Teach for America and the status quo

Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates and professionals—of all majors, backgrounds, and career interests—who commit to teach for two years in urban and rural low-income communities and become lifelong leaders in expanding educational opportunity.

Right now, 8,200 corps members have begun teaching in 40 regions across the country, while over 20,000 Teach For America alumni continue working from inside and outside the field of education for the fundamental changes necessary to ensure educational excellence and equity.

Join the movement and apply to the 2011 Teach For America corps.

FINAL Application Deadline: Friday, February 4^th, 2011

Full salary and health insurance. Federal student loans deferred.

All majors and professional experiences.

Learn more: www.teachforamerica.org/compensation

For more information contact the Minnesota Recruitment Team:

The above announcement came through the College of Education and Human Development listserv earlier this week. While I won’t dwell on the odd placement of a message like this in a venue occupied by the students we target to become teacher education candidates, it’s worth a mention. Strangely enough, among the many implicit messages in the announcement is one directly from the College itself that TFA is a viable and endorsed (not to mention cheaper! And higher-status!) option for graduates of our undergraduate programs.

Messages about teaching, teachers, and the role of teachers in society:

• Teaching is a commitment… BUT, all you have to be is “outstanding” to earn a place in a classroom. The rest will be worked out in practice. (Practice first, reflection later.)
• A 2-year commitment is adequate to fashion oneself a leader “in expanding educational opportunity.” Freire, of course, would remind us that the commitment goes beyond “depositing” the benefits I reaped from my high-class education onto the underserved children under my tutelage.
• The elite college-educated can benefit even more from their work with marginalized students; teach the poor, get your loans forgiven and a job at Goldman Sachs! Win-win! This instrumentalist view of the process of educating does nothing to address the system that initially allows opportunity gaps to persist. A long-range view of TFA depends upon the status quo; we need the struggling schools and the fancy degrees in equal measure, and there’s no space for either to budge is a meaningful or systemic way.