Wendy Kopp
All around the world, we send our top talent into finance, technology, medicine and law - everywhere but towards expanding opportunity for our most marginalized children.Collection: Finance
The idea that computers can ever replace teachers and schools reveals a deep lack of understanding about the role leadership plays in student success.Collection: Computers
You will find it will almost always be more comfortable to sit on the sidelines and critique the builders from afar. But at the end of the day, the people who make a difference, the people who shape history, are not the haters.Collection: History
Every time a child's promise is cut short by their legal status, our country wastes precious resources and loses talent we need.Collection: Legal
We are looking for a set of personal characteristics that predict success, the first and foremost of which is perseverance in the face of challenges. We also look for the ability to influence and motivate others who share your values, strong problem-solving ability, and leadership.Collection: Leadership
Education is the gateway to the American Dream. But today our immigration laws make higher education - a virtual requirement for financial security - out of reach for more than one million undocumented students.Collection: Education
Research shows that whether you are low-income or not, mindset is a bigger predictor of success than academic skills, and how students gain great academic skills and persevere in the face of challenges.
It's easier to poke holes in an idea than think of ways to fill them. And it's easier to focus on the 100 reasons you shouldn't do something rather than the one reason you should.
We believe strongly in transparency and accountability, which is why Teach For America encourages rigorous independent evaluations of our program. Our mission is too important to operate in any other way.
People are everything in education, just as in the corporate world.
In the long run, we will need many more African-American, Latino, and Native American leaders, and leaders from low-income communities, who can bring additional insight and a deeply grounded sense of urgency, and who are the most likely to inspire the necessary trust and engagement among students' parents and community leaders.
The lack of diversity in higher education is a problem we as a country must tackle if we're going to live up to our promise.
Teach For America was built on the idea that our best hope of reaching 'One Day' is to have thousands of alumni use their diverse experiences and ideas to effect change from inside and outside the education system.
A core part of Teach For America's mission has always been affecting positive change in the traditional public school system.
We have found that the most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic.
People think of teachers who are born to teach, and you think of all these charismatic folks. Some of the most successful teachers are some of the least charismatic, interestingly. But they have a gift of figuring out what motivates people.
In the long run, we need to build a leadership force of people. We have a whole strategy around not only providing folks with the foundational experience during their two years with us, but also then accelerating their leadership in ways that is strategic for the broader education reform movement.
It's Teach For America's responsibility to ensure that all alumni know their voices are heard and valued, and to surface the range of opinion they represent.
We aspire to be equal opportunity, but all across the country where a student is born, their race, their class affect where they end up.
Mindsets, skills and leadership, experience and access, and critical consciousness - we need all four of these things for our students to be the leaders, people and citizens we want them to be.
Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.
Our laws guarantee all students the right to a K-12 education, regardless of their immigration status.
Education must be the only sector that hasn't already been completely revolutionized by technology.
It's time to declare a cease-fire in the education arms race. We have far more to gain from collaborating to solve our common problems than competing for higher rankings.
Our experience at Teach For America has been that the more people understand educational inequity, the more they want to do something about it.
When I started Teach For America as a college senior, I sensed that there were thousands of talented, driven college students and recent grads who were searching for a way to make a real difference in the world.
I think people are attracted to teaching because they want to make a real impact.
Some people seem to sort of have a gut for hiring. I literally had a gut that was exactly the opposite. So whenever I thought someone would be great, it was sort of the opposite.
We've done a lot of research on the characteristics of our teachers who are the most successful. The most predictive trait is still past demonstrated achievement, and all selection research basically points to that.
Kids in urban and rural areas face so many challenges, and they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity or extra resources to meet their needs.
Effective teacher support in my mind is the same thing as effective management. Our teachers need strong management, just like anyone in any profession.
Charter laws do something really important. They give educators the freedom and flexibility that they need to attain results. But we also have to invest a lot in the leadership pipeline to take advantage of that freedom and flexibility.
When kids are met with the highest expectations and given the extra supports they need, they can be as motivated as kids anywhere.
I think Teach for America has suffered from the fact that I did not teach, in a major way. I also think if I had taught, I wouldn't have started Teach for America.
It's possible to train great people, but a person with great training who doesn't have certain characteristics is only going to go so far.
If we freed up all the money in the certification process, think about how much more money we'd have to put into teacher salaries.
It gets to whether we're a teacher-education model or a movement for social justice. I would say we're about the latter.
Teach for America recruits top recent college grads, young professionals, people we believe are the U.S.'s most promising future leaders, and asks them to commit two years to teach in high-need urban and rural communities.
We should be individualizing instruction, utilizing that data to actually give teachers the tools necessary to meet the needs of a very diverse group of kids which exists in every class.
Whenever we've seen the kids in the most disadvantaged context truly excel, always it's been in classrooms and in whole schools where there is a clear vision of where the kids have the potential to be.
I think the way to understand Teach for America is as a leadership development program.
We are working essentially to build a leadership force of folks who will, during their first two years of teaching, actually put their kids on a different trajectory - not just survive as a new teacher, but actually help close the achievement gap for their kids.
The mission that unites all of the programs of the Teach For All global network is that of cultivating the leadership capacity critical to ultimately ensuring educational opportunity for all.
Kids who live in low income areas face extra challenges and show up at schools that were not designed to meet their extra needs.
If we could reach the point where many of our nation's future leaders know what teachers know after teaching successfully in our highest-need schools, we would have a very different situation.
On average, our corps members stay in the classroom for eight years. But again, given the systemic nature of educational inequity, we know it is vital that some of our alumni take their experience outside the classroom.
I've heard a number of our alumni - people who are running schools and school systems - think a lot about different models for the teaching profession.
I'll get up at 5 or 6. I try to catch up on sleep on the weekends, so I'll try to get seven hours of sleep. During the week, my ideal is to go to bed at 9 and wake up six hours later.
I usually don't really have breakfast.
We go around and talk about what are each of the kids most proud of from the previous week.