Brianna was a public school student in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. In the wake of the flood, whole neighborhoods were destroyed. Approximately 1,300 people had died and hundreds of thousands were yet to return. Amid all this, she had faith her schools would weather the storm.
Instead, she found that her school was one of the many consolidated into charter schools, which draw public funds but are privately managed. Thousands of school employees had been fired (a move later ruled illegal), and many of the replacements were young, lightly trained recruits from Teach for America. By 2007, nearly half of the city's teachers were in their first three years of teaching. TFA became embedded in the fabric of the district, and one in three New Orleans students can now call a TFA recruit their teacher.
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The students returned the teachers' animus. Disciplinary actions spiked. Brianna tells of students being cuffed by police and pulled from classrooms, of classes dwindling and incarceration rising. Today, the Recovery School District boasts an out-of-school suspension rate that's four times the national average.
Who was this corps of new teachers, so combative in their approach? Why their obsession with numbers? Whence the startling admission, "I'm here for two years, then I'm out"?
Only later would Brianna learn that they were recruited through Teach for America, a nonprofit that places thousands of new teachers in high-needs schools every year. They come armed with five weeks of summer training, committed to two years in the classroom. Founded by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp in 1989, TFA now has some 28,000 alumni throughout the country.
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Rubinstein found that without classroom management, it didn't matter "how much you knew or how much you cared about the kids." So he became a martinet. He considers himself one of the first "no excuses" teachers, subscribing to a brand of unwavering discipline many charter schools now espouse.
He recorded his observations on classroom management (now a book), and decided to put together a guide for incoming corps members he considered underprepared. He asked Wendy Kopp in an elevator for her blessing, which she granted. (They're no longer on such amicable terms.)
Rubinstein has questioned TFA's training model, a five-week training course called Institute, for two decades. In 1995, by then a veteran teacher by TFA standards, he began leading a workshop on classroom management, partly an excuse to splash cold water on the faces of the dewy-eyed idealists. "TFA is not giving you the real story," he'd tell the recruits. "They're trying to shield you from reality." He delivered that pep talk for 11 years.
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To understand the arc of TFA from the early years to the present requires a long view. Alex Caputo-Pearl, who served in the inaugural corps in 1990, provides such a view. He still teaches in Los Angeles and serves in the leadership of a progressive union faction. He's watched TFA evolve from a remedy for "honest-to-goodness teacher shortages" to a "huge corporate organization." By the early 2000s, he considered TFA "part of a constellation of organizations" – charter operators, foundations, advocacy groups – "that were promoting a version of privatization in schools."
Concurrent with TFA's development, the education reform movement of the last two decades has picked up momentum, pushing charter school expansion, causing record numbers of school closures, and advocating increasingly data-driven accountability measures. That growth has prompted greater scrutiny of TFA's political role.
Teach for America Apostates: a Primer of Alumni Resistance
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