Teach for America: Lies, Damned Lies, and Special Contracts
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this past weekend, Teach For America (TFA) marked a milestone. Over the past 25 years, the organization has not only expanded, but also shifted their mission and approach. With seemingly good, albeit naive and arrogant, intentions, TFA originated as a solution to the national teacher shortage by recruiting college graduates from "elite universities" to serve as supplemental faculty in hard to staff districts. Founder Wendy Kopp claimed that TFA "would bill itself as an emergency response to a shortage of experienced, qualified teachers and would therefore not be telling the nation that its inexperienced members were preferable to, or as qualified as, experienced teachers." Fully departing from that description, TFA now claims that their corps members are superior to traditionally trained teachers and the organization has effectively changed its mission to "enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence."
Over the last quarter-century, TFA has been taken to task, for example, for their;inadequate training, demographics of corps members, connection to charter schools and corporate philanthropists, development of leaders with a market-oriented "brand" of education reform, attempts to undercut unions, and their generalarrogance and hubris in ignoring those critiques.
Among these critiques, there has been much anecdotal evidence that TFA displaces other, more qualified teachers. TFA vehemently refutes this, claiming on their website that;
Corps members do not have special contracts with school districts. They apply for open jobs, and they go through the same interview and hiring process as any candidate. Our approach is to bring the best possible people into the field, but no one is obligated to hire our teachers.
Until now, this issue has been an anecdotal back-and-forth and had not been Teach for America: Lies, Damned Lies, and Special Contracts:
