Teach for America Has Gone Global, and Its Board Has Strange Ideas About What Poor Kids Need

[eridani]

https://www.thenation.com/article/teach-for-america-has-gone-global-and-its-board-has-strange-ideas-about-what-poor-kids-need/

By promising innovative classroom techniques and inspirational leadership, the Teach for All model seeks to transform tremendous material deficits into a problem of character. For the purpose of comparison, I visited a public school in the same area untouched by Teach for India’s embrace. In Ms. D’s second-grade classroom, the effects of the cuts in education spending by Prime Minister Narendra Modi (a close friend of Teach for India’s corporate patrons) and the failure of the Indian state to properly develop a public-school system were immediately noticeable, even in India’s financial capital.

Ms. D is every bit as young and energetic as the Teach for India fellows who teach in the same building, but her class is very different. She is most definitely not a “global citizen”: She wears a traditional salwar kameez, speaks English in a thick Indian accent (the kind that would probably preclude her from being accepted by Teach for India), and occasionally swats her students—a common classroom practice that TFI fellows often cited when discussing the allegedly brutal public-sector “culture” they were fighting to transform.

On this day, Ms. D’s class has 22 desks and 36 students—about the same as the Teach for India classroom down the hall. But unlike the TFI fellows, she has never had a “coteacher” or “parateacher” to help with this load. The class size, Ms. D readily tells me, is clearly in violation of the Right to Education Act—but she goes on, attempting to do right by her students.