Doing Good and Doing Well: Credentialism and Teach for America.

Maier, Adam

In recent years, Teach for America (TFA) has placed thousands of high-achieving college graduates in hard-to-staff schools, and its popularity continues to grow. TFA thus represents an anomaly: it attracts higher education’s top students to primary and secondary education’s least desired jobs. This article reviews the current explanations for TFA’s success and draws from credentialism theory to explain how these theories overlook a key characteristic differentiating TFA from other programs, and how this difference limits TFA’s generalizability. Using credentialism theory, previous research, and official recruitment messages, this article delineates TFA’s use and exchange values and finds that TFA, by recruiting noneducation majors from prestigious universities, remaining selective, embedding members in a resource-rich social network, and increasing access and reducing the costs for its members to connect to nonteaching career ladders, has increased its credential’s exchange value relative to other preparation programs. The research and policy implications of TFA’s high exchange value are discussed.

TEACH For America Inc.; ALTERNATIVE teacher certification; TEACHER recruitment; TEACHER retention; TEACHER education research; TEACHER training

Journal of Teacher Education, 2012, Vol 63, Issue 1, p10

0022-4871

Academic Journal

10.1177/0022487111422071