The Problem With TFA is It is Designed

to deskill and deprofessionalize teaching into something like the Peace Corps, when teaching is SUPPOSE to be a profession made up of professionals not dabblers who are looking for the experience of "teaching" so it looks good on a resume.

Again, TFA is one piece of a larger puzzle in the attempt to destroy public education once and for all.

This writer's take:

My interview with Kevin Huffman, TFA’s vice-president in charge of public affairs, was equally frustrating. I asked where TFA saw itself and its priorities in five years. Huffman explained how TFA has consistently improved over the years, from training and support to growing in scale and diversity. “Every year we learn new things that we should be doing better, and I think this is going to continue,” he said.

The same could be applied to classroom teaching, I noted. Might TFA consider changing its mission, and ask teachers to commit to, say, five years in the classroom?

No, Huffman made clear. Sticking to the two-year commitment “is critical to our theory of change.”

That's because it plays right into school districts' desire to hire on the cheap by hiring these cheapo bimbos with only a few weeks' of training.

NOT everybody can teach, and the theory behind TFA is that anybody can. That's World Bank/neoliberal-style nonsense.

Not to mention these people are all corrupt peas in the same corrupt pod:

Marcello Stroud sent me TFA’s 990 for fiscal 2008. It shows that TFA had revenues of $159 million in fiscal year 2008 and expenses of $124.5 million. CEO and founder Wendy Kopp made $265,585, with an additional $17,027 in benefits and deferred compensation. She also made an additional $71,021 in compensation and benefits through the TFA-related organization Teach for All. Seven other TFA staffers are listed as making more than $200,000 in pay and benefits, with another four approaching that amount.

It’s also interesting to look at the 990 for the KIPP Foundation, the charter school chain led by Richard Barth, a former Edison vice president and TFA staffer who also happens to be Kopp’s husband. Barth made more than $300,000 in pay and benefits, bringing the Kopp/Barth household income to almost $600,000 for their work with TFA and KIPP. (In a 2008 article, the New York Times dubbed Kopp and Barth as “a power couple in the world of education, emblematic of a new class of young social entrepreneurs seeking to reshape the United States’ educational landscape.”)