"Having a summit sounds great, and pushing back against Teach for America gets your name in the news, but it's difficult to take anyone seriously whose sole stated goal is to criticize with no expectation of formulating positive recommendations," Cleek wrote in an email. "It's very easy to book a conference room, tell anecdotes about how awful TFA is, and bemoan the influence of private money. I might enjoy participating in something like that myself, but it only amounts to self-aggrandizement and does nothing to advance the goal of improving public education."

A more productive countermovement, Cleek argued, would seek pragmatic alternatives to Teach for America rather than trying to subvert the organization itself.

"Hopefully these people don't think our education system would be better off with fewer new teachers who graduated at the top of their class," Cleek wrote, "but this is the only certain outcome I see from discouraging potential TFA recruits."

But indeed, many of Teach for America's most vicious opponents point out that the high turnover of trainees being dispatched to some of the country's most challenging school districts—often without any long-term plans to be teachers—is precisely the problem. Anthony Cody's experiences in Oakland corroborated this critique. In a typical cycle, the school would lose about half of its corps members after their second year. By the third year, half of those who had remained after the second year would be gone. The problem, Cody explained, is that many who join Teach for America don't actually want to be teachers in the first place, instead using the program as a prestigious stepping stone for policy work, law school, or business school. One study found that roughly 57 percent of corps members planned to teach for two years or less when they applied, while only 11 percent intended to make teaching a lifelong career. (TFA has claimed, however, that 36 percent remain in the classroom as teachers. But their recently announced partnership with Goldman Sachs, which provides TFA recruits with jobs at the banking firm after two years of service, doesn't entirely help their cause.)

"A big part of what we talked about [in graduate school] was schools being community hubs," said one Los Angeles-area teacher, who asked not to be identified by name. "In order to do that, you have to minimize 'churn'—the rotation of teachers and principals. And TFA contributes to churn. Their framework is about developing leaders, not teachers."

Certainly, nearly 25 years after its founding, Teach For America's decorated alumni pool is enough to invite graduates to network their way to success. ("They have graduates who are actually in significant places of power writing legislation that is working hand-in-hand to privatize education," the teacher said.) But are freshly minted TFA alumni, carrying only two years of experience in the field, qualified for leadership in education policy? The question stirs fierce debate in the education world.