In Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” the narrator suggests that the common man was inspired by the Teddy Roosevelt who allowed his patrician roots to show, along with his Harvard persona. He was the first President to be so transparent about his prosperous origins. Today we take Ivy League credentials for granted, as long as our Presidents don’t flaunt them to excess.

But T.R. had also educated himself about the working classes in a sojourn in the West and journeys through New York’s poorest neighborhoods as police commissioner.  The documentary makes the same point about F.D.R.’s acquaintance with the squalor of urban life to explain his fervor for the most deprived classes.

Today the noblesse oblige for the working classes has spread to Ivy League schools, where undergraduates have begun to aspire to teaching as a way to express their highest values.  At Harvard, Professor Kay Merseth offers a class that reveals the social inequities in education to undergraduates: “United States in the World 35: Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education.” She has seen the class grow from 90 to 300 applicants for 47 seats in just three years.

A significant experience for those selected by lottery for the class is a series of three-hour visits to K-12 schools in the Boston area. Kia Turner reported:

That visit was the biggest moment of impact in this class for me. I never knew the discrepancy–schools that have, those that don’t. It really opened my eyes. We are not giving our kids the same opportunities. It was a moment of frustration for me, too.

This recalls the famous Jacob Riis portrait of the lower classes How the Other Half Lives, which had its impact on  Theodore Roosevelt. It was Riis, along with Lincoln Steffens, who led him through the slums of New York, partly to check up on delinquent police officers, but equally as an education in the horrid living conditions of the city’s poor. For Roosevelt, a well-bred New Yorker, it was an epiphany.

The well-bred students of Harvard received a similar education from Merseth’s class, but how many of them now see themselves as career teachers? After taking the class Manny Mendoza moved to Oklahoma  to teach secondary science with Teach for America.  Said Mendoza,

It is a privilege to be given even a choice of what career to pursue. I want to effect change on a large scale, one that will allow all students to pursue an education and career that is meaningful and productive to them.

I suppose that was my goal, too, when I graduated with my M.A.T. from Harvard, but I had also spent a year at Rindge Tech High School and saw that this was a hard job and the differences you make were incremental. And the longer I stayed in education (now 43 years) the longer I saw that not everyone was on the same side of reform. I saw the one step forward and two steps back that could make the work so frustrating.  I found more satisfaction in the one student who changed than in the uncertain progress of my school.

Like Kay Merseth I want the Millenial generation to change all this, but when I hear that undergraduates are signing up for Teach for America, I hear low investment, low commitment.  I hear early disillusionment or quick transition to more visible public service. Some may see themselves as Obama putting in time with community organization and then on to better things. Not that I am not grateful for a President who was once a community organizer, but we can only have so many Presidents.

Such teachers will never change education, because they are in to get out.  The growth curve for public school teachers smooths out after three or four years, and most TFA students will have exited the profession by then. And Ivy League graduates always have alternatives. If they feel dissatisfied with the diluted professional climate, they can move on.

So I feel queasy when I hear Professor Jon Star say,  “Teach for America captured something. It elevated the status of teaching for high-level students.” What TFA did was put bright students on the fast track to the classroom, where their commitment will be tested by senseless bureaucracy, disenchanted students, and invisible parents working two or three jobs.  We already know that most TFA teachers will exit the classroom in two years.

How will this help public education? It is a short-acting drug that injects bright young teachers into the classroom, then excretes them after two of the hardest years of their lives. There has to be a better way to “effect change on a large scale.”  And another short-term recruit takes their place.

Noblesse oblige brought us two amazing Roosevelts. They did effect change on a large scale. But we need those who are willing to effect small changes and take satisfaction in small victories to populate our K-12 schools today. We need career teachers.