We Can't Pay For This Kind of Recruiting

Great recruiting piece in the NY Times. Op-Ed contributer Colson Whitehead explains how difficult it is to be black and successful. It is a whole article about how tough it is to be black and successful. Not black and poor. Not black and in need of a good education. Black AND successful. From the article:

It makes the head spin, this talk of who’s elitist and who’s not. I’m confused, myself. For years, they said you can’t have this because you’re black, and then when you get something the same people say you got that only because you’re black. I mean, here I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, and yet the higher up you go in an organization, the less you see of me.

I'm not going to pretend that I understand that part of the article, but look, recruitment loves to take credit for our astronomical growth. And usually I am happy to go along with it. What else is going to keep a ton of overworked, underpaid young professionals toiling away to make some crazy-ass artificial numbers me and my husband make up when we get into a pissing contest over whose organization is better?

(Pissing Contest Aside: See, when Rich and I want to get out

for a while we drop the kid-oes off with a nanny and we do tequila shooters until the world starts to make sense. Usually this leads us to start talking about whose educational model will have the greatest impact. But since neither of us know too much about pedagogy, we end up just talking numbers. Invariably this leads to betting, and then the next morning Lisa gets a call about how our corps will be 4,000 in 2009 or else. I'm not saying it's a pretty process, but it works.)

But as much as our tequila benders shape the policy of Teach For America, the real truth is that this organization is built upon white guilt. Lots and lots of privileged white guilt. If we could place 5,000 corps members in regions, we could probably recruit them. In fact if we could just measure white guilt, we might be able to drop the selection rubric all together.

People feel guilty though, because they are doing better than others. And that spurs them to join Teach For America and try to help others to do better. However if white people are now supposed to feel guilty, even when minorities are doing good - whoo-eee! - we are never going to have recruitment problems.

Our 2020 goals are going to be off the charts. Suck-it KIPP!