Teach For America, the Neoliberal Alternative to Teacher Professionalism

• In Event: Effective or Wise? Teaching and Assessing Professional Dispositions in Education

Abstract

The biggest threat to teacher professionalism and the traditional dispositions associated therein is the neoliberal paradigm currently shaping the discourse of education reform in the United States and globally. Accordingly, the proponents of pro-market reforms seek to subvert teacher professionalism, commoditize teaching and learning for profit, and de-skill teaching in order to replace traditional colleges of education with fast- entry alternative training programs. In order to accomplish this, education reformers are attempting to manipulate the public’s (and teachers) disposition towards education into a more quantifiable and thus accountable practice. This requires teachers and other stakeholders in public education to understand teaching as a standardized hard service rather than a more individualistic and reflexive practice.
Such positivist dispositions towards education and teaching attempt to reduce teaching into segments of “best practices” that can then be duplicated en masse with quality control and measurement as both the means and ends of teaching. This disposition supports the assumption that anyone can be a teacher if they simply have the recipe of good practices and focus strictly on the measurable outcomes of testing rather on the soft services that teachers provide.

Operating under such illusions, neoliberalism and its proponents – if allowed to continue shaping education policy – will subvert the traditional dispositions that teachers ought to enter the field with (e.g., caring, collaboration, quality-centered pedagogy over quantity, etc.) by replacing them with dispositions of standardization, replication, indoctrination, meritocracy, and the promotion of the self over the collective good. We argue that this goal of de-skilling teachers via privatization of training and reductionist dispositions is best characterized by the alternative teacher training program Teach For America (TFA). Accordingly, through an analysis of the practices of TFA, this paper examines how the organization – as an example of the larger neoliberal reform movement – undermines teacher professionalism in its practices by the orchestrated subversion of traditional dispositions in favor of market-based pedagogical approaches. Drawing on first hand experiences with TFA corps members in addition to participant observation, this paper provides a unique perspective on professional dispositions embodied by TFA corps members and the implications that such dispositions have for students and the teaching profession.

Given the recent climate of education reform that is teacher-focused, understanding the dispositions of alternative certification programs like TFA stand to increase our knowledge of who is entering our nation’s classrooms, how they approach pedagogy, and how the teaching profession is being changed in favor of pro-market ideologies.

Authors

• T. Jameson Brewer, University of North Georgia

• Anthony Cody, Education Week