Relentless Pursuit (4 page)

“The TFA teachers come here with a missionary zeal,” said Wells, explaining why he hired so many. “It must be a requirement of the program.”

Good grades and a history of achievement were, too. The program was highly competitive. A record seventeen thousand people applied for two thousand spots in the 2005 corps. Among them were 12 percent of the senior class at Yale, 11 percent of the graduating classes of Dartmouth and Amherst College, and 8 percent from Princeton and Harvard. Founder Wendy Kopp once said that she wanted Teach For America to have the same cachet as a Rhodes Scholarship. In 2005 it did: Teach For America was
the
postgraduate program of choice for the elite of America's top universities.

Ultimately, only 12 percent of all applicants gained admission to TFA in 2005; two thirds of the Ivy Leaguers who applied didn't make the cut. The average GPA of those who did was 3.5, SAT scores averaged 1310, and 95 percent held leadership positions on their campuses or in their communities. Getting accepted at Teach For America was a big deal.

The selection process had actually changed little since 1990, when Wendy Kopp and her start-up team accepted 500 of the 2,500 college seniors who applied to join Teach For America's inaugural class. The first applicants submitted an essay application, underwent a tough personal interview, and had to present a five-minute lesson plan. In the interview, selectors probed for proof of the candidate's persistence, commitment, and intellectual heft. Kopp recalls in her book
One Day, All Children
that one of the questions posed to applicants was “(1) What is wind? Don't describe it, just tell me what it is. (2) Phenomenologists draw an analogy between religion and the wind, claiming that one can't see religion, only the manifestations of it—like synagogues, churches, and mosques. Similarly, one can't see the wind, only manifestations of it—waves in a wheat field, moving branches. What's another analogy you can draw to the wind?”

From the very beginning, Kopp believed that in order to make teaching attractive to her peers, tagged then as the “Me Generation,” or even the “Mean Generation,” there had to be an “aura of status and selectivity” around Teach For America. High-achieving college students like Kopp viewed teaching as a downwardly mobile career. Those who didn't go directly to graduate school after graduation tended to head for investment banks or marketing firms. To most, becoming a schoolteacher was unthinkable.

Kopp was going to change all that. The 1989 graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University wrote her senior thesis on the idea of starting a “Teacher Corps” not unlike the Peace Corps. The mission would be to take on what she considered to be the number one civil rights issue of her generation: the educational achievement gap between the rich and the poor in America.

Nothing in Kopp's past, to that point, had suggested that education would become her issue or social justice her passion. Raised in University Park, an affluent, lily-white enclave of Dallas so insulated from urban realities that it was known as “the Bubble,” Kopp didn't know exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up. She told her local newspaper,
The Dallas Morning News,
in 1985: “I would love a career that combines speaking and writing skills with economics and politics.” She never seriously considered becoming a teacher.

Kopp was part of a generation of “extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious” students the author David Brooks wrote about in a much-noticed 2001
Atlantic Monthly
article called “The Organization Kid.” The cohort were rule-following team players who were not trying to buck the system but climb it, observed Brooks. Like others among Princeton's young meritocratic elite that Brooks deftly profiled, Kopp was goal-oriented—a straight-A student who was valedictorian at Highland Park High School, a perennial on the Best High Schools in America list. Kopp's credentials—even by today's overheated standards—were impressive. She was editor of the school newspaper two years running, president of the debate team, a member of the National Forensic League, the lead in the school play (Hannah in Neil Simon's
California Suite
), and a member of the National Honor Society. Kopp did community service through an organization called Right Turns, which counseled younger children about drug prevention. She also sat at the school's Round Table, a current-events discussion group. In the summers Kopp worked for her parents, Jay and Mary Pat, who published guidebooks for conventioneers in Dallas and Houston. She loved to play tennis and was an avid jogger. Oh, and she also sewed her own dresses and skirts.

At Princeton she kept up the pace. Outside of the lecture hall, much of her energy went into the Foundation for Student Communication, a student-run organization that held three yearly conferences and published its own undergrad magazine called
Business Today,
the largest student-run magazine in the country. Within months of joining, Kopp was an associate editor writing about student entrepreneurs for the magazine. But
Business Today
was financially shaky, and soon enough Kopp was working the ad side as well. During an interview with a top executive for a story she was writing, Kopp mentioned the magazine's financial woes and suggested he might like to buy an ad. She made the sale then and there. More important, she learned an invaluable fund-raising lesson that would serve her well in the early days of Teach For America. Instead of hitting up lower-level executives for ads, she realized it was more efficient—and effective—to go right to the top. After that, ad revenues ceased to be a problem. By her senior year, Kopp was president of the foundation and editor and publisher of the magazine. Foundation revenues had jumped fivefold, from $300,000 to $1.4 million.

The idea for Teach For America was born at one of the foundation's conferences in November 1988. Kopp had handpicked a group of top executives and leading students to meet in San Francisco that year to discuss the problems facing public school education. Among the many issues on the agenda was a session about teacher quality. Nearly all of the student participants claimed that they would be willing to teach in public schools if it were possible to do so without having degrees in education. Suddenly, Kopp had an idea. As she wrote in her 2001 book: “Why didn't this country have a national teaching corps of recent college graduates who would commit two years to teach in urban and rural schools?”

The rest of the tale is now part of TFA lore. Kopp was the very last person in the Woodrow Wilson School to declare a thesis topic that year; she couldn't find an advisor. So she went to the sociology department chair, Marvin Bressler, who promised to take her on if she agreed to propose mandatory national service as her thesis. Kopp ignored Bressler's suggestion. She had a better idea: she would write about creating a national teaching corps. When she made her case to Bressler, he quipped: “You are quite evidently deranged.”

He was joking. Bressler was very impressed with Kopp; he just thought she suffered from excessive ambition. What she proposed seemed to him undoable. But, as Bressler recalls, Kopp was possessed of a kind of “innocent arrogance,” which made it clear that she believed she had already thought of ways to overcome all the obstacles to her plans, and Bressler evidently had not. She was right, says Bressler with a chuckle. “She had this combination of midwestern idealism and a very good practical mind on how to do things, that made her dreams less extravagant,” he remembers. “It was a kind of American conviction that if you have a good idea, it can be put into practice.”

In April 1989, when she turned in a very detailed proposal for a national teaching corps that she calculated would take $2.5 million to get off the ground, Bressler dismissed it as “a glorified advertising campaign.” Kopp defended her idea, Bressler came around, and the thesis earned an A.

Kopp recalls that her senior year was difficult. “I was in a funk,” she confides seventeen years later from her small, simple office adorned only with a few photographs, among them one of her wedding to Richard Barth and another of her three small children on the beach. “I was tortured. I could not figure out what I wanted to spend my life doing.” Kopp knew she wanted to make a difference in the world. But she was at a loss as to how to do that. So she reckoned she'd start with a corporate training program—“maybe do brand management, or investment banking, or management consulting.” But her heart wasn't in it, and she kept searching for more meaningful work. She wrote to policy makers seeking internships, and she even fleetingly entertained the notion of teaching. When she discovered that she was too late for a spot in Princeton's small teaching program, she researched the maze of teacher certification requirements and talked with a recruiter for the New York City public school system. She gave up when she was told that New York didn't hire uncredentialed teachers until days before the school year began. But the experience made her wonder:
Why aren't we being recruited as aggressively to teach as we are being recruited to work on Wall Street?

In the end, she applied to Morgan Stanley, McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Procter & Gamble, and a commercial real estate venture. Kopp, impressive résumé aside, was turned down by every one of them. When she sent her idea for a teaching corps to the White House for consideration, her proposal was mistaken for a job application and she was rejected there as well.

So she decided to turn her thesis into reality. Though Bressler scoffed at the notion that Kopp could actually raise the $2.5 million needed to start a national teaching corps, he thought enough of the project to put her in touch with Princeton's director of development. The day after she turned in “A Plan and Argument for the Creation of a National Teacher Corps,” Kopp whittled her thesis down to a thirty-page proposal and headed over to the college library for a listing of the country's top CEOs. Within a week, some thirty proposals went out across corporate America, each topped with an eye-catching red cover and a letter requesting a meeting. By the time Kopp graduated from Princeton, she had secured a $26,000 seed grant from Mobil and donated office space in Manhattan from Union Carbide.

With three trash bags of clothes and a sleeping bag, Kopp moved into a New York apartment with two other girls. She spent the summer crisscrossing the country in search of funders and wise counsel—with mixed results. It was hard to argue with her stated goal of closing the achievement gap. But was sending the teachers with the least amount of experience into the classrooms with the greatest need the right solution? Was it even fair? Skeptics argued that the way to close the achievement gap was to reform teacher education, not to undermine it by sending teachers into needy classrooms with a meager few weeks of training. What's more, they charged, TFA's limited two-year commitment would only add to the problem of teacher retention in underserved communities. TFA could actually turn out to be an enabler of dysfunctional school systems. Would providing underperforming school districts with ready-made teachers for the hardest-to-fill spots allow them to put off true reform?

Kopp had an answer for every concern. Her plan to close the achievement gap was based on a two-pronged theory of change. In the short term, she believed, the most talented graduates in the country would almost certainly be successful in the classroom if they worked relentlessly and were committed to the mission. In the longer term, she was convinced, the TFA experience would be so profound that it would inform whatever its members decided to do afterward. Inevitably, she reckoned, TFA alums—the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academics, policy makers, and, yes, the schoolteachers and administrators who got hooked and never left—would eventually force and lead the systemic change necessary to level the educational playing field.

Professors in the schools of education may have complained about the possible negative consequences of hiring TFAers, but at least some superintendents in the trenches indicated they would jump at the chance to hire young college graduates from premier universities for their toughest slots. The alternative, they knew, was to contract with permanent subs—many with no training at all, some without even a college degree. In the face of a national teacher shortage, taking a chance on a TFA recruit was a no-brainer.

So Kopp forged ahead. That fall she assembled a skeleton crew to help realize her vision. Sustained by cold pizza over a seemingly endless string of all-nighters, the group of five moved into larger quarters (this time donated by Morgan Stanley) and began to work out how to recruit, select, train, and place a prospective five hundred new teachers.

In one respect, the selection process was easy. Kopp and her band were looking for people just like themselves—hard-driving, high-achieving twenty-somethings who, when contemplating their futures, were filled with a mix of idealism and indecision, in equal measure. “I think it's very hard for college seniors to think about their futures,” Kopp explains. “At that age, you think the next two years are the rest of your life. It was certainly true for me. I assumed, honestly, I really believed all the momentum [for this movement] would exist after two years. I fully thought it would happen. I had no long-term plans for the future. None.”

After researching selection models and consulting with successful principals, the start-up crew hammered out a rigorous admissions process. Long and heated debates resulted in a list of twelve character traits thought necessary to succeed in the classroom: persistence, commitment, integrity, flexibility, oral communication skills, enthusiasm, sensitivity, independence and assertiveness, ability to work within an organization, possession of self-evaluative skills, ability to operate without student approval, and conceptual ability/intellect. Candidates applying to Teach America—as it was tentatively called—would be judged on each trait based on a sliding six-point scale. (It turned out that Teach America was a name already taken by a medical company. Kopp tossed around a number of other names, like Teach U.S. or U.S. Teach. The idea of inserting the word “For” and making the name Teach For America came to her during a late-night ride on D.C.'s Metro. “Even better,” she wrote in her book, “in that it was a call to action and communicated a sense of service.”)