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Teach for America solicits donations, public funds, finder fees while amassing $1 billion fortune, tax records show

Posted in BESE, Budget, Education, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Public Records, Taxes on March 5, 2013| 17 Comments »

Remember when teaching was about answering to a calling—before the Jindal administration came charging onto the scene with its half-baked ideas of education reform through sweeping legislation that promoted something called Teach for America?

As noble and magnanimous as Teach for America (TFA) would have you believe its motives to be, it would be wise to keep your eye on the dollar sign.

While Teach for America is going around asking for money from state legislators and local school districts, the organization has quietly been amassing a fortune even as TFA comes under fire from former TFA teachers and the media.

Like a snake trying to swallow its own tail, TFA has begun to devour itself, to feed off its own perceived success to the detriment of those it was formed to help.

TFA’s 2010 federal tax return reveals that it has received nearly $907.5 million in gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees over the five-year period from 2006 through 2010, including $243.6 million in 2010.

The breakdown, by year, shows that TFA had $77.94 million in income in 2006; $142.35 million in 2007; $251.52 million in 2008; $193 million in 2009, and $243.65 in 2010.

Other 2010 revenue brought TFA’s total income to $270.5 million against expenses of $218.7 million for a net income of $51.8 million, the return shows.

Of those expenses, $129.9 million was for salaries.

Another $548,437 was spent on “direct contact with legislators, their staffs, government officials and legislative bodies,” or lobbying.

TFA CEO Wendy Kopp is paid $393,600 by the organization she founded in 1989, according to the tax return, but the salaries of her support staff are equally impressive for an outfit that purports to wants only to uplift the nation’s neediest students in poverty-stricken school districts. A few examples:

• Matthew Kramer, President: $328,100;

• Tracy-Elizabeth Clay, General Counsel, Secretary: $174,500;

• Osman Kurtulus, Vice President of Accounting & Controls & Assistant Secretary: $178,500;

• Miguel Rossy, Chief Financial & Infrastructure Officer: $260,600;

• Elisa V. Beard, Chief Operating Officer: $233,400;

• Elissa Clapp, Senior Vice President of Recruitment: $246,700;

• Ellen N. Shepard, Chief Information Officer: $214,800;

• Lily Rager, Executive Vice President: $178,500;

• Aylon Samouha, Senior Vice President, Teacher Preparation Support: $253,500;

• Eric Scroggins, Executive Vice President: $231,000;

• Jeffrey Wetzier, Senior Vice President, Chief Learning Officer: $235,300;

• Kevin Huffman, Executive Vice President, Public Affairs: $243,300;

• Gillian C. Smith, Chief Marketing Officer: $238,800;

• Aimee Eubanks Davis, Chief People Officer: $229,000;

• Theordore Quinn, Vice President, Strategy & Research: $179,900.

So now, TFA, which faced financial collapse several times in the early years, comes begging to the state of Louisiana with a $5 million request for NGO (non-government organization) funding even though that request is a bit misleading.

The request is made on behalf of TFA by the compliant Department of Education (DOE) to fund TFA operations in several high need areas of the state. Instead, the legislature funds, through DOE, three contracts totaling more than $2.3 million to help recruit TFA teachers in different school districts around the state, including $1.27 million to specifically recruit teachers for the Recovery School District and for the Teaching Fellows program in northwest Louisiana.

In neighboring Mississippi, TFA requested a legislative appropriation of $12 million to send 700 recruits to the impoverished Delta area of the state. Instead, the Mississippi legislature appropriated $6 million, sufficient to fund 370 teachers.

Just how the money is spent is something of a mystery because the local school districts are required to pay TFA a fee of $3,000 per teacher recruited and the districts must also pay the TFA teacher salaries.

On top of all that, TFA receives generous grants and contributions from such philanthropists as the Walton family of the Wal-Mart retailing empire.

TFA does offer summer training to prepare recruits for the classroom—an entire five-week training course as opposed to four years and more (for advanced degrees) for teachers to receive college degrees in education and who generally sign up for the long run as opposed to TFA teachers who commit to only two years.

Some remain beyond the two year hitch but for the most part the TFA turnover is a negative factor in educating kids and in school staffing continuity.

Despite that, Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White, himself a TFA alumnus, calls TFA “an incredibly good investment.”

Of course they are. School districts are laying off veteran teachers with years of education and classroom experience in favor of TFA corps members because they are less expensive to hire. Some districts seem to prefer to cycle through ill-trained TFA teachers every two years.

A former TFA teacher claims that the organization’s five-week training model is ineffective, that TFA spends $33 million “doing a poor job teaching corps members to teach.” He describes the TFA training as “not enough depth, not enough breadth, not enough time.”

Reuters News Service, in an article entitled “Has Teach for America betrayed its mission,” quotes TFA alumni as claiming that policies promoted by TFA-trained reformers threaten to damage the very schools TFA once set out to save and that TFA’s relentless efforts to expand has betrayed its founding ideals.

For example, Reuters says that TFA, founded to serve public schools so poor or dysfunctional they couldn’t attract qualified teachers, now sends fully one-third of its recruits to privately-run charter schools, many of which have outstanding academic credentials, wealthy donors and flush budgets.

It’s about the money, folks.

And while there certainly are TFA teachers who truly have the welfare of students at heart and who are effective teachers, TFA has backed off its claim that almost half of its teachers achieve outstanding academic gains by students.

Heather Harding, TFA’s former research director, told Reuters that statistics claiming significant gains were unreliable and misleading because only 15 percent of TFA recruits even teach subjects and grades that are assessed by state standardized tests. As an alternative means to measure growth, Harding said, many teachers rely on assessments they design themselves.

So while TFA recruits may come into the classroom with high ideals and lofty goals for their students, TFA long ago stopped being about the students and became all about the money.

It would be a mistake for parents, legislators, school administrators and benefactors to forget that.

Any coach of any sport will tell every player on his team to keep his eye on the ball.

In this case, keep your eye on the dollar signs.

It’s all about the money.

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TFA: seeking $5 million in NGO funding so that it can knock qualified, certified Louisiana education graduates out of jobs

Posted in BESE, Charters, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Recovery School District, Revenue, RSD on March 3, 2013| 17 Comments »

Budgetary constraints coupled with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s general reluctance to approve non-government organization (NGO) funding requests have resulted in a declining number of requests in each of the past four years—from almost 450 in 2010 to just 90 last year and 80 this year (not counting the obvious $12 trillion joke request from the prankster in Georgia).

But Teach for America (TFA) apparently is not discouraged by the realities of fiscal austerity.

Among those 80 requests for funding by NGOs this year was one from TFA for a $5 million appropriation.

So, why would TFA need a $5 million appropriation from the state?

According to the project summary submitted with its application, the money would apparently be used to provide 550 to 700 teachers and 1,000 alumni who would serve as teachers, leaders and “positive change agents (whatever that is) in the lowest income schools throughout the greater New Orleans and greater Baton Rouge areas, central Louisiana, Acadiana and the Louisiana Delta.”

But wait. LouisianaVoice has come across three state contracts with TFA totaling almost $1.6 million to recruit, train and place 570 TFA teachers in the Delta region of Louisiana and the Recovery School District.

First, such an appropriation would seem to raise the obvious question of potential violations of federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws by awarding contracts for the hiring of specific applicants to the exclusion of other equally or better qualified applicants.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), http://www.eeoc.gov/ for example, recently:

• Settled a disability discrimination lawsuit against Dillard’s, Inc., which had forced employees to disclose personal and confidential medical information in order to be approved for health;

• Sued a discount tire store, claiming that the store does not hire women in management positions and other positions because of their gender;

• Sued Texas Roadhouse restaurants for age discrimination because the restaurant did not hire applicants age 40 and older;

• Sued Bass Pro for racial discrimination because the store does not hire African-Americans or Hispanic applicants and for retaliation against employees who complained about discrimination.

Louisiana’s colleges and universities each year turn out about 600 graduates in elementary education alone. These are students who pay increasingly higher tuition to complete a minimum of four years of education and student teaching (longer, if advanced degrees are pursued) in order to become certified teachers to educate our children.

But the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE) apparently is willing to dole out $1.6 million to TFA in order to give preferential treatment to 570 individuals whose only qualification is a five-week crash course with no certification.

So who are these 570 TFA teachers (or if you go by the NGO funding application, 500 teachers and 1,000 alumni) “who serve as teachers, leaders and positive change agents” and where are they employed?

A public records request to DOE by LouisianaVoice produced a list of 529 TFA teachers scattered across Louisiana over a three-year period—and not all of those in the “lowest income schools.” Nor was there any way of know how many names on the list provided by DOE are still employed, given the relative short tenure that has become indicative of TFA.

The largest number of TFA teachers (208) was found in various charter schools, followed by East Baton Rouge Parish (83). Some, however, were found in more affluent areas such as Jefferson Parish (19) Zachary (1), West Feliciana Parish (2).

Other school systems and the number of TFA teachers employed included:

• Acadia (1);

• Ascension (22);

• Avoyelles (16);

• City of Baker (9);

• East Feliciana (29);

• Pointe Coupee (20);

• St. Helena (14);

• St. Landry (3);

• Vermilion (1);

• Madison (10);

• Plaquemines (7);

• St. Bernard (32);

• St. James (5);

• St. John the Baptist (13).

TFA’s NGO application summary said that its historical size of operation was 200 teachers and 100 alumni.

But just as described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine natural disasters or emergencies have opened the doors for takeovers of local governmental entities by for-profit investors.

“…After Hurricane Katrina and with the incredible opportunities for educational change in Louisiana, Teach for America was asked by the state and private philanthropists to grow larger to provide the necessary human pipeline for schools and districts,” TFA’s application summary says.

Incredible opportunities? Human pipeline? Interesting how education has come to be seen in such terms.

“Using millions in national philanthropic dollars, Teach for America grew from 200 teachers and 100 alumni to our current scale.

“This $5 million matches the giving levels of our neighboring state of Mississippi and is in line with the needed funds to continue operating in Louisiana,” it said.

“Teach for America is currently leveraging state funds more than 10 to 1 by raising more than $11 million in private funds for our operations in Louisiana. An increase in state funding allows us to continue this work and allows us to attract even more private donations in the years to come.”

And just how would this $5 million be used?

The proposed budget provided on the application gives the following breakdown of expenditures:

• Contracts: $0;

• Acquisitions: $0;

• Major Repairs: $0;

• Operating Services: $0;

• Other Charges: $0;

• Salaries: $0;

• Professional Services: $5 million.

In describing its public purpose, TFA said it “recruits, selects, trains and supports teachers and leaders for the lowest income schools and school districts in the state of Louisiana and around the country.

“Teach for America is tapping a previously untapped base of talent and attracting America’s top recent graduates to teach in schools that need their support the most,” TFA said in its application. “We are ensuring that these teachers achieve excellent results immediately and are working to channel their energies towards long-term impact within education and within the state of Louisiana.

“Currently our 500 corps members work with nearly 45,000 students in the state of Louisiana. Our 1,000 alumni run schools, continue teaching in classrooms, are setting policy and otherwise influencing the debate for educational change in a positive direction.”

Running schools? Setting policy?

And all this time, we thought the Louisiana Department of Education was doing that

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$12 trillion NGO request to legislature from mythical Georgia applicant manages to sneak onto 2013 wish list

Posted in Budget, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Revenue on March 1, 2013| 9 Comments »

Non-government organizations (NGOs) traditionally submit requests for funding each year before the legislature convenes but in recent years those projects have met with increasing difficulty obtaining needed revenue given the financial plight of the state.

NGOs include organizations like councils on aging, various foundations, the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport, local tourism associations, and even the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and in the past, requests have numbered as many as 450 as recently as 2010 but that number has dropped off sharply to 170 in 2011, about 90 last year and just 81 so far this year.

Many of those that were approved by the legislature were subsequently vetoed by Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Among this year’s submissions are requests for:

• $3.25 million for the 2014 NBA All-Star Host Committee;

• $544,000 for the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation;

• $280,577 for the New Orleans Bowl;

• $2.47 million for the Jazz Festival;

• $2.5 million for the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport;

• $403,100 for the Washington Parish Fair;

• $12 trillion for the National Security Agency’s Leonard Cross Hendrickson, Jr.

Wait. What? How much and for whom?

That’s right: $12 trillion for something called the National Security Agency’s Leonard Cross Hendrickson, Jr.

Obviously, the request is someone’s (probably someone named Leonard Cross Hendrickson, Jr.) idea of a joke.

And the fact that the request actually got past whatever passes for the legislature’s screening process or committee indicates Hendrickson’s joke is an unqualified success.

To request NGO funding, entities must complete a detailed questionnaire, which Hendrickson did but some of the answers he provided should be a cause of some red faces somewhere in the state bureaucracy.

Let’s start with the requesting recipient entity’s mailing address: 7998 Hwy. 5, Douglasville, GA.

An out-of-state entity seeing a state appropriation of $12 trillion (the national budget is something in the neighborhood of $3.8 trillion) should have sent up sufficient red flags and triggered enough alarms to catch someone’s attention.

But wait. There’s more.

The request form asks applicants to provide the name of each member of the recipient entity’s governing board, to which Hendrickson obligingly listed the CIA, DEA, DNI (Director of National Intelligence) and the Bush administration.

“Provide a summary of the project or program,” the questionnaire instructed, to which Hendrickson responded: “Measure waste water from space and space-based earth assets control and code enforcements water cosmic ray shields.”

Had that nonsensical response appeared on a federal grant application, Hendrickson probably would have received the money.

“What is the budget relative to the project for which funding is requested?” was the next question on the application form. Hendrickson’s response was classic:

• Salaries—$75 million;

• Professional Services—$250 million;

• Contracts—$12 billion (with the Jindal administration, that’s entirely believable);

• Acquisitions—$9 billion;

• Major Repairs—$12 billion;

• Operating Services—$100 billion;

• Other Charges—$100 trillion.

If you did the math as you read this, you know that the last item, $100 trillion for “other charges” is more than eight times the total amount requested.

For his contact information, Hendrickson provided two telephone numbers, both in the Atlanta area code. One was a non-working number and a woman answered the second number only to say she had received several calls for Leonard Cross Hendrickson but that no such person lived at that number.

So we Googled Mr. Hendrickson and a web address appeared: http://www.lookwhogotbusted.com/douglas-county-ga/hendrickson-leonard-cross-2.

Against our every instinct, we clicked on the address and up popped a photo of a smiling man identified as “Hendrickson, Leonard Cross,” 35, who, according to the website, was booked into Douglas County, GA. Jail for probation violation.

We have no way of knowing why he was on probation or what he did to violate that probation but we have to give Mr. Hendrickson high marks for successfully sneaking in his request.

Now the big question remains: will it be approved by legislature and if so, will Jindal veto the appropriation?

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Kristy Nichols: ‘We didn’t present a truly balanced budget because we couldn’t’ (or ‘down the old rabbit hole’—again)

Posted in Budget, Governor's Office, Guest Columnist, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Politicians, Revenue, Taxes, Transparency on February 23, 2013| 20 Comments »

Guest Column
By STEPHEN WINHAM

The long-awaited Jindal administration proposal to balance the Fiscal Year 2013-2014 budget was released yesterday (February 22). The most surprising thing about it was its almost complete lack of surprises. Once again, we were presented with a budget that uses one-time money, contingencies, and outright conjecture, along with increased college tuition, to create the illusion of a balanced budget that does little or no harm.

Perhaps the most surprising and indefensible part of the presentation was revealed in Melinda Deslatte’s AP wire story late yesterday. Deslatte reported that commissioner of administration Kristy Nichols defended the use of patchwork funding in the budget on the grounds that not doing so would result in “needless reductions to critical services.” Think long and hard about what that means.

The governor is happy to tout his refusal to increase state taxes. He is also happy to talk about his successes in reducing the size of government and refusal of additional federal support. He is very direct, if not necessarily consistent, when it comes to holding the line on these things. Although there is no second half to his current plan to eliminate income and franchise taxes, he assures us that, if he actually ever presents a proposal for the other side of the equation, it will be income neutral.

If Nichols’ testimony is to be taken at face value, we can only assume it is not possible to maintain critical services with our current level of recurring revenue. So far, the governor’s approach to reducing state government has been to gradually strangle it through continued submission of unrealistic budgets intended to give the impression everything is okay. The legislators adopt these proposals and congratulate themselves on another successful year.

In reality, everything is not okay. The governor knows it. Ms. Nichols knows it. The legislators interested enough to pay attention know it. As long as projected revenues from reliable, stable sources do not equal projected necessary expenditures, things will NEVER be okay. Governor Jindal has not submitted, nor has the legislature adopted, such a budget during his entire administration. This is proven by the mid-year cuts that are always necessary in adopted yearly budgets and the never-ending projections of deep holes for every future year.

Governor Jindal has been quoted repeatedly in the national press saying we all have to learn to live within our means. If he really believes this, why does he not present budgets that allow the state of Louisiana to do so? I think Ms. Nichols has made the answer quite clear – because we simply cannot live the way we want to within our present means. Presenting a truly balanced budget would result in an outcry from even the staunchest fiscal conservatives who would immediately begin to cry, “Why don’t you cut the fat, not the meat?” They would never accept there isn’t enough fat left to leave the meat alone.

A group of legislative “Fiscal Hawks” [a term coined by respected blogger C. B. Forgotston] has attempted to solve the perennial problem of unbalanced budgets by forcing the governor and the legislature to simply comply with the clear spirit of the state’s existing constitution and statutes as they apply to the budget.

Regardless of how complicated some might attempt to make these laws, their intent is plain common sense: we should do our best to project recurring revenues and adopt a budget that balances expenditures with them. If one-time revenues are used, they should only be used for clearly one-time expenses because doing otherwise automatically creates holes in future budgets. We shouldn’t budget on contingencies and conjecture because if the revenues fail to come in we will have significant trouble paying for or cutting the services they were supposed to fund.

Could anything be simpler or make more sense? If the governor and the legislature know we cannot live within our means why don’t they do something as simple as following the intent of existing law? The governor doesn’t propose budgets doing so because, like Ms. Nichols, he knows it is impossible without making unpopular cuts to essential services. Cutting taxes is popular. Cutting needed services, or raising taxes, is not.

The legislature doesn’t demand we live within our means for the same reason and also because of their collective belief that their constituents are only interested in the extent to which they bring home the bacon. Legislators believe not bringing home the bacon equals not getting re-elected. Although they already have a history of funding local services to the detriment of state programs in the past, we have now reached a critical stage.

If essential state services are cut at the same time purely local projects are funded, there might actually be a backlash for individual legislators. They might learn that their constituents benefit from the critical state services to which Ms. Nichols refers and actually care about the future of the state in which they live as much as their local neighborhoods.

Why can’t our state’s leaders just be honest about this and do the right thing? Understanding and dealing effectively with the budget dilemma requires a level of knowledge that can only be gained through fairly intimate involvement with, and knowledge of, the state’s budget and fiscal status. It is unreasonable to expect individual citizens to educate themselves at the detailed level necessary to make the right decisions about how to fix things even if they could. When we elect our governor and legislators, we do so with the reasonable expectation that they can and will take care of these things in our behalf.

It is certainly easy to understand why it is difficult to make hard cuts when cash is, or even may be, available to avoid them. But willfully allowing gross fiscal instability to continue indefinitely is a violation of the public trust. It serves no one well and doesn’t even allow the ability to isolate inefficiencies and make rational cuts in spending where they actually need to be made.

Only by facing reality can our state’s leaders make the necessary changes to move us forward. The administration has admitted the current gap cannot be closed by cuts alone. We should support those legislators and other elected officials who have the courage and conviction to make responsible decisions about our future even if they include additional taxes.

(Stephen Winham is the retired Louisiana State Budget Director)

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Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, BESE, Contract, Contracts, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Privatization, Public Records, Teague on February 22, 2013| 6 Comments »

“I have prepared a bill calling for a constitutional amendment making the Louisiana Superintendent of Education elected and not appointed. It will be difficult to pass, but the people should decide who their superintendent is—not the Governor.”

—State Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe), in an email Thursday to LouisianaVoice as a result of LouisianaVoice story about plan to provide personal student information to a computer bank controlled by News Corp., owned by Rupert Murdoch.

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