In the effort to remake New Orleans schools and shake up Louisiana education after Hurricane Katrina, few groups left a bigger mark than Teach For America, the national organization that trained hundreds of charter-school teachers and molded many future leaders, including a former state education chief.
But now, more than 30 years after the group’s first recruits set foot in Louisiana classrooms, Teach For America has been booted from the state budget.
Last month, Gov. Jeff Landry vetoed the $500,000 that state lawmakers annually earmark for Teach For America, or TFA. The cut won’t cripple the well-funded nonprofit, but it does underscore the group’s waning influence and Louisiana’s hard right turn under the state’s new Republican governor.
“Teach for America is a non-profit organization that in recent years has strayed from its original mission,” Landry spokesperson Kate Kelly said in an apparent nod to conservative critics who have accused TFA of veering into “woke” progressive politics.
At the same time, the number of new recruits joining the group has plummeted over the past decade. In New Orleans, TFA supported 375 first- and second-year teachers in 2013. This school year, it will support fewer than 50.
The group’s declining enrollment owes partly to national trends, including ebbing interest in the teaching profession and increased competition from other programs that offer aspiring teachers an expedited path to the classroom.
Former Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White and Crescent City Schools CEO Kate Mehok, right, speak with a school leader in 2017. Both are Teach For America alumni.
But Teach For America’s diminished stature also reflects the decline of bipartisan education reform. TFA was a driving force in the movement for more charter schools, higher standards and stricter accountability that spanned the Bush and Obama presidencies. But Trump-era polarization pushed Democrats to distance themselves from school choice and Republicans to embrace the school culture wars, eroding the middle ground where reform groups once stood.
“Like many elements of school reform, TFA has lost its constituency,” said Doug Harris, an economist at Tulane University who directs the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans.
Yet even with less political clout, Teach For America remains a force in Louisiana education. This school year, it will support about 90 teachers statewide and provide online tutoring for some 450 students. And more than 750 educators who went through the program continue to teach, lead schools or run nonprofits in Louisiana, the group says.
The “effect of TFA is still felt today,” Harris said.
TFA grows in size and reach
Louisiana was one of Teach For America’s first destinations when the group launched in 1990 with a mission to recruit and train graduates from top universities to teach in impoverished communities.
After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the group helped supply educators to replace the city’s teachers, all of whom were fired after the storm. The city’s new charter schools relied on TFA and similar programs, such as TeachNOLA, to staff up.
The changes transformed New Orleans' teaching force, replacing many veteran Black educators with inexperienced White teachers without local roots.
“They’ve changed the face of New Orleans into the face of Teach for America,” Joyce Haynes, then the president of a state teachers union, said in 2011.
Critics blasted TFA’s model, which only asks recruits to stay in the classroom for at least two years.
“You're building in high turnover rates at schools that already have high turnover rates,” said Benjamin Backes, an education researcher who has analyzed TFA teachers’ impact.
Yet studies also found that TFA teachers helped boost student achievement, and often outperformed Louisiana teachers who completed traditional undergraduate programs.
Kira Orange Jones ran Teach For America's New Orleans chapter before winning a seat on the Louisiana board of education.
TFA’s reach also extended beyond the classroom. In 2011, TFA New Orleans’ leader Kira Orange Jones won a seat on the state board of education. The following year, TFA alum John White became Louisiana’s Superintendent of Education, a position he held for eight years. Other TFA veterans went on to found charter schools and launch nonprofits.
“Teach for America and its members have contributed greatly toward the academic progress we’ve seen over the last two decades in New Orleans,” said Dana Peterson, CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, a charter-school support organization founded by TFA alum Sarah Usdin, who also served on the Orleans Parish School Board.
TFA’s influence declines
In recent years, Teach For America's influence in Louisiana has faded.
White stepped down as state education chief in 2020. After years of paying TFA to recruit and train teachers, the state Education Department stopped contracting with TFA after 2022, an agency spokesperson said. And last school year, the group had one of its lowest enrollments ever: just 64 teachers statewide, a TFA official said. (Enrollment rebounded this year, with 88 first and second-year teachers.)
Some school districts that used to rely on TFA have turned to other recruiters or established “grow-your-own" programs that steer high schoolers into education. Others said TFA had been unable to meet their needs.
“When we inquired about the possibility of a partnership, they informed us that there were no teachers interested in working in our school district,” said Kelli Joseph, superintendent of the St. Helena Parish school district.
Last month, Gov. Landry vetoed about 20 earmarks that lawmakers had included in the state budget, including the money for Teach For America. Like TFA, many of the groups that lost funding have a strong presence in New Orleans or other Democratic strongholds.
In a statement, TFA Greater Baton Rouge Executive Director Laura Vinsant said state support has helped the group place teachers in high-needs Louisiana schools for many years.
“In a time of teacher shortages, we look forward to working with the Governor’s office, legislature, and Department of Education to restore this critical funding,” she said.
Kelly, the Landry spokesperson, noted that schools can still use their state aid to hire TFA teachers.
“This veto will not contribute to a teacher shortage,” she said.
Kelly didn’t elaborate on Landry’s reasons for the veto, but it’s clear that his priorities and TFA’s don’t fully align.
The organization has long focused its efforts on improving schools that serve mostly poor students, and in recent years it has sought to recruit more teachers of color. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the group took aim at his “indisputably hostile and racially charged campaign.”
Landry, by contrast, is a close ally of the former president whose top education goal this year was to help all parents — regardless of financial need — pay for private education.
Harris, the Tulane professor, said a similar dynamic is playing out nationally.
The “political right is less interested in academic achievement, more interested in ‘choice,’ and more skeptical of teachers” who come from elite programs, he said, “like TFA.”
