The Best and the Brightest Myth: Teach For America and the Challenge of Preparing Urban Teachers

• In Event: Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: (In)Equitable Access to High-Quality Teaching

Abstract

This presentation uses oral history testimonies from 30 participants in the inaugural 1990 cohort of Teach for America (TFA) – a group of young people dubbed the “best and brightest” of their generation and tasked with “saving” education – to illustrate the problematic nature of the concept of recruiting the “best and brightest” into teaching and the way it continues to play out in debates about teaching. While TFA’s theory of action presumed that participants’ personal qualities and academic achievement would trump professional training and experience, participants’ testimonies told another story and expose assumptions about what it takes to teach in classrooms and about how teachers are prepared (or not) for teaching low-income students of color.

Authors

• Megan Blumenreich, City College of New York - CUNY

• Bethany Lynn Rogers, College of Staten Island - CUNY