‘Shit shows’ or ‘like-minded schools’: charter schools and the neoliberal logic of Teach For America

Abstract

Over the past three decades, two neoliberal educational reform efforts have emerged in tandem – the charter school movement and Teach For America (TFA). This paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, ‘shit shows,’ and ‘like-minded schools.’ Grounded in corps members’ teaching experiences, this paper argues that even at its best, the close partnership between TFA and charters can create a mutually reinforcing educational subculture that is isolated from broader educational discourses and practices. At its worst, this partnership can result in the ill-advised ‘propping up’ of under-funded, mismanaged, ill-equipped charters that might otherwise struggle to find adequate staffing and, consequently, close. This paper suggests that these two tendencies – toward corps members’ insularity and poor placement – have the potential to conflict with the charter movement’s and TFA’s stated purposes of improving the quality of schooling for disadvantaged and marginalized students.

Keywords:

• Teach For America
• charter schools
• neoliberalism

Notes

1. It is worth noting that the application numbers for TFA have declined in recent years (Brown 2016a), though it is impossible to know whether this is attributable to increasing public criticism of TFA, to an improved economy for university graduates, or other factors. Yet TFA continues to place a significant number of CMs each year, as well as to advance its domestic policy agenda through support for alumni to run for public office, and to expand its international agenda through the Teach For All constellation of TFA-like organizations.

2. Perhaps indicative of charter schools’ sharp movement away from their original conceptualization and toward privatization, the National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that charter schools function more like private corporations than public schools in terms of unionization (Brown 2016b).

3. While it is possible that this over-representation is somewhat accounted for by the fact that charter schools enroll a greater percentage of minority and low-income students than traditional public schools (U.S. Department of Education 2015), charter schools still only account for a small minority of all public elementary or secondary schools.

4. ‘Drinking the Kool-Aid’ was a common phrase among certain TFA cohorts in the study. They used this phrase to describe CMs who wholeheartedly supported the TFA philosophy and approach and were therefore relatively uncritical in their perspectives.