Is Teach For America the Villain?
For over 30 years, Teach For America has been a lightning rod for criticism of the education reform movement, social entrepreneurship and the role of philanthropy in the US.
A week after Barack Obama won the US Presidency for the first time, I started a new job in London in a team that was funding new ideas in education. We noticed that many of the most promising projects were led by alumni of Teach First—the scheme that places top graduates in schools for two years. Tom Ravenscroft founded The Skills Builder Partnership. Jamie Feilden combined farming, family and therapy to reduce school exclusion. Josh MacAlister (now a Labour MP) founded Frontline, replicating the Teach First model in children’s social work. There must have been something in this Teach First model, I thought, that set these people up for success.
A couple of years later, a consultant started working with our team: a Black American woman whose acuity and style I found magnetic. I learnt that she’d been on one of the first cohorts of Teach For America (TFA), the model that had inspired Teach First in the UK. I eagerly asked her for coffee to get feedback on an idea I was working on, to build something similar in the field of social entrepreneurship. “I may have done TFA but that doesn’t mean I don’t have serious critiques of TFA,” she told me before launching into a comprehensive take down of the scheme and leaving me chastened. Since then I’ve only known TFA as both a colossal presence in the US education system and the topic of ferocious debate—about public education, racial equity, labor rights, social mobility and elitism.
Ahead of the publication of my interview with Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder, I wanted to dig in to the arguments / hear out the haters.
Since its founding in 1989, TFA has sought to reduce educational inequity—disparities in academic achievement between students of different races and socio-economic backgrounds. The organisation’s original vision statement was: “one day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education”. So far, so uncontroversial.
Where the obloquy comes in is when it comes to TFA’s method: recruiting, training, and placing graduates under-resourced schools to teach for two years.
So, first, here is the entry-level case against TFA:
Elite graduates are not the right people to teach children from low-income backgrounds. They share little in terms of identity or lived experience with their students.
TFA provides inadequate preparation to its participants before they enter the classroom. Just a few weeks’ training over the summer is much less than other new teachers receive.
TFA teachers leave the kids high and dry when they inevitably leave teaching for a high-paid corporate job. The TFA commitment is for two years. After this, many participants leave teaching—at higher rates than teachers who came up through other routes.
These 101 criticisms are rebuffed vigorously by Kopp, who often says that they are a wilful misunderstanding of the model. She addressed some of them at Stanford University in 2011:
Presumably these takes, if true, would have a negative impact on the educational attainment of students of TFA teachers. But the data suggest that Kopp is right. The model—inclusive of its selectivity and relatively limited professional preparation—works. A 2024 meta-analysis by the American Institutes for Research reviewed data from 23 studies of the efficacy of TFA over the scheme’s first 24 years. The study found that TFA teachers had a significant positive impact in Maths and Science (although the impact was not significant in English).
What about churn? Surely teachers leaving the profession at high rates can’t be good for kids. A 2022 Brown University study evaluated New York City data and found that the lower retention rates of TFA teachers was offset by an uplift in student performance among those taught by TFA teachers.
But social change is more multifaceted than just a slight uplift in grades at the end of a school year. TFA speaks in the language of systemic change and we should appraise its impact and influence accordingly. It is in this systemic domain where things get more complicated and where the fiercest debates about the scheme are ablaze.
For two centuries, the U.S. public education system has yielded stark educational inequity. One of the main drivers has been segregation which, while declared unconstitutional in 1954, persists to this day1. Another cornerstone of this injustice is the nature of public school funding. The primary method for funding schools in the U.S. is via local property taxes, meaning that schools in poorer areas with lower property values get less funding.
How to solve the achievement gap has become a contested question. In the 1980s and 1990s, school choice policies2 led to the development of charter schools, which are publicly-funded but independently-run, and the topic of much debate3. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind4 pushed standardised testing and punished schools for poor performance. It was into this fraught debate that TFA came on the scene.
Critics argue that the TFA model has insidious effects on labour rights, educational equity and racial justice in America.
So let’s hear three of those those arguments.
1. TFA is Anti-Union and Pro-Privatisation
As TFA grew, it was seen as increasingly allied to the charter school movement. Charter schools have been blamed for contributing to the structural weakening of teacher unions’ power and the deprofessionalisation of teaching. One of the largest charter school networks, KIPP, was founded by TFA alum. For 16 years KIPP was led by Richard Barth, a founding staff member at TFA and Kopp’s husband.
New Orleans is perhaps the starkest example of the shift from public schools to charters. Before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, less than 1% of the city’s kids attended a charter school. In the years that followed that disaster, the city fired over 7,000 school workers and became the district with the highest proportion of students in charter schools in the nation, with TFA playing a significant role in staffing up these new schools.
A 2019 Propublica investigation found that the organisation’s largest private funder, the Walton Family Foundation5, was granting higher amounts for teachers placed in charter schools than in traditional public schools. Around the same time, an increasingly disproportionate number of TFA teachers were being placed in charter schools: 40% of them in 2018 according to the article. For context, less than 7% of students across the nation attended charter schools at that time.
TFA has been denounced as complicit in the mass lay off of unionised teachers, who are then replaced by TFA teachers. The pattern has been reported across the country in the school systems of New Orleans, Chicago and Oakland among others. In 2019, 300 alumni signed a letter to TFA’s leadership asking it to stop “pressuring” participant teachers to break a strike by suggesting they may lose financial benefits if they do.
2: TFA Maintains the Status Quo
The dynamic between TFA and its powerful funders illustrates the core contradiction of philanthropy as described by Edgar Villanueva in Decolonizing Wealth: giving to the needy with one hand, while keeping the poor poor with their other. The argument goes that extreme wealth—concentrated in the bank accounts of a few, mostly white, families—is uninterested in structural change that might harm its own interests. This contention is reasonably applied to many nonprofits but TFA, in particular, has been a darling of US philanthropy for decades. The organisation generated over $2.5 billion revenue in the 2010s alone.
A special education teacher in Chicago authored a searing open letter to new TFA recruits, pointing to TFA’s partnerships with the very financial institutions that contributed to the 2008 financial crash and drove families into deeper poverty.
TFA may open doors to lucrative careers, help you get into prestigious law and graduate degree programs, even give you direct paths into high-paid jobs in the worlds of education, business, or politics. But are you willing to participate in the destruction of public education, destroy the teaching profession, and deny children experienced long-term educators?
Katie Osgood, An Open Letter to New Teach For America Recruits
TFA aims to address educational inequity but it can only pursue a specific strategy to achieve that goal if it is funded to do so. What if the most effective strategy to eradicate educational inequity negatively affected the bottom line of the financial institutions who fund the work, or their customers? What if TFA started advocating for a wealth tax to better fund public education? Would those banks—or the Walton Family Foundation—still support?
The holders of the purse strings tacitly dictate what TFA does and, perhaps more consequentially, what the organisation does not do to further the cause. The result: an inequitable status quo remains unchallenged.
3: TFA Does Not Challenge Racism
A common characterisation of TFA is that its teachers are privileged outsiders and mostly white, while the students are disadvantaged and mostly Black or Brown.
In the school year before Hurricane Katrina, 93% of students enrolled in New Orleans public schools were Black and most of their teachers were Black too. In the six years that followed, EducationWeek reported that the proportion of public school teachers who were Black dropped from 73% to 49% while the proportion who were white increased from 24% to 46%. The same article reported that TFA had 375 first and second year teachers in the city by 2013 and that just 16% of its 2012 cohort were Black.
Teach For America’s displacement of experienced, certified and culturally competent teachers of color with mostly white, mostly uncertified, inexperienced teachers has done a grave disservice to the students TFA corps members teach.
Ann Marie Coviello, 30 Years of Teach For America Shows How Reform Movements Can Become Co-opted
Undeniably, public education in the U.S. has racist roots—in the denial of education to enslaved Black people, segregation and the ensuing resistance to integration, and unequal school funding. Many argue that this racism persists, all be it in a different form, today. Looking through this lens, activists and advocates say that TFA has an obligation to dismantle these racist systems.
One modern manifestation of educational racism has been described as a ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ in which Black and Brown children are funnelled, through a confluence of disciplinary practices and racial bias6, out of the education system and into the criminal justice system. By placing teachers in the ‘no excuses’ schools most associated with the school-to-prison pipeline, TFA has been accused of not doing enough to disrupt this pipeline.
So, Is Teach For America The Villain?
Where does all this leave us? These bigger, more complex questions about privatisation and labor rights, structural inequity and anti-Blackness are hard to weigh.
TFA has maintained that it is neutral on teacher unionisation. In response to the complaints surrounding the 2019 strike action in Oakland, a spokesperson said that the organisation “cannot hinder or prohibit” their teachers’ participation in the strike. TFA says that it supports a broad range of educational models, not just charter schools, and that it sets policies independently rather than being beholden to its funders. Since the organisation’s birth, Kopp has tried to disabuse critics of the notion that TFA is an example of white saviourism or even anti-Blackness. In her 2001 memoir, she said “I felt we needed to make a particular effort to recruit individuals who shared the socioeconomic and racial backgrounds of their students.”
The answers to these thorny questions are likely more nuanced than some detractors would have us believe. One small example: TFA’s staff were initially all paid a flat $25,000 salary, regardless of their seniority—pretty far from the ultra-capitalist model that the organisation is charged with emulating.
But some of the criticisms do ring true. I did some LinkedIn stalking before meeting Kopp and discovered that the members of the founding team and board she names in her book are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. The mismatch between the racial and socio-economic backgrounds of the scheme’s founders and those of the student population that it serves does leave a bad taste in the mouth.
The answers to these questions are also not fixed in perpetuity. A social purpose institution can (and should) change—rather than cupping its corporate hands over its ears as objections are thrown its way. TFA’s intake has diversified considerably over the years and is now majority people of colour. Teach For All, the organisation that Kopp now runs, embraces a ‘collective leadership’ philosophy which incorporates a more diverse set of actors into the conversation about education reform.
But all that still leaves lots of questions unanswered. I put many of them to Kopp herself. Look out for my interview with her in the next few days.
Further Reading
Wendy Kopp - One Day All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way: Kopp’s memoir chronicles the first ten years of TFA’s development. Kopp is frank about major fundraising hurdles, her own blind spots, and facing down her detractors.
Teach For America is shrinking—Is this cause for celebration? (Brookings, 2023): a comprehensive review of the evidence of TFA’s efficacy in the light of a declining enrolment in TFA—and increasing enrolment in for-profit certification programs with dubious results.
While the Supreme Court declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), schools remained segregated. A 2024 report by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Southern California found that segregation between white and Black students has actually increased by 64% since 1988, and class segregation is up by 50%.
School choice policies allow parents to decide where their children go to school, rather than being assigned to the school closest to their home. The theory is that creating competition between schools drives up standards. Alongside charter schools, voucher programs give parents public funds to send their children to private schools. Magnet schools are selective public schools with specialisations, open to students outside the local area.
Proponents of charter schools say they offer parents more school choice, foster innovation and produce better results. Critics say they lack transparency, cherry-pick students and divert funds from public schools. They also point to the fact that most of their teachers are non-unionised.
George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (2001) aimed to address racial and economic achievement gaps between students by focusing on standardised testing and teacher accountability. Opponents argued it led to an over-reliance on testing and punitive measures that were disproportionately directed towards schools serving low-income or minority students.
The Walton Family Foundation was established by Walmart founder Sam Walton and his wife Helen Walton. Walmart is the world’s largest retailer and one of the most financially successful companies in history. It is also infamous for its anti-union tactics.
Contributory factors in the school-to-prison pipeline include disciplinary measures such as the zero tolerance policies that grew popular in the 1990s and resulted in increased suspensions and expulsions; criminalisation methods such as video surveillance and the presence of police officers stationed in schools; and racial bias whereby Black and Brown students are perceived as more aggressive or disruptive than their white peers.