The Two Million Minutes Blog

Teach For America Works - Why Stop AT 4,100 NEW TFA Teachers?

In business, when one's company has proven its product and has secured a steady supply of raw materials, one accelerates growth as quickly as possible -- to maximize benefits.

In education, when one proves top notch recent graduates can out-teach most teachers from colleges of education - the unions, the bureaucracy and the colleges of education - try to slow TFA down fear for of their own survival. So they question results, limit the number of TFA teachers by school or by district or regulate them out of the state.  They do all they can to protect their own jobs.

Sorry, Americans children are not part of this discussion.

This year 35,000 individuals from more than 130 colleges applied to join Teach For America.

At Ivy League universities, 11 percent of all seniors applied, including nearly 20 percent of African-American and Latino/Hispanic seniors.

Teach For America is the No. 1 employer of graduating seniors at more than 20 schools, including Georgetown University, Spelman College, and the University of Chicago.

Why are TFA Corps teachers so successful? Highly intelligent, highly motivated people: GPA of 3.6, a combined SAT score of 1333 and 89 percent held leadership positions as undergraduates. And well trained by a talent, seasoned TFA staff.

Out of 35,000 applicants, TFA accepted 4,100 this year. But insiders say 10,000 easily met all the selection criteria - the schools just didn't want that many great teachers. Say what?

The unions, the colleges of education and the educational bureaucracy fought very hard to keep the number of TFA teachers to a minimum.

The Teachers Unions are particularly threatened - every TFA teacher is lost income to the Unions. So we call again on our old buddy Bob Chanin to remind us of what Teachers Unions are all about:

China behind on innovation? The Reds Are Really GREEN says Friedman

Most Americans believe China is A) woefully behind America in innovation and creativity, and B) their K-12 education system perpetuates that problem, and therefore C) America's economy and standard of living is not at risk in the 21st century.

I do NOT subscribe to any of points A, B or C above. I have seen first hand that Chinese people can be highly creative and I have invested in several globally innovative Chinese companies - e.g. - BYD Electric Auto.

The Chinese are playing a brilliant game right now in global warming, industrial growth and clean-tech - regardless of your ethical standards their cunning is to be admired.

Pleading to the OECD that "we are but a developing country", the Chinese continue to strip the earth of raw materials and build high-carbon polluting factories. When challenged, their retort is "the West has done this for over a century, don't try to hold China back with your new morality" - a valid argument.

When asked to adopt new, cleaner technologies from the West, the Chinese reply is, "we are but a poor country, the wealthy West should help us pay to use these technologies." Since the west insists on referring to China as a developing country - our arguments are hollow.

Finally, where do the Chinese put their advanced R&D money and manpower resources in this field - they are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into CLEAN-TECH - fully realizing they can't sustain the polluting system of today and using the dodge of "help us pay" as a head fake to distract and befuddle

(quite effectively) the rest of the world.

China is taking the lead in innovation and in manufacture of green technologies at a pace that exceeds every other country on earth. Thomas Friedman captures this in todays' NY Times article The New Sputnik.

From now on, we should think of Communist China not as RED but as Green:

Indiana Education Superintendent Proposes Radical Change to Teacher Qualifications

INDIANAPOLIS - July 29, 2009 Dept of Education Press Release

"All new teachers will be content experts in the subjects they teach if new licensing rules announced today by Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Tony Bennett are adopted.
                                                                                 “Research shows teachers are the primary factor influencing student achievement,” Bennett said.  “Our goal is to ensure educators are highly knowledgeable in the content areas they’re teaching.
 
“These licensing recommendations will put the focus on teachers’ content knowledge and instructional skill while giving teachers and administrators greater flexibility and freedom to improve instructional quality.”
 
To guarantee the highest teacher quality, the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) is proposing the following changes:

Increase content-area requirements for teacher licensure. Secondary education teachers (grades 5-12) will be required to receive a baccalaureate degree with a major in the content area they wish to teach and a minor in education."

Read Full Story
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Having traveled the globe and seen first-hand that the schools with the highest levels of academic achievement ALWAYS have teachers with Masters degree in their subject area, I view Dr. Bennett's step as a major move toward 21st century education in Indiana.

 

This Can't Be Good....Talent Leaving the USA?!

More of world's talented workers opt to leave USA

By Emily Bazar, USA TODAY

More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home, raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields.

"What was a trickle has become a flood," says Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration.

Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth.

"For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced," he says.

Suren Dutia, CEO of TiE Global, a worldwide network of professionals who promote entrepreneurship, says the U.S. economy will suffer without these skilled workers. "If the country is going to maintain the kind of economic well-being that we've enjoyed for many years, that requires having these incredibly gifted individuals who have been educated and trained by us," he says.

Wadhwa surveyed 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had worked or been educated here before returning to their homelands and found the exodus has less to do with the faltering U.S. economy than with other factors:

•Career opportunities. At NIIT, an information technology company based in New Delhi, about 10% of managers in India are returnees, mostly from the U.S., says CEO Vijay Thadani.

Most go into mid- to senior management and make "excellent employees," he says. "They're Indian, so they understand India, and they have lived outside the country."

China's government entices some skilled workers to return with incentives such as financial assistance and housing, says Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington. "China needs a lot of well-trained personnel" in fields such as finance and information technology, he says.

•Quality of life and family ties. People return to India to reconnect with their families and culture, Dutia says. "They have a support system there, family and friends."

Purchasing power is greater, he says, which allows returnees to afford more luxuries than they did in the U.S. Dutia describes a complex of "magnificent homes" in Bangalore. In the club room, there were "all these Americans and Europeans and expats on the treadmills with iPhones, watching CNN and BBC," he says. "Things have changed."

•Immigration delays. Multinational companies that belong to the American Council on International Personnel tell Executive Director Lynn Shotwell that skilled immigrants are discouraged by the immigration process, she says. Some can wait up to a decade for permanent residency,

DC Premiere of The 21st Century Solution is huge success

"In Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination, Bob Compton highlighted the challenge we face in bringing our K-12 education up to global standards. In this film, the 21st Century Solution, Compton has presented America with a model for 21st century education."  Newt Gingrich

The DC Premiere of The 21st Century Solution on the evening of September 17, 2009 was a great success. Both the Reverend Al Sharpton and Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed the audience after the screening and highlighted how the BASIS Charter schools presents a low-cost, high performance, easily replicable 5th -12th grade education for the 21st century. An education above the global standards.

While not everyone in the audience agreed with all points made in the documentary, they did agree that what Michael and Olga Block achieved at BASIS - from start-up to # 1 high school in America in 10 years - was extraordinary.

Here are a few photos from the event:

Sharpton & Gingrich - NPR Interview on Education

Courses teachers must take "no more useful than watching paint dry."

Great article by Jay Mathews at The Washington Post - Aug 24, 2009

When a Gifted Teacher Has to Jump Through Hoops Just to Keep His Job, Change Is Needed

I am not a big fan of merit pay for high-performing teachers unless the entire school staff is rewarded. But I have no doubt that our current teacher pay upgrade and certification system, based largely on education school credits, is dumb and should be changed.

You disagree? Then let me introduce you to Jonathan Keiler, a social studies teacher at Bowie High School in Prince George's County, where school starts Monday.

It is difficult to argue that Keiler, 49, is anything but one of his county's best teachers. He is the only member of the Bowie High faculty with National Board Certification, having passed a competitive series of tests of his classroom skills that has become a gold standard for American educators. He has a bachelor's degree in philosophy and history from Salisbury University and a law degree from Washington and Lee University. He served four years as an Army Judge Advocate General officer, then was a partner in a private law firm in Bethesda until, as he puts it, he "got sick of law and became a social studies teacher at my alma mater."

He teaches a survey course called Practical Law, as well as Advanced Placement World History and AP Art History. More students signed up for his classes this year than he had periods to teach them. He coaches Bowie's Mock Trial team, the most successful in the county. He has published articles on military history and law in several magazines.

He hates the education school courses teachers must take to be certified and qualify for pay increases. He says they "are generally no more useful or interesting than watching paint dry." But he dutifully accumulated three credit hours at Bowie State University, six through the county's continuing professional education program and three for going through the National Board process. That was more than enough, he was told, for his standard certification.

Then earlier this month, the county's teacher staffing and certification office informed him that previous officials counted his credits wrong. If Keiler didn't somehow produce three extra credits by the end of September, he would be decertified and any pay increases he received associated with certification would be retroactively revoked.

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One Governor Sees America's Future - Rough Road Ahead

WSJ: The Coming Reset in State Government

My fellow governors and I are likely facing a permanent reduction in tax revenues.

By MITCH DANIELS, Governor of Indiana

State government finances are a wreck. The drop in tax receipts is the worst in a half century. Fewer than 10 states ended the last fiscal year with significant reserves, and three-fourths have deficits exceeding 10% of their budgets. Only an emergency infusion of printed federal funny money is keeping most state boats afloat right now.

Most governors I've talked to are so busy bailing that they haven't checked the long-range forecast. What the radar tells me is that we ain't seen nothin' yet. What we are being hit by isn't a tropical storm that will come and go, with sunshine soon to follow. It's much more likely that we're facing a near permanent reduction in state tax revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments. And the time to prepare for this new reality is already at hand.

The coming state government reset will be particularly wrenching after the happy binge that preceded this recession. During the last decade, states increased their spending by an average of 6% per year, gusting to 8% during 2007-08. Much of the government institutions built up in those years will now have to be dismantled.

For now, my state's situation is far better than most, but it won't stay that way if we fail to act in Indiana. At present, we are meeting our obligations, without raising taxes, and still have over $1 billion in reserve. But the dominant reality is that even assuming the official revenue projections are accurate (and they have been consistently too rosy for the past two years), the state of Indiana will have fewer dollars to work with in 2011 than it did in 2007. Most other states face similar or worse prospects.

And, unlike the aftermath of past recessions, odds are that revenues will take a long time to catch back up to their previous trend lines—if they ever do. Tax payments have fallen so far that it would require a rousing economic rally to restore them. This at a time when the Obama administration's policies on taxes, spending and more seem designed to produce the opposite result. From 1930 to 2008, our national average annual real GDP growth rate was 3.49%. After crunching the numbers, my team has estimated that it would take GDP growth of at least twice the historical average to return state tax revenues to their previous long-term trend line by 2012.

I doubt even that would suffice to rescue most states. Instead, historical forecasting models need to be revised. One-third of state revenues (over half in seven states) come from sales taxes, but it's hard to imagine them snapping all the way back up to where they were just a few years ago. Americans are now saving much more then they used to relative to how much they are spending. This sudden shift will mean that even in good economic times to come consumers will likely spend less and therefore pay less in sales taxes than they did during bubble years.

Even if Americans wanted to go back to their high-spending, high-borrowing ways, will anyone lend them the funds to spend like it's 2007 all over again? Consumer credit will remain tighter as a matter of both sound business practice and new government regulation. Home equity appreciation is gone as a huge source of collateral, even if lenders were either willing or permitted to loan freely against it.

The "progressive" states that built their enormous public burdens by soaking the wealthy will hit the wall first and hardest. California, which extracts more than half its income taxes from a fraction of 1% of its citizens, is extreme but hardly alone in its overreliance on a few, highly mobile taxpayers. Both individuals and businesses are fleeing soak-the-rich states already. Those who remain in high-tax states will be making few if any capital gains tax payments in the years to come. Even if the stock market comes roaring back to life, the best it could do is speed the deduction of recent losses.

Sadly, the political impulse to protect government largess leads many states to aggravate their dilemma. Already more than half have raised taxes, often on businesses, serving only to chase them and their tax payments away and into the open arms of states like Indiana. Our traffic flow of interested investors is as heavy as it was in 2007. Since January we have welcomed the consolidation of more than 30 firms that closed up shop elsewhere and chose us as the low-cost, enterprise-friendly environment among their current locations.

Indiana was near bankruptcy five years ago but is relatively solvent today because we have spent the intervening years making hard choices. We have reformed state procurement, contracted out some jobs, cut costs, and relentlessly scrutinized expenditures in pushing for annual improvement in departments large and small. We've also reduced the number of state employees by some 5,000 from the 2004 level.

In contrast to the national pattern, our per capita state spending has cut, on average, 1.4% each of the past five years. Indiana is now the sixth thriftiest state by this measure. And if we Hoosiers are realizing that we need to re-examine what we can afford to have our government do, what must they be thinking in Albany, Lansing or Trenton?

Truth be told, officials in those cities are probably not thinking about this at all. But they will because state governments will soon have to choose between a major downsizing or consigning themselves to permanent decline. Wishing for an improbably huge boom while chasing your own tail through self-destructive taxes won't prove much of a strategy.

Unlike the federal government, states cannot deny reality by borrowing without limit. The Obama administration's "stimulus" package in effect shared the use of Uncle Sam's printing press for two years. But after that money runs out, the states will be back where they were. Even if Congress goes for a second round of stimulus funding, driven by the political panic of bankrupt Democratic governors, it would only postpone the reckoning.

The time to plan and debate is now. This is a test of our adulthood as a democracy. Washington, as long as our Chinese lenders enable it, can practice denial for a while longer. But for states the real world is about to arrive.

Mr. Daniels, a Republican, is the governor of Indiana.