Teach For America’s soft-power education reform strategy
Is Mississippi’s next big movement taking shape in the classrooms of the Delta?
CLEVELAND, Miss. — Babak Mostaghimi never expected to settle down in the rural Mississippi Delta. A native of Virginia, he graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2006 with a high-paying job offer as a defense contractor at a consulting firm. On a whim, Mostaghimi also applied to Teach For America (TFA), a 24-year-old program that recruits mostly young, successful college graduates to teach in low-income, underperforming schools.
Mostaghimi realized that it might be his only opportunity to work with kids, a longtime passion. He accepted the offer.
Babak Mostaghimi, pictured at Town Hall in Duncan. Mostaghimi works with residents of Duncan through a grassroots coalition organized in hopes of improving education and community health in the region. (Photo by Aubrey Edwards/Next City)
His friends and family were appalled, he said: “They were like, ‘You just turned down that paycheck for a teaching job in rural Mississippi?’” After two years of teaching in the Magnolia State followed by two years of graduate school at Harvard, Mostaghimi returned to the Delta, one of the poorest regions of the country, where access to healthcare, healthy foods and good schools is lacking.
“I realized as a teacher, I could have a great impact, but very temporary impact,” Mostaghimi said. “Because there’s systemic problems … there’s a bigger problem here that needs fixing.”
Mostaghimi, 30, now lives on a modest tree-lined street in the town of Cleveland with his wife and toddler, and works as director of community, family and school engagement for the Jackson-based Center for Education Innovation, a nonprofit that focuses on community engagement and education reform. Part of his job is to listen to the concerns and ideas of residents in Duncan, Shelby, and Alligator, a string of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it towns off Highway 61 in a stretch of lush Delta land between Cleveland and Clarksdale. He’s helped the three communities form a coalition, apply for grants and start neighborhood initiatives to combat issues from health and exercise to littering.
He’s part of a small but growing group of Teach For America alumni in Mississippi who were so influenced by their exposure to the state’s daunting education challenges they’ve decided to stay and try to create broader, systemic change.
Today, the alumni who have stayed number 160 out of the 2,000 young teachers who have cycled through the Mississippi Delta region since TFA began sending teachers to schools thereTeach For America’s soft-power education reform strategy | The Hechinger Report:
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