In 1968 the Ford Foundation gave me a five year grant to study and evaluate the Teacher Corps, a federal program authorized as part of the Peace Corps legislation and intended to improve classroom teaching in economically disadvantaged schools. The program was trying to attract extraordinary students from disciplines not usually associated with teaching—including philosophy, literature, the humanities and the social sciences—who participated in a nontraditional internship program. Their training required close collaboration between colleges of education and selected low-income schools. Each participating school was to train four or five student interns who would have been exposed to innovative methods that were thought to be effective with students enrolled in low-income schools. The interns would in turn show experienced teachers how to use these new techniques.

I published my findings in a book entitled Reform and Organizational Survival: The Teacher Corps as an Instrument of Educational Change. My thesis was that reform programs like this one often must compromise their original reform mission in order to survive. The struggle to merely keep going saps the energy and resources need to spearhead reform. The book was the topic of a symposium one year at the American Educational Research Association. The study received some flattering comments that day. I also concluded that the teacher corps design itself was self defeating, in that it required cooperation between autonomous organizations: universities and schools, professions and unions, communities and the federal government. It became clear that, in response from pressures from all sides, and especially the seething tensions between testy but untested interns and skeptical teachers, the program had to compromise its reform mission. Schools refused to cooperate with interns who had been arrogantly told they were “catalytic change agents” responsible for instilling new approaches in weary and experienced teachers. Veteran teachers at best came off as naïve and at worst they were being portrayed as reactionary obstructionists. The more aggressive the interns, the more defensive the teachers became. The program subtly redefined its goals behind a smoke screen of ideologies used to disguise that fact that change was not occurring. By the late 1970s, the mission of the corps became difficult to define and its varied constituents hard to satisfy. In an effort to cut back federal involvement in education, President Ronald Reagan officially eliminated the corps as part of the 1981 Education Consolidation and Improvement Act. It ceased operations in 1983.

Richard Graham, the program’s visionary director, imagined a new kind of school that simply could not meet the test of reality. Over the years, a succession of program directors and personnel gave progressively less emphasis to reform and turned their attention to preparing specialists that were not much different than found in traditional training programs. In the end there was not much left of the original vision. Anyone who thinks a few Harvard history majors can change big inner-city schools is out of touch with reality.

But not to worry. Like the little battery bunny, the Teacher Corps keeps popping up under new guises. In 1990 it was revived under the name, Teach for America. The founder, Wendy Kopp, says she got the idea while attending undergraduate classes at Princeton University. The new, innovative program, says Kopp, provides special training for college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools. But, excuse me. It sounds suspiciously like a watered-down version of the Teacher Corps. And, like the teacher corps, it may not be working as advertised. A recent study by Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, and Cynthia Brandt found that participants’ dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service. In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lagged behind those who were accepted but declined and also behind those who dropped out before completing their two years. The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, said McAdam, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity.

And then, incredibly, again in 2010 still another teacher corps was proposed, once more pawned off as an utterly new idea. This bizarre proposal was made by Russ Whitehurst, Steven Glazsfmna and other senior fellows representing the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings Institution (a think tank devoted to education). The fanciful report proposes “…a new (italics mine) federal program, America's Teacher Corps, to support the development of effective teacher evaluation systems at the district and state level. The objective is “to keep the best teachers in the classroom, enhance the likelihood that more qualified people will enter teaching, provide opportunities for potentially good teachers to realize their potential through additional support and development and encourage qualified teachers to teach in hard-to-staff schools.” What do you know: still another teacher corps! Astonishing! I guess if you wait long enough, everyone will have forgotten a failed idea, which you can then claim as your own creative brainstorm. The advocates of this new teacher corps want us to know that their idea is not “compelled by research.” Of course it isn’t. They apparently are ignorant of the research, and anyway, they would not be heartened by it.