Rhetoric and practice in pre-service teacher education: the case of Teach For America

Abstract

Teach For America (TFA), an organization that places college graduates in urban and rural classrooms for two-year terms of service, is lauded by reformers who see its five-week summer training institute as evidence that teachers have little to learn before entering classrooms. Yet, while boosters see TFA as a radical alternative to traditional teacher education, a look at the evolution of their increasingly robust summer training model hardly affirms that perception. In fact, much of what is done in the summer institute parallels the work of traditional teacher education programs in the USA – a surprising state of affairs given the rhetoric of so many TFA supporters. This project traces the evolution of TFA’s summer training institute across two decades, highlighting the growing divide between TFA’s outward-facing image and its actual work. Framing TFA’s summer institute as a case study for examining the relationship between rhetoric and practice in education, the article raises broader questions about how the policy-making context affects the construction and perception of reality.

Keywords:

• history
• politics

Notes

1. For the purposes of this study, leading teacher education programs are those in line with best practices recommended by the scholarly literature. See, for example, L. Darling-Hammond, ed., Studies of excellence in teacher education. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Some programs, like that at Stanford University, are referenced by name, primarily because they are mentioned specifically by TFA staff. The program at Stanford is also ‘well-regarded’ in the sense that it has been ranked consistently near the top of US News and World Report’s crude but influential system.