Archives|Wendy Kopp, Leader of Teach for America
Wendy Kopp, Leader of Teach for America
By JODI WILGOREN NOV. 12, 2000
Wendy Kopp has never taught. Hasn't had the time. Or maybe she doesn't know how.
Instead, Ms. Kopp has spawned a movement of teachers -- people who never planned a career in education, in many cases never even considered it. Most of them are just dabbling. But some stick with schools. And nobody forgets the experience.
As a senior at Princeton University, Ms. Kopp had neither a thesis topic nor a job offer. But she had an idea, and a decade later, her Teach for America is a thriving nonprofit organization, having placed 6,424 newly minted college graduates in some of America's most impoverished classrooms for two-year stints, and raised $76 million from foundations, corporations, individuals and government grants.
''I look at where am I going to have the most impact -- if I do this for three years or if I teach for three years,'' Ms. Kopp, now 33, said when asked why she never tried the classroom herself. ''I think Teach for America has suffered from the fact that I did not teach, in a major way. I also think if I had taught, I wouldn't have started Teach for America.''
Since her big idea became a reality, the teacher shortage it attempts to address has gone from gaping to gargantuan: the nation is expected to need 2.5 million new teachers by 2010. Questions of teacher quality are at the crux of the education debate, but there is little consensus on what produces pedagogical success. Even as states scurry to fill the need by letting thousands join the work force without master's degrees or majors in education, legislators are considering clamping down to require certification of all teachers.
Teach for America has doubled in size over the last few years and plans to double again, to a total of 2,000 recruits each year, by 2004, and to spread to 25 regions from its current 15. A separate Kopp initiative, a nonprofit consulting firm called the New Teacher Project, is bringing the recruitment and training strategies to states and school districts. Most recently it helped New York lure 320 midcareer professionals to some of the city's worst schools after a short boot camp. While the organization still trains just a tiny fraction of the nation's schoolteachers, its successes in finding new teachers in unlikely places -- and its struggles in figuring out what they need to know to do their jobs -- speak to the age-old question of whether teachers are born or bred.
Asked what makes a good teacher, Ms. Kopp did not describe a particularly inspirational person from her past. She did not wax sentimental about the triumphs of Teach for America corps members or quote aphorisms from famous educators.
Her recipe is simple: Good teachers are good leaders, people who can move children from point A to point B.
''It's possible to train great people, but a person with great training who doesn't have certain characteristics is only going to go so far,'' Ms. Kopp said. When observing effective teachers, she said, ''I feel like I'm not watching the equivalent of surgery, where the key thing is the precision of every single movement.
''Basically, management and leadership ability is what I see,'' she said. ''It's what it takes to succeed in my role, in any role at the head of an organization. It's what it takes to be a leader.''
For Corps Alumni, Varied Roles
For all the buzz about Ms. Kopp, who has been called the ''godmother of social entrepreneurism,'' the founder and president of Teach for America insists she would prefer this article not be about her.
She would rather it focus on, for example, Verdel Baskin, who was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to teach his seventh graders the importance of sequential steps when she took some potential donors to visit his classroom in the South Bronx last spring. Or on Michael Feinberg and David Levin, corps members from 1992, whose Knowledge is Power Program in Houston and New York was spotlighted at the Republican National Convention last summer. Or perhaps on Mark Levine, who quit teaching after two years in Washington Heights but has returned to the neighborhood to open a credit union; or Bill Norbert, who talked about his teaching experience as he campaigned door to door before his 1998 election to the legislature in Maine.
At Princeton, Ms. Kopp ended up writing a thesis proposing a national teacher corps in which she expressed her dual goals: To get bright young missionaries into some of the nation's neediest classrooms and to create a cadre of civic leaders conscious of the challenges of education and poverty. To the critics who chafe at the notion of know-it-all Ivy Leaguers cycling through schools on two-year tours, Ms. Kopp seems to say, so what? Look what happens later.
The statistics are practically the first thing out of her mouth at every meeting: 40 percent of Teach for America alumni are still teaching and an additional 20 percent remain in education. The numbers, though, may be skewed; they are from a survey to which half the alumni responded, and it would seem likely that fewer teachers than, say, investment bankers, have lost touch with the organization. In any case, the retention rate is far below the national average. Typically two-thirds of all new teachers last longer than four years in the classroom (in the organization's first eight years, 19 percent of the recruits did not complete their initial two-year commitment).
But her organization has vast tentacles throughout what is known as the education reform movement, as well as in a broader circle of the young power elite: Harvard's business, law and public-policy schools have numerous Teach for America alumni; the former corps members have started at least nine charter schools around the country; someone is running a laptop program for students in New York City, someone else is the deputy budget director for Washington's school system; there are legal-services lawyers, inner-city pediatricians and ''social entrepreneurs'' working on libraries, sweatshops and prenatal care.
''We need policy makers who understand these issues,'' Ms. Kopp said during a recent meeting in Chicago, one of two cities where Teach for America recruits were placed for the first time this fall. ''We need C.E.O.'s who understand these issues. We need doctors who understand these issues.''
Going to Boot Camp in Houston
First, though, they must teach. And before that, figure out how.
Fresh from their college commencement celebrations, the young corps members trek each summer to the University of Houston for a five-week crash course. Forget apprenticeship; after a week of lectures and discussions outlining the philosophy of the corps and the tenets of teaching 101, the recruits run a summer-school program for 4,000 local children. In teams of three or four, they teach from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., meet with their advisers at the school sites until 4:30 p.m., then return to campus for workshops on topics like literacy and discipline. In between, they tackle several hundred pages of readings, and must plan lessons for the next day; there are also some scheduled social events. ''They are never idle,'' education consultants wrote in an evaluation of the 1998 institute. ''Stress is almost a planned design element.''
For Michael Siegel, the realization hit in Houston: ''Pretty soon you start to see what it takes to be a teacher and how poorly trained we're going to be.'' Mr. Siegel, a 1999 graduate of Brandeis University with a major in comparative literature, said he thought his enthusiasm for writing had infected some of his third graders at Jefferson Elementary School in Oakland, Calif., but he admitted he was ''not very good at breaking down the nuts and bolts of multiplication.''
As for reading, perhaps the most crucial gateway for meaningful education, Mr. Siegel said he ''didn't even know what phonemic awareness was'' until more than halfway through the school year, when he learned about the concept in a graduate school class he was taking at California State University at Hayward. Having grown up in Oakland, Mr. Siegel sought out his own third-grade teacher for guidance, but ''for months, I was teaching over their heads,'' he said. ''I didn't know what third graders know.''
Erika Johnson, who hoped to teach high school English but ended up with a first-grade bilingual class in East Palo Alto, Calif., said part of the problem was that many recruits did not get their teaching assignments until after the summer institute was over, making it hard to choose appropriate workshops,
Jane Fossner remembered the institute as a ''big blur'' and said it offered little help when she arrived at Castlemont High in Oakland to find her social studies classroom constantly disrupted by hallway noise and false fire alarms. ''There were some people who just loved it -- they stayed up all night and read everything,'' she said. ''It was just hard for me to take it all in.''
The director of the summer institute, Abigail Smith, who taught for two years in rural North Carolina, acknowledged that ''the environment is incredibly intense; potentially, it's too intense.'' She and Ms. Kopp do not pretend that five weeks is enough. Rather, they say the institute is supposed to persuade recruits to take responsibility for their own professional development, to seek out mentor teachers, to ferret curriculum resources, to lean on corps alumni for support and to take classes at local universities.
They also point out that in the corners of the country where Teach for America toils, from South Los Angeles to the South Bronx, the Mississippi Delta to the Rio Grande Valley, the alternative is less likely to be a certified teacher with a degree in education than someone recruited at the local Wal-Mart.
While principals in those underserved schools give the program high marks -- 92 percent said in a survey that they would hire more of its teachers -- there has never been an evaluation of their impact on student achievement. There are countless stories of members forming after-school clubs, visiting parents at home, planning elaborate field trips; there are also innumerable anecdotes of teachers who run home each day weeping. Not surprisingly, the movement has its critics among educators.
''I think that the energy and the commitment that these people bring to some of the most difficult schools in the country is inspirational,'' said Pat Wasley, dean of the Bank Street College of Education in New York. ''But inspiration isn't enough. You also have to have knowledge and skills.''
That is why teacher candidates at Bank Street might take an 18-week seminar outlining five different approaches to teaching mathematics, or, over a similar semester stretch, observe a child in a classroom, learning to distinguish, for example, whether a student staring out the window is disengaged or deep in thought.
At the University of Washington, Pam Grossman teaches English methods over two quarters and still feels ''barely able to cover the topic.'' A class on Dilemmas in Teaching and Learning addresses issues like what to do when you've taught something, but the students did not learn it.
''We don't have Doctors for America,'' Professor Grossman said. ''There are places that are desperate for legal advice; we don't send bright young graduates into the legal clinics.''
Instead of helping professionalize teaching, the organization has demeaned it, Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin contends, by promoting ''teaching as volunteer work.''
The question of what a good teacher needs to know is at the heart of the discussion, particularly in light of the new curriculum standards and high-stakes tests that have swept the nation's schools over the last decade. Certainly, teachers need a combination of subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical training -- but how much of each? Undergraduate education majors often emerge with little sophistication in, say, science; teachers given emergency credentials, with or without Teach for America-style boot camps, frequently cannot control their classrooms long enough to begin a lesson. Fifth-year master's degree programs seem too slow and expensive to many people considering entering a career with a relatively low earning potential.
Arthur C. Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, offered laundries as an analogy: You don't suggest how long they wash your clothes, you just say you want them clean. ''Let's stop arguing about the length of time,'' he said. ''Let's figure out what we want a teacher to become.''
Ms. Kopp is not eager to join the debate over teacher certification. Years ago, heady from Teach for America's initial success, she announced plans for the organization to begin certifying teachers on its own, earning the ire of the education establishment, and she hesitates to rekindle the issue.
''If we freed up all the money in the certification process,'' she said, ''think about how much more money we'd have to put into teacher salaries.'' Ms. Kopp is mostly quiet on the big-picture policy questions, preferring to perfect her project; she says she was never trying to revolutionize teacher training in America.
''It gets to whether we're a teacher-education model or a movement for social justice,'' she said. ''I would say we're about the latter.''
Discipline, Not Dynamism
With her girl-next-door good looks and poised, executive manner, Ms. Kopp seems an unlikely candidate to lead a national service movement. Unlike most of her recruits, she did not tutor needy children, or do much volunteer work while growing up in the Dallas suburb of University Park, the daughter of a onetime Republican committeeman. Before her 1989 Princeton graduation, Ms. Kopp had never even visited an inner-city school. She has never been a charismatic public speaker. In college, far from the rabble-rousers and do-gooders, she ran a business magazine.
''If you had asked me who was going to spend 10 years saving the children, of everybody at Princeton, Wendy would have been close to the bottom,'' said Dan Porter, who graduated a year ahead of Ms. Kopp and was among her organization's early employees. Corps members often find her aloof, seemingly more interested in courting corporate scions than sharing their classroom stories. ''She isn't a cheerleader,'' said Cami Anderson, director of the group's local effort in New York. ''She's not going to be the person to deliver a rally cry.''
Instead of dynamism, there is discipline. Ms. Kopp sleeps five hours a night -- for a while, upon a roommate's suggestion, she tried sleeping every other night -- and must have been one of the only new mothers who routinely set an alarm clock for 3 or 4 a.m. so she could bond with her laptop and go for her daily five-mile run before heading to the office. After her baby, Benjamin, was born in December, Ms. Kopp took a six-week maternity leave, during which she worked on her book, a memoir expected out in April.
She never swears, saying ''gosh'' instead of God. Her trademark is an elaborate list-making system: Goals for the forthcoming month are charted in the ''strategic plan'' (she even had one for her wedding); priorities are culled for each week's ''action plan;'' every evening, she extracts a list of names and phrases to outline what must get done the next day, and spends most of her time between meetings crossing items off the list and adding new ones.
Ms. Kopp relentlessly attacks projects, pushing for constant improvement. She looked at 120 apartments before buying one. It often seems as much about reaching the goal as the goal itself.
Her younger brother, David, said: ''I'm one of those people who says, you get an A for a 95 or a 92, so the ideal grade is a 92. Wendy is one of those people, she will work four times as hard to get 100.''
But if something sets Ms. Kopp apart from legions of ambitious workaholics, it is an intrinsic belief in her own ability to do the daunting task -- ''her ability to free herself of any doubt,'' as Iris Chen, a former employee now pursuing law and business degrees at Harvard, put it.
When Ms. Kopp started Teach for America, everybody she consulted suggested she shrink the proposal from 500 recruits to 50; she ignored them, and proceeded to recruit 2,500 applicants. A few years later, through a monthslong budget crisis, Ms. Kopp would diligently dial supporters every two weeks and ask for advance payments or loans or extra gifts; she never missed a payroll. During the coup d'Kopp, when the entire staff threatened to quit unless she agreed to make all decisions democratically, Ms. Kopp refused; nobody left. It was only recently that she abandoned the nonhierarchical organizational structure in which every employee earned the same salary (it now ranges from entry-level $25,000 to Ms. Kopp's $100,000).
''Wendy is just a very far-thinking individual, who's not really that concerned about what the public's view is, or what tradition requires, or what other people will tell her are the barriers for things that can be done,'' said Ian Huschle, one of her first employees, who has started two new media companies since he left the organization in 1993. ''I heard a great definition of an entrepreneur yesterday, as someone who looks at the calculations, sees that they don't add up, and goes forward anyway, on the conviction that they'll work out. That's what Wendy does.''
Ms. Kopp takes recruitment seriously. She interviewed 30 candidates before hiring a nanny. Her husband, Richard Barth -- a former employee of Teach for America -- is the chief recruiter for Edison Schools, a for-profit company that runs 108 schools in 21 states. Every single staff member at Teach for America, including Ms. Kopp, interviews applicants each spring (only about 1 in 5 is accepted, making the program much more competitive than most education schools or hard-to-staff school districts). This is what it has always been about: finding the best people.
That is why she went to Howard University in Washington, last spring to meet with the then-provost, Antoine Garibaldi (he has since joined the Educational Testing Service). Although 15.6 percent of Teach for America's members have been African-American -- more than twice the 7 percent of teachers overall -- Ms. Kopp says the organization is much too white, since most of the students it serves are black or Latino. Dr. Garibaldi, a scholar of education, was reported to have a thick Rolodex of black leaders in academe and a voice that carries. With high hopes for the meeting, Ms. Kopp said she was even thinking of asking him to join the board.
On the cab ride over, Allison Rogovin, the Northeast recruitment director, gave her boss a quick briefing. Only five applications from Howard this year. Five! Ms. Rogovin called 12 faculty members to try to interest them in the program. One called back. Among the obstacles is Howard's $800 fee for a booth at the career fair; most campuses charge $50 or let Teach for America in free.
''We are under so much pressure -- we pressure ourselves -- to have a more diverse corps,'' Ms. Kopp said, psyching herself up. ''Why don't we do better at historically black colleges? This is the most difficult one. It's pathetic we haven't met with him before.''
Settled into a brown leather club chair in the provost's office, Ms. Kopp began her pitch, building up to the $800 career-fair fee, in hope that he would pick up the phone right there and get it waived. Instead, Dr. Garibaldi said the organization would only get lost at the huge fair, and should come to campus some other time. He demurred on her offer to visit local classrooms with the group's teachers, saying he had seen his share of schools.
Although Dr. Garibaldi said he was impressed with her group, his loyalty was clearly to the university's teacher-education program. So he suggested lower-level administrators who might help, pointed them toward undergraduates involved in tutoring. The meeting slipped away, and Ms. Kopp left with only a bunch of names to add to her action plan.
''We need our champion in this community,'' she sighed at the elevator, ''and it's not going to be him.''
Courting Donors
Though she has never had a classroom of her own, Ms. Kopp does visit her teachers frequently, sometimes just to watch, more often with potential donors in tow, eager to impress. On a sunny morning last spring, she took two money men to the South Bronx, touring KIPP Academy, the program's best-known success story, and Intermediate School 145, where 16 of the 111 teachers last year were Teach for America members or alumni.
Glen Bader, the principal of I.S. 145, sounded as though he had stepped out of a Teach for America ad. ''If I had to start a school, I'd go straight to Teach for America,'' he gushed. ''I wouldn't hire anybody else.''
Standing in the back of classrooms for, maybe, six minutes each, it is impossible to assess the teachers' success. One young woman has her students listening to an audiotape of a story, preparing for a test. Another is conducting an Oprah-style interview, pretending the youngsters are characters in the book they have read. A third shows how sound waves from a radio make grains of salt dance.
The most engaging is Verdel Baskin, whose children are cracking up as they try to provide ever-more detailed directions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: You can't just ''spread the peanut butter,'' you have to open the jar and stick the knife in and take it out and put it on the bread and then run the knife across it, he said.
When an eighth grader at KIPP said she planned to be a doctor, Ms. Kopp suggested that first she teach for two years.
Heading back downtown, as the barbed-wire fences of Harlem whiz past the livery-cab window, Ms. Kopp makes the hard sell to one of the wealthy donors. The coming expansion means taking the annual budget from $10 million to $26 million by 2003. To get more recruits more recruiters are needed.
''In the end, it's always about people,'' she said. ''What we do is not rocket science. It's the most basic, common-sense stuff. There are all these people running around looking for magic solutions to education when every business leader knows it comes down to: Do you have good people?''
The philanthropist got out near Grand Central Terminal, but her headquarters are across town, in a garment district warehouse.
Ms. Kopp whipped out a cell phone, slumped in her seat and focused on her list. It was 1 p.m., four hours since she had checked her voice mail.
''These school visits are good,'' she said, as if trying to convince herself, ''but it's slow. It's just slow.''
A version of this article appears in print on November 12, 2000, on Page A4 of the National edition with the headline: Wendy Kopp, Leader of Teach for America. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe