Teaching Firms of America Professional Preparatory Charter School

Mission:

Teaching Firms of America—Professional Preparatory Charter School (“TFOA”), is an new innovative charter elementary school dedicated to preparing its students to become the future professionals (lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc.) who will lead our global society in the 21st Century. Scheduled to open in Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn in August 2011, TFOA seeks to provide a fun, ‘college-successful’ preparatory elementary school experience to our primary demographic of low-income inner-city youth, where they will be nurtured, challenged and ultimately cultivated into highly intelligent, creative and critically thinking young leaders. We are committed to creating an instructional environment that is student centered, data driven and mastery focused, where every teaching professional holds themselves and each other accountable for the school’s most important outcome: high student achievement.

We believe that in order to accomplish this mission and successfully prepare all of our students to become the future professionals who will lead our global society, we must begin as early as possible to provide them with a world-class education, one with a focus on enabling its students to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to move beyond mere college readiness, to ‘college success’. We believe that ALL students can excel, and thus a school that provides such an education is one that is driven by the highest expectations for students AND teachers, something that demands the provision of extraordinary instructional service offered by highly talented, diligent and powerfully incentivized instructional professionals (teachers). Entering the 21st Century our nation’s economy has seen (heretofore) the top talent (as measured by exceptional academic achievement in higher education), flock to careers in professional service industries characterized by high levels of autonomy, accountability, control and compensation (i.e. law, medicine, consulting, etc.). Therefore, we believe that schools must become educational enterprises that more closely resemble these professional service organizations in how they are structured, organized and managed if schools are to similarly compete for our nation’s top talent.

By attracting, developing and retaining top talent, TFOA will be led by and employ such teaching professionals, those who will use data and a relentless focus on results to do whatever it takes to ensure that our students adopt the important habits of mind essential to success as future professionals in the 21st Century global economy. TFOA will be in a position to provide our students with the world-class education they need to compete in the global economy. The charter school mechanism will provide us the freedom and flexibility to re-engineer the “school” from the ground up as a professional service enterprise, one that offers teachers unprecedented autonomy, control and compensation in exchange for unparalleled accountability and instructional service to produce extraordinary results. With this new and innovative “Teaching Firm” structure, TFOA will forge a professional culture within the school that revolves around using best practices to serve the individual needs of every student, while simultaneously facilitating timely exposure and appropriate instructional connections for students to the ‘practice’ of the major professions (law, medicine, engineering, etc.). By attracting and retaining top teaching talent, TFOA will be in a position to provide our students with the world-class education they need to compete in and lead the global economy in this new and dynamic century.