Guest post: “Teach for America” as a two-year prelude to Wall Street.

By MIT Prof

I teach at MIT.   I have several traditions associated with my last class of the semester, one of which is to give a short speech to my students on why they, the best and the brightest, should go into K-12 education.  Last month, I encountered a new response.  One of my students, a very bright management senior, told me that JP Morgan Chase is offering her a job as an analyst but also offering to postpone the position for two years while she spends that time in the “Teach for America” program.

The class discussion that followed her statement was interesting.  I asked the class if they thought they would be good teachers after a five-week boot camp.  With one exception, they all thought it would take more time for a teacher to learn his or her craft.  I asked students how many of their favorite teachers had just started teaching.   There was a general consensus that their best teachers had been teaching for at least four or five years.

My business student commented that Morgan-Chase thought that the “teaching as leadership” focus of Teach for America was good preparation for work in Wall Street.  I went to the Teach for America website, where I found the following statement:

Our Teaching As Leadership framework is the cornerstone of our training and development program. It grounds corps members in the principles of leadership that will maximize student achievement in their classrooms and help them succeed as leaders after the corps.

For my very smart MIT student, Teach for America, would be a pit stop where she would pick up some leadership skills while teaching disadvantage children on her way to Chase, where she would use her finely honed mathematical and leadership skills in ways that almost certainly would not benefit the students she taught.