Wendy Kopp Quotes
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Charter laws do something really important. They give educators the freedom and flexibility that they need to attain results. But we also have to invest a lot in the leadership pipeline to take advantage of that freedom and flexibility.
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Our experience at Teach For America has been that the more people understand educational inequity, the more they want to do something about it.
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The U.S. has a long history of walking up to the precipice of rigor and then walking away. As voters, let's support leaders who were courageous enough to make the hard decisions necessary to move our system forward. And as parents, let's put our faith in our educators, our children and tests that hold them to their highest potential.
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Research confirms that great teachers change lives. Students with one highly effective elementary school teacher are more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as teens, and earn tens of thousands more over their lifetimes.
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I'll get up at 5 or 6. I try to catch up on sleep on the weekends, so I'll try to get seven hours of sleep. During the week, my ideal is to go to bed at 9 and wake up six hours later.
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Imagine how different those classrooms could be if hundreds of Nigeria's most talented recent graduates and professionals channeled their energy not only into the country's banks, but into making education in the country a force for transformation.
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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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Dartmouth is such a special college with its rich history, dedicated student body, and, as I've been learning more recently, colorful customs.
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I think the way to understand Teach for America is as a leadership development program.
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We are working essentially to build a leadership force of folks who will, during their first two years of teaching, actually put their kids on a different trajectory - not just survive as a new teacher, but actually help close the achievement gap for their kids.
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There's no how-to guide for how to change the world. But it's easy to get hung up by misconceptions about what it takes to make an impact.
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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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It's easier to poke holes in an idea than think of ways to fill them. And it's easier to focus on the 100 reasons you shouldn't do something rather than the one reason you should.
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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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Across the globe, disadvantaged children are not living up to their potential because if they attend school at all, the schools are usually not designed to meet their extra needs.
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The teachers are trying to build the same culture in the classroom as we're building in the organization.
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When I started Teach For America, I wasn't trying to come up with an idea that would change the world. I was trying to solve a problem much closer to home: I was a senior in college, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life!
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Research shows that whether you are low-income or not, mindset is a bigger predictor of success than academic skills, and how students gain great academic skills and persevere in the face of challenges.
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Technology has enormous potential to address educational needs more efficiently, help teachers improve their performance, and enrich and individualize student learning.
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We're trying to be the top employer of recent grads in the country. Size gives us leverage to have a tangible impact on school systems.
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When I started Teach For America as a college senior, I sensed that there were thousands of talented, driven college students and recent grads who were searching for a way to make a real difference in the world.
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In every case where I've seen a transformational school, there's a principal who really has the foundational experience of having taught successfully.
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We must broaden the definition of who our neighbors are, and extend the boundaries of our interest and empathy.
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We should be individualizing instruction, utilizing that data to actually give teachers the tools necessary to meet the needs of a very diverse group of kids which exists in every class.