ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and federal charter school reform to interrogate how policy decisions are shaped by networks of individuals, organizations, and private corporations. Critical scholars bring to the fore the specific interests and relations of power-shaping educational policy processes. The chapter maps a nexus of individuals and organizations constituting an education entrepreneur network to illustrate how TFA's movement to close the achievement gap is also fundamentally a movement towards corporate sponsorship, choice, and competition. It uses a directed graph to map the flow of financial resources from venture philanthropists to TFA-affiliated organizations. Shifts towards neoliberalism have had a profound impact on education, as evidenced by neoliberal policies such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and its reauthorization, merit-pay initiatives for teachers, a boom in value-added research systems for school districts, and dramatic increases in the number of charter schools.
