Wendy Kopp Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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 think the way to understand Teach for America is as a leadership development program.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.
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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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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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The teachers are trying to build the same culture in the classroom as we're building in the organization.
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We must broaden the definition of who our neighbors are, and extend the boundaries of our interest and empathy.
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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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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.
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In every case where I've seen a transformational school, there's a principal who really has the foundational experience of having taught successfully.
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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.