Hanging Chad
I know that people always get upset, no matter how many times I issue this disclaimer, when I use a blog post or tweet from a new corps member to illustrate some of the problems with the TFA ‘mindset’ training. These are never intended to be personal attacks. I just like to do them as a way of helping people, particularly the new CMs, understand the issues in a highly relevant way. As a TFA alum who has many TFA alum friends, I know that CMs are generally good people. I don’t think there are very many who are just doing it to put on their resume. So my critiques are of the way that TFA takes these good people and, in a sense, brainwashes them by feeding them the reform ‘Kool Aid’ and by shielding them from critical commentary.
I’ve recently been made aware of a new 2013 CM named Chad and who goes by the twitter handle @ChadForAmerica. Again, if Chad reads this, I want to be clear that I don’t fault him for what he has been writing. TFA corps members, despite supposedly having been chosen for their leadership potential, are very docile and even gullible. They seem to trust TFA blindly and are not able to even consider alternative points of view.
One of Chad’s first tweets is a good example of this:
Yes, I understand that this is his ‘street’ way of saying that he is going to accomplish transformational change, but when you really get into the subtext, intentional or not, this is quite disturbing. Has TFA encouraged him to think that inner city kids are filled with feces and that regular non-TFA teachers have been content with this while only TFA teachers have the ability to extract it from them? Again, I am not attacking Chad, as I know commenters are sure to blame