Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, who seems to have turned all his thoughts of late to the machinations of a future Obama administration’s education policy, raises an interesting question about the place of Teach for America and other reform efforts in Obama’s pantheon.
On the one hand, Barack Obama has praised Michelle Rhee, the poster-child for Teach For America’s impact on American education. Several of his advisors are drawn from the group’s alumni and friends….So why on earth is the campaign allowing Linda Darling-Hammond to play surrogate for the Senator and say nasty things about TFA in high-profile events?
Darling-Hammond is TFA’s most notable critic, and has long argued that alternative certification programs ill-serve poor and minority children.
Someone—probably Barack Obama himself—is going to have to make a decision about whether to embrace reform (and in this case, TFA) or embrace the union-and-ed-school establishment (and in this case, LDH). If he wins the election and appoints Darling-Hammond to a senior position, we’ll know which way he’s decided to go.
Back in 2005, Darling-Hammond said of TFA, “While a band-aid on a bleeding sore is helpful in a crisis, healing wounds of inequality and poverty is also a policy problem worth solving.” Thus it’s likely that the scenario described by Petrilli will be portrayed as a false dichotomy. Still it’s safe to say there will be people with very different views of the world vying for a place at the table.
I think that Mike is overplaying the case here, and as a TFA and Obama fan I’m not worried. For one, LDH has I think moderated her anti-TFA rhetoric over the years, partly because it’s really hard to argue that TFA is an inherently bad thing. I saw her on a panel with some urban principals a year or two ago, and every principal praised their TFA teachers. For another TFA is hugely popular among non-education folks, and I really don’t see anybody trying to stem that tide effectively. Lastly I’m not sure federal policy has a huge amount to do with TFA, but maybe I’m wrong on that.
It seems to me that its perfectly possible to be pro-education, and even pro-education reform, without being anti-union or even anti-ed-school, and that will be exactly what a Democratic president needs to do.
The tendency of the Fordham folks (and others) to insist on the dichotomy, and to suggest that all the answers are known, and just waiting for people with the resolve to implement them, decreases their credibility in my eyes.