Teach for America Founder Gets Called Out for Princeton Tory Masthead
Lest I forget that my undergraduate writing career may come back to haunt me, Corey Robin '89 just called out his classmate Wendy Kopp '89, the founder of nationwide educational program Teach For America, for writing for the conservative Princeton Tory as an undergrad, and allegedly, being a self-proclaimed "corporate tool."
I have no idea what she was thinking when she joined it...We worked together as stringers for newspapers and wire services across the country. But beyond her telling me, proudly and repeatedly, that she was a “corporate tool” (the phrase, I think, was just coming into vogue), I have no idea what her political views were.
Disclosure: The news organization that Kopp and Robin worked together in? The University Press Club. (The Ink never tires of a little self-referential drama.)Robin's criticism is that Kopp's loose association with the Tory, "Princeton's premiere magazine of conservative and moderate thought" (they have since recently dropped the "moderate" in the print edition of their magazine--a shift in values, or an admission of reality?) reflects how TFA's neoliberal agenda is rooted in conservative principles of education.
[TFA] underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.
The criticisms of TFA aren't new, and they don't all come from Jacobin-- a "polemic" mag that is about a Tory-and-a-half from moderate on the leftist side of the political spectrum. The Washington Post also featured a back and forth between Kopp and critics about the organization's mission, and many have criticized the organization for essentially serving as a vehicle for privileged kids to sublimate their elite guilt.Or, as the Onion puts it in the voice of a fourth grader:
"Just once, it would be nice to walk into a classroom and see a teacher who has a real, honest-to-God degree in education and not a twentysomething English graduate trying to bolster a middling GPA and a sparse law school application...I'm not some sort of stepping stone to a larger career, okay?"
File this under our new UPC segment 'Princetonians Throwing Shade.' Correction: "Byline" has been replaced with "Masthead", since Robin couldn't find any proof of what Kopp wrote for the Tory.