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Teach for America is Building a Corps of Education Advocates

Wendy Kopp, Teach for America

Kopp

April 2004

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Teach for America is well on its way to meeting its 15-year goal of having a $40 million budget and 4,000 corps volunteers plus implementing metrics to evaluate the program's success in classrooms, Wendy Kopp, the organization's founder and president, told a Business School audience at the April 20 View From the Top speech.

At its founding 14 years ago, few would have believed that the organization would thrive. When Kopp conceived the idea for Teach for America in 1989 during her senior year at Princeton, most folks didn't think that highly qualified, driven students from top universities would choose to teach in the country's most underserved communities. Kopp recalled potential corporate donors and people in the education community endorsing the idea but saying there was no way it would work. The nay-sayers didn't deter Kopp, however, and she secured seed money and placed almost 500 corps members into schools across the country in 1990 during the program's first year. Fueled by media attention and growing funding opportunities, Teach for America took off.

So how did it succeed? It may sound strange, but Kopp attributes her naiveté and the power of inexperience, which kept her from being jaded or discouraged. The timing was also perfect. Teacher shortages were constantly in the news and campus leaders were looking for careers beyond the popular training programs on Wall Street.

The biggest challenges came several years into the program. How, after all, "can you take people straight out of college with little work experience and put them in an environment full of poverty where they don't get guidance and support from the school administration? We expect them not only to survive but excel," said Kopp. Another challenge: making sure Teach for America members leave the experience more committed to helping improve the education system and not completely disillusioned. "To do that well is a hugely complicated thing."

Effective management is key, she said. In the beginning she recalled ignoring managerial details and hoping the organization could be run in a non-hierarchical way with a group of people focused on the mission. She learned after some missteps that "effective management is everything."

Today, Kopp focuses on several key leadership qualities. She concentrates on the power of focus and zeroes in on Teach for America's core mission instead of getting distracted by side initiatives and programs. She describes herself as "obsessed" with finding and retaining great people, focusing on "clear outcomes," and trying to measure the group's fundraising success and programmatic effectiveness. Lastly, she said she now realizes the value of culture and tries to instill the organization's core values at every level. "I think internal management 'stuff' is why Teach for American is thriving."

On the organization's 10-year anniversary in 2000, Kopp and the staff decided to set five-year goals. Seeing "incredible" educational disparities, the group set out to grow the membership from 1,000 to 4,000 by 2005 and to increase its budget from $10 million to $40 million.

Another important goal was to create better metrics for Teach for America to track corps members' success in the classroom. A small fraction of the corps members were dramatically effecting change in student achievement, most were making some difference, and others were struggling. By 2005, the organization wants to see 40 percent of its corps members in that top group. Lastly, Teach for America wants to catalyze the leadership of alumni. Although many corps members leave teaching after their two years' service, Kopp said she believes they can be an important future source of change in the education world regardless of the profession they eventually enter.

So far, Teach for America is on track to meet those goals. As of this year, the organization has 3,000 corps members, 16,000 applicants, and a $30 million budget. It also has made strides in evaluating teachers' performance by realizing that certain personality characteristics are critical classroom success.

Kopp also defended her organization against charges that Teach for America doesn't adequately prepare teachers for the grueling classroom environments. She said she knows of no other program that has as intensive a training or support system and stressed that a teacher's personality, not training and support, is often the key to success. Kopp also said that while many people call Teach for America a "band-aid" for larger problems in the education world, she had decided early on that it was important to help the children who are students today rather than try to effect long-term systematic change.

—Sarah Robertson