TFA CEO Announces Exit As Recruitment Falls Below 2007 Numbers
On January 29, 2024, Teach for America (TFA) announced that its current CEO, Elisa Villanueva Beard, will resign from her post in 2025:
After 25 years of service to Teach for America (TFA), chief executive officer Elisa Villanueva Beard announced that she has decided to step down as CEO in 2025. Villanueva Beard will continue to serve as CEO for the next 18-24 months until a successor is chosen.
Interestingly, the announcement also included the dress-loss-as-a-win “clear sign of impact” that “This school year, over 2,200 new Teach For America teachers entered classrooms across rural and urban America.”
The truth is, 2,200 recruits is not much higher than the TFA “15-year low” of roughly 2,000 recruits as reported in Chalkbeat in March 2022. In fact, TFA recruitment peaked in 2013 and has been in general decline for the past decade, with the “2,200 new teachers” in 2024 notably below the 2, 900 recruits even 17 years ago, in 2007:
In 2013, Villanueva Beard became co-CEO of TFA along with Matt Kramer. Kramer resigned as TFA co-CEO in 2015, leaving Villanueva Beard as sole CEO.
In 2015, recruitment was just over 4,000, down from 5,300 in 2014, which was down from almost 6,000 in 2013….
Under Villanueva Beard, TFA’s annual recruitment had never again breached 4,000. The closest it came was almost 3,700 in 2018.
Billing themselves as “teachers” or “educators” based upon a fleeting couple of years of K12 classroom experience, TFA alumni have been responsible for promoting corporate education reform (and promoting TFA itself) for decades. They may, for example, climb the TFA ladder for a while until they are politically placed in positions of influence over education policy and finances, including as local or state superintendents or as advisors to politicians or as politicians themselves.
One market-based, education reform darling is the charter school. As the June 2019 ProPublica notes, TFA is an established promoter of charter schools, which often lack public accountability for how they spend taxpayer money, among other issues:
When the Walton Family Foundation announced in 2013 that it was donating $20 million to Teach For America to recruit and train nearly 4,000 teachers for low-income schools, its press release did not reveal the unusual terms for the grant.
Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the foundation, a staunch supporter of school choice and Teach For America’s largest private funder, was paying $4,000 for every teacher placed in a traditional public school — and $6,000 for every one placed in a charter school. The two-year grant was directed at nine cities where charter schools were sprouting up, including New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee; and Los Angeles.
The gift’s purpose was far removed from Teach For America’s original mission of alleviating teacher shortages in traditional public schools. It was intended to “generate a longer-term leadership pipeline that advances the education movement, providing a source of talent for policy, advocacy and politics, as well as quality schools and new entrepreneurial ventures,” according to internal grant documents. …
Another major donor to both Teach For America and charter schools is the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, created by the founders of The Gap. In 2009, the fund gave $10 million over five years “to continue Teach For America’s role as a pipeline of teachers and leaders in the charter school movement,” according to an internal agreement.
In 1994, two Teach For America alumni founded the Knowledge is Power Program, now one of the nation’s largest charter school networks. As chief executive of the KIPP Foundation, Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, has overseen the network’s expansion.
As of 2012, a third of KIPP’s teachers were Teach For America corps members and alumni. KIPP did not provide more recent figures. “You look at the percentage of the principals and teachers at KIPP and it’s clear that it’s a pipeline,” Kopp said.
As school superintendents and state education directors, TFA alumni have pushed to expand charters. In 2011, former corps member John White became superintendent of the state-run Recovery School District, which oversaw most of New Orleans’ schools. He’s now the state superintendent of education. Over the same period, charter schools in the city and across the state have proliferated. The last traditional public schools in New Orleans are set to close or begin a transition to charter control by the end of the year, and by 2022, all of the city’s schools will be charters.
Cami Anderson, a Teach For America alum and former employee, was a key adviser to Cory Booker in his unsuccessful 2002 campaign for mayor of Newark, New Jersey. In 2011, when Booker was mayor, she became Newark’s superintendent of schools. She reorganized the district, which led to mass layoffs of public school teachers and an increase in charter enrollment.
Under Teach For America alum Kevin Huffman, who served as Tennessee commissioner of education from 2011 to 2015, the number of charter schools there doubled. The state’s current commissioner, Penny Schwinn, was also a TFA corps member. In Washington, D.C., two charter-friendly Teach For America alumni have led the district over the past decade: Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson.
Eric Guckian, a former Teach For America corps member, headed the organization’s North Carolina chapter, and he later pushed for more charter schools as a senior adviser for education to the state’s governor. He said propelling TFA alumni into positions of power was always the plan.
TFA is a powerful education reform organization. With almost $500M in total assets in 2022, TFA has networked for decades to keep the money rolling in.
However, TFA’s weakness is that it is dependent upon multiple (and increasing) thousands of recruits volunteering year after year to spend two years teaching in K12 classrooms despite overwhelmingly graduating with four-year degrees in majors outside of K12 education.
That business model is just not holding up– certainly not well enough to support numerous TFA officers drawing annual compensation of $250K to $500K. Here’s a sampling of that fat that needs (apparently even more) trimming, from 2022, complements of ProPublica. Note the exits of several of the six-figure folks and how much compensation many garnered without even working close to 12 months. (The TFA tax year here is from 06/01/21 to 05/31/22):
In January 2023, Chalkbeat reported that TFA planned to cut its staff by roughly 25 percent come June 2023. In 2016, TFA cut its staff by 15 percent. In 2016, Villanueva Beard said that the layoffs would enable TFA to be “leaner and more nimble.”
What has not been cut over the years– what has not become “leaner and more nimble”– is Villanueva Beard’s own salary– which continued to increase despite the trend of falling recruitment:
- 2022: $492, 586 (plus $40, 928 in “other” compensation)
- 2021: $485,291 (plus $40,490 in “other” compensation)
- 2020: $478,737 (plus $39,929 in “other” compensation)
- 2019: $465,477 (plus $38,699 in “other” compensation)
- 2018: $451,807 (plus $42,029 in “other” compensation)
- 2017: $421,650 (plus $41,180 in “other” compensation)
- 2016: $392,529 (plus $36,957 in “other” compensation)
- 2015: $373,146 (plus $28,990 in “other” compensation)
- 2014: $342,134 (plus $27,116 in “other” compensation)
- 2013: $276,725 in total compensation
Here’s some more top-exec plum: In 2013, 2014, and 2015, co-CEO Matt Kramer was drawing roughly as much or more than Villanueva Beard. Also, in 2013, TFA founder Wendy Kopp was paid $447,405 in total compensation, and that for being “CEO until 02/28/13” (tax year: 10/01/12 to 05/31/13) and continuing as board chair.
So, nonprofit TFA is willing to pay its CEOs fantastic (and increasing) salaries year after year, not only in the face of continued decline in recruitment but also despite experiencing its expenses exceeding its revenue in eight of the last ten years (rounded to millions; from Propublica):
- 2013: Expenses: $189M; Revenue: $196M; Net Income: $7M
- 2014: Expenses: $357M; Revenue: $331M; Net Income: -$26M
- 2015: Expenses: $376M; Revenue: $300M; Net Income: -$75M
- 2016: Expenses: $328M; Revenue: $303M; Net Income: -$25M
- 2017: Expenses: $287M; Revenue: $273M; Net Income: -$14M
- 2018: Expenses: $284M; Revenue: $264M; Net Income: -$20M
- 2019: Expenses: $288M; Revenue: $324M; Net Income: $36M
- 2020: Expenses: $289M; Revenue: $274M; Net Income: -$15M
- 2021: Expenses: $259M; Revenue: $252M; Net Income: -$6M
- 2022: Expenses: $270M; Revenue: $221M; Net Income: -$49M
Spending more than one takes in means dipping into savings, which even for TFA with its hundreds of millions in total assets, cannot go on forever. However, the bigger question for TFA is how to keep the donor money flowing when it cannot seem to do the same with its annual recruits.
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deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog 
I first encounters several seemingly well-meaning TFA recruits, shortly after its founding, when I was the Science Coordinator for CSD 16 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. They were bright and energetic but way out of their element and ill prepared to deal with or have a sense of identification with kids’ struggles in extraordinarily difficult times. The TFA concept recruit the brightest for a while concept was flawed, condescending, and elitist at it founding. And then it got way worse.