Teach For America Alumni Changing Education

Yesterday, Jay Mathews from the Washington Post wrote a story in which he calls the Teach For America Alumni mavericks on the rise in the education world. I don't know if the word "maverick" is an apt moniker for the likes of Michelle Rhee and other TFA alums, but certainly TFA is starting to come into its own. I don't know if TFA founder Wendy Kopp envisioned the kind of "infiltration" into the education establishment that has occurred among TFA alums. Mathews mentions eight or nine alumni of TFA in his short article, many of them in leading position in the education policy sector.

TFA's reach in the DC school system is palpable, but critics wonder how much they are actually doing to improve education.

Some critics note that, on average, teachers in the program do not raise achievement levels much higher than do other young teachers. They also say that despite some successes, the innovators, who seek new ways of training teachers and running schools, have not found a way to improve learning for the vast majority of low-income urban students.

Still, the insurgency has much momentum. On college campuses, inner-city teaching has become the most popular public-service job for new graduates. When Rhee joined TFA in Baltimore in 1992, there were 560 corps members. In the fall, a projected 5,000 members will be teaching more than 400,000 students -- about the equivalent of the Chicago school system, said TFA spokeswoman Sara Grace Blasing.

Its alumni number about 12,000, and their influence has become hard to ignore.

One in 10 principals in the D.C. public school system is a former TFA member, said Blasing, 26. Several program veterans, including Kaya Henderson, 36, who would be Rhee's new deputy, have important positions in the city schools. The Knowledge Is Power Program, considered the nation's most successful charter school group, was founded by two Rhee friends who joined TFA when she did. The KIPP system in the District, which has city's highest-scoring public middle school, was established by another TFA veteran, Susan Schaeffler, 37.

Admittedly, most TFA alums don't spend very many years in the classroom, but I imagine that these very bright individuals quickly learn that the way to effect change on a wide scale is not on the classroom level, but on the school or school system level.

The DC alumni chapter of TFA now runs the system and given the level of support and the shared background, Michelle Rhee may have enough critical mass to effect change. I certainly hope so and I am eager to watch.

But there are some features of urban education that I don't think the TFAers have grasped. Most urban education departments are practically calcified with a bureaucratic maze that would dizzy most people. If Rhee and others like her are to succeed on any sort of level, what they need is an "organization" guru, someone who knows how to pick apart, chart, understand and then reform a bureaucracy that is often more interested in their existence than their actual job. Between the complex union contracts, and the, at least in DC, antiquated human resources offices, most urban districts are so helplessly trapped in the mid-20th century that it would take a near super-human effort to move them forward.