This article tells the story of Jessica Millen, who graduated from Notre Dame in 2013 and immediately joined Teach for America.

Jessica’s essay is part of a new book: http://www.amazon.com/Teach-America-Counter-Narratives-Critical-Thinking/dp/1433128764/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439827400&sr=8-1&keywords=teach+for+america+counter-narratives”>new book: “Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out.”

As an idealistic college senior, she was drawn to TFA by the promise that she could change children’s lives in her two-year stint. She wanted to make a difference. She describes her experience of five intense weeks of training, which included rather bizarre chanting of TFA slogans and other exercises that encouraged loyalty to TFA.

Although she had been told repeatedly that she had the makings of a great teacher, when she arrived in her Néw Orleans classroom, she felt woefully unprepared. She knew she was supposed to enforce the strict behavioral management techniques of TFA, but they didn’t feel right to her.

She writes:

After those 5 weeks of training, I was alone in a classroom with 27 eight- and nine-year-olds. I had no idea what to do with the rigorous and inflexible curriculum modalities that dictated what I taught and when. There was nothing in our training that indicated our teaching lives would be so scripted and controlled. Moreover, I was confused by strict administrative policies that were completely developmentally inappropriate; for instance, my third graders were allowed only 20 minutes of recess, once a week. Again, there was no mention of what to do when school-wide policies were completely incongruent with what I knew at this point to be developmentally appropriate practices.

Trying to balance the demands and expectations of both my school and TFA was challenging, especially when both parties were extremely focused on data and standardized testing to the detriment of what my young students needed. This made it difficult for me to realize my vision of schooling. While I understood the necessity of assessment and its usefulness in gauging how much students know, and therefore in future lesson planning, both my school and TFA’s focus on testing overshadowed my legitimate concerns for students’ emotional and social well-being and academic growth beyond what could be measured in omnipresent assessments. I had to prepare my students for weekly and quarterly testing, on top of looming state-mandated tests that would also measure my success as a teacher. The pressure from both the state and district to raise student test scores manifested in my administration’s extreme concern with test scores and maximizing instructional time not only in specific subjects but also to specific isolated skill sets, always to the detriment of exploring other important areas of elementary education, such as exposure to culture, creative and scientific thinking, music, and art.

Armed only with TFA’s strictly behaviorist methods of classroom management, I was unprepared for many of the issues I faced, and my classroom quickly spiraled out of control. From my 5 weeks of training, I was knowledgeable only about behaviorist management methods that focused on giving clear directions, narrating student behavior when they were following directions, and then giving consequences to those students not complying. These management methods were presented as best practices during our training; no other alternatives were mentioned.

She could not follow orders. She was warned that she lacked leadership; she lacked confidence in herself. But she thought “my vision of schooling did not include a classroom where the teacher is all-powerful, all-knowledgeable, and in strict control at all times. What I was beginning to understand was that there was no room in their model for my vision; in fact, my vision was completely contrary to their understanding of how schooling should be conducted and why. TFA’s Teaching as Leadership model is based upon the idea that teachers are responsible for everything that happens inside of the classroom, regardless of whether or not you agree with the techniques and content you are being forced to adopt.”

The clash between what she believed to be right and what TFA taught her made it impossible to remain. She left TFA after six months. She is now a pre-school teacher in South Bend, Indiana.