Few organizations have shaped education reform as profoundly as Teach For America. This year, TFA marks its 35th anniversary, an improbable milestone for a program conceived in Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis at Princeton. It produced not only achievement gains among students taught by TFA corps members, but also an elite talent pipeline, as alumni went on to leadership roles across business, medicine, law, and other fields, while many remained in education. For K–12 in particular, TFA developed a deep bench of superintendents, policymakers, elected officials, and other influential figures.
Yet Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion and hardly a TFA hater, recently offered a stinging assessment of its trajectory:
Almost no other important organization lost its way as completely as TFA in the last 8–10 years… 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.”
That’s quite an indictment of an organization that was once a bipartisan darling, earning plaudits from Democrats and Republicans alike. In its heyday, TFA was a movement with remarkable reach and influence. So what happened?
Modeled loosely on the Peace Corps, TFA’s founding coincided with heightened public attention to the glaring disparities in American education. Jonathan Kozol’s best-selling Savage Inequalities, published the following year, became a cultural touchstone for that concern even as it drew ire on the right. But the original idea behind TFA was fundamentally about human capital. Compete directly with Wall Street investment firms and management consultancies for high-achieving undergraduates, then place them in inner-city schools that struggled to attract teachers. It also dovetailed with an emerging push for alternative certification, challenging the assumption that prospective teachers needed to pass through traditional routes before entering the classroom. As TFA matured—and faced questions about whether inexperienced college graduates were actually helping children—student achievement moved to the center of the organization’s identity.
When I joined the corps in 1997, Teach For America was hardly a conservative outfit. Most of my fellow corps members leaned left. But importantly, TFA seemed determined not to make politics a condition of belonging. We were there because children growing up in poverty weren’t getting the education they deserved. We could disagree about why that was happening, or what policies might fix it, without disagreeing about the mission itself. The focus on kids and equity, properly understood (more on that below), was paramount, and politics largely stayed in the background. TFA’s instinct calls to mind Michael Jordan’s famous quip that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Teacher recruitment was an appealing form of civic service that carried little ideological baggage, allowing people with different politics to rally around the same goal. Its message was essentially, “Come teach poor kids who deserve a great education.” That proved to be a potent formula.
In the late nineties and through the early aughts, many ed reformers understood “equity” largely in terms of outcomes. Hold all students to high expectations, especially those living in marginalized communities. That conviction was central to what attracted people like me to TFA. Since then, however, the term has accumulated more ideological and political freight.
The culture evolved, too. I joined Teach For America before smartphones and social media, before Amazon became an everything store. The generations that followed came of age in a radically different technological and information environment, one that reshaped and continues to reorder everything from social interaction and political engagement to the culture on college campuses. The labor market changed as well. An organization that had once beaten Goldman Sachs and McKinsey at their own recruiting game found itself competing for talent in a very different marketplace. The numbers tell the story. At its peak in 2013, TFA drew 57,000 applicants and nearly 6,000 new corps members. By 2022, the incoming corps had dwindled to roughly 1,600.
At the same time, TFA’s politics moved from the background to the brand. Its public messaging began weighing in more directly on policing, structural racism, gender, and identity. As mission creep set in, its pitch morphed into something like, “Come join a broader struggle against systemic injustice.” That newer framing asked for agreement on more contested questions about why injustice existed and what kind of social change was required to remedy it.
To be fair, the metamorphosis that Lemov describes occurred in the face of real political and cultural headwinds. But those forces alone don’t explain every choice Teach For America made. Some wounds were self-inflicted. The more TFA asked people to agree on issues beyond student achievement, the harder it became to sustain the big tent that had once made it so powerful.
Teach For America’s great advantage at the outset was that politics wasn’t especially relevant to joining the enterprise in the first place. I never thought much about it when I applied, while I served, or even after my two-year commitment was over. TFA recruited ambitious young people, put them through an intense, shared experience (Moody Towers, anyone?), connected them to one another, and seeded them throughout the education ecosystem. That was it. The clarity of the proposition gave TFA an unusually large constituency, and that network became movement infrastructure for transformational change in cities and states across the country.
TFA still has that network, which has grown to more than 70,000 alumni/ae. The question is whether it can regain the focus that once made it a tour de force. That challenge now falls to Aneesh Sohoni, who took the reins last year and whom I’ve previously had the chance to work with. Under his leadership, recruitment seems to be on the rebound. More importantly, Sohoni is publicly emphasizing areas of agreement like reading, math, and college and career readiness.
The timing might even be right. The cultural currents that pulled institutions like Teach For America toward more ideological terrain appear to be receding, while disappointing student achievement results have returned much-needed attention to the basic work of schools and teachers. That creates an opening for TFA to rediscover what once made it so effective. Doing so will require resisting the pull of new battles that aren’t essential to its educational mission. The test will be whether Teach For America can once again make its core proposition broad and compelling enough that people with different politics and worldviews can be a part of it.
