SAD: Teach for America veered left and lost its way: Can it refocus on achievement?

Teach for America, founded 35 years ago, “lost its way” completely “in the last 8-10 years,” tweets Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion. “For years TFA brought smart motivated people into schools and focused them on student achievement in areas of high need. [T]hey traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve … It’s been a long time since they cared more about student achievement than say trying to ‘teach young people to interrogate systems of power’.”

Teach for America produced achievement gains for students, and a huge group of alumni who’ve shaped education reform, writes Dale Chu, a former TFA teacher and now an education consultant. But he thinks Lemov, “hardly a TFA hater,” is right.

When Chu joined the corps in 1997, Teach For America focused on teaching, not politics, he writes. “Equity” meant holding “all students to high expectations, especially those living in marginalized communities.”

Applications for TFA slots peaked in 2013, then began a long slide as mission creep set in, he writes. The size of the teaching corps declined. And, Chu writes, TFA’s “public messaging began weighing in more directly on policing, structural racism, gender, and identity.”

Went Woke, going broke.

See also Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”