For the
Old Mole Variety Hour January 12, 2015 (
audio here)
It has come to my attention that not everyone has heard the criticisms
of Teach for America that have been raised in recent years. Since the
end of this month marks one of their due dates for applications, I want
to take this opportunity to advise those considering applying for the
program, or
considering writing recommendation letters
for those who are applying, to think carefully about these critiques,
which argue that the program is bad for those who teach in it, bad for
the students they teach, and, most persuasively to my mind, bad for
public education in the United States.
Founded twenty-five years ago with the stated aim of recruiting recent
graduates of elite colleges to serve as "lightly trained" teachers in
difficult districts that were, at the time, facing teacher shortages,
Teach for America has received lots of positive press--and has
worked hard to maintain its positive image, despite increasing criticism.
Much of the criticism comes from former TfA recruits. "Corps members," as they are called, are given
too little training and too little support:
"They get just five short weeks of training before classroom placement,
as opposed to the years of training for professional teachers,
including a term of up to one year working in the classroom under the
supervision of an experienced teacher."
Moreover, not only is the training brief, the limited classroom time
included in that training is generally under very different
circumstances than those they will face in the schools where they are
placed--involving not only different student-teacher ratios but often
different age groups and sometimes different subject areas.
As one former TfA teacher put it,
"Training was like leading us to the top of a cliff before we had to
jump off into the reality of our own classrooms. . . . the mountain was
high and the fall was hard."
In addition to the lack of adequate preparation, TfA participants have complained of
lack of focused support, isolation, shame,
guilt, and burnout.
While nearly half of all teachers leave the classroom after five years, for folks
in TfA the figure is over eighty percent. Even the
Onion has recognized the burnout problem, back in 2005 running a story titled, "
Teach For America Chews Up, Spits Out Another Ethnic-Studies Major."
The Daily Dot notes
that many "TFA Corps members are white men coming from privileged
backgrounds . . . giving TFA a whiff of the White Savior." This does
seem to be one of the few criticisms the organization has taken on
board, and more recent recruits are increasingly of diverse ethnicities.
But as Jodi Melamed has argued, "neoliberal multiculturalism"
sutures official anti-racism to state policy in a manner that hinders
the calling into question of global capitalism, it produces new
privileged and stigmatized forms of humanity, and it deploys a normative
cultural model of race . . . as a discourse to justify inequality for
some as fair or natural. (Social Text 89, Vol. 24, No. 4, Winter 2006, 14)
Or, in other words, having a Black president makes it that much easier
to keep incarcerating inordinate numbers of poor, mostly black and brown
people, and killing black, brown, and disabled bodies.
But the school-to-prison pipeline is a slightly different topic.
Anyway, Teach for America corps members have increasingly organized resistance--holding
a summit at the 2013 Free Minds/Free People education conference, and starting the
twitter hashtag #ResistTFA. There are movements organized by
United Students Against Sweatshops and
Students United for Public Education, as well as individual testimonies by TFA veterans, with titles like,
Why I Did TFA and Why You [Should Not] ; and
"How Interning for TFA convinced me of its injustice"; and
McTeaching with Teach for America and
This former TFA Corps Member Thinks you should join City Year Instead; and
I Quit Teach for America; and
so on.
Their recruitment has fallen off so much that they are
closing their New York City training center.
On the other hand, if you're interested in resume-building and
connections with the rich and powerful, TfA can be a useful stepping
stone, offering prestige and access to elite patronage networks.
TfA alumni include former Chancellor of Washington, D.C. public schools
Michelle Rhee, LAUSD Board member Steve Zimmer, and KIPP charter school
founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin. By 2011, there were
56 TFA alums in public office:
on school boards, on school and neighborhood councils or other local
boards, as well as two state senators, a constable, a judge, and a
justice of the peace. By last year the number was over 70, including
two assistants to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as education
policy advisers and associates in the offices of Senators Harry Reid
and Al Franken and Representative George Miller.
Whether those resume-building years were good for the students in their classes is a different question. (The
Onion has covered that, too, with an opinion piece titled
Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher?)
Research suggests that TFA participants do about as well as other
comparably trained and experienced teachers. But that's a pretty low
bar.
In fairness, those ratings seem to be at least partly based on
value-added measures of student success on standardized tests, which are themselves
a poor measure of real learning.
But, Julian Vasquez Heilig, co-author of
two of the
peer-reviewed studies of TFA, is convinced enough of the problems with the program that much of his own blog,
Cloaking Inequity, is devoted to debunking the TfA brand; and he's described the program as
a glorified temp agency.
Moreover, the pedagogical model favored by TFA, like that in KIPP schools, tends toward
what one alumna describes as "chanting, rote, and in general the sort
of bunch o’ facts education that none of its wealthy backers and
cheerleaders would EVER accept for themselves or their children".
Andrew Hartman in Jacobin
describes it as a program of perpetual "surveillance" and "Taylorist
institutionalization" designed to adjust "poor children to the regime
otherwise known as the American meritocracy." What TFA calls its
Academic Impact Model
"leaves no space for whether some nights a student goes hungry, whether
she’s experienced the trauma of a death in the family or a natural
disaster."
And that helps to explain what all those TFA alumni are doing in public
office. Like the organization's paid lobbyists, they are rationalizing
inequality, arguing for privatizing public education, for increasing
standardized testing, and for union busting.
The increasing emphasis on high-stakes testing
has led to a number of cheating scandals:
with increasing frequency, student scores on standardized exams are
tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations, upon which rewards
and punishments are meted out. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy — the
brainchild of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of
Chicago Public Schools — further codifies high-stakes testing by
allocating scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively
implementing these so-called accountability measures. The multi-billion
dollar testing industry — dominated by a few large corporations that
specialize in the making and scoring of standardized tests — has become
an entrenched interest, a powerful component of a growing
education-industrial complex.
Cheating has now been confirmed not only in Atlanta, but also in New
York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Dayton, and Memphis, education reform cities
all. Rhee’s DC “miracle” has also been clouded by suspicion: impossibly
high wrong-to-right erasure rates indicate that several of Rhee’s “blue
ribbon” schools might have cheated their way to higher test scores. Such
accusations are nothing new to Rhee. The legend of how she transformed
her Baltimore students — a fable resembling the Hollywood drama Stand
and Deliver, based on East Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante’s
work in helping several of his underprivileged students pass the
Advanced Placement Calculus exam — has been called into question by
investigative reports that suggest fraud.
As George Joseph puts it in the Nation
For decades, sociological research has shown that
anti-poverty measures,
not energetic young college students, are the driving factors in
improved education outcomes. Yet for over twenty years TFA’s
organizational model has been based upon the idea that a college
student, fresh from a five-week summer camp, could swoop into an poor,
overcrowded classroom and inspire her students to overcome all barriers
of structural inequality. Thus, the fundamental premise of Teach For
America elides this need for wealth redistribution, perhaps explaining
TFA’s massive corporate donor appeal.
argues that in many cities the recent "epidemic of school closings, teacher firings, and union busting"
has been directly connected to Teach for America. For instance: in
Chicago, at the same time that the budget for public education was being
slashed and teachers were being laid off, the Board of Education voted
to increase its payment to TFA from $600,000 to nearly 1.6 million and
to add up to 325 new TFA recruits to Chicago Public Schools classrooms,
in addition to 270 second year ‘teacher interns.’ ” Similarly in New
Orleans, directly after Hurricane Katrina when most of the voting
population was displaced, Teach for America was found to have pushed
through legislation that would bankrupt public education and fire
teachers. . . .
The
Daily Dot notes that TFA's lobbying crowds out funding for other groups, like
Grow Your Own Teachers,
which encourage people of color to get involved in teaching and remain
active in their communities as educators.... Writing for
The American Prospect, James Cersonsky highlights the
differential treatment of TFA and Grow Your Own: “In Chicago, for
example, TFA's multiyear contract is granted by the city's
Non-Competitive Procurement Review Committee rather than through a
request-for-proposal process.
By contrast, Grow Your Own Teachers, which helps parents of color
become certified to teach in their communities, mobilizes in Springfield
every year for state funds—which in 2013 were decreased 60 percent as
part of $128 million in across-the-board higher-education cuts. Grow
Your Own has also suffered because of TFA’s clout. In 2010, TFA—Chicago
director Josh Anderson pushed Illinois’s P-20 Council, an advisory body
on education policy, to raise the passing score for the state's teacher
certification test; as a result, fewer blacks and Latinos, who make up
most of Grow Your Own's constituency, have passed.”
As
Bruce Dixon points out in Black Agenda Report,
Teach For America recruits...
replace experienced, mostly black teachers
in inner city schools. Although TFA used to claim it sends its recruits
to “underserved” schools where experienced teachers don't want to go,
the facts are that underprepared TFA temps have replaced tens of
thousands of experienced teachers in Newark, Chicago, St. Louis, and
dozens of other cities around the country. Teach For America contends
that inner-city public schools are NOT underfunded, that chronic
poverty, joblessness, homelessness and short staffing are merely
“excuses” used to protect the "bad teachers" which its mostly white
temps are replacing. ...
Chicago just shut down
50 public schools, and
Philly 40 public schools,
nearly all in black neighborhoods. Many thousands of black people are
in the streets in these and other cities fighting for the right to a
quality public education, and the very survival of the communities
around them.
After Hurricane Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board and the Louisiana Department of Education
illegally fired 7,500,
mostly black, teachers across Louisiana, a move which opened the floodgates to hundreds of TFA recruits, whose numbers
quadrupled in the New Orleans
region post-Katrina. After a TFA alum--veteran of only three years in
the classroom--was appointed to head the New Orleans Recovery School
District, he closed
every single traditional public school, making it the nation’s first all-charter school district.
Similarly, the TfA alum superintending Newark, NJ schools has pushed
to make the district 40 percent charter school, a plan that sparked controversy because it would disproportionately close schools in black neighborhoods and
replace 700 veteran teachers with 370 TFA recruits, funded by the Walton Family Foundation.
Dixon describes TFA as a
Students Against Sweatshops activists point out
that with ties to Exxon Mobil and JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and
Walmart, companies that "gut wages and benefits for parents and
destabilize communities," TFA is actually "adding to the impoverishment
that contributes to students’ difficulties in the classroom."
I realize that in difficult economic times, joining TFA might look like a
way to get a stable job. But even if that were true, I would encourage
anyone considering that route to think as carefully about it as they
would about that other apparent route to steady employment, joining the
military.
Whatever good TFA might once have done, whatever good individual participants may still manage to do, the organization
and its offshoots at this point are clearly part of the problem.
(More) Critiques of TFA:
Rethinking Schools
Popular Resistance
At the Chalkface
Public School Shakedown (scroll down for more links)
The Guardian
Al-Jazeera
Diane Ravitch
Save Our Schools
Gary Rubenstein
Reconsidering Teach for America
In These Times
Larry Ferlazzo (compilation)
Daily Dot
American Prospect
The Nation Magazine
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