Kopp Wendy
Organization: Teach For America
Year Founded: 1989
Country: USA
Website: www.teachforamerica.org
Geographic Area of Impact: United States.
Model: Leveraged Non-Profit
Focus: Education.
Schwab Fellow of the World Economic Forum Audio Interview The Innovation Wendy Kopp refuses to believe that where you were born should determine your future. She founded Teach For America to build a movement among promising future leaders to ensure that children growing up in low-income areas in the United States have the same chance to succeed as their better-off counterparts. Teach For America calls upon outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors and career interests to commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and to become lifelong leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity. In the short run, corps members go above and beyond traditional expectations to help close the achievement gap for children. In the long run, Teach For America alumni (who go on to become educators, lawyers, corporate executives, and policy makers) use their influence to improve education and social conditions in low-income communities. Recently, Teach For America collaborated with Teach First, an adaptation in the U.K., to design and launch Teach For All to support the development of this model in other countries. Teach For All is supporting efforts in Australia, the Baltic region, Chile, Germany, India, Lebanon, and South Africa. Background Teach For America aims to address the inequities facing children growing up in low-income areas of the United States, where they are seven times less likely to graduate from college than those in better circumstances. One of the challenges initially faced by the organization was the threat felt by the education community itself. How could it be that young people, straight out of college, could be qualified to teach alongside professionals who had been through state approved teacher training programs? Recruiting untrained college graduates seemed to further jeopardize teachers' already fragile status. Teach For America managed to turn the tide in its favor as veteran educators witnessed the impact that corps members had on students and the community and as the program’s alumni proved to be a powerful force of educational leaders. Strategy Each year, Teach For America recruits and selects a corps of recent college graduates, intensively trains them during summer pre-service institutes, places them as full-time, paid teachers in urban and rural public schools, provides two years of ongoing professional development to ensure corps members’ impact on student achievement, and coordinates an alumni network to foster participants’ ongoing leadership. Teach For America has fulltime staff members (most of whom are alumni of the program) who recruit, select, train and support corps members and alumni, raise funds for the organization and manage administrative and communications functions. It has 25 national board members and close to 500 local advisory board members. Its funding base is highly diversified, with 70% of the financial support coming from the local areas where Teach For America places its members. In its initial years, Teach For America has achieved impressive growth. In 2008, Teach For America had close to 25,000 highly qualified applicants, including between 5 and 10% of the senior classes at 100 colleges and universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Its annual group of over 6, 000 corps members reaches more than 400,000 students. Sixty percent of the 14,000 Teach For America alumni are still working full-time in the field of education, and of the remaining 40%have jobs that relate in some way to schools or low-income communities. While program alumni are still in their twenties and thirties, they are already leading reform initiatives as school superintendents, running many of the highest-performing schools in low-income communities, winning the highest accolades teachers can win as national and state teachers of the year, and pioneering far-reaching reform initiatives. While Teach For America is in the midst of an aggressive growth plan in the United States, it has worked in partnership with Teach First, its U.K. adaptation, to launch Teach For All to support the development of its model in other countries. Teach For All, a global network of local, independent organizations that will channel the talent and energy of their countries’ top recent college graduates to help end the educational disparities facing children in their communities, is supporting efforts in Australia, the Baltics, Chile, Germany, India, Lebanon, and South Africa. The Entrepreneur Wendy Kopp turned her senior thesis at Princeton University into Teach For America. Kopp pursued potential funders relentlessly, traveled the country, knocked on high-level doors, and refused to start small. She was determined to start Teach For America with no fewer than 500 college graduate recruits. For her, achieving this scale from the outset was the only way to gain the national importance necessary to inspire the most talented graduating seniors to compete to teach in low-income communities. Spurred on by a relentless commitment to educational equity, she climbed a steep learning curve in building a strong program and sustainable organization. Today, she is engaged in an ambitious effort to expand Teach For America’s impact still further, to become a truly effective movement to eliminate educational inequality.
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