What Went Wrong With Teach For America
Teach for America is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Twenty-five years may not seem like much, but TFA has changed a great deal since Wendy Kopp first turned her Princeton paper into a real organization, and those changes help explain why some folks are throwing anniversary bouquets but others are throwing less fragrant and attractive projectiles.
What’s the fuss? Why would anyone object to a program to put America’s best and brightest college grads in underserved classrooms? After all—if it’s a good and noble thing to join the Peace Corps straight out of college to go serve the poor and needy on foreign shores, why not direct a similar effort to people in need in our own country?
From the beginning, TFA tapped into the most noble and inspiring images of teaching, the idea of standing in front of a group of young people and really Making a Difference. Who wouldn’t want to make the world a better place, to step into the classrooms that strapped districts couldn’t fill on their own?
But from the first there were misgivings in the education world. TFA was giving just a few weeks of training to its teachers, believing that if TFA recruited A students from the nation’s top schools, they would be naturally equipped to teach poor, urban students. Those of us in teaching raised our eyebrows—what other profession would let recent grads take over professional duties with just five weeks of training? Would my English degree plus five weeks of training make me ready to be a Brain Surgeon for America?
There were other concerns. As Jack Schneider notes in Excellence for All, TFA sold itself as a solution to national problems. Stated an early recruitment letter: “one thing on which business and government leaders from different industries and political parties agree is that the state of the educational system is threatening America’s future.” It was an idea that would echo through many versions of education reform—the nation needs poor people to be educated in ways that will make them more useful to corporate America.
As the program developed, it became evident that for many if not most TFA teachers,
