New post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:
In fact, the service organization component of TFA is supposed to help along TFA’s political goals. TFA admittedly recruits college seniors based, at least in part, upon their future leadership potential. The theory is that putting these future leaders through the program will ensure that a chunk of the future powerful will be sympathetic to the educational problems facing our poorest kids. More cynically, it could be said that TFA attempts to capture the future powerful for a moment to fill them up with its agenda as part of a long-game strategy of winning a political fight.