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Maria Bartiromos Money Makers: Wendy Kopp & Teach for America: A Brilliant Brainstorm-Careers Employment

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A Brilliant Brainstorm

In 1989, Wendy Kopp was a college student, searching for a topic for her senior thesis. What she found was a calling.

As a public policy major at Princeton University, Kopp couldn't help noticing the educational disparity between students who had gone to public schools in low-income communities and those who had attended prep schools. "I saw students from under-resourced communities who were incredibly driven but struggling to meet the academic demands, and I saw kids from privileged backgrounds calling Princeton a cakewalk. That turned me on to the fact that while our country aspires to be a land of opportunity, where you're born does a lot to determine your educational prospects."

At the same time, Kopp was anxious about finding a meaningful topic for her thesis. And she was getting irritated by the popular assumption that pegged her fellow Gen Xers as self-involved moneygrubbers who only wanted to work for investment banks and management consulting firms.

Then, at a conference on the sad state of American education, Kopp realized she had a solution to all three problems: "Why doesn't this country have a national teaching corps that recruits young graduates to work in low-income communities the way we were being recruited to work on Wall Street?"

She called her brainstorm Teach for America. In 15 years, this "Peace Corps for teachers" has placed over 10,000 recent college grads in more than 1,000 schools in 22 regions around the country. Last year, no fewer than one out of every eight seniors at Yale University and Spelman college competed with some 17,000 applicants for 2,100 slots. Their training and the salaries for their two-year stints are paid out of a multimillion-dollar budget, derived from both government and private funds. The donors include such heavy hitters as Wachovia, AT&T, the Walton Family Foundation, the Xerox Foundation and many of the same Wall Street institutions where Teach for America alumni might once have been headed.

"Making Your Idea Fly"

The seeds for success were all in Kopp's original proposal, as well as a deadline of one year in which to recruit teachers, find schools to place them in and raise several million dollars. Of this ambitious plan, Kopp's thesis advisor said, "Listen, kid, this is obviously deranged."

But Kopp wasn't discouraged. "I believed so strongly in this idea, it just had to happen. And I was blessed with naiveté. Inexperience was my greatest asset at the time, because I just did not know why it couldn't be done, and why I couldn't be the one to make it happen."

In fact, Kopp wasn't completely naive. While at Princeton, she had served as president of the Foundation for Student Communication, a campus organization that linked students and Business leaders. In that position, Kopp oversaw a $1.5 million budget and met dozens of CEOs.

"Everything I do is based on that experience," Kopp once told The New York Times. "It taught me how to strategize and manage people. I realized there's an incredible amount of money in the world and people who are looking for good things to support. If you just get in the door, you have a good chance of making your idea fly."

With office space donated by Morgan Stanley and $26,000 in seed money from Mobil, Teach for America took off. Kopp soon learned that conviction and a compelling idea only go so far. She would find out later about the power of experience.

When Kopp started Teach for America, everyone she consulted said she wouldn't find more than 50 recruits. Convinced that 500 was the smallest number needed to make a national statement, she ignored them -- and 2,500 seniors applied.

Initially, there was concern that Kopp was recruiting people who had not majored in education and that she was asking for only a two-year commitment. To Kopp, that was the core element of Teach for America's success.

"I felt strongly it's the two-year commitment that enables us to draw folks from all different career interests and academic majors. And I've held firm on this for 15 years."

The Power of a Clear Mission

Over the course of time, Kopp says, "I've gotten a lot of advice that I didn't follow. Part of being an entrepreneur is standing firm on what you're doing and not just swaying with the wind."

But her single-mindedness was tested several years after she launched the project when, like many young entrepreneurial organizations, Teach for America hit the wall. "It wasn't clear where our next payroll was going to come from, leaders in the education world were criticizing our approach, and our internal organization wasn't as strong as it is now," says Kopp. "I felt at times as though I was surrounded by a sea of negativity."

Ultimately, Kopp decided to stick it out. To do that, she realized that she was going to have to change her entire approach to managing. "In the beginning, I had almost a disdain for the fine details of management. But when things seemed to be crashing down, I realized that whether we fulfilled our programmatic mission -- to ensure that kids in low-income communities have the opportunities they deserve -- had everything to do with whether I became a good manager. I learned, the hard way, lessons about the power of a clear mission, about developing talent and systems for accountability."

Kopp knows that the recruits face enormous obstacles. "Our corps members are teaching in the most challenging situations. Their kids are in the 14th percentile against the national norm. Through ongoing training and development, we're increasing the percentage of our teachers who are effecting significant academic gains."

Pausing to reflect, Kopp says, "It's incredible to see what you can build with time and continuous improvement. I have both a constant fear that things will come crashing down, and a conviction that at the end of the day, something that's meant to be will be. The fear keeps me working those extra hours, and the conviction makes it all worth it."

And FYI...
  • Author Dr. Henry Cloud examines in Integrity why true leaders -- and why all of us -- need courage.


  • For insightful profiles on women who fought for social change, check out Karenna Gore Schiff's book Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America.


  • Are you a "born entrepreneur" with the "DNA for success"? Try Instinct by Thomas L. Harrison, a former cell biologist turned entrepreneur. Quite readable.
Editor:wwlcj1982 
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