From 1990 until 2013, the CEO of TFA was the founder, Wendy Kopp. Under her leadership the program grew from a small organization that struggled to make payroll into a powerful player in the education world. When Wendy left in 2013, Teach For America was at an all time high in popularity. They even had about 5 TFA alumni serving as state commissioners. When she left, there was no reason to believe that TFA would not continue to ascend.

In 2013 TFA named two co-CEO’s, one was a TFA alum named Elisa Villanueva-Beard and the other was never a teacher at all, Matt Kramer. I wrote a few posts about them back in the day and even had an uncomfortable meeting with them, and others, during their ‘listening tour.’ By 2015, Matt Kramer stepped down and for the past ten years the sole TFA CEO was Elisa Villanueva-Beard (known as EVB sometimes).

In the twelve years since Wendy left, TFA has plummeted in its popularity. I believe they still raise a lot of money, their budget, I believe, is something like $300 million a year. The CEO makes about $500k. But TFA has struggled to find a way to regain the magic it once had. They started having a lot of trouble recruiting. Then they laid off many of the employees. And in the world of education, most of those TFA alum state education commissioners have resigned. Most of those seem to have disappeared, though if you search enough you can find that they have gotten good jobs at different foundations and things like that.

I do not think that it is really EVB’s fault that TFA now resembles what happened to Pride Rock in The Lion King during Simba’s absence. The reason I don’t really blame her is that I don’t know that she had much power to make big decisions at TFA. I suspect that she did what The Board told her to. Maybe I’m wrong and, in that case, the fall of TFA is her fault.

The reason TFA is struggling so much in recent times is that they don’t have a great sense of what their identity should be in a changing educational landscape. In the beginning (starting in 1990) it was easy — they were sending students from top colleges in the country to teach in states that are suffering teacher shortages. Then, around 1997 some alumni started charter schools and that became a big part of TFA’s identity. They helped staff these charter schools and they also spread the PR that the charter schools were superior to the district schools. A spin off organization called The New Teacher Project was formed, sort of a regional TFA program that would train teachers to teach in a specific state. The head of The New Teacher Project was a Baltimore TFA alum named Michelle Rhee.

Charters continued to propagate as did charter PR. If charter schools are so great and the main difference between charter schools and district schools is that it is easier to fire the non unionized teachers there, then, some started to argue, unions must be the reason that schools are not performing better than they do. In 2003 Michelle Rhee became the first TFA alum to lead a district when she was named the Chancellor of D.C. schools. It is not an exaggeration to say that Michelle Rhee was to education what Donald Trump was to politics.

She was brash and outspoken and often less than truthful. But she had a type of charisma and when the documentary ‘Waiting For Superman’ came out, she was the hero who led the fight against the big bad teachers’ union. When the incumbent mayor lost the D.C. reelection campaign, Rhee resigned and started a nonprofit called StudentsFirst. During Trump’s first term he offered the position of Secretary of Education to Michelle Rhee, I was surprised she did not accept.

Other TFAers followed in her footsteps using the ‘education reform’ playbook that was supported by President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Race To The Top gave grant money to states that promised to open more charter schools and to find ways to evaluate schools and teachers by standardized test scores. The idea that teacher quality can be measured easily by standardized test scores and that giving bonuses to the most effective teachers by this metric and by firing the teachers who are least effective by this metric was driven by a research paper developed by none other than The New Teacher Project (by then, renamed TNTP) with a paper called ‘The Widget Effect’ in 2009.

One of the next state Education leaders was none other than Michelle Rhee’s ex-husband, Kevin Huffman, who was also a TFA alum. He became the commissioner of Tennessee where he shut down the lowest performing schools and replaced them with charter schools and put those into the ASD (Achievement School District). Using the education reform model, the idea was that the schools in the ASD would rise from the bottom 5% to the top 25% in 5 years time. Fifteen years later, the schools that still exist are still in the bottom 5% and the ASD is soon to be terminated as well.

In about 2015 the education reform bubble began to burst. I think the main thing was that charter schools and rock star superintendents were not able to deliver on their promises. They had their chance to show what they could do if given the power, but they ended up just upsetting a lot of families, making teachers miserable, and creating a big mess. In Louisiana, Newark, and anywhere TFA alumni had power, people were losing patience. The TFA superintendents left and for the past few years, at least, districts have invested their money and energy away from charter schools and costly and inaccurate data systems to measure teacher output and have tried to have a more holistic view of what was going on. The oversimplified ‘teachers union ruined schools’ wasn’t going to be enough anymore.

But TFA didn’t seem to get the memo on this. So in every interview you hear from EVB, even now, you get the same reformer talking points. There is an implication that non-TFA teachers are so lazy they cannot even bring themselves to have high expectations for their students. Though it is not direct teacher basing anymore, it is still a more subtle type of teacher bashing. EVB will also quote statistics from the TFA lore like ‘2/3 of TFA alumni are still teaching while 80% are involved in a profession that impacts education or low income communities’ or that ‘research shows that the teacher is the most important in school factor for a child’s education’ or ‘research on TFA shows that TFA teachers are more effective at teaching math and equally effective at teaching reading as non TFA teachers.’ And most of the examples of schools that are demonstrating what can be done are, of course, still charter schools. In this way, the messaging from TFA has not really evolved, they are functioning like it is still 2013.

Sorry for the long intro, but all of this is relevant to understanding the background of the newly named CEO of Teach For America Aneesh Sohoni.

When I saw the press release that Aneesh Sohoni was named the new CEO, I thought, “Who is that?” I hadn’t heard of him before. So I did some research and as I located all the pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle, I was disappointed by the picture that seemed to be emerging. I found at least 7 ‘red flags’ that suggest that Aneesh Sohoni was, and perhaps still is, a direct disciple of the TFA education reform club from the 2010s.

Red Flag #1: He only taught for two years from 2009 to 2011

I know that this is better than not teaching at all, but even Michelle Rhee did three years. EVB also did three years. I just feel like someone who gets out of the classroom as quickly as possible after finishing the TFA two year commitment is a red flag.

Red Flag #2: He went to work for the Department of Education of Tennessee working on teacher evaluation metrics from 2011 to 2013

This was during the heyday of Race To The Top which means that he was hired by Kevin Huffman (ex-husband of Michelle Rhee) and involved in implementing the ideas in ‘The Widget Effect’ (produced by Michelle Rhee’s TNTP program). Though the idea of trying to evaluating teachers is not a bad thing at face value, the methods of doing so-called ‘value-added’ have been shown to be very unreliable. Most states stopped using them after a few years when they realized how inaccurate they were. The Tennessee model he helped implement was brought to court by the union and even though the case was dismissed on a standing issue, I think, the system was eventually dropped anyway. In Aneesh’s defense, at the time, in 2011, this was considered a cutting age game changer in eduction and he was just a young guy in his early 20s.

Red Flag #3: He went to work for TNTP from 2014 to 2016

So then he went to work for the organization that Michelle Rhee started, that produced the influential report ‘The Widget Effect’ that promoted the ‘Waiting For Superman’ myth about how we need a way to fire the bad teachers.

Then, between 2016 and 2024, he did other things that I don’t consider ‘red flags’ so much. He spent five years as the executive director of TFA Chicago, which is not a bad thing necessarily. Chicago dealt with a lot of destructive ed reform, with the closing of 50 schools once. There was also a teacher’s strike in Chicago while he was there, so I tried to see what sorts of public comments Aneesh might have made about some of these conflicts but could not find any.

From 2021 until now he has been the CEO of a non-profit called One Million Degrees which seems like a good program that helps low income students to get into and to persist through college. So for the past 10 years it seems like he’s been doing things that are pretty good. So I was thinking maybe all the ed reform Michelle Rhee disciple stuff might have just been in his past and he has evolved beyond that oversimplified and somewhat destructive ideology.

(potential) Red Flag #4: He won the TFA Peter Jennings award

I know this sounds like a good thing. But you need to know that for the first 8 years of the Peter Jennings award the recipients from 2007 to 2014 were so of the most destructive TFA alumni I can think of. 2007 Michelle Rhee, 2008 Cami Anderson (the embattled chancellor of Newark), 2010 Tim Daly (He was the head of TNTP when the published ‘The Widget Effect’), 2012 Kira Orange Jones (who did a lot of damage in New Orleans), 2014 Kevin Huffman (for causing havoc in Tennessee) and Kaya Henderson (Michelle Rhee’s nicer successor who tried to continue the same policies). Now the good news is that Aneesh got his award more recently, just in 2024 and since 2014 the recipients of the Peter Jennings awards have been more deserving of them so maybe this one is not a red flag.

Red Flag #5: He has been a guest speaker with all the different teacher bashing groups that have popped up over the years. These include Democrats For Education Reform (DFER), Educators For Excellence (E4E), and Leadership For Educational Equity (LEE).

Red Flag #6: As recently as 4 years ago, he was spreading ed reform and TFA propaganda in a public interview

To see what Aneesh is like, I found this interview he did with podcaster Michael Golden. Since I saw no writing from Aneesh I really had no idea what he really values or thinks. Based on just his resume, I wasn’t optimistic but to see him speak for 40 minutes I could get a sense of what he chooses to say or not to say and how he responds to spontaneous questions. Here are the notable moments for me:

5:15 “The biggest thing I took away from being a teacher is that our students are incredible. They will rise to the level of expectations that you put in front of them.” This is something that EVB also says in most of her interviews. I know I might get accused of being a curmudgeon here but while I do agree that teachers should not disrespect their students with expectations that are beneath them, a skilled teacher knows how to set expectations that are just beyond where the student thinks they can meet. So, no, they don’t just rise to whatever level you set. There is no real teacher who believes that. To say that some people underestimate the intelligence of the students is accurate, but if the biggest thing he took away from being a teacher is not true, that’s a problem. It’s also a problem to spread this idea when you are in charge of a teacher training program. Because if you tell someone who never taught before something like this and they assume you are telling them the truth then the new teacher is never going to consider “is this lesson too much for one period” and they will lose the respect of their class. There is a balance between expectations being too low and being too high and the best teachers find that sweet spot.

6:16 “Now when you look at the research and the data it’s actually very straightforward and clear. The teacher is the most impactful person on a young person’s life outside of the family they live with.” So this one is pretty bad. Back in around 2009, Michelle Rhee would always include in her talks a phrase like “The research is clear that the teacher is the largest in school factor impacting a child’s learning.” As misleading as the Rhee saying is, what Aneesh says is much less accurate. The claim that a teacher is the most important ‘in school factor’ is based on some pretty old research that has mostly been debunked. Even if true, it has been estimated that other school factors are very close and that the combination of all the school factors is very small compared to all the other factors that impact a child’s learning. So to so quickly in the interview pull out the sound bite and say something like this really makes me wonder. Is this what he believes from his experience? Is this just what he believes because he has heard people like Michelle Rhee and those who followed her saying it for the past 15 years? And I’m not saying teachers are not important. But I think when you inflate their importance you also implicitly scapegoat them.

6:47 “Raj Chetty” OK so 2010’s ed reformers love Raj Chetty. He did a study that seemed to conclude that teachers whose students got higher test scores went on to earn $50,000 a year more a year or something like that. I’m not going to get into it, but that research is hardly mentioned anymore because it was kind of silly.

9:09 The interviewer said that he was pro union on the teacher’s strikes in Chicago and Aneesh ignores the question and instead answers about the problems of remote learning during COVID-19

17:43 “When you look at Teach For America broadly somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of people start their time with Teach For America thinking this will be something they’ll do for 2 years and then go back to a different plan but if you look at the back end you see that 2/3 remain working in education and 85% remain working either in education or another field or sector that impacts low income students and families” OK, so this 2/3 statistic is something that has been around for at least 15 years. I first wrote about it in 2011 and most recently I wrote about it again in 2019. Basically the statistic is not true because the data collection process was biased. It’s not like they tracked down 60,000 people and counted how many were in education and how many were in careers affecting education. Not only did alumni have to opt-in to the survey but they also self reported whether they considered themselves currently “in education” or “in a career impacting low income communities.” The reason I make a big deal about this is that I wonder if Aneesh knows that he’s spreading lies or if he thinks that these are true. If he knows he’s spreading lies, that’s pretty bad since this is a lie that is so unnecessary. Honestly, even if 25% of TFA alums are still in education, that would be pretty impressive. But to have to say crazy numbers like 2/3 and 85%, I just wonder if he might actually believe those numbers. If he doesn’t realize that he’s spreading lies, I’m going to encourage him to be more skeptical. You’re taking a $500K job where your actions are supposed to help kids learn. In this day of false claims, do you really want to be guilty of spreading them?

I know that some might think I’m making too big a deal over this 2/3 thing but it hits home with me. I very nearly was a first year corps member who didn’t make it through my first year. About 20% of corps members, don’t complete their first year. Those people aren’t even part of the survey. And hardly anyone I know who I did TFA with are still in education. I’d say that out of the 300 people I knew, maybe 30 are still in education, if that many. So saying 2/3 is just crazy to me. It makes TFA seem like it’s a lot more effective at making people like teaching than it really does.

21:40 Repeats the claim that the teacher is the second most important adult in a child’s life outside of their family. I think part of the reason that I cringe when I hear a TFA person say this is that if they really believed that was true, how could they sleep at night knowing that they continue to send new corps members into the classroom with almost no training at all. Ever since the pandemic, TFA has been doing a hybrid institute where they only come to a school setting for practice teaching for something like two weeks. I got a message recently from a corps member who said that the student teaching involved six student teachers working with six students. So TFA is very hypocritical to say, on the on hand, that teachers are nearly as important as parents in their impact on a child’s learning and on the other hand to say that it is not worth investing energy, time, and money into training these new teachers so they can be as effective as possible.

24:40 In response to a bizarre story by the host that he had read that TFA examined their model 10 years ago and decided they were doing things wrong and they made all kinds of changes. I’ve been tracking TFA for 34 years and I have not noticed much improvement in the training and, most recently, the training getting worse. Every teacher will tell you that nothing can substitute the experience you get when you are in front of a class of 30 students and student teaching. That is just not at all what’s happening in training anymore. Aneesh says to this that “One of our core values is learn continuously. It’s been part of our DNA from the beginning. … On learn continuously it means we’re humble … You actually have no choice if you want to really achieve your vision and you mission than to be humble.” I’m glad I wasn’t sipping cranberry juice when I listened to this part. In my 34 years of being involved with TFA, I don’t think that I would ever describe anything they’ve ever done as ‘humble.’ Over the years when I have criticized some of their decisions, especially the decision to not adequately train their teachers, they get very defensive. Sometime I’ve even had to contend with TFA militia, guys on Twitter who rise to the defense of TFA any time they are criticized. Other than someone inside the organization, I don’t think anybody would ever use the word ‘humble’ to describe TFA. That’s why they have hardly improved their model in the past 30 years.

26:16 Says that a Vanderbilt study says that TFA teachers are more effective than teachers from other training programs. He says that he’s proud of the preparation that TFA does. But even if this study is accurate, it does not mean that TFA does an adequate job preparing the teachers. It could be just that they have $300 million to spend on recruitment of people which the other programs don’t have. So if TFA tried to use it’s nearly nonexistent training model on the teachers in training from the other programs and if the other programs got to work with the TFA recruited teachers in training, there would likely be a different result.

28:00 “At one point we had seven state education commissioners who were TFA alum” That’s true but, as I described already, they all resigned and disappeared like grifters. He says it was “incredible” that 7 out of 50 states had TFA alumni in charge, but remember these people were despised by their constituents. Cami Anderson was booed off the stage during a town hall in Newark. Michelle Rhee was embroiled in a possible cheating scandal. Currently I think there is still one in Baltimore and there’s about to be a Trump appointed Deputy Secretary Of Education who is a TFA alum so of course TFA has a reason to celebrate the Trump re-election.

In general, the podcast host often says pro-teacher things really just giving Aneesh an opportunity to agree with him, but he just won’t do it.

29:59 “And we actually think we are making the education system and the perception of the system stronger” Unless he is really deadpan, I don’t think he was trying to be funny here. From 2000 to 2015 teachers were bashed by the reformers who included so many TFAers and TFA also benefited from this type of bashing. Waiting For Superman and Won’t Back Down are two examples of films that supported the basing of teachers. Bill Gates, Republicans, and most Democrats got behind the teacher bashing. And now nobody wants to be teachers anymore, who would have predicted such a thing?

32:15 The host actually brings up Waiting For Superman and how it scapegoated teacher’s unions but how the anti-union sentiment in the country has changed now with families supporting teachers during strikes then from 34:14 to 37:22 After the host explains that he tends to side with the teachers’ union, he asks Aneesh to respond. He says “As an organization and a rep of TFA we don’t take a stance on unions” He calls the unions vs TFA debate ‘bizarre’ because TFA members are often at unionized schools so they are in the union. He also says that he doe not ascribe to the pro-union or anti-union rhetoric. Fine people on both sides, he must be suggesting.

Honestly, how hard is it to say that unions in this country have helped the middle class and that teacher’s unions have protected the rights of a primarily female profession over the years? That unions have made working conditions better for teachers and made the teaching profession a stable choice for a college graduate. But no, he just can’t say that the union is good. It just goes against what he knows he’s not supposed to say as a representative of TFA. At one point he says that you have to distinguish between the things the union want that are part of working conditions and the other things and he wants to focus on which things help kids. This is typical anti-union nonsense, like if I have a union contract that says I can leave at 3:47 PM every day and cannot be made to stay beyond that, that I’m some kind of selfish monster if my supervisor knows not to plan anything mandatory after 3:47 PM. Or if I want to get a raise to match inflation, that’s somehow not really ‘for kids’ but for myself. Well, not all of us are going to be making $500K a year as a CEO for the next 10 or so years so excuse us for wanting a little bit of stability and comfort.

Red Flag #7: He deleted his Twitter account

I know he used to have one because I see him on some Twitter threads I was on. But I don’t see any responses from him so I don’t know if just didn’t say a lot on Twitter or if he did and just scrubbed it all.

I found some remnants of portions of conversations he had, and one involved me. Ironically this was in 2015 after Matt Kramer ‘stepped down’ from being co-CEO of TFA. I suggested that he was probably asked to step down by the board which prompted a flurry of attacks from the TFA watch dogs that used to troll me. For whatever reason, this guy felt the need to add Aneesh to this personal attack tweet so he would see it. I don’t know if he responded to it or not.

Well, there it is. As probably the only person alive who cares enough and knows enough about TFA to write something like this, I’m glad I did it. Whether or not there are any readers who care enough to read it, that I can’t say. I guess it would be great if Aneesh Sohoni himself read it and reflected on some of my points and concerns. If he is as humble as he believes TFA is and striving for continual improvement he will not dismiss me as a guy with a tinfoil hat.

What started with the question “Who is the New TFA CEO?” really is only answered with a first and last name and a lot more questions. We know who he ‘was’ — basically an ed reformer from the Michelle Rhee lineage. We don’t really know who he ‘is’ right now and most importantly, we don’t know who he will be when he takes over in April and beyond.

Questions I would have for him are: Does he believe it is hard to assess whether teachers’ unions are a net positive? Does he understand that sometimes organizations like TFA produce PR that stretches the truth? Soon he will have the ability to find out what the ‘internal’ statistics say. Is a quit rate in some regions of up to 50% acceptable in any way? Is a student teaching experience with 6 teachers with 6 students defensible in any way? Are you willing to be open to the possibility that TFA has been negligent in their training for a lot of years now and it has been disrespectful to the students who have to suffer with these ill prepared teachers, not to mention the mental health of those teachers themselves? So many questions he will have to face.

Or was he picked not to ask the tough questions but to recite the TFA lore and the canned responses like he did throughout that podcast? If the goal is to turn the TFA ship around, I don’t think that more of the same old thing is going to work. I guess only time will tell.

So this will conclude this edition of ‘Who is the new CEO of TFA?’ Presumably Aneesh will be there for at least 10 years which means that for the next CEO I will be at least 65 years old and if I’m still able to write about the ins and outs of TFA this intensely at that age, I hope my children or maybe even my grandchildren take away my internet access.