How the Corporate Class Is Using Teach For America to Turn K-12 Teaching Into a Temporary, Low-Paying Job

By Chad Sommer

January 7, 2014  |  When I joined Teach For America [3] in the spring of 2011 I had no idea that my belief in social and economic justice was about to be cynically exploited by the corporate class. As a former development manager for a nonprofit that serves low-income Chicago public school students, TFA’s claims that its corps members and alumni are helping lead an educational revolution [4]in low-income communities across the country spoke to me. Naively seduced by TFA’s do-gooder marketing pitch, I charged ahead on a mission to close the academic “achievement gap [5]” that TFA blames on incompetent (read unionized) teachers.

 

Today, having completed the two-year program and seeing how it operates from the inside, I’m convinced that TFA now serves as a critical component of the all-out-effort by corporate elites to privatize one of the last remaining public institutions of our country: our public schools.