talented people from non-traditional backgrounds to teach, particularly for high need areas and hard-to-staff schools.”
“We set up and run pre-service training institutes for high-achieving individuals without prior education backgrounds.”
The theory seems to be that anyone who went to college or worked in certain fields can teach. All that is required is a little summer training and “high-achieving individuals” will be good to go.
The new secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seemed to embrace this ideology when he visited Columbia University Teachers College in 2009. He said,
“More than half of tomorrow’s teachers will be trained at colleges of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that schools and departments of education produce about 220,000 certified teachers a year. Now I am all in favor of expanding high-quality alternative certificate routes, like High Tech High, the New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs. But these promising alternative programs produce fewer than 10,000 teachers per year.” (emphasis added)
Conclusion
Instead of relying on our amazing stable of genuine scholars doing the hard work of researching, studying, practicing and writing, we are being bamboozled into adopting the theories of neophytes that would never bite the hand of their paymasters. If TNTP has a contract with a school district, it is certain that district is a target for privatization.
TNTP is important for the DPE movement. It produces papers that undermine teacher professionalism and it works to circumvent proven teacher training led by universities. It also works to gain control of pedagogy in a way that narrows curriculum. Why? It is all about cutting costs and business transactions. It does not improve the quality of education in America; it harms it.
tultican 
TNTP was the very first of many contracted consultants brought in immediately following our state takeover in Lorain, OH. They were initially hired to facilitate “engagement” in the community and ultimately became the driver of our “turnaround” plan. When conducting data-collecting observations they refused high-quality work samples such as writing portfolios, instead requesting only worksheets that many teachers had to produce specifically for this request. In turn, those samples were used in a presentation in an attempt to shame our educators and falsely illustrate a culture of low expectations and instructional malpractice. Further, extremely small sample sizes of subjective observation data were used in a publicized “Academic Diagnosis” report claiming findings such as 0% student ownership, 0% of assignments aligned to the standards, and 0% use of appropriate texts to further fuel the narrative of our “failing” district.
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Thanks. I appreciate getting unvarnished information from destruction sights.
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Speaking of TNTP – The Mirage -Is Implicit Bias In School Leadership Programs Avoidable? This is how they feel about their own content used to train educators.
👀https://youtu.be/_LLZn6oN9rw
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This is not a surprise that teachers were not permitted to share authentic work samples as part of data analysis process. Falsifying observation data is how TNTP pushes it’s consultancy and turnaround models. These “destroyers” have one agenda to profit and leech funds from public schools.
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Thank you for the patient unraveling of the TNTP. The whole enterprise reflects the triumph of well-targeted and perpetual marketing, aided by deep pockets. The work of well qualified researchers, and teacher-researchers offers ample proof that TNTP invented fake news before Trump. Teachers who are well prepared in undergraduate programs–those with multi-year work in schools and communities are routinely portrayed as if relics of the past.
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Speaking of TNTP – The Mirage -Is Implicit Bias In School Leadership Programs Avoidable? This is how they feel about their own content used to train educators.
👀https://youtu.be/_LLZn6oN9rw
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Hi Tom! Here in Nashville, TNTP is working with “priority schools.” They are contracted to work with teachers on curriculum – it’s scripted curriculum with no teacher input, creativity, innovation, or autonomy. A lot of it comes from Learnzillion – not sure if there are affiliated directly with TNTP or not. I’m also curious to know if they work with other districts in the same capacity they are here. Thankfully, my school is not working with them….. for now. I don’t know if their goal is to work with more schools here or not. But someone higher up made the decision to contract with them.
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Also, I just saw TC’s blog post from 2018. The TNTP contract in Nashville was supposed to end in September 2019. I wonder if it did.
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Hi Mary! Great to hear from a fellow Mariner. How is David doing at negotiating the minefield setup for administrators by education destucters in Tennessee? That must be tricky.
TNTP is all about profiting off public education, but outside of marketing their product is weak. University based professional development programs are way better and light years more professional.
I don’t know much about Learnzillion but on their LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/company/learnzillion/) they council us to check out Bill and Malinda Gates’ thoughts on teaching mathematics. Which says to me they know nothing about teaching math but are just run of the mill education profiteers out to fleece the public.
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In MI, TNTP’s failed alternative teacher route, MI Teacher Corp, is being relaunched inside Detroit Public Schools under a new brand—On the Rise Academy. Former TNTP employees, now directly employed by the district as HR directors and assistant superintendents, are developing an alternative teacher pipeline and dismantling the district and teacher’s union from the inside out. Scary.
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