June 6, 2001 Features

Teach For America, the national teaching corps, was a senior-year brainchild of Wendy Kopp '89

KoppÕs program has placed 5,000 teachers in AmericaÕs classrooms.

It was in October of my senior year at Princeton that I realized I needed a plan. What was I going to do after graduation? To this point my life had always been driven toward some academic or extracurricular goal. But now, as I grappled with the biggest decision of my first twenty-one years, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I felt uninspired. I was searching for a place to direct my energy that would give me the kind of significant responsibility that I had enjoyed in various student organizations. I wanted this opportunity right away, not ten or twenty years down the road. More important, I wanted to do something that would make a real difference in the world. I just didn't know what that was.

At the same time that I soul-searched about my future, I found myself increasingly engrossed in another issue: the failures of our public education system. I had attended public schools in an upper-middle-class community in Dallas. My schools were not typical. For starters, they had money to spare. Lots of it. A $100,000 scoreboard hung above the $3-million football stadium with Astroturf that cost $1 million every three years to replace. Because of the high quality of my schools and the support provided by my family and community, I graduated with an education so solid that I was able to do well at Princeton without locking myself into solitary confinement at Firestone Library.

As I moved through Princeton, I grew increasingly aware of students' unequal access to the kind of educational excellence I had previously taken for granted. At this time I led an organization called the Foundation for Student Communication, and in November of my senior year, my colleagues and I gathered together fifty students and business leaders from across the country to propose action plans for improving our education system.

In a session about teacher quality, nearly all of the student participants said that they would teach in public schools if it were possible for them to do so. And one speaker maintained that people without education degrees were frequently hired by public schools because there weren't enough education majors interested in teaching in low-income communities.

At one point during a discussion group, after hearing yet another student express interest in teaching, I had a sudden idea: Why didn't this country have a national teacher corps of recent college graduates who would commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools? A teacher corps would provide another option to the two-year corporate training programs and grad schools. It would speak to all of us college seniors who were searching for something meaningful to do with our lives. We would jump at the chance to be part of something that brought thousands of our peers together to address the inequities in our country and to assume immediate and full responsibility for the education of a class of students. I suggested the idea in a discussion group; others responded enthusiastically.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that this simple idea was potentially very powerful. If top recent college graduates devoted two years to teaching in public schools, they could have a real impact on the lives of disadvantaged kids. Because they had themselves excelled academically, they would be relentless in their efforts to ensure their students achieved. They would throw themselves into their jobs, working investment-banking hours in classrooms instead of skyscrapers on Wall Street.

Beyond influencing kids' lives directly, a national teacher corps could produce a change in the very consciousness of our country. The corps members' teaching experiences were bound to strengthen their commitment to children in low-income communities and spur their outrage at the circumstances preventing these children from fulfilling their potential. Many corps members would decide to stay in the field of education. And those who would become doctors and lawyers and businesspeople would remain advocates for social change and education reform.

Now during my morning runs and campus walks, I would roll the idea of the teacher corps over and over in my head. This could be huge, I thought. This could be the Peace Corps of the 1990s: Thousands would join, and we would fundamentally impact our country.

And I began musing about another possibility. . . . Maybe I could start [a teacher's corps] as a nonprofit organization. My experience at the Foundation for Student Communication, where I managed a staff of sixty and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of magazine advertisements and conference sponsorships, made me think that I just might be able to pull this off. More important, I didn't have the experience to see why it couldn't be done.

Meanwhile, as a senior at Princeton, I was obligated to write a thesis. I had been looking for a topic that would grab me, that would inspire me to spend hours and hours researching and writing. After the education conference, I knew that the teacher corps idea was my answer. Here was something that motivated me personally and that would also satisfy my requirements at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton's public policy program.

As I wrote my thesis, I became all the more determined to make this idea a reality. Thankfully, the firms to which I was applying for more conventional jobs made my choice easier. I didn't get a single offer. I remember standing at a pay phone at school, hearing the Morgan Stanley recruiter - my last remaining corporate possibility - tell me that they had decided I wasn't the right fit for the firm. I took this rejection personally, but I figured it must have happened for a good reason. The moment I hung up, I made my decision. I would start the teacher corps.

In the end, I produced "A Plan and Argument for the Creation of a National Teacher Corps," which looked at the educational needs in urban and rural areas, the growing idealism and spirit of service among college students, and the interest of the philanthropic sector in improving education. The thesis presented an ambitious plan: In our first year, the corps would inspire thousands of graduating college seniors to apply. We would then select, train, and place five hundred of them as teachers in five or six urban and rural areas across the country. According to the budget calculations I had done, this would cost approximately $2.5 million.

In early April of 1989, a week before my thesis was due, I called Marvin Bressler, then chairman of Princeton's sociology department. Professor Bressler had agreed to be my thesis adviser on the condition that I make an argument for mandatory national service. I accepted the condition because, as the last senior in my department to decide on a thesis topic, I didn't have much choice. I had tried to convince Professor Bressler of what I thought to be the brilliance of my idea, but he said I couldn't write a thesis on something that amounted to little more than an advertising campaign for teachers. I was banking on Professor Bressler's forgetting his stipulation. So instead of telling him what I was really writing about, I steered clear of him until the last minute.

When I finally called Professor Bressler one week before the due date, I wasn't sure if he would even remember agreeing to be my adviser. So I reminded him that I was the student proposing a national teacher corps and then told him that I had completed a draft of the thesis. "I've actually decided to start the corps," I told him. He suggested I drop the draft off. I did. Two days later he called to ask me to stop by his office.

I walked across campus, terrified of what this brilliant, opinionated man would think of my paper and, more than anything, worried that he might insist I revise it. Would he force me to make a pitch for mandatory national service?

Professor Bressler quickly put my fears to rest. What he really wanted to know, he said in his booming voice, was how in the world I planned to raise the $2.5 million. I told him I was positive Ross Perot would help. Having grown up in Dallas when Mr. Perot had led a campaign to improve Texas schools, I was certain he would love my idea. And given his own background, surely he would relate to something so entrepreneurial. "He's from Dallas, and I'm from Dallas, and he's really into education reform," I said.

Professor Bressler leaned back, contemplating my answer. He didn't seem convinced. "Do you know how hard it is to raise twenty-five hundred dollars?" he asked. He arranged for me to meet with Princeton's director of development, who could fill me in on just how difficult it would be.

On April 12, 1989, the day after I turned in my thesis, I went back to the computer room to turn it into a 30-page proposal.

From the book, One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way. © 2001 by Wendy Kopp '89. Reprinted by permission of Public Affairs. All rights reserved.

On the Web: www.teachforamerica.org

For an interview with Wendy Kopp go to www.princeton.edu/~paw.