CURMUDGUCATION: Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching

CURMUDGUCATION: Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching

Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching

Teach for America has always been a work in progress, an evolving enterprise in search of a reason to keep existing. Once upon a time it was all about teaching and plugging holes in the system. Then it was about supplanting traditional teachers (and trying not to say out loud that they needed to be supplanted because they sucked and the Best and the Brightest had better swoop in like a shining white cavalry to rescue the poor children). And then maybe were about building a resume and getting yourself prepped for your real career (their slogan at one point was literally "change and be changed"). And then, sensitive about that shining white cavalry thing, they decided to be a force for diversity in the teaching force.

Kudzu. 

But I recently was hanging about the TFA website and discovered that more morphing of a sort has occurred, and TFA is now leaning into what has always been one of their missions. It was just never a part of the mission that they expressed so directly.

Here's some copy from their front page:

Teach For America is looking for promising leaders to take on educational inequity.

The Challenge

In America today, the circumstances children are born into predict the opportunities they will have in life. Our education system was not designed to enable all children to realize their potential or achieve their dreams. 

The Opportunity

While no single solution is enough to bring about an equitable and excellent education for all CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching