Investigative journalist George Joseph assesses the alarming transformation of Teach for America into Teach for All. The Ugly American has arrived to disrupt teaching and education, to provide jobs for young college graduates, and to put poorly trained “teachers” in front of kids who need good teachers.
He writes:
Since 2007, adaptations of Teach for America’s controversial model have been implemented in 40 countries, on every continent except Antarctica, thanks to Kopp’s Teach for All network. Though the organizations are financed through varying mixes of corporate, foundation, and state funding, there’s a remarkable continuity in the network’s so-called “Theory of Change,” regardless of national differences in teacher training, student enrollment, and infrastructure quality. Given the burgeoning presence of Teach for India in the nation’s troubled school system, the project of exporting the Teach for America model is being put to a high-profile test. If deemed successful, this model will be poised to deliver large portions of India’s education system—and, indeed, others all over the world—into the control of the private sector on a for-profit basis.
Joseph goes into detail about the workings of Teach for All in India (Teach for India), where the effort is led by an Indian woman who sounds very much like Wendy Kopp: privileged, smart, and alert to a great opportunity.
TFI, according to its official account, sprang to life after Shaheen Mistri, a prominent nonprofit leader in Mumbai, walked into the Manhattan office of Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp in 2007 and declared, “We have to start Teach for India, and I need your help!” Teach for America has become famous for tackling inequality in education by training young graduates from elite schools to teach in public schools for two years and then become advocates for “education reform”—a contested agenda that includes increasing the number of privately operated charter schools and limiting the power of teachers’ unions. TFA’s critics say that inexperienced teachers make educational inequality worse, and that the organization has become a Trojan horse for the private takeover of public-sector resources. And TFA’s recruiting numbers have dropped in recent years, as skepticism of the once-lauded organization grows.
In India, meanwhile, the education system is rife with problems even more daunting than in the United States. In 1966, during the country’s post- partition development period, the Kothari Commission declared that India needed to spend at least 6 percent of its GDP on education. Like most South Asian countries, it failed to come close to this figure. In recent years, despite India’s incredible economic growth, the most it has ever spent on education was 4.4 percent of its GDP, in 2000.
The results have been predictably appalling. According to the Right to Education Forum, in the 2013–14 school year, India had 568,000 teaching positions vacant, and only 22 percent of working teachers had ever received in- service training. This massive shortage means that as of 2015, more than half of Indian public schools were unable to comply with the 2009 Right to Education Act’s mandatory class-size ratios (no more than 30 students to one teacher in elementary schools and 35 in secondary schools). Further, a whopping 91,018 Indian public schools function with just one teacher. Also, more than 50 percent of Indian public schools lack handwashing facilities; 15 percent lack girls’ toilets; and nearly 25 percent don’t have libraries. As in many developing countries, these failures fuel the problem of teacher absenteeism in India.
Like TFA founder Kopp, a Princeton graduate who realized that a career in finance was not for her, Mistri began her forays into educational reform from the outside looking in. Every bit the “global citizen,” Mistri describes her privileged upbringing, including traveling first class from “sandy coves on Greek islands” to “the Austrian countryside,” in her book on TFI’s founding. After a year at Tufts University, she experienced her epiphany while sitting in a taxicab on a family vacation in Mumbai. “Three children ran up to my window, smiling and begging, and in that moment I had a flash of introspection,” Mistri writes. “I suddenly knew that my life would have more meaning if I stayed in India. I saw potential in that fleeting moment—in the children at my open window and in myself.”
Will Teach for India solve the massive problems of Indian education? Or will they relieve the government of any need to encourage a teaching profession that is committed to careers in teaching?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
TFA is an affront to legitimate qualified teachers worldwide. TFA is a tool of privatization designed to bust unions by staffing schools with people with less training than your local exterminator. Considering the impact it has had in our country, it will likely absolve the poor countries of any responsibility to provide professional teachers. In America TFA has mostly operated in schools with poor, minority populations. This should cause the ire of minority communities who should be asking why their communities merit such poorly trained teachers. After all, these are American public schools for American taxpayers, not missionary outposts. TFA is symptomatic of the lack of willingness of our leaders to invest in the common good while allowing elitist puppet masters of TFA gather up all the money that should have gone to serve these mostly minority students with authentic teachers. This is another tool to cheapen education and provide poor students with a warm body in the classroom instead of a certified teacher. TFA is an exploitative tool designed to allow the wealthy to exploit the poor.
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Yes, but the internationalization of a model, already entrenched in American education, should be seen in a bright light. The colonial mentality is present here and is being restored abroad by the likes of TFI and Bridge International.
George Joseph rightly says; “the Teach for All model seeks to transform tremendous material deficits into a problem of character.”
Exactly. This viewpoint and value system supports our high-stakes testing system, stack ratings of teachers, schools, districts, and nations. These values have most recently spawned all of those tests for “mindsets,” for grit, for persistence in the face of obstacles, and so on. These values make it unnecessary to address the entrenched and collective responsibility for unparalleled poverty rates and incarcerations, redlining of communities.
These values allow billionaires like Bill Gates to spend millions making teacher salaries an issue, supporting the amateur fare offered by TFA and “bringing to scale” the sham franchise of Relay School of Graduate Education where no scholarship in education is needed. The colonialism at home is wrapped up and tied with a bow-lots of empty talk about better education as “the civil rights issue” of our era. All talk, just talk, spin.
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The fact is it is a civil rights issue, but not the one they claim. It is a civil rights issue in that they are creating a separate and unequal school that is more segregated and the “teaching” is often done by novice alternate staff. If I were a taxpaying parent, I would have a fit. By the way, even renters are paying tax when they pay their rent.
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Just like in the U.S. the corporate reformers and their minions in TFA are ignoring the poverty in India, and the poverty in India is much worse than poverty in the U.S. by a huge ratio.
For instance, in India, it is estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 children die every single day from malnutrition and/or starvation — every single day!
It doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine dedicated teachers and public schools in India being closed and the funds and children being turned over to corporations that will also do nothing to end the horrible suffering that is caused by poverty in India.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/girls-and-unmarried-women-in-india-forbidden-from-using-mobile-phones-to-prevent-disturbance-in-a6888911.html
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Indians still give a dowry to the husband and his family in exchange for arranged marriages. i don’t even have to look that up b/c it happened to a friend of mine. She was fortunate enough to get a divorce and flee India. I don’t know the circumstances of that, however, she said that it is the role of the daughter’s parents to pay for everything and continually give to the daughter’s husband. Her father was wealthy. She got divorced and later remarried someone “beneath” her. They are here now in America, and he just finished his residency and is a doctor. They are free here.
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Dirty Dozen Dangerous and Harmful LIes of the Modern Education Reform Movement
Successful, decades-long PR Campaigns have solidified the ‘truthiness’ of these myths into the national discourse. Even teachers’ unions, education professors, and some teachers parrot these lies in feeble attempts to soften the horrific blows they rain down on public education, public schools, and public school teachers.
1. Teaching is easy because it is for losers who couldn’t hack getting rich in business, mostly women who should stay at home and raise their families.
2. hose who have entered teaching did it because it is an easy job that gives you lots of free time and summers off.
3. If you are good at anything or knowledgeable about something, then, ipso facto, you must be superior at teaching that anything or something to someone who spent years and years studying and practicing to be a teacher.
4. Teachers, because most are women, must be constantly micromanaged because they are lazy and will not perform unless they are constantly threatened, belittled, and scrutinized. They should be paid minimally and learn to follow orders without question so their betters can control and manage education cheaply and efficiently so the best among us can take a larger share of the education dollars for controlling them.
5. Learning can be measured by a single test. The other 170+ days of a school year and the teacher’s carefully collected data are not reliable indicators of what students are learning or doing because they are not produced, controlled, and hidden by multinational corporations who make huge profits from them.
6. Tests are perfected, flawless, and above questioning as to their legitimacy and worth.
7. Because we standardize and grade eggs, beef, automobile parts, electrical wiring, and plumbing, we should also standardize education by imposing standards on every teacher and every students.
8. Schools are just like businesses because they spend money on things and that money belongs to taxpayers so it is fair game to turn schools into a market for profiteering and monetizing with educating children and stabilizing communities a distant second in purposes for existing.
9. Business leaders, economists, and Ivy League grads (TFA) are the best arbiters of what works in schools even though they have never actually taught children and know nothing about education in general. The imaginary ‘free market’ will solve all of our problems because of competition + magic.
10. If you went to a school once, you are qualified to run one and decide what all schools should do because you have firsthand experience.
11. We are all absolved of dealing with sticky issues like poverty, racism, inequality in pay, social stratification, governmental neglect, greed, avarice, and selfishness because a few children have overcome all those obstacles and succeeded. Ipso facto, all children should be able to develop the grit needed to replicate these isolated and rare instances on a daily basis.
12. We can’t spend money on our children’s schools because some people’s children who don’t deserve it might get something that our children don’t get. More money should instead go to the brightest, smartest, most privileged, most successful, richest people because they are better and smarter than all the rest of us so they can tell us what to do and how to do it with much less money.
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