By Beth Hawkins - MinnPost.com -

Earlier this week, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education selected John White as the state’s new superintendent of education, the equivalent of the state education commissioner.

If you recognize his name, you will know that the job he’s leaving is as head of New Orleans’ Recovery School District, a post-Katrina effort to rebuild that city’s decimated, historically Dickensian public school system.

Nominally, the Recovery School District is Louisiana’s fifth-largest school system, comprised of 79 schools in five parishes (read: counties) that fell under state oversight after failing to meet the state’s minimum performance score for four consecutive years.

It is perhaps better contemplated as an insanely controversial, wildly audacious experiment in education reform. With things quite literally torn down to the studs and nowhere to go but up, all manner of reforms have been piloted in New Orleans since the hurricane.

Scores of schools were pushed -- or “incentivized” -- to become charters. Data has been used aggressively and individual student performance can be correlated to the preparation programs where their teachers trained. There have been high highs, low lows and zero shortage of controversy -- none of which this post will attempt to address.

White’s appointment is an excuse to take note of a trend. He is an alumnus of Teach for America, the equally audacious program that recruits the tippy-top of the nation’s elite college grads (in 2010, 46,366 candidates applied and 5,827 were admitted), gives them crash courses in gap-closing instructional practices and places them in struggling schools. And he is hardly the only one to rise to a position of influence over the last year or so.

Before I name some of the others, I think we should review Learning Curve’s by now standard Kramer Disclaimer: Teach for America President Matt Kramer is the son of MinnPost editor and founder Joel Kramer. I know this not because either of them has ever discussed it with me, but because Matt Kramer’s is a pretty hard name not to know if you report about education.

I have not discussed this post with either of them. I assume Joel Kramer will see it at the same time as the rest of you, and if he has constructive criticism to offer it will likely involve my poor math skills.

And my regard for Kramers notwithstanding, I was a dedicated TFA skeptic until last winter, when I had the chance to spend some time in classrooms in a destitute part of Chicago where TFA alums were succeeding in sending every pupil to college. Watching them teach is revelatory.

And so we return now to the point, which is that there is something far more subversive afoot than even TFA’s harshest critics suspect. They aim to change more than one game.

White’s pedigree is illustrious indeed. Before taking the New Orleans post he served on the senior leadership team of the country’s largest school district, New York City. Before that, he was executive director of TFA in Chicago. His accomplishments are legion.
Growing number

He joins a growing number of TFA alums who have made their way from the classroom to positions of influence. Last March, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam appointed TFA Executive Vice President for Public Affairs Kevin Huffman, who started with the organization as a bilingual elementary-grades teacher, that state’s commissioner of education.

TFA alum Kaya Henderson is chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools, alum Kira Orange Jones was just elected to the board that appointed White and ex-TFAers have assumed superintendencies in New York City, Massachusetts, Arizona and elsewhere.

Still others, like Chris Barbic, superintendent of Tennessee’s statewide Achievement School District, are heading ambitious school turnaround efforts. Some 600 are principals.

Yes, corps members, as TFA calls them, are weaving their way into the very fabric of the nation’s education establishment. You might even call it a conspiracy.

You’d be right. One of the criticisms that has been leveled at TFA in recent years is that only a third of its elite recruits stay in teaching when their Peace Corps-style tours are over. This is true, and whether it’s a demerit or not it obscures a more interesting fact, which is that another third go on to work in other capacities in education.
According to Daniel Sellers, who runs TFA-Twin Cities, this is by design. “The program has two aims and that is the second,” he said in an interview yesterday. “The first is to put talented people into classrooms where they can improve the lives of kids.”

At the very least, when those that leave teaching do, they will go on to advocate for education as they become kingmakers in other arenas. At best, corps members will become effective teachers during their stints and will be energized by watching the conventional wisdom that some kids are going to get lost fly out the window.
“You don’t learn the right lessons unless you are a demonstrably effective teacher,” explained Sellers. “You find out that the problem is totally fixable, that these kids are brilliant.”

Ideally, if TFAers go on to public policy roles, they take this no-excuses ethos with them.
Right before the holidays TFA-Twin Cities held a workshop about opportunities in educational leadership for current corps members and alums, a group that has some 300 members. Sellers expected 10 or 15 to attend; more than 40 showed.

“You can say, ‘All of these people are TFA,’ or you can say, ‘These are really smart people who are interested in education,’” he said. If they hadn’t been recruited by TFA, “Some of them might have become leaders in public affairs in some other capacity.”