Is @TeachForAmerica pimping poverty?
Few would argue that educational inequity is of grave national and international concern. Much less widely understood is how educational inequity is tied to societal inequity, and then, following that, how to alter these structures, particularly in times of widening gaps between the wealthy, and well, everyone else. Teach for America has an explicitly articulated goal and theory of change (Tuck, 2009) for transforming education, in the video above and many other freely available sources. This explicitness allows the thousands affected by this fast-track teacher training program to engage with what the approach affords and what it obscures.
Through its own website and pro forma recruitment letters, Teach for America “is working to end educational inequity by recruiting outstanding college graduates, from all majors, to teach for two years in low-income communities.” TFA also frequently cites a statistic that only one in ten children growing up in poverty will graduate from college.
TFA is both right and wrong. Poverty and the growing chasm between the wealthy and the rest of the population is intricately connected to educational outcomes. In fact, statistically speaking, the best predictor of educational attainment has long been and unfortunately remains, not motivation, individual ability, or even grit, but socioeconomic status and the education level of students’ parents, not their teachers. In other words, as much as it may be abrasive to national discourses that position individual effort as pivotal to success, trends in educational Is @TeachForAmerica pimping poverty? | Cloaking Inequity: