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In recent years, Teach for America (TFA) has invested in developing corps members as leaders. Although TFA asks corps members for a two-year commitment, TFA celebrates the achievements of alumni who have gone on to careers in politics, public policy, and advocacy. Thus, many community leaders see the arrival of TFA corps members as having a greater impact than just inside the classroom. While expectations for corps members are often high both from TFA and from the communities they serve, we seek to understand whether and how corps members become actively engaged in the broader political life of their placement city. Do corps members find the city fertile with opportunities to solve problems and engage in civic and political life? Or will these corps members leave their placements, viewing the political and educational challenges as intractable due to larger city politics? Using data from a panel study of 2012 corps members in four mid-sized city TFA placement sites, this study examines how attitudes towards and engagement with local politics shift as a result corps members’ experiences. Our research indicates that commitments to local politics shift significantly. While some corps members report an increased commitment to local politics, a sizable group actually becomes less enthusiastic and involved. These shifts appear to be related to the perceived openness of the local political arena to newcomers, one’s teaching placement and the local actions of TFA spin-off organization Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE).

Historically power to govern public schools has been delegated to local school boards. However, this arrangement of power has been shifting over the past half century and increasingly, local school boards are targeted as ineffective and antiquated. Teach For America (TFA), typically examined for its placement of teachers, also seeks to develop educational leaders and TFA now encourages and supports its alumni to run for local school boards. The involvement of a national organization, like TFA, with its own national education agenda in local school board elections may reflect the next step in the demise of local control. To investigate whether TFA’s involvement in local elections represents the spreading of a national agenda at the expense of attention to local issues, this research examines campaign messages for both TFA alumni candidates and their opponents. Results indicate that TFA alumni candidates incorporate significantly more messages aligned with TFA than their opponents (35 vs. 11), but they also maintain a focus on local issues as measured by the number of local issue messages they also incorporate into their campaign literature. Rather than debating whether school boards have lost power, this research points to the need to better understand how local politics is changing and expanding as new voices enter the arena.