Interview by Shawn Gude

For the first two decades of its existence, Teach For America (TFA) could expect fawning media coverage and unremitting praise. With founder Wendy Kopp and her band of Ivy Leaguer grads, article after article glowed, education inequity in the US had met its match. But over the last several years, the near-universal adulation has begun to wane.

Several school districts have kicked out the organization. Some professors refuse to write student recommendation letters for TFA applicants. And TFA’s high-powered PR department now seems to spend much of its time churning out statements defending itself.

Not surprisingly, the uptick in public criticism of TFA — one of corporate education reform’s totemic institutions — has tracked with increasing opposition to neoliberal education reform. Teacher organizing has been key. Taking its cues from the Chicago Teachers Union, reform caucuses have sprung up in teachers unions across the country. Bill Gates and company, if still powerful, no longer seem indomitable.

Two new books by former TFA corps members seek to heighten that growing skepticism. Unlike previous works, Sarah Matsui (Learning From Counternarratives in Teach For America) and T. Jameson Brewer (Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out, coedited with Kathleen deMarrais) both focus on the experiences of TFA alums themselves. The picture that emerges — of overworked, disillusioned corps members — is distinctly at odds with the way TFA presents itself internally and externally.

Yet the slow accretion of counter-narratives won’t be enough. And the concerted organizing it will take is still in its embryonic stage.

In the following interview, conducted by Jacobin associate editor Shawn Gude, Brewer and Matsui discuss the source of TFA’s power, why some corps members are upset with the organization, and how resistance to TFA fits into the broader fight for educational justice.