Redefining “Teacher:” Teach For America, Teach For All and the Effort to Promote Alternative Teacher Certification in Brazil

• In Event: Corporate Support for and Grassroots Resistance to Privatization and U.S. Influence: Recent Trends in Brazilian Education Policy

Proposal

In both the United States and Brazil, there have been occasional periods over the last several decades in which there were insufficient teachers to meet public demand. In the United States, over the same time period there have been a number of stakeholders who have suggested forms of alternative teacher certification as a solution to this problem, most prominently members of the private sector, including foundations, think tanks, and nonprofits. The most influential among these was the nonprofit organization Teach For America, which was largely responsible for the establishment of current alternative certification law in the United States (Russo, 2012).

Teach For America as an organization aspires to reduce educational inequality by recruiting high-achieving graduates from prominent national colleges who do not necessarily have any pedagogical or educational training to teach in low-income, under-resourced schools for two years, on the basis of the assumption that such high-performing college graduates can drastically improve their students’ performance and reduce the achievement gap between rich and poor. As these recruits typically do not have any traditional form of teacher certification or licensure (which one most commonly acquires as part of an undergraduate degree in education), Teach For America had a particularly strong vested interest in the creation of viable alternative certification pathways, and during the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, Teach For America had an outsized impact on the elements of that law which govern alternative teacher certification (Russo, 2012).

In 2007, the founder of Teach For America also founded an international umbrella organization known as Teach For All, which provides strategic support to social entrepreneurs in countries around the globe who seek to adapt and emulate the aforementioned organizational teacher training model created by Teach For America (Straubhaar & Friedrich, 2015). In 2009, several such entrepreneurs created an organization which I will here refer to as Teach For Brazil, a nonprofit which was created to emulate Teach For America’s model in Rio de Janeiro with the support of Teach For All. The founders of Teach For Brazil, along with many Brazilian policymakers and legislators, began to discuss the possibility of creating a similar legal category for the alternative certification of teachers in Brazil.

In this paper, I will draw on interviews with municipal administrators within the Secretariat of Education in Rio de Janeiro, as well as teachers recruited by Teach For Brazil, to document the process by which Teach For Brazil lobbied for the creation of some form of alternative teacher certification. I will also describe how these efforts failed, and how Teach For Brazil changed its organizational structure and model to adapt to a public school system in which its teachers could not legally work as K-12 classroom teachers. Finally, following the larger theme of the panel, I will explore how this case reflects the broader trend of private interests having an outsized impact on Brazilian public education policy.

Author

• Rolf Straubhaar, University of Georgia