Wendy Kopp's Lessons on Inspiration | Big Think

Wendy Kopp's Lessons on Inspiration

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Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp discusses the importance of Teach For America’s active alumni network.

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Wendy Kopp:

Wendy Kopp proposed the creation of Teach For America in her undergraduate senior thesis in 1989 and has spent the last 19 years working to sustain and grow the organization. In the 2008-2009 school year, more than 6,200 corps members are teaching in our country's neediest communities, reaching approximately 400,000 students. They join more than 14,000 Teach For America alumni who—still in their 20s and 30s—are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform. Under Kopp's leadership, Teach For America is in the midst of an effort to grow to scale while maximizing the impact of corps members and alumni as a force for short- and long-term change. Kopp also serves as the chief executive of Teach For All, which is supporting the development of Teach For America's model in other countries. She is the author of One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way, and holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What do you do to inspire your teachers?

Kopp: You know, I mean, right now, we have 65 people who each taught successfully in our country’s most economically disadvantaged communities who are on a mission to recruit our future leaders to channel their energy in this direction based on what they learned as teachers, you know, and they each have three to ten college campuses. They source top prospects and they try to sit down with them one on one and they share their own personal experience, which is just hard evidence that this is an unbelievably unjust problem. I mean, it’s one thing to say these outrageous statistics and realize, wait a minute. Is this possible in America? But it is another to encounter a class of kids who are literally, like, seriously, you meet your fourth graders and you realize they’re reading at a first grade level. But, meeting them, you realize, these are really smart, talented, you know, hardworking kids, and I think they bring that to life, but what they also bring to life is what they saw about the potential of their kids, like they just see real evidence through their experience that, actually, we can solve this problem, and they’re so deeply convinced themselves that, first of all, we need every additional person, whether it’s two years or more years, but two years of, you know, someone with real commitment and real ability will make a huge and truly life changing difference in the lives of kids growing up today. They also know that, you know what? More teachers going above and beyond to compensate for all the problems of the system, as important as it is, it’s not sufficient, and so they’re on a mission to get the people who are one day going to be running the world and are going to be running for president and, you know, editing big newspapers and running big companies and ultimately running our school systems and in leadership in every sector and really at every level of policy, to do this first because of what you learned. I mean, you may conceptually think you know about this problem, but what you learned through this experience gives you just an unparalleled, deep appreciation of not only the complexities of the problem but the complexities of the solution. And so, I guess that’s how we do it. You know, we’re running around on these campuses spreading awareness about the problem, solvability of the problem, and our country’s future leaders are saying, you know what? We can be part of something to actually change history. I mean, truly, like, this is within our grasp, but it’s such a real question about whether we’re going to really solve the problem. I mean, we can, but the question is will we? And the answer to that lies on the hands of the choices. I mean it’s really the choices of this generation of leaders. We’re completely convinced of that. Like, will they decide that we’re going to take this on?

Question: What story from Teach For America most inspires you?

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