Teach For All : Storytelling “ Shared Solutions ” and Scaling Global Reform

Teach For All is a global network of state-based organizations that translate Teach For America’s market model of school reform into moral projects of nation-building abroad. Referring to this challenge as one of “scaling” the organization, its leaders elaborate a theory of change that hinges on replicability: in order to effect a global education revolution, Teach For All must reproduce inspiring instances of change in classrooms around the world. In service of this goal, the organization marshals an impressive archive of transformational stories. Each supports its “shared problems, shared solutions” philosophy and attains status as evidence, suggesting that Teach For All’s brand of transformative teaching can eradicate educational inequity despite the contingencies of place. Teach For All’s use of stories to “sell” this brand of reform is itself nothing new. But what is so peculiar about Teach For All’s project is that tales of individual conversion – of situated transformation – come to serve as sites for scalability. By exploring stories as technologies of scale, 1 This article benefitted from considerable conceptual guidance from Ilana Feldman, Thomas Guglielmo, and Joel Kuipers. I would also like to thank Victor Kessler for his thoughtful edits, as well as Daniel Friedrich, Rolf Straubhaar, and the three anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback. Finally, I thank the staff at Teach For All who graciously shared their experiences with me. Any mistakes are my own. epaa aape Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 23 No. 46 2 tracing the ways in which they travel the globe and operate on different audiences, and interrogating the work they do within Teach For All’s ideological apparatus, this article explores the relationship between storytelling “shared solutions” and scaling global reform, and the generic subject that such a relationship produces.


Introduction
In Fall 2013 the global media buzzed about Malala Yousafzai, the sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by members of the Taliban, whose agitation over education has since won her the Nobel Peace Prize.Quickly making news outside of Pakistan's national borders, the young woman's story attracted unparalleled levels of global attention: no longer emblematic of local inequities, Yousafzai came to symbolize a global injustice.
Yousafzai's story quickly piqued the interest of Wendy Kopp, founder of transnational education reform organization Teach For All. Teach For America's (TFA) global incarnation, Teach For All is a network of state-based organizations that aim to eradicate educational inequity by recruiting new leaders -optimistic, energetic, and often new to the world of schooling -to commit two or more years to teach in high needs schools around the world.Casting the problem of educational equity in a slightly different light than does Teach For America (which tends to focus on race-and class-based differentials in educational access), Teach For All frames education as a moral project of "nation-building": it molds responsible citizens, supports peace and understanding, and contributes to worldwide democratization.
This expressed goal saturates the organization's promotional materials, 2 though it stands in a curious relationship with the organization's design: each of its national partners frames education as a vehicle for building a "more vibrant democracy" at home, and at the same time must retain "independence from the control of government and other external entities, with an autonomous Board, a diversified funding base, and the freedom to make operational decisions, challenge traditional paradigms, and sustain the model in the face of political changes" (Teach For All, 2014c).That is, Teach For All is a global movement comprised of national organizations that are not nationalized -they simultaneously do the work of "nation-building" and remain strategically outside each nation's governing structure.
Though this project seems counterintuitive, leaders of the organization contend that the route to sustainable nation-building lies in the global sphere.In marketing materials and public statements, they repeat a "shared problems, shared solutions" philosophy, insisting that the challenge of educational inequity endures on a global scale, and that its mechanisms reveal, first, identifiable patterns, and second, the "good news…that solutions can be shared" (Kopp, 2012).In other words, Teach For All renders global inequity "legible" through a common standard (Scott 1998), and disseminates a "humanitarian narrative" that exposes the contours of causality and of human agency; by representing problems and solutions as formulaic, this narrative makes ameliorative action morally imperative (Laqueur, 1989, p. 178).It also offers members what Sassen calls a "transnationalized citizenship identity… [a] global sense of solidarity and identification, partly out of humanitarian convictions" (2006, p. 289).
Personal stories, found almost everywhere that the organization leaves its trace, replicate its 2 I choose to define "promotional materials" broadly; here, they include memoirs by the organization's founder, recruitment materials, fundraising documents, and the organization's vast web-presence.While most of Teach For All's promotional materials are disseminated in English (or accompanied by an English translation), a number of transformational stories are shared with recruits in other languages.This article only examines materials available in English, and so cannot comment on how they are translated to appeal to non-English speaking audiences.I have, however, done my best to accommodate for this obstacle by "checking" my assumptions about the organization's mission, methods, and stories through a series of ethnographic interviews, detailed in the research methods section below.
overarching humanitarian narrative and evidence its theory of change.Indeed, since Yousafzai's shooting in 2012, Kopp has invoked her struggle as a call to action, repeating and reframing the sensational tale in public speeches, television appearances, and widely circulated articles.By giving the crisis of educational deprivation "a face and a voice," Kopp has written, Yousafzai made education "ground zero in the fight for a better future" (Kopp, 2013, p. 1).While figures like Yousafzai seem like "outliers" -exceptional people with compelling personal stories and the charismatic leadership to drive a global movement -Teach For All vests their rhetorical power in replicability.Rather than symbols of fleeting and singular change, stories like Yousafzai's join a vast archive of transformational narratives, whose sheer preponderance seems to indicate that they are actually quite ordinary.They defy the contingencies of place and constitute a kind of renewable resource, one that Teach For All claims to produce with unparalleled efficiency.
Teach For All's use of stories to "sell" the organization's brand of reform is in and of itself nothing new.But what is so peculiar about Teach For All's project is that narratives constitute a mechanism for scalabilityfor proving that "there is nothing elusive about it [transformative education].We can replicate and spread success" (Kopp, 2011, p. 33).Here, Teach For All (and indexically Teach For America) is the "we" with the pedagogical know-how and moral authority to affect a global education revolution, and "scale" offers its idiom of change.
"Scaling" is a metaphor that has been marshaled in education reform circles since at least the 1990s (Healey & DeStefano, 1997) offer an early use of the term), though typically it refers to replicating success within school districts, or at most nationwide.Within the United States, "scaling" commonly accompanies a metric of statistical measurement and a rhetoric of quality control used within the professional sphere (among researchers, reformers, and policy makers).But Teach For All departs from this trend in three critical ways: by making "scale" an idiom of change in public spheres, by evidencing scalability through narrative, and by situating its ambitions on the global stage.Scale, then, becomes a mechanism for "autonomous" global growth, and for the success of a transnational nation-building enterprise that eludes the limitations of governance.
So how is it that personal narratives -tales of individual conversion, of situated transformationcome to serve as sites for scalability?What does this peculiar pairing accomplish?By scrutinizing stories as technologies of scale, this article explores the relationship between storytelling "shared solutions" and scaling global reform, and the generic subject such a relationship produces.Specifically, I pay attention to the making of the generic reformer in and through the medium of personal stories, and unpack the synecdochic relationship that stories shape between individual reformers and Teach For All as a reform organization: binding the transformation of self to the efficacy of a movement roots Teach For All's legitimacy in each member's journey through struggle, metamorphosis, and spectacular success.I then show how reformers' stories lend the organization's theory of change a persuasive "reality effect," one that travels the globe, operates on different audiences, and does specific work within Teach For All's ideological apparatus. 3In short, I find that "scalability" -imagined romantically but executed quite technically -makes global change an oddly personal undertaking.
3 While ideology is by no means a simple term -having been the subject of heated scholarly debate at least since Marx (1845; and even, arguably, within Marx's own career) -throughout this article I use the term to denote an integrated collection of assumptions, assertions, theories, and aims that constitute a "project" (here, Teach For All's moral-political project of global reform).References to Teach For All's "ideological apparatus" are meant to index Althusser's (1970) "ideological state apparatuses," which hail subjects and shape self-understandings through processes of "interpellation," though I do not apply the term with quite the same fervor.

On Development, Stories, and Scale
As an organization that transplants one collection of ideas, assumptions, and structures of school reform across the globe, Teach For All is subject to many of development anthropology's critiques (Edelman & Haugerud, 2005;Escobar, 1995;Ferguson, 1994;Friedman, 2005;Tsing, 2005), as well as debates surrounding cross-cultural policy borrowing (Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002;Cheng, 1998;Dale & Robertson, 2002;Phillips & Ochs, 2003;Rival, 2000;Sutton, 2000;Welmond, 2002).Informed by this body of work, this article critically interrogates discourses of international intervention coming from Teach For All, and the politics of representation they permit.It also investigates the practices that enable dominant cultural forms to attain power as "global" authorities.The "dominant cultural form" in question here is decidedly Western, emerging literally from the United States in the global "West," but also decked in the hallmarks of Western philosophy -a focus on the individual as an agent of change, a near-Victorian commitment to the powers of science and numeracy, a belief in the power of democratization, and an evangelistic attitude toward spreading it.It is also neoliberal, driven by competition, corporate-style leadership, and an outcomes-based, bureaucratic approach to accountability (for more on neoliberal education policy, see Ross & Gibson 2006), making Teach For All a particularly ripe candidate for cultural critique -a critique I am confident it has and will continue to receive.Concretized in the figure of Teach For America, and spread globally through Teach For All's network of thirty-four national organizations, its market model4 of reform moves from Bulgaria to Pakistan, from Austria to Lebanon, from Belgium to Chile to Qatar.In the process, Teach For All purports to "build nations" and support children around the globe.
However, this article does not focus on how Teach For All's stories "entrap the poor in a vicious cycle of passivity and misery" (Edelman & Haugerud, 2005, p. 2), continue a kind of "colonial" project (Goldsmith, 1997), or succeed or fail as they travel from one cultural context to another (Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002;Cheng, 1998;Noah, 1984;Phillips, 2000).Instead, it takes an interest in the discursive production of the reformer, "an under-theorized personage in the literature on school reform, as a partisan albeit technical class of institutional change agent" (Yang, 2010, p. 144).This focus offers a window into the different movement narratives, scales of belonging, and socialization practices that shape teachers' subjectivities.Underdeveloped in the general literature, the reformer is also particularly critical to examine under Teach For All.After all, the reformer is the figure that connects Teach For All's global moral mission with its nation-building goals; she alone belongs both to the community of the nation-state (as only citizen-nationals can teach for Teach For All's member states, with the sole exception of China), and to the organization's supranational movement.So while they seem incommensurable, reformers' national forms of membership can be put in service of transnational goals.It is not enough, then, for Teach For All to "scale" a political project.It also must scale a certain kind of subject -the generic teacher-reformer -with both national membership and allegiance to a transnational education movement.
I argue that, by paying attention to the making of the generic reformer in and through the medium of personal stories, it becomes possible to interrogate the global spread of reform with an intimacy that macro-level studies of policy borrowing and their critics struggle to see.Phillips and Ochs (2003), for example, construct an impressive generalizable model of the "four stages of borrowing," enumerating the various motivations and missteps that can occur at every turn, in every place.But in their attempt to provide "a heuristic device," they fail to take into account the people who make policy, and also the people -the subjects and subjectivities -who policy makes (Phillips & Ochs, 2003, p. 460).And broad debasements of development, when they frame its discourse as "monolithic and univocal," tend to lose the figure of the reformer in her organization (Friedman, 2007, p. 203).As Friedman critiques, "the products of 'development' are not the result of discourse alone, but rather emerge out of the dynamic interplay between conscious, living actors," and the discourses they actively produce (2007, p. 204).
Focusing on this nexus illuminates the co-constitutive relationship between the making of the reformer and the making of the reform organization, and the peculiar way in which the tales of situated, singular change agents can enable global, communal undertakings.The two are bound in projects of "scale."At the same time as organizations produce reformer identity, individuals make organizational efficacy -their stories evidence it, extract its successes from setting, and transmit its ideologies with affect to audiences across the world.By "scaling" global change, individuals achieve synecdoche with a global moral cause.
Theorizing "scalability" constitutes this article's primary contribution to the field, one that is important because the notion of scale is embedded in the idea of global ambitions (Goodale & Merry, 2007;Tsing, 2005).As frames for viewing the world that must be brought into being -"proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted," according to Anna Tsing (2005, p. 58) -scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects.They suggest a means and a model for remaking the world.If, as Tsing continues, the "point" of a global scale is to predict local conditions from a universal model and marshal efficacious interventions (2005, p. 102), then understanding the how and why of scaling constitutes an important intellectual task.Indeed, understanding "scalability" as an idiom of change can illuminate dynamics between local and global,5 as Tsing suggests, and also shed light on the relationship between individual agency and collective political movements.
Here, I examine "scalability" by moving through three analytic stages.After introducing Teach For All and exploring the vast archive of "transformational stories" that it maintains and disseminates, I conduct a narrative analysis of these stories by paying attention to their content, rhetorical structure, and formulaic use of language (Bauman, 1986;Briggs & Bauman, 1992;Laqueur, 1989).This initial step demonstrates that Teach For All does disseminate a kind of generic narrative, and allows me to next address the ideological work that this genre achieves.
I next articulate the relationship between this genre and the organization's theory of change.Though it seems counterintuitive that personal stories evidence "scalability" -since stories of individual change more commonly express the distinct and contextual nature of one's own experience (Ochs & Capps, 1996) -narrative does provide a way for Teach For All to "scale" its imagined subject.The analytic core of my article rests in this section: by paying attention to the discursive production of the reformer in and through the medium of narrative, I show that narrative is part of the organization's mechanism, and that the "transformative leader" -a replicable revolutionary agent -constitutes its vehicle for change.The making of the transformative leader as a moral type thus exists in a synecdochic relationship with scalability, and the operational spread of an ideological package.
The article then moves to show how these stories, as technologies of scale, travel and operate on different audiences.I examine the way that transformational leadership is made to look the same from nation to nation, smoothing sociocultural difference in a tale of global redemptiona tale rendered "legible" (Scott, 1998) for an audience of internationally-minded donors, policy advocates, and potential future members.I also show how stories facilitate Teach For All's scaling by supporting the organization's financial, political, and ideological growth.This helps to focus analysis on the work that stories do.Do they "engender compassion" and inspire "ameliorative action" from donors (Laqueur, 1989)?Do they provide evidence of a policy's global efficacy, eliding contextual difference (Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002;Cheng, 1998;Rival, 2000;Sutton, 2000)?Do they imagine a cosmopolitan community of moral reformers6 -a kind of Kantian global citizenry united by reason, agency, and a commitment to progress -and attract members to take up its cause?
I argue that narratives achieve all three, by articulating a form of generic subjecthood that converts the individual agent into a metric for political change -an embodied "datum" that signals Teach For All's moral authority.Through the relentless pursuit of personal transformation, characters in Teach For All's tales become synecdochic "evidence"; each reproduces in micro-scale the maturation of Teach For America, and Teach For All as its global incarnation.

Research Methods
This article bases its argument on data gleaned from a series of ethnographic interviews, as well as substantial narrative analysis of Teach For All's "transformative stories."Over a six-month period following several years of engagement with Teach For America, I conducted formal interviews (some in person, others via telephone and email; most identified through snowball sampling [see Bernard, 2006, pp. 192-194]) with members of Teach For All's staff, both those who work "on the ground" adapting the TFA model to the needs of nations abroad, and those who stay "at home" to package the compelling stories they find for promotional purposes.Their insights have helped inform the investigation that follows.
To identify objects for narrative analysis, I combed Teach For All's vast archive of transformational stories, located in books (Foote, 2008;Kopp, 2001Kopp, , 2011)), articles (Kopp, 2013(Kopp, , 2014;;Rogla, 2013), and online for prospective recruits (Teach For All, 2013, 2014b;Teach For India, 2014; among others).Among the dozens I encountered, I chose three for in-depth analysisboth because I believe them to be representative (each repeats the themes, language, and story arc representative of Teach For All's genre) and suggestive: their clear similarities in style and structure, but slight differences in setting and medium, allow me to make points about the production and portability of the "transformative story" that illustrate this article's argument.

Prologue to a Global Movement
Like many good stories, Teach For All's has a serendipitous start -one that begins seventeen years before the organization was conceived, with the founding of Teach For America.Stories about the development of both organizations, as told by their founders, highlight the transformative potential of placing hardworking individuals at the center of social change.This section traces the founding of Teach For America and Teach For All against three embedded narratives: that of Stand and Deliver's Jaime Escalante, of Teach For America's Wendy Kopp, and of Akanksha's Shaheen Mistri.These narratives both suggest continuities in how reformers see themselves -their inspirations, motivations, and roles -and the problems in need of reform, and offer early examples (certainly precedents, if not explicit models) of the "transformative stories" that this article explores.
Founded in 1990, Teach For America is a nongovernmental organization that places recent college graduates in the nation's neediest public schools, to serve two or more years as educators.The organization that is today affiliated with over 11,000 active Corps Members who teach 750,000 students across the United States -in addition to nearly 32,000 "involved" alumni -owes its existence to the 1989 undergraduate thesis of then-twenty-one-year-old Wendy Kopp (Teach For America, 2014).As the organization's origin story goes, Kopp was just like any other senior at Princeton -gifted by nearly sixteen years of the best education the nation has to offer, and relatively naïve about the shortcomings of public schooling in America.But a compelling tale of educational leadership would change her life trajectory.She writes (Kopp, 2011, p. 5): During my senior year in college, a hit movie, Stand and Deliver, made a national hero of Jaime Escalante, a teacher in East Los Angeles who coached a class of students to pass the AP Calculus exam.At the time, it seemed stunning that a teacher could get kids in a high poverty community to excel at that level -so stunning that the Educational Testing Service questioned the validity of the test results of Escalante's students, creating the drama that attracted the attention of Hollywood.Movie audiences around the country were moved by the depiction of a charismatic and heroic teacher who could miraculously beat the odds with students.We saw Escalante as an outlier -not as an example that could be widely replicated.Kopp quickly became overwhelmed by the question of how to reproduce Escalante's success.Finding the answer became a fixation -then an obsession -and gradually a lifelong career as she struggled to design, fund, and carry out the mission of an organization that would supply "transformative" teachers to America's underachieving schools (Kopp, 2001, p. 6).Though Kopp's teacher corps had a rocky start throughout the 1990s, Education Next reported in 2001, "It's becoming clear that Teach For America is channeling a wealth of talent, energy, and creativity into educational leadership that might otherwise have wound up in such fields as medicine, law, or business" (Raymond & Fletcher, 2002, p. 1).Today, the organization boasts more exclusive acceptance rates than many of the nation's top universities, and is broadly recognized as a leader in the fight against America's achievement gap7 (Winerip, 2010, p. 1).Indeed, TFA's origin story may represent an early example of the redemptive reform narrative elaborated in sections to come, tracing Kopp -an Escalante-esque hero -from struggle to success in her own transformative journey, and converting her into a symbol of school reform.It is possible that Teach For All not only scales Teach For America's success, then, but that the spread of reformers through both organizations effectively accomplishes a scaling of Kopp.In 2007, TFA launched a sister program, Teach For All, to assist "social entrepreneurs around the world" inspired by the market model who "wanted to adapt it in their respective countries" (Kopp, 2011, p. 213).But it did not begin as a business venture.One high-level staffer, Beth (a pseudonym), explained to me that, "Teach For All actually started with stories." As Beth described and as Kopp's memoirs recount, Teach For All was first imagined in India, in an organization called Akanksha that ran highly regarded after-school programs, and frequently fielded volunteers from abroad.Akanksha's founder, Shaheen Mistri, "kept meeting these incredible young leaders," Beth explained, "and finally got around to asking them where they came from.They told her the story of Teach For America, and about their experiences teaching in struggling public schools.They told her about the obstacles they had overcome, and the sense of possibility they had gained in the process.They spoke with conviction about educational inequity as a solvable problem."In 2006, Mistri brought a novel idea to Kopp, who recalls (2011, p. 213): Shaheen recognized that Teach For India could be a source of the leadership necessary to increase the impact of interventions like Akanksha and ultimately to effect fundamental change on a significant scale.She didn't want to reinvent the wheel and was looking for help…Inspired by Shaheen and by the vision and commitment of several other social entrepreneurs working to adapt the model in their countries, [we] worked together to create a global organization called Teach For All, which seeks to expand educational opportunity internationally by increasing and accelerating the impact of this model around the world.It is one thing for Escalante's story to inspire Kopp; though situated on different coasts, the two share a stake in the specific social, historical, and economic problems that define the American8 educational field, and are steeped in American philosophical notions of progress, enterprise, and individualism.But it is quite another thing for this story -and more than the story, its associated set of structural reforms -to gain such purchase abroad.What model of global salvation circulates to give Teach For All's mode of intervention its reasonableness?How do educators worldwide come to agree about what kinds of individuals are "transformative," and to what ends their transformative skills should be used?And how does a decidedly American understanding of the change-making individual come to be an organizing principle in thirty-four nations abroad?In other words, how -if at all -does one culturally specific model of reform become a global common sense?These are among the questions that this article pursues.Now fairly well established across the globe, Teach For All is a nongovernmental organization with sites in thirty-four nations, connected through collaborative learning opportunities in a kind of "transnational activist network," a clear instrument of the model's spread (Keck & Sikkink, 1998).Though Goodale and Merry caution that "power as a variable shaping the transnationalization of human rights discourse becomes obscured by what appears as an ideological faith in the democratizing possibilities of networks" (2007, p. 19), members of Teach For All assert categorically that networks empower -they "increase our partners' impact" across borders, and facilitate the spread of "innovations…from organization to organization" (Kopp, 2014, p. 7).Seeing themselves as equal partners in a commonsensical, even morally essential undertaking, members make it their mission to ensure children's "basic human right to an education" (Kopp, 2014, p. 6).

Scaling Reform on the Global Stage
This mobilization of human rights discourse is not disingenuous, but it is strategic.The human rights movement represents one global project that, on a much grander scale than Teach For All, situates a particular set of moral and ideological values as a global, unassailable "language of human good" (Ignatieff, 1999, p. 313).Furthermore, as Goodale and Merry write, actors embrace the idea of human rights "in part because of its visionary capacity, the way it expresses both the normative and the aspirational" (2007, p. 8).Under Teach For All, the normative language of human rights indexes its "shared problems, shared solutions" philosophy on the one hand, and promotes an aspirational "sense of possibility" on the other.The language of human rights also helps frame educational inequity as a high stakes global threat -one that supersedes the boundaries of state: it is a "systemic global issue" that "takes a massive toll on families, communities, countries, and collective global welfare" (Kopp 2014, p. 7): It's no coincidence that repression, unemployment, and terrorism thrive where education does not.In today's interconnected world, where our economic prosperity, public safety, and environmental sustainability are all linked, low educational levels and big educational disparities affect us all.Indeed, the costs of poor schools are "massive -in moral, civic, and economic terms" (Kopp, 2011, p. 4); they represent a "threat to human welfare and to the strength of nations around the world…a threat to all of us" (Kopp, 2011, p. 212).But the benefits of solving the problem are equally profound, "key to increasing the well-being of humanity, strengthening governments, increasing tolerance, and generating advances in science, health, and society" (Kopp, 2011, p. 212; see Figure 1).
Because the costs of educational inequity are so great, and the benefits of facing it so immense, "accelerating the pace of change" and "scaling" Teach For America's success seem like obvious goals.Kopp explains that, "unlike twenty years ago [at TFA's founding], the question today is not whether success is possible but instead whether success is 'scalable.'Can we develop entire school systems that provide educational opportunity for all students?"(Kopp, 2011, p. 8;Popkewitz, 2008, advances a critique of this rhetoric).Teach For All's problem thus becomes how to address Source: http://www.teachforall.org/our-network-and-impact/our-impacteducational inequity on a scale that is commensurate with the global magnitude of the problem.
Certainly scale matters on an organizational level.It is "part of a holistic effort to create the enabling environment for transformational education and build the system's capacity to run transformational schools…If we can change the broader construct in which these interventions operate, we are likely to dramatically magnify their impact" (Kopp, 2011, p. 128).But how is "scaling" achieved?According to Teach For All, transformational leadership is the key variable for replicating success.Its recruitment website reads (Teach For All, 2014d): The problem of educational inequity is multi-faceted and entrenched -and there's no silver bullet solution.But no matter what the approach, we've learned that the most powerful factor…is LEADERSHIP.Transforming education requires channeling our most valuable resources -human resources -against the problem.A tally of repeated terms from Kopp's writings (2001Kopp's writings ( , 2011Kopp's writings ( , 2013Kopp's writings ( , 2014) ) and the organization's online presence (Teach for All, 2013All, , 2014aAll, , 2014bAll, , 2014cAll, , 2014d;;Teach For America, 2013;Teach For India, 2014) suggests that the "transformational leader" is a "rigorous" planner with a deep "sense of purpose," who is on an "intense" moral "mission" to put children on a "new life path."She "maximizes value," "invests others," and "constantly evaluates progress" so that "action" is "aligned" with "vision."She "inspires," "empowers," and does "whatever it takes."She is a "heroic" teacher, enveloping students in a "culture of achievement" so that they can "transcend their circumstances."Even in the face of "tremendous obstacles," she is wholeheartedly "committed to change.""What is encouraging" about defining transformative leadership as a kind of moral type, according to Kopp, is realizing "there is nothing elusive about it.We can replicate and spread success" (Kopp, 2011, p. 33).
The charismatic individual thus becomes the agent of change in this ideological model.But it is not her individuality that matters so much as her replicability.As Beth explained to me: People think that great teaching is magic, but in fact it is something you can scale.
We try to face our skeptics with evidence -to prove past impact in the face of critique, and to create a sense of possibility for the people who support our organization.And when you look at the stories of people who are doing this workand Shaheen's is a great example of this -it's hard to deny that we have tremendous reason for optimism here at Teach For All.

Scripting Reform and Redemption
Stories of transformative leadership within Teach For All do not circulate ad hoc.Once a story seed is "found" in any of its member organizations, it is "filtered through central," where the business of storytelling constitutes some staffers' whole careers.Members of Teach For All's marketing team explained to me that immense amounts of time and money are spent on each story: on discovering it, crafting it, disseminating it through print, image, and video, and -if the story is great -on flying the protagonist around the world to tell it.The process is so exhaustive, one staffer suggested, that she feels "guilty" about the resources spent on telling stories, and wonders how reapportioning these resources directly to schools "would make a difference on the ground."But she quickly qualified her apprehension: "I get it.In the US we can make our point with stats, but stats are so American.My contacts abroad are looking for something more real to hang onto.And stories are compelling, they're human."Here, the staffer seeks a strategy for making something "so American" more compelling and commonsensical for an international audience.It also seems significant that researchers have hotly critiqued the validity of cross-cultural comparative data (Feuer, 2012; among others); Teach For All must find other ways to evidence its organizational efficacy.
Whereas a "reality effect" is constituted in Teach For America through a kind of theology of numbers, stories effect "reality" under Teach For All.Both methods rely on "detail as the sign of truth," much like Laqueur's "humanitarian narrative" (1989, p. 177).Laqueur defines the humanitarian narrative as a genre in which details about the suffering bodies of others engender compassion, which "comes to be understood as a moral imperative to undertake ameliorative action" (1989, p. 176).By describing a "particular suffering" and offering "a model for precise social action," derived from an examination of the body that elucidates the reason for pain, such narratives support a metric of cause and effect that presupposes the means for relief (Laqueur, 1989, p. 178).
Teach For America and Teach For All do not rely on a medical rhetoric of suffering; instead, respectively, numbers and narratives do this work.In fact, stories act as proxies for statistical data by decontextualizing social change, making intervention "trackable," and evidencing its consistency across scales.By analyzing the content, rhetorical structure, and formulaic use of language in Teach For All's "transformational stories," I argue that numbers and narratives work similarly to marshal detail within a causal chain, render these chains "portable" through a process of extraction (Briggs & Bauman, 1992;Keane, 2008), and convey a moral message that incites the sympathetic aid of listeners around the globe (Laqueur, 1989).
I draw on three key stories in this analysis out of the dozens I encountered in books (Foote, 2008;Kopp, 2001Kopp, , 2011)), articles (Kopp, 2013(Kopp, , 2014;;Rogla, 2013), and organizational materials (Teach For All, 2013, 2014b;Teach For India, 2014; among others): Maurice's, Gaurav's, and Minxuan's.I have chosen these three narratives because each repeats the themes, language, and story arc representative of Teach For All's genre.Each also comes from a different site of dissemination used by the organization, suggesting that the genre's form is relatively stable despite its setting (recounted in Kopp's memoir, put forth by a member organization, or displayed on Teach For All's central site) and medium (book, article, film).For the sake of brevity, I only recount Maurice's story in full (Kopp, 2011, pp. 14-16): When Maurice [a new high school history teacher in Atlanta] diagnosed his students' academic skills at the beginning of the year, he found that they had mastered, on average, only 67 percent of the standards they were supposed to have learned in the ninth and tenth grades and that half of his juniors were reading below an eighth grade level.The more Maurice reflected on this situation, the more indignant he became."I was angry because my students had failed," he said."I realized that I had to be the one to stop the cycle.I was filled with a sense of urgency."He described the challenge: "Teaching in Southwest Atlanta presents a unique set of challenges for my students and me.The neighborhood of Ben Hill that surrounds my school is filled with crime, teen pregnancy, and poverty.All of these factors make their way into our school every day.Of the twenty-two girls I taught last year, ten were pregnant or had children.Many believed they could not achieve… One day early in the year, Maurice told his students about a young girl who had attended his own high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.She was a typical student in most respects, but in her junior year she had a baby boy.Her father was an alcoholic and wasn't supportive of her, and she considered dropping out, but in the end she did not quit.She came to school every day, sometimes with the baby.In fact, she went to summer school to take classes and graduated a full semester before the rest of the senior class…"This woman who never gave up, who never made excuses, was my mother, and that baby was me, your teacher," he told his students.By sharing his own story, and in many other ways, Maurice went about investing his students in the goal of passing the year-end exam and in his belief that "college was the only option." After an enormous amount of hard work on his part and on the part of his students, all of them passed the exam needed to graduate, and a year later he saw them all -fifty-five high school juniors -gain admission to college.
Maurice's story, which actually embeds an account of his hard working mother, contains a series of elements critical to Teach For All's brand of transformational storytelling.Structurally, the narrative introduces an idealistic young person who confronts extraordinary obstacles -here, a measurable set of academic deficits.There is also a moment of realization, a kind of conversion to the cause; Maurice realizes he has to be the one "to stop the cycle," and is "filled with a sense of urgency."(Maurice's diction is also notable, as he invokes Teach For All's "sense of urgency" and desire to "stop the cycle" of poverty by "never making excuses.")Through hard work, personal sacrifice, and the relentless pursuit of excellence, Maurice and his students achieve ambitious goals.They "rejuvenate a sense of possibility" and "reset our expectations of students" -precisely what the transformational story is meant to do.Kopp writes (2011, pp. 182-183): [This story] -that of a talented new teacher whose experience leading students through enormous challenges to dramatic achievement galvanized a lifelong dedication to solving educational inequity and gave him the foundational experiences necessary for success -is precisely the experience we hope all of our corps members will share.It is the story of the transformative power of a successful teaching experience, one that serves as the foundation for a lifetime of leadership and advocacy for children… [It] is representative of the stories most of the classroom, school, district, and political leaders described in this book and of Teach For America's theory of change about how to eliminate educational inequity.Tracing a process of reform that is also redemptive, stories like Maurice's repeat a conversion experience typical of the transformational story: the personal experience of inciting inspirational change helps teachers develop "an unshakeable conviction about what is possible," and concretizes a once abstract moral mission by investing corps members with a kind of ethnographic authority (Kopp, 2011, pp. 185).Each can prove that he has been there, and he has seen change happen firsthand.Indeed, he has been a change maker.
Unfolding over 8,000 miles from Maurice in a classroom in west central India, Gaurav's story repeats this structural model (Teach For India, 2014): Gaurav remembers his first time in the classroom."I started working in a classroom with no electricity and 50 students from vulnerable backgrounds.My youngest kid was six, my oldest 14.These children had few chances."The challenge is not easy.India is the second largest country in terms of population, with 1.2 billion people, 400 million of whom are children.40% of adults do not know how to read and write.
Although most children start school, only 60% of them finish primary and a slim 10% finish secondary school.These odds are even worse for some subgroups: for example, girls in rural areas have only a one percent chance of graduating school…Gaurav was not sure how to beat the overwhelming odds.But one day a thought seized him, and continues to drive his work every day.It was a simple question: "What will I do about it?"He understood what his role in the world was and settled to learn how to accomplish it.Gaurav's story progresses from here, recounting how he did "whatever it took" to overcome obstacles within his classroom, and came to understand firsthand the importance of education to the stability of his nation.As Kopp repeats in her memoir, "Teach For India has made me a convert…it has given me a sense of larger purpose toward my nation-building goals" (2011, p. 211).
In addition to repeating a process of confronting challenges, making the choice to be an agent of change, and effecting transformation for a group of vulnerable students, note how stories like Maurice's and Gaurav's envelope data that on its own is "so American."By giving the stakes of educational inequity a "face and a voice" -not unlike Yousafzai -they invest it with personal meaning and testify to its gravity.They also manage to envelope the quite dry trappings of accountability -with its emphasis on responsibility, autonomy, measurement, and choice -in the affective language of redemption.Indeed, their personal experiences lend data a "moral authority and credibility" rendered portable in the global political sphere (Kopp, 2011, p. 71). 9  Teach for All offers Minxuan Zhang's story as evidence of precisely this -the portability of systemic change from nation to nation, and the transformative promise of sharing solutions within the network.Recounted in a blog post by Javier Rogla (2013), CEO of Empieza por Educar (Spain's Teach For All affiliate), Minxuan's story is accompanied by a short video about Teach For All leaders who traveled to Shanghai to learn from Mr. Zhang.Thanks to Minxuan, Shanghai's educational transformation…is a rare example of excellence and educational equity.Shanghai's education system is now ranked #1 in the PISA results, with 20% of students achieving level 6 (in Spain, we have just 3% of students on that level, and the overall OECD average is 8%)…All of these changes were implemented by a person who did not undergo a formal teacher training program, but, during the Cultural Revolution, was sent to a rural area, and as the most educated person in the region, was asked to teach the children, which he did for eight years.This experience touched him profoundly and led him to institute all of the changes in favor of excellence and equity.Recalling the experience of visiting China's excellent schools and learning about Minxuan's model for producing academic progress, Rogla titled his post, "Nothing Was Revolutionary… And This Is What Gives Me Hope." Despite the individual texture of Maurice's, Gaurav's, and Minxuan's stories, they share a general structure and set of rhetorical tropes that suggest the presence of a genre (Briggs & Bauman 1992, p. 137), one that lays a strategic "interpretive template" over each reformer's own experiences, such that "the form and content of his story…internalize the protocols of testimony" (Allan, 2013, p. 47).In Teach For All's transformative narratives, this interpretive template is quite explicit: the organization mediates young teachers' stories by excerpting their testimony -embedding the voices of "heroic" individuals within a strategic, statistical register.Amidst numbers that attest to the gravity of global inequities, each "character" testifies to both the possibilities for positive change and the particular mindsets through which change is enacted.In doing so, each manages to encapsulateand thereby replicate -the storyline that undergirds the organization's founding: that leadership like Kopp's transcends the boundaries of state, and that Teach For All can produce it.
Embedded within such a structure, the power of each leader lies not in his singularity as an agent of change, but rather in his promise that such leadership can be replicated -identified, imitated, and excerpted -despite the vast differences in educational need and infrastructure that circumscribe his setting.Given that Teach For All couples a commitment to "nation-building" with a curious avoidance of national institutions, this point seems particularly salient.Under the generic leadership of Maurice, Gaurav, and Minxuan, the challenges that differentiate reform in a Western federalist system of public education from the inequities of class, caste, and gender in a South Asian city, from the highly structured state-run system of education in the People's Republic of China, manage not to muddy the storyline: with an enterprising attitude and an unwavering commitment to Teach For All's specific cause, any dedicated leader can overcome obstacles in service of the world's deserving children.Transformative stories support projects of scale, then, by smoothing sociocultural difference into tales of global redemption.And yet, oddly, the discursive mechanism through which scale is achieved is actually quite personal.Though scale implies change to the global educational sphere, it relies on transformation at the individual level.

Embodying an Idiom of Change
While members of Teach For All's team cite two functions of the "transformational story"to "prove past impact" and create a sense of "future possibility" -stories do not merely signal organizational efficacy; in crafting the generic reformer as a kind of embodied datum, I argue that they actually create it.As Foucault suggests, it is important to treat "discourse [not] as groups of signs…but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" (1972 [1969], p. 29).Furthermore, according to Briggs, "narratives do not simply describe ready-made events; rather, they provide central means by which we create notions as to what [has taken] place," (1996, pp. 22-23; see also Bauman, 1986).More than referential, stories are instrumental: they develop subjectivities and move people to action.Through a process of mediation -and of targeted representation -Teach For All's marketing team translates personal stories of transformation into efficacious instruments of scale.Specifically, narratives inscribe ideology into practice through synecdoche, binding the making of the reformer to the spread of the reform organization.
Within the narrative arc, the two are bound by each character's conversion to the cause.This moment simultaneously marks the individual's transition from recruit to committed in-group member, and encodes Teach For All's moral and ideological values.When Maurice declared himself "the one to stop the cycle," when "a thought seized" Gaurav that "continues to drive his work every day," when Minxuan's teaching experience "touched him profoundly" -these lines map a moment of becoming that converts the generic transformative leader at the same time as it validates the organization.Indeed, binding the transformation of self to the efficacy of a movement establishes a double right to reform, rooting Teach For All's legitimacy in each member's journey through struggle, metamorphosis, and spectacular success.It is a right reproduced through synecdoche, distilling the reform organization in the figure of the reformer and at the same time making the character of the reformer into something that is greater than himself.Complementing Teach For All's American roots, here the individual comes to stand in for the promise of a collective endeavor.
While exploring Teach For All as a missionary project (as Linda Darling-Hammond has famously quipped about Teach For America; 1994, p. 23) is not the main goal of this article, it seems critical to note that its rhetorical structure indexes the American religious practice of bearing witness.The narrative arc of the transformational story -mirroring moral conversion -and the process of disclosing personal struggles -which takes on a confessional quality, a moment when corps members testify!-cannot be fully appreciated without acknowledging the formulaic debt both owe to the American redemptive tradition (see McAdams, 2006 andSlotkin, 1973, among others).Teach For All is, after all, Teach For America's global incarnation.It should not be surprising that American narrative traditions get repeated through its rhetoric.It is also significant that Protestant theses of inclusion and salvation, of intervention and proselytization, mirror the underlying thrust of movements like Teach For All (Popkewitz 2008;what Kavanagh & Dunn [2013] call a "white savior" master narrative).Perhaps the humanitarian narrative is an offshoot of this genre that manages to better evade critique.
So framed, each conversion manifests Teach For All's theory of change, achieving status as evidence that turns a generic experience of despair into a replicable story of hope.Like details about the body for Laqueur and the swath of data disseminated by Teach For America, here people and their experiences are the building blocks of the reality effect.They testify in support of strategic intervention.And just as "a life that ended could be retrospectively and definitively represented," it is the completion of corps members' conversion that makes replication not only possible, but also highly portable, easy to extract from and re-insert into almost any possible context (Laqueur, 1989, p. 177).Rendered mobile, stories in turn become discourses that mobilize.
Indeed, stories render evidence legible and extractable.They translate the intricate experience of educational intervention into "a common standard necessary for a synoptic worldview" (Scott, 1998, p. 2), making it "modular, capable of being transplanted…to a great variety of social terrains" as the "stuff" of an imagined revolution (Anderson, 1983, p. 4).Rather than being defined by the political, historical, and personal contingencies of context, each attains meaning intertextually, against a larger pattern of transformative experiences that seem to transcend the boundaries of state.This same quality grants them epistemological power: it is precisely because stories are repeated in so many different contexts that they become, through repetition, an authoritative form of knowledge.By making stories interpretable through the use of generic precedents, such intertextuality affords narratives and their narrators "great power for naturalizing both texts and the cultural reality they represent" (Briggs & Bauman, 1992, p. 148).
In this way, narratives function instrumentally within Teach For All's ideological apparatus.By structuring the overall patterning of discourse within the genre as proof of its moral efficacy, and instilling this proof in the human figure of the reformer, narratives strategically blur the distinction between ideology and personality.They constitute individual experience as evidence -replicable, consistent, and objective -of a broad political claim.Couching the organization's moral goals in what appears to be a pure form of experiential knowledge -a personal story of struggle replete with the authority of proximity (Allan, 2013, p. 44) -narratives render "consensus…particularly unavoidable" (Briggs, 1996, p. 28).
If Teach For All can teach us something broad about projects of scale, it is an appreciation for scale's essential characteristics: such projects (1) distill a policy model into a mnemonic (here, a replicable story arc), and (2) instill it in a portable figure (here, the generic reformer), so that (3) the model's "global" efficacy becomes a kind of common sense -self-evident rather than self-interested, untethered from ideology and the contingencies of place, and unavailable for contest within the political sphere.Though it is imagined romantically, scale thus imposes a rather technical solution. 10hile stories are not the only vehicles for scaling policy, for Teach For All they offer a privileged site for performing moral authority.Here, to "scale" reform means to inscribe a model for change within the human figure of the reformer -to make the individual into a moral type.It means to package this pairing and render it portable.In this way, every repetition of the transformational story's arc affirms Teach For All's moral mission.Every individual conversion strengthens its ideology, and spreads the organization's seed.

Touring Technologies of Scale
Of course, stories cannot achieve scale solely within the narrative realm.Teach For All's transformational stories "transform" only to the extent that they move listeners to action.Like other global projects, they require interpretive communities.Teach For All must therefore enroll a range of supporting actors as its "units of agency," and offer "a model of change in which individual activists as well as social groups can imagine themselves" (Tsing, 2005, p. 214).In other words, the organization needs a means of mobilization.
Teach For All has a clear sense of its "units of agency," and tours its stories strategically, drawing them into networks of circulation that make donors, policy advocates, and potential future members characters in the organization's unfolding. 11In each sphere, stories circulate like commodities whose symbolic value can be exchanged for financial support, political clout, or ideological promise -forms of capital that bring the organization's scale into being (Bourdieu, 1994;Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).This movement helps interpellate listeners as secondary witnesses, hail them within cycles of exchange, and shape their global subjectivities.It is not just stories' presentation that serves scalability, then, but also their strategic circulation.
Financial support constitutes the most obvious outcome of a story well told.By creating a sense of property in their objects of compassion, narratives beckon listeners to become benefactors.As Laqueur writes, humanitarian narratives achieve ownership through the production of intimacy: stories "engender compassion" and inspire "ameliorative action" by making readers "feel that they have instant access, despite print, to the thoughts and feelings of the correspondents in question."They make the pain of others palpable, but not without offering audiences "a logic of specific intervention" (1989, pp. 181-182).
Stories thus bind listeners to the text and, through the text, to those who require their support.Like Maurice, Gaurav, and Minxuan, audiences faced with evidence of human suffering can scrape together funds and themselves become converts to the cause.They can mitigate the risk of educational inequity by becoming a "friend" of Teach For All (Teach For All, 2014a): Friends of Teach For All is an international community of forward-thinking, impactdriven individuals and philanthropists who are committed to the idea that every child, regardless of background or nationality, should have the opportunity to attain an excellent education…These advocates believe that our global welfare depends on raising educational levels and shrinking educational disparities.They signal their conviction in the power of the Teach For All model to cultivate the leadership necessary for educational change, and in the power of a global network for accelerating progress, with commitments of $5,000 or more.Partnerships are also available for morally minded conglomerates, and generous CEOs can earn themselves seats on Teach For All's board, alongside Kopp herself.12Their companies get hailed as "global champions" on the organization's site, corporate versions of the corporeal reformer.In their fiscal conversion to the cause, benefactors "scale" the organization materially; they provide the financial support necessary to train new leaders and initiate national partnerships.
Policy advocates constitute a second important audience of "transformational stories," though their "buy in" takes a different form.Rather than offer financial support and reap the benefits of being a benefactor, members of this audience have a stake in the efficacy of the model itself.They need to be convinced that the barriers to educational equity in their countries are symptomatic of a global crisis, for which "shared solutions" can and should be found.That stories from Atlanta, Mumbai, and Shanghai share a transformative arc is significant here: the symbolic figure of the redemptive reformer resists the restrictions of setting.He crafts a "culture of achievement" that helps students "transcend their [contextual] circumstances."Indeed, despite research that suggests otherwise (Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002;Cheng, 1998;Phillips & Ochs, 2003;Rival, 2000;Sutton, 2000), the right policy seems to overcome the challenges of place.
Though launching a new program is "complex work that requires extensive programmatic and organizational planning," and though leaders involved in startups face the same kind of extraordinary obstacles that Kopp faced in TFA's earliest days, enough political clout can "turn around the situation" in any nation.As Teach For Bulgaria's leader explains, supporting the movement wholesale means "taking real charge of our students' destiny."The model may be complex, but to "get it" is to "see light," and to render undeniable its force for positive political change (Teach For All, 2014b).Policy advocates thus trade association with the organization for a kind of validation: through partnership, Teach For All gains legitimacy and member states make measurable improvements.And through a familiar arc of struggle and redemption, policy advocates can themselves become a source of transformative leadership while facilitating projects of scale.
Potential future members make up Teach For All's third intended audience.Individuals who "join the movement" are promised their own transformative journeys: they will "change the life paths of the students they teach," and "become leaders for expanding opportunity" (Teach For All, 2014d).Teach For All's global recruitment video (see Figure 2 for a screen shot) offers perhaps the best example of an audience-specific tactic.The video embeds dismal data points amidst the words of transformative leaders, with music marking a shift in affect that mirrors the genre's arc -from desperation to determination to success.It promises that "two years of teaching" will stimulate "a lifetime of change -for you, them, and all of us."If Teach For All depends on the constant conversion of subjects, these sorts of affective appeals do important scale-making work.
In this way, stories not only stir financial and political support, they also imagine a cosmopolitan community of moral reformers and attract members to take up its cause (Popkewitz, 2008).And they spread activism to new recruits in "charismatic packages," proposing parables of political subjectivity (Tsing, 2005, p. 227).Stories also craft a relationship between the future reformer and recognizable global leaders.Indeed, Teach For All's recruitment page displays a quote in bold: "One child, one teacher, one pen, and one book can change the world."These are famous words from Malala Yousafzai herself.

Shaping Global Subjectivities
When set against the dozens of transformative stories championed by Teach For All, Yousafzai's seems almost mundane.The historical and contextual cues that imbue it with meaningthat women's education is a persistent problem in Pakistan; that the attempt on her life came from a brutal and oppressive regime; that her advocacy indexes a set of entrenched national issues; and that, since achieving such celebrity, she has espoused in her own voice the value of schooling and women's rights -are rendered strategic at best, and generic at worst.Yousafzai is not even a member of the organization.What does it mean to use her story to promote a specific set of philosophical and structural reforms, and to recruit young idealists to take up one organization's cause?Is Teach For All really Yousafzai's vision?
To a certain extent, the same questions could be asked of all "transformative leaders."For at the same time as their stories contribute to the making of the "self" and the binding of individual transformation to the efficacy of organizational change, they also create distance.When the self is made in and through a generic process, when it is only given meaning to the extent that it promotes the legitimacy of a moral-political movement, when its distinct characteristics blur into a moral type -to whom does the self belong?Membership in a group can be a powerful and satisfying experience, but there is something peculiar about transforming individuals into evidence -embodied data in support of a global education revolution.As "scaling" magnifies the symbolic power of each teacher's transformative experiences, does it not also prompt some form of alienation?
At the same time, it is too reductive to decry the usurpation of voice, the end of individual agency, or the blanket hegemonic power of Teach For All.In this article I have argued that the making of the generic reformer through the medium of narrative encapsulates -and facilitates -the making of the reform organization.This relationship does not reduce the reformer to an instrument of ideology, any less than Yousafzai's fame reduces her to a pawn in games of power and the heart.Both are, in a sense, products of a narrative agenda.But they are also productive.Teach For All's success as an organization -as well as the crucial link between its transnational ambitions and its "nation-building" promise -hinges on reformers' continued buy in.Its scalability depends entirely on the discursive production of a global problem with human solutions.And certainly individuals like Maurice, Gaurav, and Minxuan do not see themselves as pawns in this process; they retain a sense of pride in their work, even as the "selves" they see in their stories may be different than the selves they shape and experience in other settings.The making of self seems simultaneously to empower and estrange.What can we make of this paradox?
While the structures through which organizations like Teach For All produce and promote themselves worldwide deserve critical interrogation, it is just as important to examine the new subjects and subjectivities that these organizations shape.By examining stories as technologies of scale, tracing the ways in which they travel the globe and operate on different audiences, and interrogating the work they do within Teach For All's ideological apparatus, I have tried to detail one set of processes that address this question.But beyond the narrative realm -which offers a compelling but ultimately incomplete picture of Teach For All's global persona -versions of self and visions of change are constantly created, circulated, and contested.It is not enough, then, to ask whether global reform agendas "work."We must also ask what they create, and who emerges from these movements as the objects and agents of change.

Figure 1 .
Figure1.This infographic from Teach For All illustrates the benefits of its educational intervention.