The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From 'You’ll Be Making a Difference' to 'You’re Making Excuses'
Idealistic young people are lured by TFA's promises. But what happens once they're placed in classrooms has left some alums questioning the organization's approach.
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 The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From 'You’ll Be Making a Difference' to 'You’re Making Excuses' | Alternet:
