Gareth McNamara
More than a month of term has passed. In these six to seven weeks, we are expected to have learned enough to be able to pass midterm exams for the majority of our courses. Are you feeling prepared? Got it all down? Confident and ready to ace those tests? Don’t be ashamed to say you aren’t. Neither am I, but we’ll power through somehow. They’re only midterms. Even if things take a turn for the worse, we’ll be able to clean up again in time for finals in May.
Six or seven weeks — more than a month — feels like such a short space of time to take in all that we need to get us through midterms. We manage, though, because, in the grand scheme of things, we can bounce back from a bad midterm. But what if we were being asked to do something far bigger than writing a few essays, interpreting some graphs or tables, answering a battery of short answer questions and defining a handful of key terms after only having that short a time to prepare? What if, say, after five weeks of learning, we were being asked to take responsibility for a classroom full of children in one of the most disadvantaged schools in the US for two years? Sound a bit mental? Welcome to Teach for America.
Teach for America (TFA) is the brainchild of Princeton grad Wendy Kopp. Like many things I’ve taken issue with in my columns, the original intent behind TFA’s mission is very admirable and noble: bring enthusiasm and learning to some of the least well-off school districts in the country, enabling students to overcome their disadvantages to education. Who could fault that ambition?
Unfortunately, the brand of idealism that TFA champions is hopelessly blind. It’s blind to the fact that five weeks of training — however intensive — woefully under-prepares people for taking on any teaching position, let alone one that places the trainee in some of the most challenging educational settings nationwide for two years. It’s blind to the inherently paternalistic and naive bent of its model: elite, predominantly white college students shepherding disadvantaged, predominantly non-white, primary and secondary school kids not only through their formative education, but also out of the depressed social and economic conditions they have inherited. And it’s blind to the fact that the post-2001 (and I’m thinking No Child Left Behind, here, not 9/11) trend towards emphasizing standardized test scores above all other aspects of education has proven time and again to be detrimental to students’ development as learners. Much as the problem TFA aims to tackle needs a solution, idealistic and inexperienced middle-class Bachelor’s grads teaching to the test is not it. These kids are already suffering from a lack of quality education. How is someone with less than two months of training and experience with teaching supposed to make their lives any better? TFA’s idealism could be argued to be as selfish as it is selfless.
TFA’s blindness is not its sole problem, though. Other troubling aspects of TFA’s project seem to be entirely intentional, calculated decisions rather than naiveté. When cheaper TFA rookies are recruited en masse to fill places in districts that have recently laid off swathes of experienced (not to mention union-affiliated) and better paid teachers, I can’t help but raise an eyebrow. When TFA recruits swell the ranks of staff at charter schools that prevent their employees from engaging in unionization and collective bargaining, I have to admit I’m a bit worried. And when TFA’s continued mission is supported by tens of millions of dollars in donations from organizations as bent on anti-union, pro-charter and pro-privatization policy reform across the public education system as the Walton Family Foundation (yes, the Wal-Mart Waltons) I must say I find their idealistic claims to be dubious at best.
Though at its core, TFA appears to be ultimately noble, it instead has become another tool in the socio-political engineering of those who oppose public education, who oppose the right of workers to organize and who oppose models of education not centered around standardized testing. The children TFA insists it helps are merely pawns in their attempts to dismantle the public education system. Though your heart may be in the right place, and your job prospects may be dismal enough to push you to it, do not Teach for America. Students in our disadvantaged schools need help, but Teach for America is not it.