Reconsidering TFA a New Trend? Break Out the GNR!

News out of Massachusetts says an activist group at Harvard University is encouraging campus leaders to oust Teach For America from the Ivy League campus. The Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) instead wants the university to focus on students who truly want lifelong careers as teachers. Read more of the story from The Harvard Crimson's Mariel A. Klein here.

Klein suggests SLAM's efforts are part of a nationwide push from United Students Against Sweatshops. 

I've long thought of TFA as "Welcome to the Jungle" teaching, given TFA-ers typically serve only 2 years in a classroom and with the desire for a high-profile payout in terms of resume padding for law school or other end-goals beyond teaching. Indeed, the best reality-based article I've ever read on TFA actually comes from The Onion. TFA takes "elite" students from "elite" universities, gives them 5 weeks of pedagogical training, and then places them in under-served schools for a couple of years. Most leave and never return to education. The whole operation comes off, to me, like an "expedition into the wild" where privileged (and not rarely) white "saviors" get to spend some time cleaning up the dirty animals and seeing how the savages live. Then leave to return to their cushy upper-middle class lives and pursue whiter-collared work.

At least, that's how it used to me. The new trend is to fast track TFA members into education leadership positions. "Welcome to the (Corporate?) Jungle?"

Surely a rational person can see how either end result is insulting to children and to those who actually want to be teachers so badly they majored in education in college, spending at least four years to learn the basics of a craft requiring lifelong efforts at mastering, maybe even earning advanced degrees in curriculum and instruction of educational leadership to help them face the challenges of years of service in public education.

 But there's the rub: The new TFA is part of the corporate education reform effort to remove public schools as a right of every American. No one in the right mind wants to place a teacher fresh off two years of classroom experience in an administrative position. No one except those who can gain from such novice and self-served experience.  Most teachers will state it takes at least three years to actually figure out what they're doing. There's simply no humane reason for TFA's motives. Perhaps the motives were pure, or purer, anyway,once. But either the program has been perverted or was always perverse. Putting young people in positions of power might be great for those young people, but part of the strategy for strangling public education does seem to be proving incompetent leadership. Hmm...

Thankfully, SLAM isn't the only group saying "adios" to the insidiousness.  A school board in Durham, North Carolina, voted to oust TFA from its schools recently. Pittsburgh has taken serious actions against TFA as well. Melissa Katz, a student activist at the  College of New Jersey, has criticized TFA's recruiting and end goals.

While TFA may never be stopped completely given how it has embraced corporate-modeled education reform,  a well-financed operation, opposition can now be considered a constant. As a professor at Washington State University, where TFA also had a presence, I was firm in letting students know I would not write letters of recommendation for acceptance into TFA, and I know of teacher education colleagues who also have that stance. Teach For America probably needs to evolve to avoid growing criticism, but I'm not an advocate of the current iteration.

Indeed, regarding TFA, I'd like to keep singing that Guns N' Roses song: "You're in the Jungle, Baby/You're Gonna Die." America's students don't need TFA in its current iteration which seems more intent on bringing K12 public education to its "kn-kn-kn-kn-knees" than serving students and communities.