Teach for America and the Politics of Progressive Neoliberalism‪.‬

Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit organization designed to recruit recent college graduates to commit two years to teach in understaffed urban and rural schools across the country, has been heralded by private organizations (e.g., 2008 recipient of the Social Capitalist Award) and state agencies (e.g., Duncan, 2009; U.S. Department of Education, 2004) as a poster child for alternative pathways to teaching. However, at the same time, TFA has also been criticized for its conceptions of teaching and teacher education and for its impact on student learning in urban and rural schools across the country (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2004; Darling-Hammond, 1994; Laczko-Kerr &Berliner, 2002). Although numerous studies have examined the effectiveness of TFA teachers on student learning (e.g., Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, Rockoff, & Wyckoff, 2007; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Heilig, 2005; Glazerman, Mayer, & Decker, 2006; Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger, 2008; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002; Stevens & Dial, 1993; Veltri, 2008), conclusions as to the program's efficacy remain contested (Zeichner & Conklin, 2005). Rather than examine the impact of TFA, the purpose of this article is to problematize TFA's intentions by situating its political philosophy in the larger context of neoliberal educational reform. To do so, we analyze TFA's explicit use of the language of business and appropriation of corporate culture in its pursuit of more equitable public education. We find that while TFA builds on some neoliberal assumptions, it simultaneously breaks from others in order to pursue its goals. We argue that this has created a guiding set of assumptions that can be thought of as "progressive neoliberalism."