A few weeks ago, a recruiter for Teach for America emailed me and said that a Northwestern alumna would be setting up times to meet with “top students” to tell them about the program. And since I was “an Editor for the Helicon Poetry Club” (in reality, last year, I was one of about seven editors for the poetry staff of Helicon), I had apparently “demonstrated a commitment to leadership during my time at Northwestern.”
So I met with the former NU student, who now teaches elementary school in Phoenix. I talked about what I knew about the program and my activities on campus, and then she asked me about my future plans. I talked about my journalism internships and how I thought I wanted to go into something in the political journalism or public policy world. Perhaps because my interviewer is good at what she does, she immediately perked up and told me how not only would two or three years teaching be useful in subsequent journalistic endeavors, but how TFA specifically wanted people who would go on to be involved in public policy. Arguably, it’s this, not the actual teaching the corps members do, that is at the heart of TFA’s strategy to reform and improve American education.
The vision is that if they can get the “best” to teach in under resourced schools, then student achievement will go up. Or, alternatively, if they can get people to do TFA because they see it, like Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, as another rung on the meritocratic ladder. And then when they’re wealthy financiers (Goldman Sachs allows college hires to take two years off if they’re also accepted to TFA), to hire other TFA alumni to staff the charter school they fund. Or to support politicians who appoint TFAers to run their school districts.
It’s certainly possible that the 5,200 new teachers who were accepted in 2011 (TFA has an 11 percent acceptance rate) will be doing what they can in the classroom to ensure that “our nation’s children, regardless of where they are born, have the opportunity to fulfill their true potential,” as the TFA website states. But the long-term strategy is to seed the meritocracy with TFA alumni and then be able to change education policy from there. It’s a project of the meritocracy trying to advance social justice, but not by redistributing resources. Instead, they’re channelling the virtues of the meritocracy – the desire to achieve and be part of ever-more-exclusive meritocratic settings – toward the project of implementing a particular vision of education reform.
There is perhaps no better example of this tendency than the case of Zeke Vanderhoek. After Vanderhoek graduated from Yale, he joined TFA and taught middle school in New York City. While teaching, he also did test-tutoring and eventually founded Manhattan Prep, which specializes in the GMAT, the standardized test for business school applicants. Their tutors are required to have scored in the 99th percentile on the GMAT and are paid $100 an hour, plus bonuses.
While this has been a successful business model, there is probably nothing that has less to do with social justice than grooming the next generation of MBAs. Then Zeke imported the same model – the top meritocrats training the next generation of themselves – to public education.
His charter school, The Equity Project, opened to fanfare in 2009 and pays its teachers a base salary of $125,000. The theory is that if you pay the most – around two and a half times the average teacher salary – you’ll get the best teachers and the best student results. And just like more common career paths for the meritocracy such as investment banking, the hours are absolutely brutal, as is the case in many charter schools that look to hire the best.
If this works, then it will be the meritocracy’s greatest gift to the society it rules. But it will be on their terms.
Matt Zeitlin is a Weinberg senior.
He can be reached at [email protected]
