Kopp Speaks on Public Schools

Though the current financial crisis may dominate the news, Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp spoke at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education yesterday afternoon about a very different crisis: that of the myriad problems facing America’s public schools today.

Kopp, who serves as the CEO of the organization, was introduced by Graduate School of Education Dean Kathleen McCarthy who stated that “more undergrads than ever are seriously considering Teach for America.”

After the introduction, Kopp spoke enthusiastically for half an hour about the 18-year-old program.

According to TFA’s mission statement, the non-profit institution tries to “eliminate educational inequality by enlisting our nations most promising future leaders in the effort.”

TFA works by training and overseeing a core of high-achieving recent college graduates to work as public school teachers in under-served rural and urban districts for a minimum of two years.

In 2008, 6,200 graduating seniors joined the program, 33 of which were from Harvard.

According to Kopp’s 2001 book “One Day, All Children,” Kopp developed the idea for TFA in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton in 1989 and founded the organization in 1990.

In her speech, Kopp highlighted the “three big lessons” TFA has learned while navigating the American public education system during the past 18 years.

First, she emphasized that the achievement gap in American public schools is “solvable,” and that Americans have “a sense of responsibility to take this problem on.”

Second, the TFA administrators have grown to understand the qualities needed to be a great teacher in the context of perpetually under-served schools, something which remains a continual learning process.

Last, Kopp emphasized that TFA alone is not sufficient to solve America’s public education crisis.

“We need to do a whole lot more than expect our teachers alone will solve this problem,” she said.

While stating that “there is no silver bullet” to solving this systemic issue, Kopp ended the speech on an optimistic note.

“This world should be a different way and what I’ve learned from this is that it absolutely could be a different way,” she said.

Kopp spent the subsequent hour answering questions from the audience, which ranged from practical issues of how the organization supports its core members to the idealism on which it is founded.