The College announced yesterday that Wendy Kopp is the Class of 2012's Commencement speaker. I believe she is a speaker worthy of Dartmouth.
In the past 20 years, Kopp has become the midwife of modern education reform. Kopp founded Teach for America in 1989 after she proposed an American "Teacher Corps" modeled after the Peace Corps in her Princeton University thesis. Teach for America now has 30,000 alumni, two-thirds of whom work full-time in education. A 2011 study showed that Teach for America alumni created one-sixth of all educational entrepreneurial organizations in the country, way more than any other teaching program or school district. These alumni include state education directors, city superintendents and the founders of New Schools for New Orleans, Democrats for Education Reform and StudentsFirst. Colorado state Sen. Michael Johnston, D-Denver, who taught with Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta, wrote the state's landmark legislation on teacher evaluations. Two of the most successful charter school networks, KIPP and YES Prep, are also alumni creations. Dartmouth has been heavily involved with Teach for America. This year, our Teach for America acceptance rate was one of the highest in the country, and the recruitment team would like to see an even higher number of offers for the Class of 2013.
Kopp's speech will be most valuable to Dartmouth students if she focuses on how she was able to inspire top performing students to consider education as a viable career choice, instead of promoting Teach for America itself. I, along with the other Teach for America campus recruiters, have made sure that Dartmouth students are exposed to the program, so there's no need for her to advertise. Furthermore, Teach for America, like most organizations, is imperfect. The organization's five-week training program and only two-year commitment may not accomplish its goal of placing a highly effective teacher in every classroom.
In her address, Kopp can talk about elevating our impressions of the teaching profession. I wouldn't believe that teaching is considered a waste of an Ivy League degree, except I've heard it said in casual conversations and student forums. This tone reflects a larger problem. In the 1970s, 20 percent of top performing students went into careers in education. Today, that number has dropped to 10 percent. Based on SAT scores, America draws most of its new teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. And almost half of our country's teacher preparation programs accept every applicant, while the programs in high-performing countries like Finland and Singapore have 10 percent admission rates.
This decreased selectivity is coupled with the mindset that high performers stick with other high performers. Friends justify going into finance and consulting because they want to stay with other "smart" people in addition to the high salaries offered by these firms. This "skyboxification," or clustering of the "smart," has been featured in recent works like Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" and Timothy Noah's "The Great Divergence." It is worth worrying about. Kopp has accomplished something special by persuading more graduates to take their fancy degrees to plainer places. Dartmouth can encourage this just as well as Teach for America does. We can challenge the "if you can't do, teach" attitude by hiring more professors at Raven House and creating an education major. We can lead research in the underappreciated field of rural education. Many students are involved in the Tucker Foundation's education-centered organizations, but Tucker can always use more. We could even work with the other Ivies and consider tuition incentives for those who get teacher certified.
I am excited for Wendy Kopp to be my class' Commencement speaker. She has created an environment in which a Dartmouth student is now congratulated instead of pitied for teaching third graders in South Dakota. I understand that a Teach for America teacher might not be those third graders' ideal option, but I hope that Kopp can acknowledge this next month while making a persuasive case for Dartmouth students going where they are most needed instead of where they are most wanted. And at the very least, I hope she convinces a few more people to write a thesis.
