four - Franchises, start-ups and disruptive innovation: Teach for All and the ‘independent graduate schools of education’

Summary

In this chapter, we build on the previous chapter's discussion of brands and vertical integration and look at two responses to the supposed failure of universities in preparing sufficient effective teachers for public education systems: the Teach for All global brand; and the emergence of ‘independent graduate schools of education’ outside of traditional university structures. These responses are globally ‘travelling ideas’ (Seddon et al, 2013) that have materialised in profoundly different settings. In both, global financial networks’ ‘venture philanthropy’ (Saltman, 2010) is significant, more so in some national settings, less so in others; these networks of individuals, foundations and corporations using their private wealth to influence public policies, responding to the rhetorical appeal of the enterprise narrative. In our discussion, the idea of disruptive innovation (Clayton Christensen Institute, nd) will continue to be important as well as the related concept of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1942/2014). Our concern will be with what these travelling ideas have come to mean and what the consequences are for how teachers are prepared.

Teach for All: the global brand with ‘the universal solution’

Since its creation in 2007, Teach for All has become a selfconsciously global brand that has identified a ‘universal solution’ to ‘a universal challenge’ – that of equity in education (Teach for All, 2011, p 8). Although now grown to a network of over 60 formally affiliated organisations in multiple countries as well as several ‘un-official’ partners, its origins lie in the undergraduate study of one of the US's ‘charismatic entrepreneurs’ in teacher education identified by Adonis (2012).

Origins: Teach For America

In 1989, Princeton University student Wendy Kopp submitted a senior thesis entitled ‘An argument and plan for the creation of the teachers corps’. Within the year, Kopp launched the teacher recruitment programme, Teach For America (TFA), in New York City with seed money from the Mobil Corporation and office space donated by Union Carbide (Scott et al, 2016). In 1990, TFA had over 2,500 applicants and chose 500 of them for the inaugural, five-week Summer Institute, placing them in six sites nationwide (Heilig and Jez, 2010; Blumenreich and Rogers, 2021).