A Teacher Success Story
With tribal warfare spreading in politics, corporate chieftains heading to jail, the news media sinking, and casualties rising in Iraq, it's easy these days to be discouraged. No wonder over 60 percent of Americans think the country has swerved off track. But hold on. To lift your spirits, just spend a little time with leaders of the younger generation.
This spring on many college campuses, something absolutely remarkable happened: Talented young people lined up by the scores to teach lower-income kids in urban and rural public schools. In years past, investment banks like Goldman Sachs were the recruiting powerhouses at top campuses; this year, they were joined by Teach for America, a program that expresses the fresh idealism and social values of this new generation.
At Yale, no fewer than 12 percent of the graduating seniors--nearly 1 out of every 8--applied. At Dartmouth and Amherst, some 11 percent did; at Harvard and Princeton, 8 percent. Hundreds more signed up at Northwestern, Boston College, the University of Texas, and the University of California-Los Angeles. Altogether, over 17,000 seniors applied for 2,100 openings.
A few words of background: Sixteen years ago, Teach for America was merely an idea in a thesis by a Princeton senior, Wendy Kopp. She thought the country needed an organization modeled after the Peace Corps that would attract top college graduates into classrooms with poor kids. With thesis in hand, she bravely ventured out to raise money, find recruits, and find school superintendents who would hire them. Kopp experienced the bumps and detours of every new start-up, but a year later, she had 500 recruits.
This summer, the newest class of teachers will enroll in a five-week training institute to prepare them for the classroom. In the fall, they will report for work at some of the toughest public schools in America, classified by the federal government as "high need." Some 95 percent of their students will be minorities. Each member of the program is committed to two years of teaching, paid by the local school systems at the same rate as other starting teachers; at the end of their service, they may qualify for a $9,500 scholarship for graduate study.
As you can imagine, skeptics have popped up all along the way: professors at schools of education scoffing that college graduates who haven't enrolled in formal teacher education will never succeed in the classroom; cynics who say that these are a just bunch of elitist kids punching their tickets to make it into law or business school who will then turn their backs on social reform. Well, the doubters just don't get this young generation.
A year ago, Mathematica Policy Research found that students of Teach for America recruits got better results in math and the same gains in reading as did those of other teachers, including veteran instructors. In math, the TFA students made a month more progress than other students. The results partly reflect the fact that 70 percent of Teach for America volunteers come from among the nation's most highly rated colleges, compared with fewer than 3 percent of other teachers; the results also reflect the passion that these volunteers bring to their work.
Dedicated to the cause. The 10,000 alumni of TFA have not turned their backs after their service, either. The organization says that nearly two thirds still work full time in education, most in low-income communities. TFA alum Jason Kamras, a math teacher in a Washington, D.C., public school, was just named national teacher of the year. Two other alumni, Mike Feinberg and David Levin, founded and now run what is probably the most successful set of charter schools in the country: the KIPP academies (Knowledge Is Power Program). Started in Houston and New York, the academies have become a network of 38 schools in low-income communities that demand extra studies by students, balance that with extracurricular activities like martial arts, music, chess, and sports, and--guess what?--have achieved the largest and quickest improvement in learning around the country. No fewer than 25 principals in KIPP schools are alumni of Teach for America.
What does all this mean? First, the nation owes a debt of gratitude to Wendy Kopp. She represents the emergence of a new breed of social entrepreneur, talented doers who are unleashing their generation's innovation and idealism to address long-standing social problems. Even as they struggle for the resources to turn their visions into reality, the success of Kopp and others shows that this has the makings of a social movement.
But it also shows that the rest of us need to wake up and see what we can do to help. It's time for the country to embrace the national service movement with serious money--not the cheap change we are putting today into AmeriCorps. It's time to scale up nonprofits so that when 17,000 kids volunteer, there are 17,000 openings. It's time, in short, to recognize the greatness that lies in the next generation.
This story appears in the July 4, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.