Has Teach For America reached its Waterloo?

by Amy B. Dean


In December, Pittsburgh became the first school district to reject an active Teach for America (TFA) contract. Like many urban school districts, Pittsburgh is struggling with budget problems—the school district is projected to run out of money by 2017—and overwhelmingly serves families that struggle with poverty: 73 percent of students in the Pittsburgh School District are enrolled in free or reduced-price school lunch programs. But unlike cities such as Chicago or Philadelphia, where the mayor or governor appoints school board members, Pittsburgh’s Board of Education is democratically-elected, allowing local communities a far more direct influence over decision-making. Indeed, three of the six members of Pittsburgh’s Board of Education were just put in place, and it was these newly elected officials who have rejected the easy answers offered by pro-privatization education "reformers."

The decision to can TFA shows that democratically elected school boards—like Pittsburgh's—are vital tools for defending public education and the public interest. In this case, the elected school board rebuffed the organization’s agenda and tactics.

Undermining teachers

TFA famously trains recent college graduates, who have usually had no other training in education, for a mere five weeks before placing them in a struggling urban or rural school. This model has brought much criticism. Many of these new recruits have little to no actual teaching experience, and they often have few connections with the communities they are thrown into. They are expected to be instantly capable; “microwave teachers,” in Pittsburgh School Board member Regina Holley’s memorable turn of phrase. The attrition rate is astonishingly high: 72 percent of TFA recruits drop out of the teaching workforce within five years.

But if TFA were merely a program designed to train and recruit new temporary teachers, it might be defensible—even if it hardly represents a comprehensive solution to the problems in our schools. The real problem is that TFA has fed into a larger, corporate-driven education movement that has worked to privatize education, pulling resources out of neighborhood schools and abandoning the kids most in need of quality public instruction.

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