Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp
Wendy Sue Koppis the CEO and Co-Founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent nonprofit organizations working to expand educational opportunity in their own countries and the Founder of Teach For America, a national teaching corps...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth29 June 1967
CountryUnited States of America
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On average, our corps members stay in the classroom for eight years. But again, given the systemic nature of educational inequity, we know it is vital that some of our alumni take their experience outside the classroom.
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As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.
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As a founder of two organizations that recruit top college graduates to expand educational opportunity, I've spent a lot of time examining what's at work in successful classrooms and schools over the past two decades.
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Kids in urban and rural areas face so many challenges, and they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity or extra resources to meet their needs.
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I've heard a number of our alumni - people who are running schools and school systems - think a lot about different models for the teaching profession.
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If the world's leaders are serious about improving collective well-being, we'd better get serious about prioritizing education in our nations and in our global discussion.
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In the long run, we will need many more African-American, Latino, and Native American leaders, and leaders from low-income communities, who can bring additional insight and a deeply grounded sense of urgency, and who are the most likely to inspire the necessary trust and engagement among students' parents and community leaders.
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Teach For China recruits top American and Chinese college graduates, like 26-year-old Yang Xiao, to teach in the country's most disadvantaged schools.
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Cultivating more leaders who reflect our heterogeneous society depends on universities' transparent use of race as one of many factors in an admissions process that is accessible to all.
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Teach For America would not be able to continue recruiting and developing an ever-more diverse and impactful group of corps members and alumni if the nation's leading colleges become even less diverse.
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Mindsets, skills and leadership, experience and access, and critical consciousness - we need all four of these things for our students to be the leaders, people and citizens we want them to be.
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As a white woman with a privileged education, I'm keenly aware that I founded an organization that can only realize its goal if it enlists many more leaders who share the backgrounds of the students and families we work with.
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Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.
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I myself was completely torn by the decision to start Teach For America. There was a voice in my head telling me not to do it - to take a more normal path. I did have one thing going for me, which was that I had been rejected from all the other jobs I'd applied to.