Peter Greene was pleased to learn that the number of applications to Teach for America has steadily declined since 2013. In a way, it’s not surprising because “the entire teaching professional pipeline has been drying up.” TFA blames the pandemic but it’s decline started long before the pandemic.
TFA used to boast that it’s ill-trained recruits were superior to those with professional training, even to experienced teachers (who allegedly did not have “high expectations” like TFA). But you don’t hear much of that boasting any more.
Greene writes:
TFA has long been mocked for putting their people in classrooms with little training or support, but the damage done by unqualified rookies in the classroom has been dwarfed by the damage done by their products after they leave the classroom. TFA has unleashed a small army of “former teachers” and “education experts” who spent two whole years in the classroom (knowing full well that they weren’t going to stay, and therefor had no real reason to try to learn and develop professional understanding) but now feel qualified to tell actual teachers what to do. It has become predictably cliche–scratch almost every clueless edupreneur and amateur hour policy leader who claims to have started out as a teacher, and you find a TFA product.
Worse, for the past few years they’ve been leaning into that part of their mission, that “spend a couple of years in a classroom as a way to launch your career as a policy leader and education thought leader who can spread the gospel of reformsterism.” This has turned out to be the most damaging legacy of TFA, and the fewer people they recruit to carry it on, the better of the world of US education will be.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The most damaging legacy of TFA is that it exacerbated the perception of teaching as mission work. The mainstream media fell in love with a mission that was lazy and misguided and forced underprivileged communities to suffer for it. Teaching is a profession that requires preparation, planning, and support. Simply getting good grades in an elite school doesn’t cut it.
Amen
My daughter graduated from Oberlin in 2016, and she observed that TFA was popular on campus when she first got there and was largely scorned by the time she graduated.
I observe that Wendy Kopp founded TFA with a presumably well-meaning plan — to fill teaching spots in schools that had trouble hiring and keeping teachers, plus to give pampered, privileged future Masters of the Universe a look at the realities of life outside their rarefied bubble.
It soon became clear that billionaires would pour money into TFA if it transformed itself into a weapon to attack and undermine veteran teachers and their unions, and public schools overall, and to promote and exalt charter schools. Obviously, that’s what TFA did, promoting its bright-eyed beginners as superior to those deadwood veteran teachers just serving time to collect their fat pensions. (Though it also had to regroup and stop focusing on recruiting just the privileged white elite, since that part of the business plan didn’t wash even with the billionaires.)
As Greene observes, TFA did also become a breeding ground for future think-tank fellows, policy “experts” and education administrators, as opposed to the original plan for serving as a way station en route to the career in hedge funds.
TFA stands for Truly eFing Awful. In Marine Corps slang, TFA is also a Clusterfuck.
clus·ter·fuck
/ˈkləstərˌfək/
nounVULGAR SLANG•US
a disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking.
But for TFA, it was a deliberately managed disaster to destroy public education to generate profits and power for the few.
“As Greene observes, TFA did also become a breeding ground for future think-tank fellows, policy “experts” and education administrators….”
That was the plan from the beginning! There was no morphing from being an innocent service to help public education and poor kids in inner city schools to what TFA has become. The billionaires and deformers are always 5 steps ahead. They know how to “boil a frog”.
yes, scariest thing to SEE once it is seen and registered in the brain: they are always 5 steps ahead
Hmm, maybe. I followed it from its beginnings. But I was thinking of it as parallel to charter schools, which in my observation started innocently enough*, and the billionaires and so-called “reformers” had grabbed the lucrative opportunity and taken off with it before human decency could get its pants on in the morning.
*I know all the blah-blah about how charter schools were Albert Shanker’s idea, and I know he disavowed them. I still think there was an innocent trust in the idea at the very beginning.
Lots of good ideas get sabotaged by people only interested in how much they can extract from them ($$$). If an idea is “marketable” and “scalable,” there is a profiteer or two out there who will try to hijack it.
To be clear, I don’t think that either charter schools or TFA were good ideas to begin with. The unintended consequences were quite foreseeable. But yes, absolutely true about profiteers.
I equate charter schools with those schools white segregationist set up for their children in the South when integration was mandated. Those schools started out as “private” but soon found a way to use public education dollars to fund their mission of maintaining status quo. How could a college graduate even think that those few weeks of training would make them educators?
Having bright college graduates around children who need to learn is a good idea. TFA might have provided a pipeline for young people not familiar with education to choose it post grad.
But having these same young people in charge of things is so preposterous that one is tempted to suggest that the whole thing was conceived with the plan of failure in mind. Perhaps the failure of charters and the disruption caused to traditional public institutions fit perfectly with this idea.
I tried TFA, and based on my experience looking for my first K-6 teaching job, I agree with carolinesf’s 2nd post, and speduktr and Roy’s posts. In the late 1990s, as I was finishing my MEd program, I drove 3 hours to a TFA recruitment event in NYC. The director of my graduate program encouraged me, but warned “There are a lot of problems with the TFA program due to the minimal preparation they offer.”
Before the event started, I only had a chance to talk to a few of the other applicants and like me, they were all looking for their first teaching job, hoped to make a difference, and were worried about their soon-to-begin student loan payments. I heard nothing about using a TFA job as a stepping stone to something else.
The recruitment started with an enthusiastic welcome and pep talk by a somewhat cocky young man. Next, we were each assigned a topic and given 20-30 minutes to prepare a brief lesson which we then presented–one by one–to “the class” of our fellow applicants. After a brief break, a list of names was read off, indicating who was to return after lunch. The rest of us were thanked and dismissed. The selection was based on that trial lesson only; no grades, student teaching evaluations, recommendations, etc. were considered.
In any case, working in NY or another large city was not my preferred path, so I returned upstate to look for a job. It was VERY slim pickings in those years, with an over-supply of both experienced and new teachers. Time after time I was told, “You’re welcome to fill out an application, but we already have 20-30 applications, and many of those are from teachers with several years of experience..”
So, I undertook “PLAN #2” as one of my professors called it: “Pick a district where you’d like to work, and sub for a year, all grades, all classes. Go to meetings, be visible, volunteer for everything.” (His “PLAN #1” referred to our hometown or other “dream job”)
To increase the odds in my favor, I moved to a rust belt city with 10,000 students plus neighboring suburban districts, 40 miles from my rural hometown in upstate NY. I bought a large brick house off the demolition list for $6,000 borrowed from a friend, boarded up the windows, installed new front and back doors, patched up the holes in the roof, cleaned up all the cigarette butts, liquor bottles, and drug debris, plus one awful room filled waist deep with trash and garbage. .
I fixed up the best room upstairs as a studio apartment. I ran a new plastic water line to replace the old lead and copper pipes that had been scavenged, bought an electric heater, a hot-plate and toaster oven to cook on, spent a day cleaning and disinfecting the half-full refrigerator which had sat for 3 years, and fixed up another room as an unheated bedroom.
A few weeks later I started my year of “PLAN #2” subbing, rotating among 9 elementary schools, all grades from K-6, and all specials (art, music, PE) except computer lab. “Plan #2” worked. At the end of the year, I was offered a choice of jobs, and stayed in that district for 7 years.