Wendy Kopp Discusses Educational Inequity
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The Founder of Teach For America on the state of education in the US.
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Wendy Kopp:

Wendy Kopp proposed the creation of Teach For America in her undergraduate senior thesis in 1989 and has spent the last 19 years working to sustain and grow the organization. In the 2008-2009 school year, more than 6,200 corps members are teaching in our country's neediest communities, reaching approximately 400,000 students. They join more than 14,000 Teach For America alumni who—still in their 20s and 30s—are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform. Under Kopp's leadership, Teach For America is in the midst of an effort to grow to scale while maximizing the impact of corps members and alumni as a force for short- and long-term change. Kopp also serves as the chief executive of Teach For All, which is supporting the development of Teach For America's model in other countries. She is the author of One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way, and holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is educational inequity and how has it changed over the years?

Kopp: The most salient lesson of our work is actually that we can solve this problem. Maybe it sounds a little trite, but I think… I mean, when I came to this, and I think I would speak for, you know, thousands of people who have joined Teach For America who’ve come to this feeling like the world should be a different way, you know? It isn’t fair that we have 13 million kids in our country who are growing up below the poverty line, who, you know, by the time they are in fourth grade are, you know, already three grade levels behind fourth graders in high income communities, half of whom will not even graduate from high school. The half who do who will have an eighth grade skill level. You know, one out of ten of our kids in low income communities will actually graduate from college, so we’ve all come to this saying this shouldn’t exist. Like, we have to do something about this. And I think what has happened to us is that we’ve come to realize not only should we do something about it, we actually could do something about it, and really, we could attain a world where all the kids in our country have the chance to attain an excellent education, and I think what’s led us to that, initially, was what we saw from initially a fraction of our core members who go into their own learning curves, figured out how to actually put their kids on a different trajectory. You know, so now, today, because we’ve learned so much from the initially small fraction of teachers who are affecting dramatic gains in their kids’ achievement, you know, we’ve learned a lot from them and have fed those lessons back into our training and support models, and they’ve reached a point where now many more of our teachers are extremely successful with their kids, and so, now, we see evidence across any sort of community, from remote rural areas to our hardest pressed urban areas, you know, at the elementary level, at middle school level, at high school level, we see just hardcore evidence that when kids are given the opportunities they deserve, they excel, you know, kids facing some of the greatest challenges of poverty in our country. So, seeing that at the classroom level, and now seeing through, you know, a number of our alums would teach very successfully and see their kids going off into nearby middle schools or whatever and would see that those schools weren’t giving the kids the opportunities, really, that they deserved to continue on the new trajectory, and that led a number of them to go out and pioneer these very high performing charter schools, you know, and there are many others in the country now as well who are, you know, growing this generation of schools in low income communities that are taking, you know, whole schools full of kids in low income communities and putting them on the track to graduating from college. And so, now, we see not only at the classroom level but at whole school levels that it is completely possible to do this. And so, whereas, you know, I think back to 15 years ago, you know,

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