Book Review: Examining Teach for All: International Perspectives on a Growing Global Network (Editors: Matthew A.M Thomas, Emilee Rauschenberger and Katherine Crawford-Garrett) (original) (raw)
Over the past decade, scholarship on the Teach for America (TfA) programme and its global offshoots 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 offshoot (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.
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