The Problem With Teach For America
How to fix urban teacher programs in America
Probably by virtue of living in Washington DC, I’m often asked the question: “what do you do?” People are often initially surprised to hear that I’m an instructional specialist since apparently, the assumption is that if I’m in K-12 education, then I’d be a dean or a coach (but more on that another day.) What further seems to surprise people is that I ended up in the classroom after attending an Ivy League university. What usually serves as a shorthand explanation is the fact that I started classroom teaching through Teach for America, which for them, seems to clarify why a high achieving person ended up as a lowly classroom teacher. While this is a frustrating issue in and of itself, it is not the main reason why I rarely ever offer this affiliation up initially. It’s been years since I’ve been actively involved with the organization, but I’m not necessarily ashamed of my own association with TFA. But I do feel like there are a few issues with urban teacher programs in general that produce some pretty substantial shortcomings.
They don’t create lasting teachers. TFA has essentially established a path from teaching into careers outside of the classroom. The organization is pretty forthright about this, even in their own literature. While this in and of itself isn’t negative, (everyone is definitely not cut out to be a teacher, believe me) it creates a view of teaching as a waystation for those who can’t figure out what to do after college, and need something else to fill a gap on their resume before applying to graduate school or joining corporate America. This attracts people who are perhaps well-meaning but aren’t at all passionate about teaching. Although TFA alum are often touted as people who will go on to “effect change outside of the classroom to benefit students,” they are often people who lean on their two years of service as leverage, presenting it as something noble that afforded them some keen insight, but simply using as a source of casual anecdotes about their time “slumming it” in the public school sector. Somehow their two years of (usually bad) classroom teaching entitles them to regale their fellow happy hour bar patrons with their hard-won tales of “whew chile, the ghetto.” Even the mentors and coaches within the TFA organization are former teachers who’ve had as few as two years of classroom experience and are now charged with the task of developing successful new recruits.
It’s pitched as altruistic. During my two years, I heard far too many people say that “if you don’t do this work, nobody else will.” What irked me about this, besides the idea that people were somehow “giving back” to communities in which they had no membership, is that it minimized the people who actually aspire to become great teachers. It also casts the students as pariahs who nobody wants to teach — the unwanted refuse of the educational world, and not human equals to be treated as such. This aspect of ‘noble service’ isn’t hard to see from an organization that also includes City Year and the Peace Corps. In many ways, it is similar to the common trope of colonialism-as-altruism, wherein the ‘dusky tribes’ can be rescued only by their sympathetic white saviors (see: Dangerous Minds, Freedom Riders, Hardball, Glory, Finding Forrester, The Blind Side, Half Nelson, Up The Down Staircase, The Last King of Scotland, etc…)
It’s overwhelmingly white. While this fact is also true of the US teaching corps, it becomes more of a problem when you consider that these organizations largely target poor, urban school districts, where the students are primarily nonwhite. This paradox creates a situation where teachers are culturally ill-equipped to handle the environment in which they find themselves. During the summer-long boot camp known simply as Institute, I witnessed nearly innumerable white women stumble, fail, cry, and quit because of this lack of preparation. (At one point, some of my peers and I held friendly wagers, a la Shawshank Redemption, about who would cry or quit next from the culture shock or the pressure.) That attrition feels even worse when you remember that these are poor Black and brown students who are losing their teachers unpredictably throughout summer school and the ensuing school year.
They contribute to gentrification. This becomes clearer when you consider the aforementioned points in tandem: a group of outside citizens comes to a largely poor, urban area, and instead of understanding, respecting, and amplifying the existing cultures there, they either ignore them or relegate them to the margins, considering them as simply setpieces of the local impoverished landscape. This sentiment was made clear in the barely-coded language used during orientations: new inductees were informed by their white predecessors which neighborhoods were “safe,” which were “up-and-coming,” and which ones were still “sketchy.” White twenty-somethings were far more interested in which new gastropubs they could frequent instead of which businesses were owned and supported by the communities into which they were moving.
I don’t mean to dump on Teach For America wholesale since there are obviously exceptions to every rule. I’ve met several great educators who started their careers in TFA, supported their local communities, viewed themselves as equals with their students, and are still in education now. (Coincidentally, most of them are Black, which is already exceptional.) I’d consider myself an exception. But there are simple ways to make these cases the norm, instead of scattered rarities. Here are three:
Create a two-tier track. This idea was co-signed by a colleague of mine who came into TFA with me and is now an assistant principal at a school in California. Essentially, there would be two track options to TFA: the currently existing two-year option, for those who are basically testing the waters, and a five-year track for those who see themselves becoming serious career educators. This better allocates resources to committed teachers and also alleviates the burden to squeeze in masters degree credits without the sufficient accompanying classroom practice that better reinforces the theory. Most teachers would also agree that they weren’t good at all after their first two years, and didn’t hit their stride until their fourth or fifth.
Prioritize local residency. Let teachers work in their home states, or in cities in which they are experienced or comfortable living. I did this myself when listing my own placement preferences. I chose to only request cities in which I had previously lived for any substantial amount of time (NYC, Philadelphia, and DC) to prevent the culture shock that I might’ve felt as an outsider. It’s hard enough to learn to be a good teacher. Trying to also learn the culture, customs, commerce, transit, geography, and even the slang of your new city can be enough work for a whole separate degree.
Actively court black/minority students. Instead of eliminating positions that officiate corps diversity, start looking instead to hire teachers that more accurately represent the student populations that you serve. It would go a long way to combat the white savior stereotype, the culture shock of white teachers in Black and brown schools, and it may even begin to sway the pendulum toward equitable representation in classrooms across the country. Perhaps the laudable skill of teaching can be seen as something that is more than just a noble gesture for magnanimous, erudite white college grads. But this might mean that you follow the lead of other programs, spending a little more time recruiting outside of the same Ivy League and top tier universities, and beginning to cultivate a pipeline of teachers from HBCUs and other colleges who are both passionate and prepared to teach.
