I periodically post outstanding articles that were written a while ago. “A while” might mean a month ago, six months ago, or years ago.
This article was written by Rachel Levy, a thoughtful essayist. A sample:
It’s time to stop allowing achievement and privilege to masquerade as competence, dedication, and skill. It’s time for the grown-ups who promote TFA to acknowledge that the quality teaching that we all agree is so valuable comes from experience. It’s time to stop letting TFA stand in the way of the committed, skilled, and experienced teachers our kids so desperately need.
This article was written by Barbara Miner, who specializes in investigative journalism. It is an important analysis of the goals and methods of a powerful and well-funded organization. A sample:
To further investigate TFA, I decided to go back to Journalism 101: Follow the money. Which leads, among other places, to the story of Barbara Torre Veltri’s mother.
Torre Veltri is an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University. Last summer, her mother received a letter from Wachovia Securities/Wells Fargo Advisors, dated June 12, 2009, requesting input on a customer service questionnaire. In exchange for her time, the letter promised, “We will make a donation to your choice of one of the following charities: American Red Cross, Teach for America, or the National Council on Aging.”
Torre Veltri’s mother was puzzled. “Why would donations be solicited by [Wachovia Securities/]Wells Fargo for Teach for America?” she asked her daughter. “Since when is teaching some kind of charity?”…..The organization is, without a doubt, a fundraising mega-star. In one day in June 2008, for instance, TFA raised $5.5 million. The event, TFA’s annual dinner, “brought so many corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York that stretch limousines jammed Park Avenue for blocks,” the New York Times reported.
This article was written by Andrew Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University. A sample:
In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?
This book by Barbara Torre Veltri (who is mentioned above) is quite interesting, as Veltri has mentored TFA teachers at Northern Arizona University and lets them express their views and concerns in her book, Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach for America Teacher.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What bothers me is that corporations, individuals, and celebrities use donating to TFA to tell themselves that they are helping public education. I wish that donating to local public school systems had the same “sexiness” that donating to TFA had. Of course it has had the same impact on teaching. A college graduate who participates in TFA is respected. A college graduate who becomes a teacher through the traditional path isn’t qualified for “anything better” than teaching. It’s crazy because traditional teachers are trained for years before taking over a classroom, but they are less respected and qualified than a TFA recruit trained for five weeks.
Why doesn’t TFA promote “Police for America?” After five weeks, idealistic Ivy League graduates could join America’s urban police forces for two years. They could show those “experienced” and “lazy” police officers how their low expectations of residents causes crime in urban areas! If it is ridiculous for our police force, why isn’t it ridiculous for our teachers?
This paragraph from the Hartman article says it all. Maybe TFA is the status-quo?
In contrast to such “success,” the TFA insurgency has failed to dent educational inequality. This comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp of the tight correlation between economic and educational inequality: TFA does nothing to address the former while spinning its wheels on the latter. In her writings, nowhere does Kopp reflect upon the patent ridiculousness of her expectation that loads of cash donated by corporations that exploit inequalities across the world—such as Union Carbide and Mobil, two of TFA’s earliest contributors—will help her solve some of the gravest injustices endemic to American society. Kopp shows some awareness of the absurdities of her own experiences—including a “fundraising schedule [that] shuttled me between two strikingly different economic spheres: our undersourced classrooms and the plush world of American philanthropy”—but she fails to grasp that this very gap is what makes her stated goal of equality unachievable. In short, Kopp, like education reformers more generally, is an innocent when it comes to political economy. She spouts platitudes about justice for American children, but rarely pauses to ask whether rapidly growing inequality might be a barrier to such justice. She celebrates twenty years of reform movement success, but never tempers such self-congratulatory narcissism with unpleasant questions about why those who have no interest in disrupting the American class structure—such as Bill Gates and the heirs to Sam Walton’s fortunes, by far the most generous education reform philanthropists—are so keen to support the TFA insurgency. Kopp is a parody of the liberal do-gooder.
http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/teach-for-america/
TFA will use any means and methods to rake in financial contributions. The above excerpt bothered me. StudentsFirst increases it membership rolls in much the same way. Both mislead the public.