It’s a news story, but the New York Times appears to be trying to make Teach for America (TFA) look bad. TFA gives smart college graduates five weeks of intensive training and then places them in urban public schools, where they turn out to be pretty effective teachers. TFA is not popular with some educators.

The Times reports on a study of TFA participants after they left the program, which typically lasts two years. “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” by Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt, finds that the participants’ “dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service.”

But the researchers also find that a full 63 percent of the Teach for America alumni remain in education, and 31 percent are still teaching — and this is for a program that is generally viewed as an urban Peace Corps for bright kids who don’t know what they want to do with their lives.

Commitment to education isn’t good enough for the study authors or for the New York Times. Post-TFA, these young people fall behind their peers in “voting, charitable giving and civic engagement.” The reasons, the Times says, “include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.” (So that is a reason why 63 percent stay in the education field?)

The story notes that McAdam did a similar follow-up study of participants in the 1964 Freedom Summer, 20 years after, which turned out much better. The Freedom Summer workers were mostly college students conducting black voter registration and teaching in “freedom schools” in Mississippi (three were killed in cold blood). McAdam found that “nearly all of Freedom Summer’s participants were still engaged in progressive activism when he tracked them down 20 years later,” the Times said. Apparently, the failure of TFA alumni to stay “progressive” explains why the Teach for America case is “puzzling.”

I confess to a little suspicion about the McAdam/Brandt study. I was a participant in the 1964 Freedom Summer, and I was not a “progressive activist” in 1984. I must have been an outlier, or else I was missed or not counted.