The conservative-TFA nexus began at the beginning, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp’s initial efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize taking responsibility for the event. Not only did Union Carbide provide financial support for Ms. Kopp, it provided her with other corporate contacts and office space for her and her staff.

A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved by their managerial assistance. The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools run by elected school boards with for-profit, corporate-run schools.

In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, then joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was vital to Bush, since as Governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican. And everyone knows about Michelle Rhee’s prescription for improving education, close schools rather than improving them, and fire teachers rather than inspiring them.

Wendy Kopp’s idea for Teach for America was a good one. TFA teachers do great work. But its leaders often seem to blame teachers, public schools and teachers’ organizations for the achievement gap. By blaming teachers for some deep-seated social problems this nation has, they are not only providing an inaccurate critique, they feed conservatives more ammunition to use in their twenty-eight year war against using government as a problem solver.

Our achievement gap mirrors our country’s level of economic inequality, the greatest among affluent nations. Better schools are only part of the solution. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed our schools by permitting the middle class to shrink.(It’s not the other way around.) As more people are starting to recognize, we need national health care, a stronger union movement, long-term unemployment benefits, generous college funding, trade policy and reductions in military spending to bolster the middle class.

Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor Peoples March—even when it pissed off powerful people. His final speech, the night of his assassination, was on behalf of striking Memphis sanitation workers. In his last book, he argued for modifying American capitalism to include some measure of wealth distribution. I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com. You as an individual TFA teacher has a responsibility here because your work alone gives TFA leaders credibility (its not the other way around.)

Hundreds of alumni have been honored as teachers of the year at the national, state, district, and school levels. In the 2007-2008 school year, just a few of them include:

Shannon Brady (South Dakota ’06), 2008 South Dakota Middle School Teacher of the Year
Carrie Holmes (Baltimore ’03) and Mekia Love (Mississippi Delta ’01), 2007 American Stars of Teaching (a national award given by the U.S. Department of Education)
Laura Hoover (Phoenix ’00), 2007 Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award (by The Washington Post)
Robert Kelty (New Mexico ’01), 2008 Arizona Teacher of the Year
Ann Quarles (Eastern North Carolina ’01), 2008 Wake County Teacher of the Year (North Carolina)
Scott Wolf (Bay Area ’04), 2007/2008 Silicon Valley Teacher of the Year

OK, I’m with you. I’m firmly against “credentialism.” I’m all in favor of alternative routes to teaching, to law, to medical careers. But, you see, I believe that those alternative routes should support everyone, should raise up those at the bottom, not entitle those at the top.

TFA, interestingly, in describing what their alumni come away with – never mention becoming great teachers. Why? Because that is not what the program is about. It is “leadership training” for a self-declared elite.

What Darling-Hammond’s study found was not a flaw in the idea of alternative certification, but a flaw in TFA’s complete lack of teacher training. We really shouldn’t be surprised, it takes much longer to become a McDonald’s grillmaster than a TFA teacher. You have to believe that teaching is either “easy” or “unimportant” to see it as a skill which can be perfected in five weeks.

And so the study found that the most vulnerable were most victimized. I doubt, based on the previous work of this group of researchers, that this was a pre-conception. I think the evidence led them there.

I think they serve the kind that helps you work on your lacrosse stick handling on the quad at grad school and allows you to believe that there is such things as Michelle Rhee liberalism—believing you can bring the poor into the middle class by tearing down the institutions that created it.

The study was the product of Teach For America’s biggest critic who works at a school of education at a university. If THAT is not self interested what is?

I’d apologize for my profession but that would sound too presumptious. I don’t know enough to judge the research, but I heard good things about TFA from my daughter who is from generational poverty. She says that the TFAers started out thinking she was too much of a disciplinarian. But being a Black woman from Little Dixie, she loved having a school with highly educated young Black TFA teachers adding energy to her middle school in Bed Stuy.

But I know this firsthand. We don’t accompllish anything when we prejudge and too many veteran teachers are too critical of TFA.

What happens if the TFA model creates large numbers of TFA alums in powerful educational positions, and traditional teachers have antagonized them by knee jerk resentment?

If you think a TFAer or a traditional teacher is a jerk, then criticize that individual. If you think that too many TFAers are following mistaken policies, then criticize those policies.

But just because I’m being reasonable here, don’t think I’m going soft on Charlie Barone, Kevin Carey, or Michelle Rhee. just kidding.

The people you – and the rest of your “Hill” buddies – need to be speaking with is students. Real, actual, diverse, not picked-by-their-principals, students.

Then, you might actually be able to start to find better policy decisions.

Right now, you’re arguing which group of entitled, power holding groups to listen to – and when you do that, you won’t get much range in “answers” you get,