A pal passed along this link to a PBS special on education from Arizona and urged me to check out what Lisa Graham Keegan had to say at the 24:12 mark.
In case you don’t feel like skipping through, she basically says that when history looks back at what is happening in modern day school reform, Teach For America will have emerged as the most important development in terms of saving the public school franchise.
I have written about this before, and I still swear I’m not a TFA water-carrier (they seem to do just fine on their own, thank you) but I think that Keegan is right. That organization is planting some serious seeds and I don’t think any of us can fully comprehend just yet what is going to start growing in the next 25 years. But I am quite certain that government, philanthropy, unions, and public education in general will be fundamentally different as a result of TFA as the TFA corps starts to lose its hair and age through society.
And even before I got to Keegan’s remarks, as I fast-forwarded my way through the segment, I found it striking enough to stop when they interviewed TFA’s Andrea Stouder (at the 3:25 mark.) Did you notice that she was the only one interviewed in the entire show who didn’t look completely miserable? She was young, bright, attractive, and effervescent. She made you feel hopeful that public education might be saved just yet. It wasn’t even what she was saying as much as how she was saying it.
There is something happening here folks.