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Stanford GSB News

 

Fill Classrooms With Committed Teachers

April 2008

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —Don’t let youth and inexperience deter you from aiming to achieve something big, Wendy Kopp, the founder and chief executive, of Teach For America, told a Business School audience.

Kopp was just a senior at Princeton University when she devised the idea for a nationwide organization dispatching top college grads to teach in low-performing public schools as a strategy to boost student achievement. By putting energetic and committed people in classrooms for their first jobs rather than have them take more conventional positions on Wall Street, Kopp said: “Maybe we would influence our country’s consciousness and its priorities and ultimately its policies and practices. I thought ultimately that would lead to real fundamental change in our country that would be a positive thing.”

Along with several other recent college grads, Kopp launched Teach For America in 1980, one year after receiving her own undergraduate degree in public policy from Princeton.

Today, according to the group’s website, 5,000 Teach For America corps members work in 26 urban and rural regions nationwide as part of the organization’s ambitious plan to have 7,500 teachers in 33 regions by 2010, reaching more than 600,000 mainly low-income students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

Many of the new grads aren’t trained as teachers. This has led to some criticism of the effort. People selected for the program undergo several weeks of training before they begin working in the classroom.

“The decisions you make when you are really young really matter, and they matter to the world,” Kopp said on April 17 during the year’s final View from the Top speech. That student-run lecture series brings leaders from business, government, and the nonprofit sector to campus to share their views on leadership.

Teach For America’s philosophy is that if teachers set expectations high, all students will rise to meet the challenge. And the new grads will learn their own leadership lessons in the process.

“When I think about the huge societal problems out there, and I hear people talking about how they will go off and get a lot of experience and then retire and do good things, I just wonder if it’s the right call,” said Kopp. “There is such a value to the fresh perspective and the naïveté and the idealism that young people bring.”

Kopp cited herself as the ultimate example of an idealistic youth taking on a huge challenge. She had little background in education or business but was determined that her effort, modeled after the Peace Corps public service group, “was going to be about building a movement among our future leaders to do something about this social injustice that persists in our country,” she said.

Kopp said she took on the challenge partly because of naïveté—not knowing how hard it would be to run such a large organization aiming to solve such a systemic problem.

Her group’s first-year goal was an ambitious one—to recruit and place no fewer than 500 students in teaching jobs in low-income areas nationwide. Responding to flyers slipped under doors, 2,500 applied in four months, she said. After an intensive training session, the first class of 489 recent college grads fanned out to classrooms in 6 low-income urban and rural school districts. Kopp believes a rampant teacher shortage at that time prompted many schools to embrace the program.
But difficulties arose. Major grants from corporations and foundations seeded the group’s early growth. By the mid-1980s, however, corporate support had waned, leading to what Kopp called Teach For America’s “dark years.”

She explained: “It was literally sweating every payroll, every two weeks for three years, which is a miserable way to be.” By 2000, Kopp said the group had solved its early funding woes and gained stability. Teach For America now receives support from foundations, corporations, and the federal government.

Today, the effort is paying off, she said, as thousands of Teach For America workers or alums are either teaching in needy public school classrooms, or working in other ways to erase the educational inequalities that often come with being disadvantaged. Teach For America service is now seen as prestigious, and getting in is competitive. Corps members include top performers from elite institutions including Spelman College, where 16 percent of the senior class applied to join Teach For America last year, Kopp said.

One of the organization’s highest-profile alums, Michelle Rhee, was named the first school chancellor in Washington, D.C., last year. She has promised to boost achievement throughout the long-troubled District of Columbia Public Schools.

Not all Teach For America alums stay in teaching. Looking to get more people from the business world as supporters, Kopp said the group recently struck agreements with large corporations, including Goldman Sachs, permitting new grads who accept jobs with those firms to defer starting their corporate positions until they complete their two-year Teach For America posts. “Ultimately,” said Kopp, “we need more business people who understand that we could solve this problem if we were making different choices.”

Some of the group’s alums have risen to higher positions in education or gone on to start schools of their own, said Kopp. Others have entered public health or social services fields. That’s positive because it creates cross-profession allies who can help further Teach For America’s mission, she said.

“I’ve never been so charged up, because I feel that we can see evidence of the potential of this strategy to become a fundamental force for real change against the larger problem of educational inequity,” said Kopp.

—Michele Chandler