Legitimizing the Dilettante - Teach For America and the Allure of Ed Cred

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Mary Man

Teach For America (TFA) corps members describe motivations to join the program as idealistic, ambitious, and driven by a desire to change education, later confronted by harsh realities in both placement schools and the program. Scholarship links this mismatch to popular culture’s unrealistic hero-teacher ideal. The study uses a pre-service interview approach to detect the hero teacher narrative in applicants’ beliefs, rather than relying on post-service reflections.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages48

Reading Time2 h 1 min

AccessFree to download

Background and program context

TFA recruitment and placement model

Critiques and the hero-teacher narrative

Study approach and findings

Pre-service phenomenological study design

Ed cred as a legitimacy framework

Implications

UC Berkeley Berkeley Review of Education Title Legitimizing the Dilettante: Teach For America and the Allure of Ed Cred Permalink [https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1zt0411s](https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1zt0411s) Journal Berkeley Review of Education, 7(2) Author Clement, Davis Publication Date 2018-01-01 DOI 10.5070/B8bre7232956 Peer reviewed [eScholarship.org](eScholarship.org) Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Available online at [http://Escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre](http://Escholarship.org/uc/ucbgse_bre) Legitimizing the Dilettante: Teach For America and the Allure of Ed Cred Davis Clement 1 College of William and Mary Abstract Teach For America (TFA) corps members in reflecting on their experiences, have described their motivations to join the program as idealistic, ambitious, and “profound drives to effect educational change”(Crawford-Garrett, 2012, p. 27) that eventually had to be reconciled with unexpected, harsh realities—both in their placement schools and in the TFA program itself. Matsui (2015) argues that popular culture is the source of this unrealistic idealism about teaching. This hero teacher narrative is a familiar theme in films such as Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, and Freedom Writers, as well as in documentaries such as Waiting for Superman and The Lottery, some of which feature TFA teachers. TFA taps into this vein of popular idealism in its recruitment efforts. This post-intentional phenomenological study sought instances of the hero teacher narrative in the beliefs and motivations of TFA applicants and preservice corps members—not as post-service reflections, as with many counternarratives, but in pre-service interviews, before conceptions of their initial intentions could be reconstructed by considering actual experiences. Findings suggest that TFA applicants may be pursuing ed cred, a unique conceptualization of legitimacy that blends the competence of professional mystique and the competitive hero teacher narrative with three new experiential variations: the drive for credibility, preference for convenience, and need for a credential. Implications for policy and leadership are discussed. Keywords: ed cred, education reform, hero teacher narrative, professional mystique, Teach For America, TFA For nearly 30 years, Teach For America (TFA) has contracted with school districts and charter-school networks to place teachers in hard-to-staff urban or rural schools for 2-year commitments; students in these schools are largely from marginalized racial or ethnic groups and/or low socioeconomic backgrounds (Barnes, Germain, & Valenzuela, 2016; Teach For America, 2016) . TFA recruits graduating college seniors—usually with majors other than education—from prestigious universities (Blumenreich & Rogers, 2016; Scott, Trujillo, & Rivera, 2016; Trujillo & Scott, 2014) . The program is highly selective, and many consider acceptance to be an honor (Cann, 2013; Kretchmar, 2014; McAdam & Brandt, 2009) . In the current landscape of education reform, TFA is ubiquitous––it offers a response to staffing shortages in urban and rural schools (Cloud & 1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Davis Clement, 128 Queen Mary Ct., Williamsburg, VA, 23188. Email: [dclement@email.wm.edu](dclement@email.wm.edu). Berkeley Review of Education Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 29–75 30 Clement Fastenberg, 2010) and teacher preparation reform (Sawchuk, 2015; Veltri, 2012) . Several new teacher preparation programs have either adapted or outright copied the TFA model (Kretchmar, 2014; Lincove, Osborne, Mills, & Bellows, 2015; Mehta, 2013), creating a burgeoning new sector of unconventional teacher education options (e.g., The New Teacher Project, Urban Teacher Residency New York City Teaching Fellows) outside the purview of universities, which have traditionally trained and certified pre-service teachers before they enter the class

FAQs

What problem does the study address about Teach For America motivations?

It examines how applicants’ idealistic beliefs about educational change collide with unexpected realities once they enter placement schools and the TFA program itself.

How does the research methodology differ from many counternarratives?

Instead of analyzing post-service reflections, it looks for instances of the hero teacher narrative in pre-service interviews before applicants’ initial intentions are reshaped by experience.

What does the study find about applicants’ pursuit of legitimacy?

It suggests applicants may be seeking “ed cred,” a legitimacy concept combining professional mystique, the competitive hero-teacher narrative, and three variations: credibility drive, convenience preference, and credential need.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Mary Man