The Problem with Teach for America: Less is More

Problem: our current vision of school is as a factory, where learning should be efficient and scientific. And everyone emerges identical.

Here’s a strange article objecting to Teach for America, the programme that hires top graduates fresh out of college, gives them five weeks’ training, and then sends them into the schools. It argues that the preparation the enrollees get in this program is absurd. This can easily be seen to be the case. Yet its proposed solution is to give enrollees more such training. And this despite the fact that, as the article admits, those who get more of the same training—those who go to Teachers’ Colleges--do not do as well as the Teach for America grads. The evidence for this last is actually far stronger than the author would like.

The proper solution is obvious: eliminate the five weeks’ training. Granted, it might be better to have some training, but not the training they are ever likely to get under the current system. The training they currently get is ultimately coming from the Teachers’ Colleges.

On what’s wrong with the training, the author could again be clearer. She quotes approvingly the core message she was given: “as a 2011 corps member and leader, you have a deep personal and collective responsibility to ground everything you do in your belief that the educational inequality that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is both our nation’s most fundamental injustice and a solvable problem. This mindset… is at the core of our Teach For America—Metro Atlanta Community.”

This is a political statement. Working as a public school teacher should not require a set of political or religious “beliefs.” And this particular faith is actually antithetical to the educational enterprise. The job of the teacher is most naturally not to ensure “educational equality”—i.e., that all students get the same results. It is to strive to get for each student the best results of which he is capable. Equality of results necessarily requires holding the best students back.

Moreover, with this core principle, why should the author be surprised, or frustrated, by a student’s argument that there is no point in applying himself, since "I did the same thing last year and I passed"? Smart kid. Where everyone wins, and the hardest workers are held back, working hard is for suckers.

Come to think of it, this enforced equality of outcome could have a lot to do with the discipline problems the author, and so many other teachers, complain about. The problem is, the kids are not stupid. They get the mixed messages, and know the Mickey Mouse Show when they see it.

The “sea of jargon, buzzwords, and touchy-feely exercises” in which our author was immersed for five weeks must indeed have been uncomfortable for a good student. But welcome to Teachers' College: imagine a full year or two of this. And then emerging to subject one’s students to much of the same.

These things are vague time-wasters for a reason: the current educational establishment has nothing else to offer. They have no specific suggestions on how to manage an unruly class, or on how to improve student retention, because they have no idea how to do it. If they knew, they could probably convey it well enough in five weeks. But if they ever say something concrete, their bluff could be called; the next—or worse, the last—study is just as likely to discredit it. the studies all go around in a circle, and never come to any solid conclusions. They never will, for the human mind is too complex a thing.