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Two posts ago, I wrote my most widely read post of all time (nearly 12,000 hits) about how upset I am with the current 'direction' TFA is headed in. In case you are wondering, I do not ever get contacted by anyone in TFA to beg me to stop. I really don't think they see my posts as a threat or as any kind of motivation to make changes that would make me not feel the need to make such posts. Maybe there are people in the TFA national office reading these posts, I don't know. But I don't want to seem like someone who just likes to complain without having any of my own ideas about how things can be improved. As an out-of-the-box thinker, I know exactly how I could easily turn TFA into an organization that I'd once again be proud of. (And then I could start wearing my T-shirts again.)

There was a time, not very long ago, when I was an active volunteer alumni recruiter for TFA. And, as you might expect, I was great at it. One year, I think it was 1998, I did a recruitment session at Colorado College, a very small school, which brought the house down. A year later when TFA published the list of the most popular schools for TFA, Colorado College was listed alongside The University Of Michigan and all the other common TFA schools as one of the top twenty schools for that year.

"The event, called "Organizing Resistance to Teach for America and its Role in Privatization," took place during the Free Minds, Free People conference from July 11-14, in Chicago. It aimed "to help attendees identify the resources they have as activists and educators to advocate for real, just reform in their communities." Namely, resisting TFA. The summit didn't drop from the sky fully formed. A group of New Orleans-based parent-activists, former students, non-TFA teachers and TFA alumni collaborated for months to arrange it. Complementing their critique is a small but growing group of TFA dissidents and apostates who've taken their concerns to the press. Even as TFA marches into more and more classrooms throughout the country and world, a burgeoning group of heretics is nailing its theses to the door. But why are they speaking up just now?"

Few observers doubt that Teach For America (TFA) has high aspirations. Established in 1990, TFA strives to close persistent racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps in U.S. public education by recruiting high-achieving college graduates to teach for two years in low-income urban and rural schools. In recent years, applications to TFA have soared, especially at highly selective colleges. In 2009-10, for example, 18% of Harvard University's seniors applied to the program. Proposing to expand its teaching corps from 7,300 to 13,000 over the next five years, TFA recently won $50 million in the federal i3 (Investing in Innovation) competition and succeeded in raising $10 million in matching funds.

A recent post by one of the most thoughtful TFA bloggers on this site was called 'Don't Hate Me Because I'm TFA.'  In it, Tony B responds to another blogger that I think is great, Katie Osgood, from Chicago.  What people who have just begun following the education debate in this country might be surprised about is the 'hating' of TFA is something that has only recently become a phenomenon. A new TFAer might be confused about why she could be 'hated.'  After all, all she's trying to do is do her part, give back, be a front-line soldier in the war against the achievement gap.  What could be so bad about that?

Though TFA reports the recent attrition rate as 92% completing the first year and 91% completing the second, there are some regions that have much higher quit rates than others. In Kansas City, they fired about 200 experienced teachers last year to make room for new TFA recruits.  The superintendent who made this decision, John Covington, resigned in August to take a job leading Detroit's school system.  Left behind, were the first year TFA corps members who surely did not get the kind support from their co-workers that helped people like me survive my first year. From an article I just read in the Kansas City Star, I've learned that Kansas City may have been the biggest disaster in the 2011-2012 school year for TFA.  They report that 32 out of 141 first year corps members, about 25%, will not be returning.  And that is just so far as there will surely be some who just haven't decided if they are coming back next year yet.

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than the overstated former Washington D.C. Chancellor of Schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty's term in office Michelle Rhee, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk. This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher's unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education-and the role of public school teachers-in a deeply unequal society.

A TFA alum who has stayed in public school teaching and gotten increasingly turned off to TFA, and who follows my work, forwarded to me an email that demonstrates a new tactic by TFA, perhaps as s/he notes, in response to the criticisms of TFA this past summer by the National Education Association, the larger of the two main teachers unions.

In this week's show (Part One of a two part series), Education Radio continues to disrupt the dominant narrative of corporate education reform by investigating the organization Teach for America (TFA). TFA is one of many insidious examples of how the language of social justice and equity is hijacked and appropriated, and instead employed to further the goals of the neoliberal education reform agenda. This agenda includes a firm belief that education should primarily serve the interests of private profit and as with all neoliberal education reformers, TFA is actively intensifying racial and class inequality, and the destruction of education as an essential public good along with the continued decimation of unions - two institutions that are primary determinants of a democratic society.

Randomized trials are a common way to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of education programs. This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach for America (TFA). The TFA experiment faced challenges with recruitment, randomization of students, and analysis. The solutions to those challenges may be instructive for experimenters who wish to study future interventions at the student or classroom level. The article concludes that within-school random assignment studies such as the TFA evaluation are challenging but, under the right conditions, are also feasible and potentially very rewarding in terms of generating useful evidence for policy.

Over the past several months, I have featured a number of posts that were critical of Teach For America (TFA). We had education professor Phil Kovacs, who wrote several articles reviewing the research cited by TFA on their web site, and heard concerns from current TFA corps member Jameson Brewer. Last month, fellow Education Week blogger Rick Hess carried an interview with Heather Harding, TFA's vice president in charge of research, responding to some of these posts. I wrote to Ms. Harding and asked if she would answer some followup questions. Here is the result.

Okay, I think I'm going to need to preface this one.  I'm about to write the TFA version of the Kubler-Ross model.  Now, this analogy has to be taken with a grain of salt, because what CMs go through isn't exactly a grieving process.  BUT it's survival mode for the first year, and it requires a sense of humor.  After all, I'm more sarcastic now than I've ever been in my entire life.  It's like if Ms. Lora had a less successful, more sarcastic teacher down the hall that TFA will not have you visit as a prospective CM, it'd be me.  (Do I sense a sequel to Ms. Lora's Story?  A part-time summer job, perhaps? I need a title.  Suggestions are welcome.).  So here it goes.

My comments will focus on the role TFA has played in union busting and wage compression in the public sector. In the last few years TFA has encouraged,or at least passively accepted, a pattern of school districts firing veteran teachers and replacing them with TFA corps members.

"Dani Lea, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University, believes that Teach for America (TFA) teachers in her high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, were detrimental to her learning experience and for those around her. Lea claimed that her principal didn't even know which teachers were members of TFA and which weren't. Upon hearing this, TFA co-CEO Matthew Kramer said, "That's not our lived experience." Lea responded, "That was my lived experience.""

The National Education Association recently passed some kind of resolution to oppose TFA sending corps members to cities that are not suffering teacher shortages. This, of course, was the original intention of TFA. We are not supposed to take jobs away from people who are planning to become career teachers - just to go where we are most needed.

I recently wrote two review articles for the New York Review of Books about the teaching profession. The first was a review of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, about the exceptional school system of Finland, which owes much to the high professionalism of its teachers. The second of the two articles was a review of Wendy Kopp's A Chance to Make History, and it focused on her organization, Teach for America. I expressed my admiration for the young people who agree to teach for two years, with only five weeks of training. But I worried that TFA was now seen -- and promoting itself -- as the answer to the serious problems of American education. Even by naming her book A Chance to Make History, Wendy Kopp reinforced the idea that TFA was the very mechanism that American society could rely upon to lift up the children of poverty and close the achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups. Wendy Kopp responded to my review of her book with a blog called "In Defense of Optimism.

"KIPP, TFA, and other programs may well have started out as well-intentioned attempts to make things better for underserved students, schools, and neighborhoods despite poverty. But they have morphed over time into fiscal and social conservative models for how to create miracles without needing to address critical social and economic issues. Whether that transformation reflects the political views of those running these programs or simply represents mission slip combined with the influx of capital from those who saw an opportunity to promote panaceas meant to convince politicians and the general public that obviously most public schools were horrible (and please note, this analysis slyly shifts tactics by starting with the neediest, most disadvantaged schools and communities but then creating policies like NCLB that are guaranteed to make the vast majority of public schools appear to be "failing" because of doubtful criteria and truly crazy mathematics). Once the notion that "US public schools are failing" becomes accepted common wisdom, the financial vultures move in with a host of projects that are almost entirely about making a profit from a crisis. This is the way disaster capitalism operates."

Is it true? Are TFAers just as good - uh, I mean just as bad - as ed school grads? Here's a policy brief from the Great Lakes Center that summarizes the peer-reviewed literature on TFA and student achievement

There has certainly been a lot of traffic about Teach For America (TFA) in the cyberworld lately. It all started with the audacious nerve of Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association, and Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for America, daring to appear together with Secretary Duncan to support his new blueprint for teacher preparation. Then of all things, they penned together a commentary for USA Today. As a result, many of my fellow bloggers have launched a storm of criticism. I respectfully ask them to "cool their jets" on that and to look more carefully at the possibilities raised by this new open dialogue of TFA and NEA.