She dreamed the dream as a Princeton undergraduate and drafted the plan during her senior year.
A year later in 1989, Wendy Kopp was looking out at an audience of the first 489 recent college graduates who had signed up to be members of Teach for America, the national corps that would grow to pioneer the movement against educational inequity in the United States.
"The fundamental idea of Teach For America is [to] channel the energy of the most tremendous people," said Kopp, who spoke at a Fox Leadership forum yesterday evening in Huntsman Hall.
TFA's 5,000 current corps members, including 55 from Penn, reach about 440,000 students in the public schools of America's lowest-income communities. Each corps member commits two years to teaching in one of the organization's 28 regions, which span from Greater Philadelphia to Hawaii.
Kopp said her background didn't exactly lend itself social entrepreneurship.
"I came from a homogenous, privileged community and a public school that ranked top ten in the country," she said.
But Kopp witnessed evidence of an unequal playing field firsthand at Princeton, where her roommate's difficult academic transition made her question the educational system. The corporate-focused senior-year recruitment process at Princeton also inspired her to take action.
"Why weren't we being recruited as aggressively to teach as we were to work on Wall Street?" Kopp said.
According to Kopp, TFA is ambivalence toward its success.
"At one level, the fundamental idea of TFA is playing out," she said. "But at the same time, probably no one at TFA feels satisfied at where we are. We feel a tremendous sense of urgency to grow our impact."
She pointed to TFA alumna Katie Pierce, who brought her struggling sixth-grade students up to par.
"It was about building personal relationships with her kids and their families so they could realize they could meet these standards and get on a track to go to college," Kopp said.
Stories like Pierce's, Kopp said, prove that the issue of educational inequity has a remedy. Still, she said, the solution demands changes at a systemic level.
"It's why we're at places like Penn," Kopp said. "We need every additional person who's going to end up in a position of influence in our country."
TFA boasts about 12,000 alumni, many of whom devote their careers to realizing the organization's mission, Kopp said.
"I really want to pursue education, and I think that the best thing that Wendy Kopp has done is increase awareness" about educational inequity, said College junior Jessica Gartner.
College junior Miguel Garces, who is considering applying to the program next year, was inspired by Kopp's speech.
"She's really amazing," he said. "Hopefully her goals will be realized soon."
