Wendy Kopp Quotes
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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.
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Imagine how different those classrooms could be if hundreds of Nigeria's most talented recent graduates and professionals channeled their energy not only into the country's banks, but into making education in the country a force for transformation.
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Our experience at Teach For America has been that the more people understand educational inequity, the more they want to do something about it.
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The U.S. has a long history of walking up to the precipice of rigor and then walking away. As voters, let's support leaders who were courageous enough to make the hard decisions necessary to move our system forward. And as parents, let's put our faith in our educators, our children and tests that hold them to their highest potential.
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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.
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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.
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Research confirms that great teachers change lives. Students with one highly effective elementary school teacher are more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as teens, and earn tens of thousands more over their lifetimes.
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Dartmouth is such a special college with its rich history, dedicated student body, and, as I've been learning more recently, colorful customs.
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I think the way to understand Teach for America is as a leadership development program.
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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.
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There's no how-to guide for how to change the world. But it's easy to get hung up by misconceptions about what it takes to make an impact.
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Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.
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The teachers are trying to build the same culture in the classroom as we're building in the organization.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Across the globe, disadvantaged children are not living up to their potential because if they attend school at all, the schools are usually not designed to meet their extra needs.
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When I started Teach For America, I wasn't trying to come up with an idea that would change the world. I was trying to solve a problem much closer to home: I was a senior in college, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life!
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We're trying to be the top employer of recent grads in the country. Size gives us leverage to have a tangible impact on school systems.
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Technology has enormous potential to address educational needs more efficiently, help teachers improve their performance, and enrich and individualize student learning.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We must broaden the definition of who our neighbors are, and extend the boundaries of our interest and empathy.