A logic of practice in the development of Teach For America, 1989--1992: Elites, social capital and urban and rural teacher education

This dissertation is a study of the development and launching of Teach For America (TFA) during the years 1989-1992. TFA was established to provide a national teacher corps consisting of newly graduated liberal arts majors from prestigious colleges and universities to teach for two years in rural and urban systems serving poor whites and students of color. The organization, patterning itself loosely after the Peace Corps, provided its first group of recruits with eight weeks of training and brokered their hiring to teach for two-year terms in public schools.; The study draws on a wide variety of documents, observations of the first training institute, and interviews with TFA staff and others. This analysis draws heavily on the theory of Pierre Bourdieu; and uses concepts such as social field, habitus, capital, doxa, and power and the significance of objective structures in defining the conditions for habitus production. Also discussed is how education is a vector of objective social structures; how the doxa of TFA created distances and divisions among the national staff; and the ways in which social fields operate as fields of power. The launching of TFA is investigated to reveal how the construction of society became reflected in TFA's minoring of themes forwarded by the contemporary business elites that supported and funded it.; One conclusion holds that TFA was developed as a vehicle for elite re-form for under-resourced public schools. In spite of its mission to positively impact public school classroom, a body of alumni of primarily white social elites was created that became an instrument through which corporate values entered public education for populations who had the least leverage to shape their own education.