Review:
A chronological history of Teach for America the book, “One day, all the children,” by founder and CEO Wendy Kopp is a fabulous story of an undergraduate who had the guts to dream big. Despite being threatened by jobless graduation from Princeton, philanthropically impassioned Ms. Kopp wrote her thesis on the possibility of a teacher reserve corps from top universities. Many of Kopp's peers at Princeton were tracked toward law firms, medical degrees, and political careers but Kopp knew that many of them wanted a shot at philanthropy. It was Kopp's dream that these leaders would either stay in education or at the least become life time advocates of education reform. In her undergraduate thesis, she wrote out an action plan that would later become the future organization, Teach For America. She submitted her thesis to her adviser and to her surprise he loved the idea, however, didn't expect her to raise the 2.5 million dollars needed to make it happen.
In her last year at Princeton, job offers for Kopp were sparse (if any) and so she set to work on find funding for her imagined teacher corps. She mailed her thesis to dozens of CEO's asking for funding and in no time received $26,000 in support and an office working space in Manhattan. From there she hired a handful of staff (barely paid college grads) and they got to work on continuing the search for funding.
Hardly able to scrape the funding for the program, TFA hung on a thread. Kopp’s thesis, now a business plan, called for 7,000 applicants of which 500 corps members were to be selected from. Her team only managed to reach 2,000 applicants. Still resolute, her small team began to select the 500 corps members originally called for. Particularly nefarious to me, applicants were promised decisions within weeks where in reality it took six months. What’s worse, the applicant brochure also promised loan forgiveness, yet the organization barely had enough money to cover operating costs let alone dole out 100k per member. This little snafu was only revealed to the corps members after disembarking from flights and beginning their training in Los Angeles. One corps member became so irate that he was forcibly removed from training by security.
Other than the TFA operating budget being $150,000 short a week before summer training of their corps members, upon launch, corps members were lost when faced with the difficult career of teaching. The summer training institute was only successful for a handful of corps and the rest were rudely awakened when thrown into under-resourced and struggling urban schools.
I'n my opinion TFA might not be a selection of top educators after all. Like Kopp herself, they were a bunch of desperate undergrads without a plan for the next year and looking for loan forgiveness. Unfortunately it seems the saying, “those who can do and those who can't teach” echos here But then there is Kopp’s side of the story. These people have indeed proven that they are the best and brightest by measurements from their high school and undergraduate careers. If this is any measure for their impact on the future then one can say that having these people as champions of the education system is indeed a benefit to the future of public schools.
A zealot for her company, Kopp drove onward no matter how close they came to failure. Her steadfast grip on the original battle plan had the company at the brink for 99% of its conception, but it was that deafness to change that in the end produced one of the biggest and best attempts at improving our public schools in the last two decades. Yes, there are plethora of valid concerns with TFA but how can you hate Kopp’s mission when she has waorked hard than anyone to make schools better. She had a dream and went for it, all in, and never gave up. That in itself is the lesson of this book.