TFA's Kopp Speaks on the Importance of System-Level Leadership

"The failures in our public schools are not the failures of the kids. The failures are the failures of adults who are not providing the kind of educational opportunities that these kids deserve," said Professor David Gergen in the opening remarks of "Realizing Educational Opportunity for All," the March 11 forum held at the Harvard Kennedy School. The guest speaker for the event was Wendy Kopp, chief executive officer and founder of Teach For America (TFA), who has worked for the past 20 years to close the educational-opportunity gap in America.

TFA was born in 1989 of Kopp's undergraduate senior thesis. In it she proposed a U.S. national teaching corps, similar to the Peace Corps, where students straight from college would teach in disadvantaged schools throughout the country. In 1990, with no resources, Kopp was able to raise $2.5 million to get the program off the ground. Today TFA reaches 450,000 students with 17,000 alumni teachers, who continue to work to reform the educational inequities plaguing America.

Throughout the forum Kopp championed the organization and its core members, who are doing the difficult hands-on work in the classroom, but also spoke to the present challenges of the aggregate problems in education and the necessity for system-level improvement. She elaborated that the large-scale change needed was unbelievably difficult to tackle, but that "it doesn't require magic. We know how to do it." Kopp believes school districts should channel all their resources toward three areas -- talent and leadership, building strong cultures, and goal setting -- in order to create successful and equal opportunities for children.

School districts, Kopp contended, should recruit as aggressively as the Wall Street companies do to capitalize on the most promising leaders, a philosophy she dubbed "war for talent." As an example, she pointed to TFA's successful recruitment practices. For the 2010-2011 academic school year, TFA received 46,000 applications for 4,000 open positions. This year, 18 percent of Harvard College seniors applied to Teach for America -- the largest amount of all the Ivy League schools.

These numbers, along with the success of individual communities across the country where TFA core members have had a presence, give her great optimism for the future. The path to broad-sweeping education reform can have many roadblocks, but she sees the localized triumphs as grand strides toward moving the needle of inequity.

TFA is now in the midst of global expansion with Kopp serving as chief executive of Teach For All, a network supporting the development of Teach For America's model in other countries. Currently there are 12 partnered organizations in the network, including Teach For India and Teach First out of the U.K.

The "Realizing Educational Opportunity for All" forum can be viewed in its entirety at:
http://www.iop.harvard.edu/Multimedia-Center/All-Videos/Realizing-Educational-Opportunity-for-All-A-public-address-by-Wendy-Kopp.