Growing up in what she described as a homogeneous and privileged community, Wendy Kopp would hardly have guessed that she would come to found an organization dedicated to educating children from low-income communities.
Kopp, the founder of Teach For America -- an organization that now manages a corps of thousands of teachers nationwide -- spoke last night to a full house in Rocky 3 about how she built the organization and what she learned from the process.
In a country that aspires to be a "place of equal opportunity," hundreds of thousands of kids just don't have the opportunity to acquire a quality education, Kopp said. With all the challenges of poverty, someone born in a low income community is seven times less likely to graduate from college than someone born in a high income community, according to Kopp.
While her childhood experiences did not acquaint her with the gulf separating the educational opportunities of the two groups, it was at Princeton University where she became aware of the differences between students' access to quality education. While students from public schools struggled with the workload, she said, those from prep schools saw it as a "cake- walk."
As a senior, Kopp, realized she had no plans for what to do after she graduated. She felt that she was only one among thousands "searching for something that they weren't finding."
Confronted with the clear divide in educational opportunity that she observed, Kopp wondered "why didn't this country have a national teacher corps of top recent college graduates who would commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools?"
The idea became Kopp's thesis. Recruiting around college campuses, thousands of applications for teaching positions poured in. Observers were surprised by the students' idealism and commitment, and the New York times soon profiled the organization, bringing it to the nation's attention.
Fourteen years later, Teach For America has placed 10,000 teachers around the nation. Kopp explained it has never been an easy experience.
"No one who does TFA will come out viewing the world in the same way. No matter their background, they will leave filled with outrage at what they saw, but feeling like it's possible to make a difference," she said.
Kopp gave an example of a recent Dartmouth graduate who started teaching illiterate third graders and through tireless work ended up with literate third graders a year later. He wrote notes to parents daily, trying to get them to help the kids at home, while tutoring his students on Saturdays at the park and Sundays in the library.
Another story included a student who realized that her secondary school math class thought themselves incapable of learning the subject. By building up their confidence step by step, the students rose from being the lowest performers to the highest in their school district within one year.
Seeing the success stories has made volunteers realize that educational equality can be achieved, Kopp said. To achieve this, they need to "inspire more of the most promising leaders coming out of college." Kopp called for all college students to accept the challenge.
Asked to give stories that were less successful, Kopp replied that the Teach For America is a "story of failure" with many successes woven in. It is "incredibly challenging to do what we're doing," she said.
Some criticize Teach For America for placing inexperienced teachers in difficult situations. Kopp acknowledged that it takes an extremely rare person to have what it takes to succeed in the type of environment into which they are placed.
These stringent requirements make it very difficult to be admitted into the organization. Recently, Teach For America received around 16,000 applications but could only accept 1,800 of them. The organization interviews many exceptional candidates, but has to make a calculation as to whether Teach For America is "exactly the right thing for them," Kopp said.
Kopp also rejected the criticism that students are not adequately trained before they start their work, asking "How much can you actually learn before you start teaching?" She added that there exists a whole infrastructure of support with an network of resources for the college students.
Kopp's visit, which was sponsored by the Rockefeller Center, also involved a signing of her new book, "One Day, All Children."
