Peter and Gary Take on Teach for America
Peter and Gary Take on Teach for America
The "disruptor" becomes the defender of the status quo
Teach for America has been around for a long time.
The program places high-achieving college students into difficult teaching assignments after five weeks of high-intensity training.
No, these new teachers don’t have pedagogical training, but they’re smart and determined, so that should be enough.
And sure, stability would go a long way to help address some of the systemic inequities TFA purports to want to address - but that would mean these especially special “teachers” would actually have to stay in their jobs and earn teacher salaries.
Much better to just leave teaching after a couple of years for lucrative education policy jobs paying six-figure salaries. Plus, now they can add “teacher” to their resume and tell stories about their charitable work helping kids in tough circumstances.
Anyway, here’s some of what Gary Rubinstein has to say about TFA’s latest changes:
Thirty-two years ago, pretty much to the day, I started my training with TFA as a member of the second ever cohort. For the next twenty years I was a major TFA supporter and cheerleader. I worked on staff at the institute, I recruited for them, I spoke at various events. But about twelve years ago I attended the 20 year anniversary alumni summit and since then I have been a ‘critic.’
Gary is a career educator AND has been on the inside of TFA.
Basically, he suggests TFA’s training and politics are disconnected from the on-the-ground realities facing schools:
The training is completely out of touch with reality. The other issue I have is that their education politics are also not based in reality, but instead on the movie ‘Waiting For Superman.’ It is pretty frustrating for me to watch an organization that I invested so much of my energy into for so many years fail to live up to their potential.
Rubinstein takes on TFA’s latest change, a “rebranding” that is essentially just a new logo and a lot of explanation about why this is the best new logo ever:
A new logo is about the last thing that TFA needed to change to improve themselves. But that’s kind of the issue. Does TFA want to improve or do they want to just maintain their power and finances without changing anything other than their cosmetic logo? Based on all the decisions I’ve seen them make over the past 32 years, I’m not so optimistic.
Peter Greene also explores the TFA rebrand:
TFA has steadily moved away from "teaching" and toward the creation of an alternate universe of education separate from the public education system. Over time, its cavalier idea that the Right Kind of People can learn to teach in five weeks (and do it better than the so-called professionals) has turned out to be far less damaging than its steady production of clueless amateurs who use their two year vacation in the classroom to slap "former teacher" in their CV as they head off into leadership or edupreneurial roles (ka-ching). Some very fine actual teachers with actual teaching careers have come out of TFA, but I can't think of a single TFA-trained "education leader" who has helped make public schools work better. Nor do they even pretend that teaching is their main focus.
The reality is that TFA, once a potential disruptor of what they saw as an education system that wasn’t working well for all kids, is now just a part of the status quo - a constant churn of education “reformers” who seek to “improve” public education without investing in kids and without addressing the underlying, systemic issues that create disparate outcomes. And, well, even if the schools don’t improve, these short-term teachers turned edu-experts get pretty rich.
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