Wendy Kopp Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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We look for people who demonstrate perseverance in the face of challenges, the ability to influence and motivate others - people who want to work relentlessly to ensure that kids who are facing the challenges of poverty have an excellent education.
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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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Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.
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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 must broaden the definition of who our neighbors are, and extend the boundaries of our interest and empathy.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.