Wendy Kopp, the woman who hatched Teach for America, popped up in The Atlantic with an odd reflection on "first jobs" and teaching, and, well, there's a lot of subtext to unpack. After "four decades trying to inspire young people... to work directly with low-income communities," Kopp has some thoughts.
She opens with the story of Jack, who was trying to decide whether or not to go the TFA route, and jumps from there to bigger ideas:
Policy makers and philanthropists aren’t particularly focused on first jobs. But these choices matter—and not only for the individuals beginning their careers. If we want to address society’s most deeply rooted challenges—poverty, polarization, environmental degradation, geopolitical conflict—we need to encourage young people to work on these issues early in their careers, so they can grow into leaders capable of solving them.
In other words, going into teaching as a "first job" doesn't really help anybody, but it gives TFA members the exposure to issues so that they can move on to leadership roles where they can actually accomplish something. You know-- real jobs where the real work gets done.
This is in line with the longtime criticism of TFA that it's for rich white kids from elite universities to get an "experience" being briefly exposed to the poors.
It also points to the less-acknowledged problem of TFA. Plenty has been said about TFA's disrespect for career teachers ("Step aside, Grandma, and let me show you how we smart Ivy Leaguers get the job done") and the absurd condescension of insisting that a top college kid can pretty much master the work in a five week training. But over time it has become clear that a wider danger of TFA is that it keeps producing a bunch of reformster amateur edu-preneurs who go into business and government claiming to have been "in teaching" because they spent two years in a classroom somewhere.
TFA has certainly produced some folks who became real teachers and embarked on real teaching careers-- which I guess would be a disappointment to Kopp, who was rooting for them to zip through their two-year first job so they could get on to important leaderly jobs of solving the world's problems.
Her story of Jack defies parody:
While teaching in Harlem, Jack saw that a lack of resources made failure seem inevitable for the kids at his school. He also saw the incredible resilience and character of the students, families, and teachers. He realized just how entrenched inequity in education is, but he gained confidence in his ability to help address it. Jack is now in his first year at Columbia Law School.
Yup. Jack went face to face with the challenges of poverty, saw what strengths were there, grabbed ahold of the problems of teaching in a low-resource classroom and decided-- to go to law school. But don't worry-- Kopp assures us that he "hopes to litigate for increased funding for education and better compliance with anti-discrimination and disability-rights laws."
But Kopp just can't stop. "Research confirms that working close to the roots of social issues early in one’s career fundamentally reshapes a person’s beliefs and life trajectory." And she connects some of that research to TFA, showing that yes, TFA is great because it provides an important formative experience for the TFA members. The actual students should, I guess, be happy to provide a useful learning experience for those college grads. It's almost as great as if someone provided learning for those students.
Kopp reminds us that her generation was known as the Me Generation. But offering a "prestigious alternative to the corporate track" those college grads proved to be more "idealistic and civically committed than people assumed." So the trick was, I guess, offering a prestigious alternative like TFA and not a non-prestigious alternative like an actual teaching career.
Kopp comes real close to some insights here--
In 2024, 35 percent of Yale’s senior class entering the workforce chose jobs in finance and consulting; add tech into the mix, and the share rises to 46 percent. At other schools—including Harvard, Princeton, Claremont McKenna, and Vanderbilt—at least half of the graduating class moved into those three fields. Meanwhile, the data I’ve seen on the share of students taking jobs close to inequity and injustice suggest a decline across the same period.
Ah, but Wendy-- those graduates going into those fields are taking jobs close to inequity and injustice. They're just close to the winning side of those issues.
Some students, of course, feel they can’t afford to pursue less immediately lucrative careers. But if this was all that was holding graduates back, you’d expect to see more kids from wealthy backgrounds taking these jobs. Yet students from the highest-income backgrounds are the least likely to enter into public service and the most likely to pursue the corporate path.
Huh. Rich people don't want to help poor people, and don't even want to be around them? I feel like there's a really deep vein to be tapped here, but Kopp isn't going there.
Kopp points out that the corporate track has a well-funded recruitment arm and that colleges are eager to hoover up some of that money in a sort of collegiate product placement.
Kopp also sees an opportunity in the AI onslaught. Maybe, since AI is going to do all the entry level jobs, companies could "push back their recruiting timelines" while grads go out and get some human skill jobs, in communities tackling social problems. Not, mind you, that she thinks the grads should stay in that first job:
And young people themselves, even those who might want to run a major company someday, would benefit immensely from devoting the early years of their careers to such challenges.
Get those humaning skills, then move on to your real job.
There are so many blind spots in Kopp's essay, like her observation that "High schools should inspire students to step outside of their comfort zone and wrestle with pressing social issues," as if there are thousands of high schools where the students wrestle with pressing social issues every single day. Philips Exeter Academy is not a typical high school.
But mostly is this whole notion that the direct social work of the world should be done by fresh-faced college grads who only stay for a couple of years before they go on to the real lifetime work of, perhaps, amassing money or political power by occasionally remembering the social issues that they observed up close for a brief time. What does a school system look like when it is staffed mainly by people who never stay long enough to actually get good at the work of teaching? And are those people really fit "experts" to lead the world of education policy?
Takes me back to two classics from The Onion-- the point/counterpoint "My Year Volunteering As A Teacher Helped Educate A New Generation Of Underprivileged Kids vs. Can We Please, Just Once, Have A Real Teacher" and "Teach For America Celebrates 3 Decades Of Helping Recent Graduates Pad Out Law School Applications." I'm going to reread those now to get the taste of Kopp's ideas out of my head.
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