Teach For America’s Embedded In Black Lives Matter
The Movement Lives in Ferguson: Teach For America, Black Leadership, and Disaster Capitalism
The 501(c)(3) non-profit has indeed come a long way since Wendy Kopp founded it in 1990. In its first year, Teach For America had 500 recruits; by 2013, the organization controlled nearly half-a-billion dollars in assets and employed 11,000 teacher “corps members” in schools across the United States.
Despite mounting evidence that school privatization does more harm than good, in less than three decades TFA has spread their reach to thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia, playing an indispensable role in enabling the proliferation of charter schools — schools run by private businesses with public funding — throughout the country. But it doesn’t stop there. Tracing the genealogy of tax-exempt education reform foundations puts Teach For America at the center of a massive scheme, backed by powerful donors, for corporate takeovers of public schools everywhere — not just in the US, but around the world.
“Join us,” reads the header on TFA’s 25th Anniversary Summit web page, “to reflect on the progress we’ve made over the past 25 years as we step forward together to reach One Day.” (The capitalized “One Day” appears to be a reference to the title of Wendy Kopp’s 2001 memoir about TFA’s origins,One Day, All Children...) Below it, the event description says: “Our 25th Anniversary Summit will bring together thousands from the Teach For America community, all united behind a single goal: in our lifetime, every child will have access to a truly excellent education.”
In the past, TFA relied on political alliances with policy makers, like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and DC’s ousted mayor Adrian Fenty, to seize control of school districts and impose the charter school model. But the long game — what it calls “the second half of the movement” — is to develop its corps members into a leadership class of its own. Kopp explains:
I think the way to understand Teach for America is as a leadership development program. We need political leaders, policy makers, doctors, lawyers, and probably more business leaders than we are producing right now . . . In the long run, we need to build a leadership force of people. We have a whole strategy around not only providing folks with the foundational experience during their two years with us, but also then accelerating their leadership in ways that is strategic for the broader education reform movement.
By developing corps members into leaders committed to its ideology, TFA has disguised its Teach For America’s Embedded In Black Lives Matter | PopularResistance.Org:
