The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From ‘You’ll Be Making a Difference’ to ‘You’re Making Excuses’
By Jessica Millen, who graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2013. She was a 2013 Teach For America (TFA) corps member in New Orleans, where she taught third grade. She currently works as a preschool teacher in South Bend, Indiana
Editor’s note: In the decade and a half of its existence, Teach For America has trained upwards of 50,000 individuals to enter classrooms nationwide and “make a difference” in the lives of children — usually those living in poverty. But the question of how prepared these individuals are to deal with the realities faced by the children they teach and meet their educational needs has long been in question.
In the following excerpt, taken from an essay in the newly published book, Teach For America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out, one former TFA corps member shares her account of her time with the organization, alleging that TFA both “preyed on [her] naïveté of the lived realities of urban schooling” and “exploited [her] desire to ‘make a difference.'” Her disillusionment with the organization and its educational philosophy grew so deep, in fact, that she resigned after just 6 months.
The Bait
On the urging of a friend and campus recruiter, I applied to join TFA in October of my senior year at the University of Notre Dame. After a multipart interview process, I was accepted into the program’s Greater New Orleans region. Soon afterwards, TFA began to effectively use social networks to bolster my desire to join. Former classmates and undergraduate campus recruiters reached out and stressed how wonderful it was that I had gotten into such a selective organization. My interviewer called to congratulate me on a job well done. After being bombarded with so many congratulations, I couldn’t help but feel proud that I had passed through such a selective hiring process.
The official TFA recruiter on my campus held events for accepted corps members after each hiring deadline, offering free drinks and appetizers at an on-campus restaurant. I found it strange how much money TFA, a nonprofit organization, spent on us. We wore name tags, ate food, and discussed our excitement about the upcoming school year. Our recruiter, like the other TFA corps members and staff who had reached out to me, stressed the “prestige” of the program and how much TFA would help us in the future. He himself was a former TFA corps member who taught for 3 years before joining the recruiting arm of the organization. I found his enthusiasm for TFA contagious as he pointed out TFA’s connections with graduate schools and the numerous opportunities that would be afforded to us post-TFA.
At the time, I was impressed by how many corps members were still involved in public education. According to TFA, more than 775 alumni were in school leadership positions at schools across the country (Teach For America, 2012a). I was glad to hear that TFA wasn’t always just used as a stepping stone to more lucrative careers; information on the TFA website boasted that as of August 2013, 78% of alumni from the Greater New Orleans region were still in education (Teach For America, 2012b). I didn’t bother to look up the evidence behind TFA’s claims. I trusted that the information from this professional organization that seemed to care so much about children was ethically collected, compiled, and reported. I now know that the organization’s assertion that “Teach For America corps members help their students achieve academic gains equal to or larger than teachers from other preparation programs, according to the most recent and rigorous studies on teacher effectiveness” (Teach For America, 2012c) is, at best, extremely misleading. Reviews of the research cited by TFA to back its claims of corps member effectiveness ultimately reveal a less favorable picture; the majority of studies listed by TFA are not peer-reviewed, are problematic, and/or produced mixed results (Kovacs & Slate-Young, 2013; Vasquez Heilig & Jez, 2014).
But taking TFA’s claims of effectiveness at face value, I continued to be wooed by the organization. Besides the free events hosted by the campus recruiter, TFA offered additional financial incentives to make the bait even sweeter. I remember gushing to my parents that I would not only receive a full teacher’s salary, but also get funding to cover the transitional costs of moving and living during the summer before I began teaching. As an indebted college student, it seemed that, on top of using my skills and education to serve in public education, I was making a solid financial decision in joining TFA. Such tantalizing benefits convinced me that not only was I making a strong move for my future, but I would also be “making a difference” in the lives of low-income and minority students. As a young, well-educated, idealistic student, I took the bait—hook, line and sinker.
The “Training”
After a 7-hour drive to TFA’s summer training Institute in Atlanta, I was excited to begin. Although I had been warned that Institute could be an overwhelming experience, the intensity of our schedule was still surprising. Breakfast at 5:30 am, followed by a full day at our school sites, a quick dinner, additional training sessions in the The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From 'You’ll Be Making a Difference' to 'You’re Making Excuses' | naked capitalism: