He describes the “regular teacher” as follows: “Teachers tend to be a lot like my aunt, who has lived in the same mid-sized southeastern Pennsylvania town for the last 30 years, raising three kids, marrying twice, and generally living a prosaic American life while making a career as a middle school math teacher.

Then you have the young, up-and-coming, Ivy-degreed TFA-er: “Many (though certainly not all) TFA corp members, by contrast, come from the privileged backgrounds inherent to Yale and other elite colleges where the organization likes to recruit.”

There are many teachers who fit neither profile: teachers with excellent education and vast experience who have been teaching for years. This is one of the key flaws of the North Carolina TFA study: it compared TFA teachers to “traditional” teachers, without considering the diversity of the latter group.

I have a pretty good education and am not a TFA fellow. I hope to continue teaching for many years. I have no desire to move up any ladder except for an internal one. People say, “oh, but you’re different, Diana.” I am weary of hearing that. There are others “like me” who are “different.” We did not fit any typical profile, but we wanted to teach, and teach we did and do.

This false opposition reminds me of the ed school dogma opposing constructivism to “traditional” teaching that consisted of course entirely of “chalk and talk” and regurgitation of “mere facts.” We must look past these stereotypes into the vastly richer truth.