The leaders of Teach for America posted a response to the front-page article in the Néw York Times describing TFA’s declining enrollment.
They blame the decline in part on the overall dip in enrollments in teacher education programs, not acknowledging that TFA has contributed to the erosion of teacher professionalism by its insistence that its recruits with five weeks of training are just as good as (even better than) experienced teachers with a master’s degree.
As you might expect, they blame the decline in applications to an improving economy, which is actually not a good defense as it suggests that a substantial number of potential TFA are more interested in money than in teaching. Those whose prime motivation is money should not enter the field of education.
If only TFA were really like the Peace Corps! They would go where they were needed, do whatever needed to be done, no matter how lowly, and make no pretense that they were more capable than veteran foreign service officers. At the end of two or three years, they would move on to their real careers, having learned from their experiences.
Instead, TFA has cozied up to corporations and right-wing foundations, placed their members in key positions in Congressional offices to protect their brand and secure millions, all the while serving as the willing tool of those who want to destroy unions, promote privatization of public education, and support high-stakes testing, especially for teacher evaluation. The last item is indicative of TFA’s disrespect for the teaching profession, as these ratings based on test scores are unreliable and will have no consequences for TFA teachers, most of whom will abandon teaching before there is enough data to evaluate their performance.
What has hurt TFA the most is that college students have organized on many campuses to combat their message and to warn that TFA is undermining public education and working closely with reactionary forces. The student-led organization called United Students Against Sweatshops called Harvard’s President Drew Faust to sever ties with TFA; it claims to have affiliates on 150 campuses. Graduate students at the University of Minnesota protested against TFA. Even TFA alumni have objected to TFA’s strategies and political agenda.
It is the student protestors who are tarnishing TFA’s brand.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, I wrote this two years ago while looking at colleges with my daughter, who is currently a dual English/Education major because she really WANTS TO BE A TEACHER. I was so disgusted that our tour guide at Boston University (she isn’t there, I hasten to add) was so cavalier about telling us that TFA was one of his “irons in the fire” AFTER my daughter had said she was planning to be a dual major in education. It says a lot about the attitude. One young person views this as a calling. The other as a fallback job/stepping stone to something bigger and better. http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/archives/entry/op-ed_tfa_contracts_ignore_the_evidence_-_and_malloys_own_rhetoric/
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Key statement: “college graduates are moving away from public and service-oriented work and gravitating towards professions they perceive as more stable and financially sustainable.”.
Why did teaching become unstable and not financially sustainable? It seems clear even they don’t view lifetime work as an educator as being valuable or that someone should be able to make a living at it.
They practically call teaching charity with that statement even though they go on to try to prove that thousands of people have stayed (though that is a tiny percentage of their enrollees if the percents of applicants cited are true).
Which is it? Are TFA people staying in a rewarding job that they can make a living at, or are they departing TFA because it’s an unstable poorly paying job? I can’t imagine the “best of the best” are choosing to live in abject poverty themselves under abusive work conditions.
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The parallel is journalism, where PR professionals, now, outnumber journalists, 4.6 to 1 (Center for Public Integrity) with a pay differential of $20,000.
In the proposed tax-supported industry of for-profit education, non-productive management will have high salaries and the “content providers”, engaged with children, will have bottom feeder wages.
Tax funded schools of the people, for the people and, by the people, should drive out the invading leeches from Wall Street and the misogynist sleazy tech world.
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TFA is “looking for the best of the best of the best, Sir
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Thanks for pointing out the disconnect with the Peace Corps. As a returned volunteer who chose to continue as a teacher I have long viewed the TFA parallel as false. Peace Corps is different on many different levels, but it is not tied to corporations, nor has it lobbied for education policies. TFA has become so overtly political, it violates the basic principles of the Peace Corps.
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“. . . but it is not tied to corporations. . . ”
But it is tied to “The Corporation”.
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Can you elaborate Duane?
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“The Corporation” is how insiders refer to its organization.
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I’d like to see you turn that into a Op Ed piece Diane. More people shoul see it
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Except that TfA isn’t needed anywhere right now, especially for only 2 or 3 years.
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When are schools of education going to start fighting back against TFA? Traditional teacher training schools appear to be even less willing to push back than unions. TFA damages teacher unions and teacher training schools.
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TFA have also infiltrated Boards of Education and Superintendents in mostly urban school systems, parade as education experts, vote on the future of education and kissing up to every CorpProfiteer paying the system in exchange for über-high unbelievable test scores & getting rid of career teachers.
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“It is the student protestors who are tarnishing TFA’s brand.”
NO! The student protestors haven’t tarnished “TFA’s brand, the students are only pointing out TFA’s pyrite brand, not to mention that they are pointing out that the “empress has no clothes”.
TFA is responsible for it’s own tarnished brand even though they will tell you it really is shiny gold.
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Diane,
I was so gratified to read your comment that TFA is not like the Peace Corps. Inaccurate comparisons have long been made along the lines of TFA being akin to a domestic Peace Corps. Well no, it isn’t. There is such an organization. When I served in the early 80’s it was called VISTA: Volunteers in Service to America. That first word is one important distinction between what now falls under the umbrella of Americorps, and TFA. As you note, the Peace Corps, also an organization of volunteers, serves at the invitation of countries who do not have the capacity to fill all their needs in areas such as education, health care, agriculture and potable water. (I recently returned from serving as a PCV in Liberia.)
One claim you made I would like to add to: “At the end of two or three years, [Peace Corps Volunteers] would move on to their real careers, having learned from their experiences,” is true enough. However, you will be hard pressed to find many returned PCVs on Wall Street or in corporate law firms or other occupations which focus on profits. Unlike TFA, a very high percentage of Peace Corps Volunteers go on to work in public health, public service – including teaching – and international development.
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Excellent posting and comments.
And I second Duane Swacker’s comment: nobody can do more damage to TFA than TFA. They have nobody to blame but themselves if their “brand” is tarnished.
Perhaps it would have helped if they had read a little John Steinbeck:
“Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.”
Of course, that would have meant diverting time from looking in their ledgers at the color-coded black and red metrics of $tudent $ucce$$.
😎
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“The Blame Game”
Everyone’s to blame
Except the ones who are
The finger-pointing game
Will really get you far
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“Trolls For America (TFA)”
Trolls For America, TFA
Under schools, they make you pay
First they tell you what to do
Then take job and children too
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SomeDAM Poet: someone far witter than I deciphered TFA as—
TeachForAwhile.
And TFAers as TeachForAwhiles.
😎
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What TFA doesn’t want to reveal is that the economy improved for corporate profits that soared, and the increased wealth for the top 1%, but the other 99% percent of Americans have seen a reduction in their share of income and job security. And TFA has played a significant roll in that financial hit to the middle class by providing mostly temporary, under trained and under supported, labor that costs less to replace highly experienced dedicated teachers.
Anyone interested who has an open mind might want to read this report from the Economic Policy Institute:
A Decade of Flat Wages: The Key Barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class
According to every major data source, the vast majority of U.S. workers—including white-collar and blue-collar workers and those with and without a college degree—have endured more than a decade of wage stagnation. Wage growth has significantly underperformed productivity growth regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity, or education level.
During the Great Recession and its aftermath (i.e., between 2007 and 2012), wages fell for the entire bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution, despite productivity growth of 7.7 percent.
http://www.epi.org/publication/a-decade-of-flat-wages-the-key-barrier-to-shared-prosperity-and-a-rising-middle-class/
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ICYMI – I’m a 2011 TFA alum, and last year I wrote a very critical piece for Edushyster that was picked up by Salon.com entitled, “Teach For America’s pro-corporate, union-busting agenda”. http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/teach_for_americas_pro_corporate_union_busting_agenda_partner/
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Thanks for the link.
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Good rebuttal , Diane. The NY Times cannot get out of its own way, and proves that there are no real journalists working on education issues, because what they publish is still clueless.
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