Peter Greene comments on Teach for America’s latest effort to reinvent itself.
In recent years, there has been a sharp decline in people willing to enter the teaching profession, a product of constant teacher-bashing (see, e.g., Waiting for Superman, see also, Arne Duncan’s constant berating of those who teach). The number of applicants to TFA has declined as well, from 57,000 in 2013 to only 37,000 this year.
So TFA has a new pitch. Joining TFA isn’t about teaching so much as it is about other things that might appeal to candidates for recruitment.
TFA, always looking to keep itself a viable business, has a plan for combating the lag in applicants and selling the program to a new generation. Part of it is a tactical tweak– recruit students while they are underclassmen and no longer wait until they are seniors and know better and have a different focus. But that’s just procedure and not the heart of the new sales pitch.
The secret? Emphasize how Teach for America really isn’t about teaching at all.
Here’s a TFA rep talking at a recruitment event:
“We believe that this is far bigger than teaching,” Kimberly Diaz, of the organization’s D.C. regional office, told a group of prospective applicants from Georgetown and George Washington universities in April. They had just visited an elementary school in suburban Maryland and heard from alumni working outside of classrooms. “This is about dismantling systems of oppression.”
Far bigger than teaching. Your two years struggling in a sixth grade classroom will actually be part of dismantling systems of oppression (“No, Pat, I can’t help you with your algebra right now. I’m busy dismantling a system of oppression”)
Of course, if dismantling isn’t your thing, a day-long recruitment event offered college students other incentives.
Like resume-building. Just what you want from your child’s teacher; someone who is there to build her/his resume for a couple of years and then move on. Not.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is nothing that should be “bigger than teaching.” Last fall I returned to the classroom (private) after retiring from a central office position and couldn’t be happier. Teaching is a calling and I was called back to be with 5th graders again.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, at least that explains TFA’s sledgehammer approach.
LikeLiked by 1 person
They can start by dismantling their business.
LikeLike
During a recent college visit at the College of William and Mary, we noticed a blurb on their literature where they tout TFA placement. It was nauseating to see. Fortunately my daughter understands that if she truly wants to make a difference by teaching she should stroll on down to the College of Education.
LikeLike
If TFA wants to dismantle a system of oppression they can start with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Pearson, Eli Broad for subversion and the disruption of public education, Eva Moskowitz’s autocratic, gulag style Success Academy Corporate Charter Chain for crimes against humanity and child abuse, and convene a grand jury to investigate the crimes/fraud of Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee.
There are enough targets of oppression, including TFA, that they would be busy for decades dismantling this industry of profit at any price through rank and punish disruption.
What ever happened to the investigation of cheating when Michelle Rhee was the broomstick witch of DC public schools?
“Test score gains under Rhee were a mirage, not a miracle”
“Rhee’s reputation, in other words, was built on gains that were underway when she became chancellor, demographic shifts, shifts in what students took tests and how those who didn’t take tests were counted, cheating, and teaching to the test so aggressively that teachers were not only teaching what might be on the test but what was on the test. Mirage is the kind word for it.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/8/22/1009572/-
The abuse of the autocratic corporate Testocracy machine is a hollow house of cards based on endless lies.
LikeLike
TFA is another erroneous shortcut that is so typical of “reform.” The young people that sign up should realize they are being exploited much in the same way the students are that receive this unprofessional service are exploited. TFA is designed on the “educational missionary” model which is patronizing and insulting to the students they serve. No doubt there are young people whose heart are in the right place. If someone truly wants to teach, then they should go back to school and learn the foundations and craft of teaching.
LikeLike
But don’t forget: Someone is bringing home big bucks by renting out these young idealists.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Renting. Perfect word choice.
LikeLike
TFA is a wage suppression scheme backed by the wealthy to undermine the teaching profession.
LikeLike
The thing is, if TFA were actually about “dismantling systems of oppression,” that would be a good thing. You’d be damn right if you said that’s more important than teaching algebra… if that’s what you were actually doing.
Unfortunately TFA is using this as bait to reel in unsuspecting young people who actually would like to do good things, in many cases. To me there is not much more evil than preying on idealism and abusing peoples trust, and then using them for your own selfish ends. (For more good examples see: H. Clinton and D. Trump, masters of deception and public manipulation)
LikeLike
That is exactly what the entire corporate public education reform movement has been doing — hijacking terms and movements for an autocratic, for profit agenda that has nothing to do with civil rights or progressive idealism that often improves the qulaity of life for many people.
The corporate public education reform movement has nothing to do with helping most of the people with anything. It’s all about money and power for the few. These fraudsters have hijacked words and twisted them to support their agenda of greed.
A few words of phrases that come to mind are:
monopoly
choice
the civil rights era of our time
and now that claim to want to “reform a system of oppression:
Everything they claim their are struggling to change, they are building for themselves.
It’s obvious for those who look close enough that corporations like Pearson are working toward building an education monopoly while accusing 15,000 community based, democratic, transparent, nonprofit public school districts in 50 states of being a monopoly when it would be impossible for that to be true.
The corporate charter school movement is building a system of oppression and segregation that will dismantle the civil rights era. Gulen, KIPP and Success Academy are perfects examples of that oppression.
The Testocracy that Pearson and the few other testing corporation are building, supports a system of oppression where choice does not exist.
The Gates Foundation claims it is helping to improve education but uses bribes that are called grants to force its agenda on people across the country that are often in the dark and don’t even know what’s going on because they have not been included in the decision making process that often takes place in secret behind closed doors. That is what happens in dictatorships — not in democracies and/or representative republics.
LikeLike
Unfortunately for TFA, they are now the system that the TFA recruits will need to dismantle as TFA IS the SYSTEM.
For those of us who taught in order to create citizens who could shape the system, this recruitment tactic is laughable. Yeah, let’s dismantle a public system and instill one favorable to hedge funders.
LikeLike
I can just picture these fresh faced, upper middle class TFA graduates charging into the classrooms, ready to dismantle the systems of oppression on their way to Yale or Harvard. In a way, I feel sorry for these young people for being duped by TFA. TFA is to education what Trump U is to real estate.
LikeLike
In practice TFA has promoted itself for some time as a résumé-filler and way station on the road to one’s “real” career and profession.
For those remaining in education, that “real” career/profession was as a policy maker and/or enforcer of policy mandates.
The frontline of education, the classroom? Why be a “mere” teacher when you can be a leader/manager/boss!
😏
This fits in well with rheephorm’s verbal turn to “civil conversation” aka “up the ante.” It’s a twofer: 1), the rheephormsters are giving us all one last chance to come on board with their rebranded & failed pedagogical and management gimmicks by acting nice now but if we continue to refuse their furious drive for $tudent $ucce$$, then 2), they will increase the intensity of their drive to privatize and charterize etc. public education because they’re all about “dismantling systems of oppression” and defeating all those evil vile people that make up those “systems of oppression” aka public school staffs and students and parents and their associated communities.
😱
There’s a bit of catch in their playbook, though, because once they bring up such loaded phrases as “dismantling systems of oppression” they invite the very sort of discussion and scrutiny that they loathe and fear.
As one of their founts of wisdom might Triumphally put it if he actually read books and such, rheephormsters are yuuuuuge fans of John Steinbeck:
“Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.”
😎
LikeLike
“The frontline of education, the classroom? Why be a “mere” teacher when you can be a leader/manager/boss!”
I have always wondered what was wrong with being a “mere” teacher. I liked being a special ed teacher! I couldn’t imagine getting tired of it; every day was new.
😏”
LikeLike
Most no excuses charter schools are dependent on TFA recruits to function. TFA implements the corporate reform system of oppression, which consists of teaching primarily poor minority children to be subservient to those in power, which still happens to mostly be rich white people. They intentionally use inaccurate euphemisms to mislead the masses, such as by describing their approach and motives as promoting progressive, middle class education –which is nothing like the real progressive education their own children receive at private schools– and falsely claiming to be about the civil rights issue of our time.
TFA is integral to the corporate education reform hoax, which is firmly entrenched in free market capitalism, but as UK economist John Maynard Keynes said, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
More Orwellian doublespeak from the punk factory.
LikeLike