Rajni Chandrasekhar

Evanston, IL

Rajni commented on the article | about 3 years ago

Teach For America, Awhile: Ivy League Temps and Corporate Missionaries, Part 1

Isn't it amusing that an enterprise originally focused to address teacher shortages has become an impeccably run, branded, and corporate "social" organization? Its branded and supported in the way that it is simply because TFA is an example of a non-profit that applied "good business" practices to its social mission. But did its mission somehow get lost along the way, as apparently TFA has become an agent of neocolonial education development in America?

In asking these questions, both the individuality of the teacher and the "poor student" is stripped away by ardent critics and indoctrinated supporters of Teach for America. TFA is no longer about teachers or students under this framework-- instead poor Black kids in urban America become helpless victims and elite college students that seek their own professional or personal development become ignorant colonizers.

TFA addresses a structural reality in America's poor schools-- a shortage of teachers, especially highly qualified ones. TFA teachers may not substitute the shortage with the best teachers, but the retention rate of a TFA teacher is higher than that of an average starting teacher in the same schools. Simply put, America's best teachers are not regularly found in America's worst schools in the first place. Does TFA highlight that through its mission? Maybe so.

As for whether TFA continues to victimize poor people and further subjugate them with "demeaning" pedagogical practices as with KIPP schools, that's questionable. This post clearly points at a need to question notions of 'responsibility,' either from the government, private, or non-profit sphere. Further, it questions the role of individuals (specifically these ignorant TFA graduates, employees, and founders) outside government systems to innovative in education reform, which is frankly silly. A more thorough analysis of the supposed holisitic failure of KIPP schools and other Charters like it would support your point better. Further, since when did public schooling get it right in the first place? Its very deficiencies are what non-profits, corporate actors, charter schools, regular teachers, education policymakers, social entrepreneurs, individuals, and naive, elitist college students are trying to address in the first place-- and there is a place for all of them in both discussion and action.

There is use for a multi-pronged approach for public education reform in America. Not all TFA corps members are braindead elitists that are just looking for a ticket to Harvard Law School. Not all non-profit actors or government reformers follow foolproof methodology for education reform. It's clear that there is not "one way" to impact or improve the quality in American education today. But a one-dimensional view of Teach for America supposedly representing yet another corporatized, neocolonial project to further subjugate poor people and prop up elites is just as problmatic as the branded TFA stance that argues that every teacher they train for five weeks will profoundly change the face of education inequity in America today.