Next time you attack Teach for America, bring the good ammo

Sucked deep into the lefty blogosphere a couple weeks ago, I found myself at Jacobin magazine, which looks like a thoughtful place to read stuff that mainstream publications — the kinds of places that pay, and sometimes pay me — will not, or do not, often publish. And I found myself reading Andrew Hartman's essay “Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-gooders,” an impassioned, smart, but ultimately unpersuasive essay attacking Teach for America. I am not an education expert, and my point of view is surely warped by being a friend to, ex-boyfriend of, husband of, and otherwise surrounded by Teach for America alumni/ae. (My wife works in the early-ed field, and I have no idea if she'd agree with anything I am about to say; she is hereby absolved.) But I believe I can say that this essay shows more about the shortcomings of anti-TFA thinking than about the shortcomings of TFA. Let's read a little:

The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders—that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.

Hartman then proceeds to dismantle, or thinks he proceeds to dismantle, each of these four rationales. Here is the beginning of attack #1:

Take the first rationale: that 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. As reported in the New York Times, eighteen percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the twenty-two percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010. Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem.

That last sentence is quite priceless: Hartman is arguing that by bringing people educated at elite schools into the ranks of teachers — and yes, the vast majority of these elite kids do not stay in teaching — the general perception of teaching as a whole goes down. Or something like that. Now, if Hartman is arguing that any time you bring more educated people into a profession, the less educated people in the profession look, well, less educated, that is a claim bordering on truism, and it's banal. What's more, it would seem to work as an argument against bringing a better-educated (or more elite-ly educated) cohort into any profession: "Don't bring in those Harvard-trained doctors — they'll lower the status of the UMass-trained doctors, and thus lower the status of the profession."

But let's grant Hartman a more plausible claim: that by having an elite group of kids drop in for two years, the people who stay in teaching for a career look, somehow, less. The question would then be: in whose eyes? I have never heard a TFA alum bad-mouth former colleagues; to the contrary, most TFA alumni are acutely senstitive to the odds arrayed against career teachers, odds that include (as Hartman argues so cogently) the economically disasterous circumstances of so many students.

And I don't think Hartman could be arguing that TFAers' existence makes more traditional public school teachers look bad in the eyes of the public, since most of the public is deaf to this whole debate. Rather, Hartman seems to be arguing that having elite TFA kids drop into teaching for two years makes career teachers look bad in the eyes of bureaucrats, who then bash unions, etc etc — more on that in a moment. But Hartman also seems to be arguing — he is never clear — that many bureaucrats are excited to have TFAers come into schools because they are looking for anti-union cudgels anyway. So it's not the case that the TFAers then lower career teachers' status in the eyes of bureaucrats (superintendents, etc). I suppose Hartman could find some evidence that TFAers get used as propaganda tools by bureaucrats eager to bash career teachers — but he offers no examples, and what's more I wonder if such propaganda would be effective.

But above all, I would retort, it's not the fault of some kid who signs up to do TFA if some bureaucrat with an anti-union agenda then says nice things about TFA, and disparages career teachers. What kind of logic is that? "Don't go help kids for two years, because there is an off chance that some conservative somewhere might use your potential success to attack career teachers"?

Anyway, back to Hartman's original claim, that TFAers do nothing to enhance the status of the profession: Isn't it possible that the mere fact that elites all over the country now personally know peers who have been public-school teachers, if only for two years, does enhance the status of the profession. Put another way: if I knew as many peers who had done two-year stints in the military as have done two-year stints in TFA, I would have a far more nuanced and fairer opinion of the military! And as I understand it, this was part of Kopp's original thinking: not that TFAers would all stay in the profession, but as they went into whatever their careers were — law, business, education, politics, medicine — they would do so as people who for two years learned a lot about the odds arrayed against public schools. Again: imagine if all Americans had spent two years in the military: would that heighten or lower the quality of debate about military deployment?

OK, claim #2:

The second justification for TFA—that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work—has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now. Following the economic collapse of 2008, which contributed to school revenue problems nationwide, massive teacher layoffs became the new norm, including in districts where teacher shortages had provided an entry to TFA in the past.

Well, fair enough. Now that economic collapse has tightened the job market, there is less need for programs like TFA to plug gaps. But that doesn't seem a sound reason to attack TFA: "Goldman Sachs has rendered TFA superfluous."

Now #3:

But the third premise for Kopp’s national teacher corps—that it would “create a leadership force for long-term change” in how the nation’s least privileged students are schooled—has been the most destructive. ...

One of the more salient aspects of the so-called “TFA insurgency” was that it operated from the assumption that more resources were not a prerequisite for improving schools. “Schools that transform their students’ trajectories aspire not to equality of inputs,” Kopp declared, “but rather to equality of outputs.” Instead of more resources, underprivileged students needed better teachers. Reformers thus set out to devise a system that hired and retained effective teachers while also driving ineffective ones from the classroom. The TFA network has been crucial in shaping efforts to improve the nation’s teacher force. Kopp’s second book, A Chance to Make History (2011), reads like a primer for such reform measures. Kopp is particularly enamored by high-performing charter schools, which succeed because they do whatever it takes to hire and retain good teachers, a zero-sum game that most schools cannot win without more resources—those dreaded “inputs.” But successful charter schools, Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom.

Etc. Basically, Hartman is arguing that some TFA leaders, and many people trained by or inspired by TFA, believe in a kind of school reform that he does not believe in. This may be true — and no doubt many of the kids being trained by Illinois State University, where Hartman teaches, have agendas he would disagree with. Many will even go on to do impressive work that some conservative latches onto and uses to further some conservative cause in some way. That hardly argues against education, or Illinois State. Every good program in the world — and every bad program — produces alumni who do things that Hartman (and I, and you) will disagree with.

Hartman is very sly in how he writes about TFA's role in stuff he does not like. He never says, "TFA is a neocon's secret plan to thwart everything I love," but he tries some crafty guilt by association, from his line high up in the piece that "TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement" — my italics; and how would TFA do anything "intentionally"? I think people have intentions, not nonprofits — to his later statement that "TFA’s complicity in education reform insanity does not stop there..." Ah, its complicity.

See, what angers Hartman about TFA seems to be that the wrong people founded it, the wrong people love it, and many of its alumni — like alumni of Illinois State, Yale, Cal State-Chico, etc etc — will do bad things. It's not that the college graduates who go teach for two years have done any harm, but they have been complicit in harm, and some of them are very bad people. The program has a bad smell about it, Hartman believes, even if it may have helped a lot of kids.

Although, actually, Hartman is pretty silent on the question of whether it helps kids. He briefly treats a wide body of research that shows that TFA teachers do slightly better in some areas, but overall are kind of a wash. But of course the truism there is that many cohorts of new teachers — say, those from ed. schools, or those form central New Mexico, or whatever — do averagely. I can't imagine a particular reason to hold averageness against TFA.

And such an argument glosses over, in any event, the lived reality not just of TFA teachers, but also of their students. Qualitatively, if maybe not quantitatively, having elitely educated teachers could pay all sorts of dividends. I don't know, but neither does Hartman, who seems not to have talked to one TFA teacher, or any students taught by TFA teachers. Whether the program is introducing new perspectives into the lives of students, or sensitizing a meaningful cohort of elite college grads to the challenges facing those students, is not of much interest to Hartman.

Given that Hartman never even avers a single harm that TFA might do, except the genetic fallacy that it was founded by bad people so must be bad, it's clear that Hartman is really irked by something else altogether. And he is. What Hartman really believes, we learn at the end, is that education is all eff'd up, and therefore trying to get poor kids to do better at it is totalitarian, or something like that. And TFA is complicit in that. Read on:

...in the KIPP [charter-school] model, [staffed by many TFA alumni,] we are presented with the solution to the nation’s educational inequalities: for poor children to succeed, they must willingly submit to Taylorist institutionalization. This is made starkly evident in the concluding scene of Waiting for Superman, when young “Anthony,” one of the lucky few, arrives at his charter school with suitcase in hand, since his particular school boards its students. Anthony is rightly ambivalent about giving up his life with his grandparents and friends in order to attend a SEED Foundation school—the prototype in education reform—where 24-hour supervision is the only way to ensure that poor children have a chance at success.

In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?

Three of my best former students have, to my surprise, been chosen TFA corps members. Although I would never begrudge such hard-won personal victories for my students—well-meaning individuals who hail from decidedly non-privileged backgrounds—in the future I am determined to strongly encourage those students interested in becoming TFA corps members to read Paul Goodman’s  Compulsory Mis-Education (1964), in my opinion the single-best critique of the kind of education that the TFA insurgency seeks to perfect.

Goodman’s disdain for what the corporate-organized society did to young people was first made apparent in his 1959 bestseller, Growing Up Absurd, a response to the “curious” fact that two of the most analyzed phenomena of the 1950s—the “disgrace of the Organized System” and the problem of disaffected youth—were given mutually exclusive treatment. Goodman combined these two popular strands of social commentary—a critique of the bureaucratic society with an analysis of juvenile delinquency—and argued that the former caused the latter. In Compulsory Mis-Education, Goodman extended this general critique of the “organized society” to a more specific attack on its socialization method: compulsory schooling. Schooling as socialization, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to—“our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, compulsory schooling thus prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”

So there we have it. At the end, the problem is not that TFAers are failing, but that they might succeed — and succeed in bringing poor kids into a system whose assumptions, and one assumes results, Hartman does not approve of. That this system is also the system that could get poor kids to college, and then into decent-paying jobs, maybe into the middle-class, maybe out of violent neighborhoods ... well, no matter. Hartman will have them unschooled, or home-schooled, or fantasy-schooled. They will resist bourgeois blandishments. They will be ubermenschen, untouched by TFA or charter schools like KIPP or any sort of standardized testing.

Here I should say that I share Hartman's basic concerns about public schooling. My eldest daughter is in kindergarten, and I worry about the No Child Left Behind testing regime. I worry, too, about the drill-and-kill model at many charter schools, which middle-class parents don't want for their own kids but prescribe for poor kids. I am sympathetic to a lot of what Hartman says. But the reality of TFA is a lot of college grads, kids who could go straight to law school or consulting firms or whatever, pausing for two years to see some of the world they might not otherwise see, and often doing great good for children in the process. Many of them — I know for a fact — then stay in the field of education. (In fact, I am curious if Hartman has sought out good statistics to back up his claim that "...TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance—or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership...." How many of these TFAers end up in finance? A higher percentage than their non-TFA classmates?)

Hartman does not like the role TFA plays in education politics; and he may be right about the politics. But his reasoning is poor, and I am confident that the slack thinking he brings to TFA he would not allow if brought to bear on unions or even, I suspect, the military. I think that if he were defending the former, or attacking the latter, he would use examples. He would think about people on the ground, not just the higher-ups. He might even report. His essay is powerful, but I am saddened at the thought of how much more powerful it could be.