Abstract
Over the past decade, scholarship on the Teach for America (TfA) programme and its global off-shoots has highlighted its interlinkages with a range of neoliberal reforms in school education. This research has connected the programme with the rapid increase of privatisation in public school systems, the deprofessionalisation of school teaching and the introduction of an array of managerial reforms to streamline learning towards narrow market-driven outcomes.
Examining Teach for All expands existing research to draw critical attention to the complex adaptations of the model across education systems in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Oceania. Drawing on a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, the volume bridges education policy studies with frameworks from sociology of education and globalisation studies. It offers nuanced social and political insights into how the TfA model is translated within regional educational terrains focusing on varying processes of funding, governance and implementation.
The key themes in the book are organised into four main sections. In the first section, the authors (Thomas, Rauschenberger and Crawford-Garrett) provide a comprehensive overview of the history and evolution of the model in the US, UK and the global Teach for All (TfAll) network. Based on the Peace Corps and other related public service volunteering initiatives, Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp began TfA in 1990 as an intervention to address teacher shortages in public school systems in the US. Over the years, the programme gained prominent corporate philanthropic support and was instrumental in shifting the gaze of school reform initiatives from larger systemic issues to localised concerns of teaching quality, school management and leadership. Its proximity to global corporate funders and malleable managerial template led to a partnership with London-based entrepreneur Brett Wigdortz who initiated the UK off-shoot (Teach First) and co-founded the TfAll organisation in 2007.
The next chapter delineates these affiliates in relation to broader discourses of neoliberalism and public education reforms in their respective countries. An important point that the authors raise through these discussions is the difficulty most researchers across countries face in gaining access to study the organisation and its work, as well as the limited public data on these affiliate programmes. In the cited instances where researchers have gained access, they have explored deeper questions on the nature and impact of the respective affiliate programmes. These pertinent concerns on researching TfAll affiliates highlight larger questions on the transparency of the corporate private sector and the accountability of private interventions working within under-resourced public school systems.
The second section examines the diffusion and adaptation of the TfAll model in Norway, South Africa, and Lebanon. An insightful discussion that emerges across the chapters on Norway and UK/South Africa is the differing structures of teacher education regulation across these countries. This, in turn, points to the differing roles of respective nation-states in the control and regulation of the private sector in the sphere of school education. In Norway, the programme was initiated as a collaboration with the Oslo municipality to improve the quality of science, maths and technology education. Equinor, the corporate partner, supports the programme with partial funding and leadership training for the participants, but the larger role of defining the programme is ultimately in the hands of the local state government. The adaptation of the model aligned with the local government’s strict mandates on teacher education, ensuring that the candidates who were selected were highly qualified science, maths and technology graduates. Unlike most off-shoots, Teach for Norway is small in scale and sees a high control of the local government and the Oslo teacher education department in modelling the programme to its specific educational requirements.
In contrast to Norway, the model’s adaptation in South Africa was heavily unregulated and outside the purview of the country’s formal teacher education system. Elliott employs a comparative lens to understand the model’s adaptation in the UK vis-a-vis South Africa. She shows that while the models tie into similar broader discourses of neoliberalism across both countries, the adaptation in a region with a weak and fragmented history of investment in education leads to deeper concerns of inequity.
The final chapter in this section, on Teach for Lebanon, draws parallels with TfA, noting how the programme attracts elite students in the country along similar lines and reproduces ideas of ‘knowledge deficit’ amongst poorer, marginalised students in the multi-religious country. Drawing on reflections by elite participants in the programme, the authors (Nimer and Makkouk) make an important point on language and the politics of curriculum in education. However, this discussion only emerges peripherally and it would have been interesting to see this thread developed further.
The third section explores interfaces between global and regional policy landscapes that shape the local contours of the affiliate programmes. Chapters on Bangladesh and Spain articulate the regional philanthropic and entrepreneurial networks through which the affiliate programmes were introduced to improve the quality of local public education systems. A significant theme across these two chapters is the evolving nature of regional corporate actors and philanthropic foundations. They are increasingly seen as important stakeholders by nation-states to contribute and inform social sector development. The chapters on Australia and Cymru (Wales) interrogate the influence of TfAll off-shoots on formal terrains of teacher education and codes of professionalisation. Both case studies point to fundamental differences in how the model conceives of the teacher, the profession and the larger aims of education for social justice. Southern’s examination of the Cymru (Wales) model is particularly interesting as Wales has a stronger framework of teacher professionalisation vis-a-vis England where teaching is seen as a ‘skill’.
In certain ways, the chapters on Australia and Cymru overlap with the thematic focus of the fourth section on teaching and leadership. The first chapter in this section by Yin and Dooley documents the teaching practices of the members of the Chinese off-shoot, locally known as the Exceptional Graduates as Rural Teachers (EGRT) programme. While there are several similarities in how the programme attracts elite graduates to teach marginalised children in rural areas, what is particularly noteworthy is how the Chinese participants understand ‘quality education’. Unlike their US counterparts who are driven by exam-oriented pedagogies, the Chinese participants equate their teaching-learning processes with a broader form of holistic education beyond performance in exams. This is an insightful observation, but the authors do not dwell on deeper discussions of pedagogy to substantiate these differences.
The second chapter in this section compares the Bulgarian and Austrian models in terms of each model’s engagement with local school systems. The authors (Schneider and Jose) present tiers of micro and macro data on teachers’ recruitment, work, administrative responsibilities and training to elaborate differences in how the participants cooperate and function within respective education systems. Finally, the chapter by Straubhaar analyses the theoretical underpinnings of TfAll’s amorphous leadership discourse that allows for easy translation and adaptation by corporate actors across diverse socio-cultural contexts. The project of leadership, he notes, promotes a corporate-driven vision to address concerns of social equity. He points to the narrow engagement with social problems within the framework of leadership, as young enterprising participants are encouraged to find their own solutions without a deeper introspection of larger social structures or earlier modes of intervention.
The volume covers an extensive range of themes to foreground the TfAll model and the particularities of its various global affiliate programmes. While the volume touches upon some aspects of language and curriculum only tangentially, it opens up a number of new directions for future scholarship, especially in terms of understanding the modalities through which the programme reconfigures the landscape of regional language learning (that is often multilingual in the developing world context), its complex connections to social histories and curriculum, and in turn, the intertwined regional and global discourses of assessments and standards. This book will be a valuable read to scholars of sociology of education, public policy and globalisation studies.
