Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach for America, gives thought and sweat equity to addressing the achievement gap in American education. With the 2011-2012 school year underway, she sat on an education discussion panel at University of Notre Dame. The panel, “The Conversation: Developing the Schools Our Children Deserve," is part of Notre Dame Forum’s ongoing series of events with the critical focus of addressing current challenges in education reform.
Active reform now
The Notre Dame Forum is a strong venue for Teach For America’s continued call for education reform that actively succeeds in bridging the dark abyss of America’s learning inequities. Wendy Kopp, experienced in taking an idea into reality in the complex arena of educational reform, has earned respect for the national corps of teachers’ committed actions. She’s driven her youthful call, birthed from her 1989, Princeton University senior thesis, for the creation of a national teacher corps to 9,300 corps members teaching in 43 US regions and nearly 24,000 alumni working in education and other sectors to create the systemic, educational changes.
Reimagining Schools
The Notre Dame Forum’s 2011-2012 thematic issue is “Reimagining Schools.” Wendy Kopp participated on an educational leadership panel that presented key K-12 education reform voices in a discussion of challenges and opportunities in American education.
With Kopp on the panel were Juan Rangel, chief executive officer of Chicago’s United Neighborhood Organization; Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; and Rev. Gerald Kicanas, Chair of Catholic Relief Services.
Under panel moderation byProfessor David Campbell, director of Notre Dame's Rooney Center for American Democracy, and the Rev. Timothy R. Scully, director of the university's Institute for Educational Initiatives, the conversation focused tightly on the multifaceted landscape, diverse stakeholders, and key issues at stake in reimagining systemic changes to reshape a 21st century school system.
It can happen -- with changes inside and outside of educational system
When CEO Wendy Kopp spoke, she emphasized the importance of recognizing crisis extremity, indicating, “It requires our embracing a new concept of what education is and requires changes inside and outside of the system, but it can happen."
As always, Kopp defied the notion that the economics and location of a child’s birth must be the indelible ink of a child’s education prospects and success boundaries. She flatly stated, "In a country that prides itself on equal opportunity, we have an education system that doesn't live up to that. We have a crisis in our country."
In words that stressed action-based reform, Wendy Kopp indicated, "We know it doesn't need to be this way." She further stressed the imperative of change for children in deeply challenged, low-income areas where “Schools aren't designed to meet their extra needs or level the playing field for them.
A Crisis of Educational Inequity
Teach For America is a response to the nation’s current landscape of educational inequity. In America today, 9-year-olds in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities. Half of the low-income learners won’t graduate from high school. And, too many of those, who do graduate, will read and do math, on average, at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities.
Educational inequity is a drain on our nation’s most vital resource, our children. It is a crisis that costs and will continue to cost across the national landscape in the challenges of a global economy.
Chasing data-based, philosophical stances with action, Teach For America enlists the nation’s most promising future leaders in the movement to solve educational inequity. Teach For America recruits top college graduates of all academic majors, career interests, and backgrounds,who demonstrate achievement, leadership, perseverance, and a commitment to expandingopportunity for children in low-income areas.
To optimize opportunities for natural successes, recruiting efforts, especially, are focused onindividuals who share the racial and/or socioeconomic backgrounds of the students in underservedpublic schools, many of whom are African American or Latino.
In 2011, a record 48,000 individuals applied to Teach For America’s corps, including 12 percent of all seniors at Ivy League schools, 8 percent of the graduating class at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and 5 percent at the University of Texas at Austin. A significant number of seniors from historically black colleges and universities applied, including 1 in 4 at Spelman College and 1 in 10 at Howard University. Nearly one-third of incoming corps members received Pell Grants, and one-third are people of color. Admission to Teach For America is highly selective, with 11 percent of applicants earning acceptance to the 2011 corps.
Action integrated with knowledge
Notre Dame, a university that is at the forefront in leadership, community, academics, and sports, was a fitting location for a knowledge-based, committed discussion of learning’s complex issues at a time of an educational crisis with rippling affects. Knowledgeable, prominent voices of different stakeholders comprising the Notre Dame Forum’s panel helped to frame present challenges as well as highlight the moral, social, and economic imperatives driving the influential shape of education’s 21st century transformation.
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