Teach for America, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy and Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics.

Perhaps twenty years ago, I worked with a fellow Wharton grad alum, and others, on creating a new charter school in Atlanta, GLOBE Academy, with the mission "To develop globally minded citizens who have the knowledge, skills and attitudes to effect positive change in our world."  A fun effort, with lots of bumps and hurdles, which finally came to fruition a couple of years after I left the board, and which is still going strong, offering K-8 for 1,200 students.  

My buddy from Wharton was a sharp fellow, one who's conversation was always interesting, challenging. and refreshing.  Something of an idealist, he had been one of the early volunteers for Teach for America and had been teaching in the Atlanta Public Schools during some of their worst periods of performance under Superintendent Beverly Hall.  He was still fired with the passion for what public education could be despite having seen some of the very worst of what public education in big cities often was.  

For whatever reason, he came to mind the other day and I was wondering whatever became of him.  He eventually left Atlanta for San Francisco, drifting into the education NGO eco-system, before I lost track of him.  Thinking about him also made me wonder about Teach For America.  Whatever became of that exciting and inspiring program?

In an example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I think of that program for the first time in years and a week later I come across Teach For America was once a movement. What happened? by Dale Chu.  

What happened seems to be the common combination of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics:

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

and Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

From Chu's essay.

Yet Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion and hardly a TFA hater, recently offered a stinging assessment of its trajectory:

Almost no other important organization lost its way as completely as TFA in the last 8–10 years… For years TFA brought smart motivated people into schools and focused them on student achievement in areas of high need. [T]hey traded that noble work for a set of political objectives that made corps members feel virtuous at the expense of the very students they claimed to serve… It’s been a long time since they cared more about student achievement than say trying to “teach young people to interrogate systems of power.”

That’s quite an indictment of an organization that was once a bipartisan darling, earning plaudits from Democrats and Republicans alike. In its heyday, TFA was a movement with remarkable reach and influence. So what happened?

[snip]

At the same time, TFA’s politics moved from the background to the brand. Its public messaging began weighing in more directly on policing, structural racism, gender, and identity. As mission creep set in, its pitch morphed into something like, “Come join a broader struggle against systemic injustice.” That newer framing asked for agreement on more contested questions about why injustice existed and what kind of social change was required to remedy it.

The shift from a student performance focus to an ideological/equity focus had a material impact.

An organization that had once beaten Goldman Sachs and McKinsey at their own recruiting game found itself competing for talent in a very different marketplace. The numbers tell the story. At its peak in 2013, TFA drew 57,000 applicants and nearly 6,000 new corps members. By 2022, the incoming corps had dwindled to roughly 1,600.

I eagerly await a time when our institutions steer back from the ideological left and once again refocus on shared positive missions of accomplishment.  Enough of this leftist pathological altruism where the focus is on the organization, not the mission, a focus on inputs not outcomes, and a focus on faddish ideology rather than real world accomplishments.