Teach for America has been described by some as the Peace Corps for this generation. The darling of the education reform movement, TFA, which attracts some of the most talented college seniors in the country, deploys that talent to the poorest school districts in the country. One of those students was Erin Nolan, who joined in 2007 after graduating from college.

“TFA was great at setting up this vision of how you could really make an impact in the students’ lives,” Nolan told “America Tonight.” “They did a great job framing these big inequalities in education, and showing examples of how teachers could make an impact on that.”

But today, there’s a growing backlash led by some of its alumni who claim that TFA isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For Nolan, she was in a bit of denial about TFA but grew skeptical about the program and its expectations for its teachers. She was placed in a magnet school in St. Louis, teaching science after completing TFA’s five-week training course.

She said she felt behind from the beginning because TFA hadn’t given her enough to transition from the summer program to classroom teaching. With 173 students, Nolan was overwhelmed. She resigned from TFA after teaching for just six months.

“I was miserable,” she said. “I was in a position where not only was I feeling incompetent every day — my incompetence was hurting the lives of children. So it was a heavy burden. It’s something where no amount of hard work I could do would fix it because I was so paralyzed by anxiety and discomfort and stress and sleep deprivation … I didn’t make forward progress.”