Education Week recently ran a commentary by Teach for America corpsmember Kerry Kretchmar. Kretchmar starts out by recalling her first year teaching 32 kids in a rat-infested South Bronx basement. This is exactly the type of call-to-action that attracts young well-educated service-minded people to make a difference in the lives of poor children. It’s a great PSA for TFA. But it’s also the kind of message that we hear far too much of—the overcrowded and unsanitary classrooms and the young teachers-in-training who learn more about life than they bargained for.

It’s a battlefield story, and while most of us who work in education have some of these to share, we would be smart to leave more of these stories to our personal journals. Because the stories are predictable—invariably pointing out the worst sins of public schools while spotlighting the storyteller as a brave and insightful hero. I mean no disrespect to Kerry Kretchmar, or any of us that have written pieces just like hers. But the problem of public education–reforming teaching in particular–is not solved by describing the horrors of teaching in the worst schools, or by convincing individuals to join the cause. It will be solved by changing the conditions of one of the most complex occupations, and the largest public service workforce in the nation– most comparable in size to the U.S. military, so we don’t have to try so hard to convince and compel people to be great teachers.

Kretchmar goes on to promote TFA for its work creating good public school advocates and leaders, whether or not they are teachers. I should acknowledge here that I fully support TFA’s work—it has made and continues to make an undeniable contribution to public education, both as a direct service program and as a pipeline for education leaders of all kinds. But in fairness to the billions we are committing to recruiting and retaining effective teachers, whether or not teachers (particularly those who have proven to be quite good) stay in teaching is actually pretty important (if it weren’t, we’d be pouring money into recruiting and retaining and evaluating education consultants and policy analysts).