From Teach For America to Teach For China

Global Teacher Education Reform and Equity in Education

Sara Lam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429833656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This book examines the role of Teach For China in addressing educational equity and expanding public participation in education. The author uses the case of Teach For China to explore the broader theme of the mobility of education models between contexts characterized by neoliberalism and those characterized by strong state control. Transnational advocacy networks are increasingly influential in the education policy making process. These networks, comprised of entrepreneurs and education corporations, think tanks, philanthropists, and government agencies, facilitate the global mobility of policy models. It is widely accepted that an education model should not be transplanted from one context to another without careful consideration of how contextual differences might impact the model's effectiveness. The book explores the argument that the same model is not only quantitatively different in terms of effectiveness, but that models can play qualitatively different roles in neoliberal and strong-state contexts, sometimes moving education reform in opposite directions.

The book will appeal to anyone interested in global teacher education reform and equity in education.

Part One
Teach For America, Teach For All, and Teach For China

1
Introduction

Teach For America has changed the landscape of teacher education in the U.S. and is now positioned to do the same on a global level. Teach For America recruits university graduates from a wide range of academic backgrounds who have shown potential to become outstanding leaders. It places these future leaders, referred to as corps members, to teach in under-resourced schools primarily in low-income urban and rural communities. The goal is to tackle educational inequity both by providing students in struggling schools with effective teachers and also to cultivate corps members into leaders who will transform education in the long run. In 1989, at the time when Wendy Kopp conceived of the plan to start a national teaching corps, fewer than 4,000 teachers in the nation obtained licensure through alternative routes (NCEI, 2011). Two decades later, that number had risen to 59,000. Among teachers who joined the profession during 2005–2010, about 40% entered their first teaching position holding alternative certification (NCEI, 2011). Beyond the composition of the teaching force, Teach For America has played a driving role in education reform in the U.S.: it has influenced public discourse on public education and the teaching profession, populated education leadership positions with alumni who are aligned with their education reform agenda, and supported the growth of the charter movement. As an organization with broad support from both sides of the political aisle, Teach For America has achieved a high level of power and has been granted a great deal of public funding with very little public scrutiny or deliberation on their strategies or impact.

Counter narratives about Teach For America have been gradually entering public discourse during the past decade. Critics of the organization raise concerns about corps members’ lack of preparation and high turnover, about placing under-prepared teachers in front of students who are already disadvantaged, about the high cost to school districts for hiring corps members, about the lack of transparency of government agreements with Teach For America, about the difference in background between corps members and the students they serve, about the replacement of veteran teachers and weakening of teachers’ unions, about Teach For America’s connections with the neoliberal reform movement, and more. As public issues, these concerns should be subjected to transparency and deliberation in the public sphere.

Amidst emerging concerns about the Teach For America model at home, Teach For All was founded in 2007 with the goal of disseminating the model worldwide. Teach For All member organizations quickly appeared around the globe. As of 2019, Teach For All boasts member organizations in over 50 countries. The Teach For America model is now operating in nearly one of every four countries in the world, reaching every inhabited continent. It is crucial for research to catch up with the rapid expansion of Teach For All to enhance transparency and public deliberation about the transfer of this model across vastly different contexts and the impacts it has in each. Given the variation among the field of education between countries, what is the role of each Teach For All member organization in its country? How does it align with existing education reform movements? Whose interests does it serve? What impact does it have on public education, the teaching profession, and educational equity?

China is a particularly interesting case to study because it is extremely different from the original U.S. context in several ways. The U.S. is characterized by a capitalist and increasingly neoliberal economic system that has led to a continuous weakening of the state as a provider of social services such as education. The U.S. education system is largely decentralized, with major policy decisions made at the state and municipal levels. In China, with an economic system described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the state dominates social service sectors, including the education system. Opportunities for the marketization of education have gradually opened, but the education market remains heavily regulated by the government. The education system is very centralized, with the central government driving important policy decisions. While the U.S. is a liberal democracy with an established civil society, the civil society sector in China is still largely subordinate to the state. Research on Teach For China can provide insights into the operation and implications of the Teach For America model in a strong-state context.

As a result of the market reforms initiated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, China’s economy is burgeoning. The nation has made incredible economic gains but these gains have not been equitably distributed. Growing inequality in income and wealth has led to severe social tensions, and the liberalization of the market has not been accompanied by an opening of civil society. Therefore, there is extremely limited space for public deliberation of the social issues that have emerged from the market reforms, including educational inequity. Many non-government organizations, while engaging in specific programmatic work, also see contributing to the building of a healthy civil society and public sphere as an important part of their goals. However, this goal is difficult to attain while under tight control of the state and increasing reliance on corporate philanthropists for nonprofit funding. Against the backdrop of these complexities, what is Teach For China’s strategy for tackling educational inequities? How does Teach For China position itself in relation to the state, market and civil society? Does it aim to broaden and deepen public participation in education? How?

Unfortunately, very few scholars have studied Teach For China. Christopher Crowley (2016) included Teach For China in an examination of alternative certification programs in China. He concluded that programs such as Teach For China support the agenda of the state and are unlikely to lead to structural change that challenges the systemic causes of social inequities. Viv Ellis and her colleagues (2016) analyzed the websites of four Teach For All member organizations, including Teach For China, and identified common rhetorical strategies used by all. Specifically, all four organizations framed the work of their teachers as “teaching other people’s children,” “teaching elsewhere,” and “teaching for a while.” Teach For All member organizations use these strategies to create and circulate a narrative around “exceptional leaders” who emerge from their organizations to save poor children and fix the broken state system.

These studies of Teach For China draw exclusively on materials from Teach For China’s official website as data. Through this study, I add to existing understandings of Teach For China by moving beyond the official narrative of the organization. This study captures the practice of the organization and its fellows on the ground through participant observation. It also includes the diverse perspectives of a range of stakeholders such as Teach For China leaders, staff, and fellows as well as local education officials, school administrators, and teachers who collaborate with Teach For China.

Goals of the book

This book examines the role of Teach For China in addressing educational equity and expanding public participation in education. I use the case of Teach For China to explore the broader theme of the mobility of education models between contexts characterized by neoliberalism and those characterized by strong state control. Transnational advocacy networks are increasingly influential in the education policy making process and facilitate the global mobility of policy models. It is widely accepted that an education model should not be transplanted from one context to another without careful consideration of how contextual differences might impact the model’s effectiveness. Looking beyond quantitative comparisons of a model’s effectiveness in different places, this book examines whether and how one model can play qualitatively different roles in neoliberal and strong-state contexts, moving education reform in divergent directions.

In the context of global policy mobility, this book is focused on the following questions:

1. How does Teach For China address educational inequities in China? In the process of globalization, how might a similar education policy model have divergent effects on educational equity in different local contexts?
2. In its work to cultivate leaders and change agents in the field of education, does Teach For China broaden and deepen public sphere participation in education? How? In the process of globalization, how might a similar education policy model have different impacts on expanding public participation in education? What are the affordances and limitations of civil society organizations in strong-state contexts for expanding public participation in education?

Research methods¹

To answer these questions, I engaged in participant observation in Teach For China sites for a period of four months at the end of 2014. I conducted fieldwork during the organization’s pre-service training institute and at partner schools. Summer Institute, Teach For China’s pre-service training program, took place over four weeks. I followed one group of fellows through the program, experiencing the training program with them and observing their summer school practice teaching. I conducted interviews with Summer Institute staff and participants.

I then spent three months in Teach For China’s partner schools in two townships, which I will refer to as Township A and Township B. My goal was to choose sites where Teach For China has been able to put its mission, goals and strategy into practice most effectively, and thus reflect the organization’s mission, goals and strategies more accurately. With this in mind, Teach For China leaders recommended the prefecture in which Townships A and B are located. Within the prefecture, I selected Township A in County A and Township B in County B to capture diversity in terms of township characteristics (such as economic wealth), school characteristics (such as academic ranking and school type), and Teach For China fellow characteristics (such as cohort, nationality, gender, and subjects taught). Teach For China had six partner schools in these two townships. I spent one to two weeks at each school. All 21 Teach For China fellows of the six schools participated in the study.

At each school, I participated in school life, observed classroom teaching and conducted interviews. I conducted two to three semi-structured interviews with the fellows at the six schools.² These interviews addressed their personal backgrounds and trajectories, their educational beliefs and practices, as well as their perspectives on themes such as educational equity, rural communities, Teach For China, and their roles as teaching fellows.

In every school, teachers ate together in a faculty cafeteria, and I joined in these meals. I also participated in other activities such as school-wide assemblies and morning exercise, faculty meetings, fellow meetings, social activities, teachers’ visits to students’ homes and more. The fellows at different schools within the same township often visited each other during the weekend, and I also participated in these gatherings. This allowed me to maintain sustained communication with Teach for China participants while I was not based in their school and gain insight into shared concerns of fellows at different schools.

Beyond observations and interviews with fellows at schools, I conducted interviews with a Teach For All leader, leaders and staff at various levels within Teach For China, and Teach For China alumni, as well as stakeholders from local communities such as education officials, school administrators, and teachers. I also observed a variety of professional development activities such as Teach For China professional development conferences and coaching sessions provided by Teach For China staff to fellows. This book also draws on the analysis of documents such as professional development materials, teaching schedules, lesson plans, annual reports, organization websites and more.

Teach For China is a very close-knit community. Although fellows are geographically widely dispersed, they maintain communication networks that are informal but very strong. I was at times surprised by how far and quickly news traveled. Because of this, I found it necessary to make a very conscientious effort to maintain the anonymity of participants who are quoted or mentioned in my writing. I have refrained from offering demographic and background information about participants except when it is truly necessary for making sense of particular data. Including such information about participants would, in many instances, give readers a richer context for understanding the data, but would risk making a participant identifiable within the Teach For China community.

Scholars have been publishing research about Teach For America for over two decades. I put the findings of this study in dialogue with the rich and extensive body of existing literature on Teach For America to engage in comparative analyses of Teach For China and Teach For America.

Limitations

The results of this study are limited by several aspects of the research design. First, this study includes only a small percentage of Teach For China’s fellows and project schools. Therefore, the results cannot be generalized to represent the experiences of fellows or the situation of project sites in general. While the study does shed light on overall organizational strategies, the implications of those strategies will vary for different fellows, schools, and regions.

Furthermore, this is not a longitudinal study and presents only a snapshot of a rapidly changing organization at one particular point in time. Teach For China has undergone some important changes since I conducted my fieldwork in 2014. Teach For China has experienced a high level of turnover among its leaders, including the resignation of its founder and CEO in 2018, which may lead to new directions in the organization’s strategy. For example, since my fieldwork, Teach For China has moved beyond only implementing the fellowship program by establishing a rural education research center and two rural elementary schools that are fully managed by Teach For China and staffed with fellows and alumni. Although limited in duration, this snapshot reveals the important ways in which a similar model may have different implications and effects in different contexts.

Another significant limitation of this study is the exclusion of students, parents, and community members (with the exception of local leaders and educators who are also parents and community members). Due to a number of constraints, it was not feasible to interview these groups, although their participation would have added very valuable perspectives.

Overview

This book is organized into three parts The first part, Chapters 1–3, sets the stage by laying out the argument of the book, examining Teach For All as a transnational policy network, and situating Teach For America and Teach For China in their respective ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ foreword
• PART ONE Teach For America, Teach For All, and Teach For China
• PART TWO Teach For China and educational equity
• PART THREE Teach For China and public participation in education
• Appendix I: Research methods
• Appendix II: Protocol for interviews with fellows
• Index