Andrew Hartman has a nice essay calling out the weaknesses of the “Teach for America” model of reform. These indictments will not be new to those familiar with current educational policy debates, but Hartman has a few zingers:
“TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.”
“TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own.”
“The TFA insurgency has, from its inception, sold education reform as above politics. The idea is to support ideas that work, plain and simple, no matter their source. But the biography of Michelle Rhee, the prototypical TFA corps member-turned-reformer and the most divisive person in the education reform movement, defies such anti-political posturing.”
“Rhee is also disliked by a large percentage of black D.C. citizens, who voted out former Mayor Adrian Fenty in part because of his unqualified support for Rhee’s actions. This included firing four percent of district teachers, mostly black, and replacing them largely with TFA-style teachers, mostly white, whom one astute black Washingtonian labeled ‘cultural tourists.’”
And, to summarize:
“The TFA insurgency has failed to dent educational inequality. This comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp of the tight correlation between economic and educational inequality: TFA does nothing to address the former while spinning its wheels on the latter. In her writings, nowhere does Kopp reflect upon the patent ridiculousness of her expectation that loads of cash donated by corporations that exploit inequalities across the world—such as Union Carbide and Mobil, two of TFA’s earliest contributors—will help her solve some of the gravest injustices endemic to American society. Kopp shows some awareness of the absurdities of her own experiences—including a “fundraising schedule [that] shuttled me between two strikingly different economic spheres: our undersourced classrooms and the plush world of American philanthropy”—but she fails to grasp that this very gap is what makes her stated goal of equality unachievable. In short, Kopp, like education reformers more generally, is an innocent when it comes to political economy.”
The essay was strongly written, but I found it incredibly unpersuasive. TFA is obviously a mixed bag. It has many problems, many of which may indeed be “systemic,” but it seems odd for Hartman to ignore the benefits, which I view, chiefly as: Getting the society’s elite to work on behalf of the society’s worst off. As he points out, this was once an important goal of progressive reformers like Dewey, James, and Addams, and I’m always slightly bewildered that progressives today would rather bash TFA and its alums (Kopp is to Rhee is to Klein is to Bloomberg is to Walker is to Exxon!) than recognize and seize the dare-I-say “radical” potential of it.
The piece does have many zingers, but they mostly strike me as hollow and silly. If working in a particular environment for at least two years constitutes “tourism” then I can safely begin to write off all the one-term congress-men and women as “political tourists” no different than visitors to the White House.
His conclusion that “TFA exists for nothing if not for adjusting poor children to the regime otherwise known as the American meritocracy” sounds bold but comes off as unclear. What is this “American meritocracy”? Whatever it is, it’s clearly something Hartman wants to see “challenged” by students, which I suppose I’m all for. But what’s the evidence that KIPP et. al. turn their students into unthinking automatons? If anything, isn’t the aim to turn them into middle-class-like-college-bound students? Do middle-class college students lack the powers of critique?
Finally, on the educational/social class inequality question, what would Hartman have TFA do? If the narrative of “social class is NOT educational destiny” is so dangerous, then is the answer for TFA to lobby on behalf of drastic cuts to public education–presumably shifting that money to more effective and direct anti-poverty programs–which after all can do nothing to improve inequality for poor students?
Coming back to my original point, I think it would be far more effective for Hartman and others who seek more “radical” change to seize on the experience of TFA alums rather than spurn it. They could take the difficulties/challenges/frustrations TFA folks face at KIPP or more traditional inner-city public schools to make the case for more systemic changes, be they integration, a bigger welfare state, a higher marginal tax, a more “radical” curriculum, whatever. Call it “TFA Vets for Income Equality” or “TFA Vets for Critical Pedagogy.”
Fair critiques, but I liked his harsher words insofar as they challenge the current raft of reforms; Michael Apple would say something like “interrupt hegemony,” etc. There is certainly flexibility in the TFA/KIPP models that could help both school and society, but that doesn’t seem to be those organizations’ primary message right now. So long as they aggrandize themselves at the expense of public school teachers, public voice, and holistic reform, your “reciprocal relations” argument doesn’t seem the actual result (or at least not the net result). Thus, while the tourist remark is a bit gratuitous, I think it speaks to two points that Hartman gets right: (1) The hope that brief contact with the disadvantaged will inspire elite students to push for systemic change in education itself needs to be quantified, as does the sort of reform that they ultimately support [many seem to come away with fairly one-dimensional critiques of their working environments, often leading to more fervent adherence to TFA methods and privatization, rather than the sort of holistic reform efforts that you suggest]; (2) The idea of teacher status is one worth talking about: at the moment, it seems to me that TFA does far too little to bolster teacher quality overall, work with those outside of their ranks, etc., and that its own status does come at the expense of regular teachers’, creating unnecessarily oppositional relationships.
[Sorry if this is not terribly clear: not much time to type.]