GROUP FINDS, DEVELOPS TEACHERS

TEACH FOR AMERICA

For more information, write to: Teach for America, P.O. Box 5114, New York City, N.Y. 10185.

For Princeton University graduate Wendy Kopp, her senior thesis not only changed her life but the lives of other graduates. Her proposal not only gave her a career, it sparked change in education.

While a student of public policy, Kopp, at 22, wrote a senior thesis suggesting that college seniors who weren't education majors be recruited to teach in inner city and rural schools after gradu-ation. Her thesis adviser discouraged the idea, but Kopp set off after graduation to prove it could work.

In the three years since her Teach for America program began, Kopp has placed recent graduates from top colleges in 25 understaffed urban and rural schools around the nation. Recruits must make a two-year commitment to teach and are paid by the school districts in which they work.

Training, orientation

Because they are not education majors, Kopp's teachers receive six weeks of training and two weeks of orientation before beginning their supervised teaching assignment. They get additional training throughout.

"This idea just came to me as I was watching my peers head off in droves to investment banks and management consulting firms, to all these other options. And I saw that these were people who were really involved on college campuses.

"They were really active in community service and that kind of thing, and they weren't particularly inspired by these corporate options," Kopp said in a recent phone interview with Children's Express from her New York City office.

"So it just came to me as a way to mobilize all that energy to focus where it's really needed, which is on the education system." The idea, she says, grew out of a "gut feeling" that an organization like hers was needed.

Although she tries to place teachers in shortage areas, Kopp wasn't thinking about shortages as much as she was the quality of our educational system and teachers' lack of prestige.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, teacher shortages exist only in isolated areas, and the number of college graduates majoring in education is increasing.

The undervalued teacher

Kopp believes teachers have been undervalued. "I had heard all my life that if I had other career opportunities, the last thing I would want to do is teach. Because I think teachers just don't have a great reputation in this country.

"I had always thought . . . that that was such a shame because teachers are, as we know, so important in the development of people.

"I'd done a lot of thinking about the education system as a whole because I was the editor of a school magazine at Princeton, and I had so much trouble finding students at Princeton who could write complete sentences," Kopp said.

Kopp spent the spring of her senior year applying for all the usual corporate jobs and found none of them very inspiring. Increasingly, she was drawn to education.

"I think that I might have ended up teaching actually in New York City public schools. But by the time I actually had started trying to make it happen, I was pretty convinced I was going to do Teach for America instead," she said.

So, she went to work getting funds to support her idea.

One of her 30 proposals landed on the desk of Rex Adams of Mobil Corp., a vice president of administration.

He was skeptical at first. But when she convinced him that her idea was possible, he asked her to submit a budget. Mobil gave Kopp the seed money to begin the organization.

Organization has 70 on staff

Today she heads a non-profit organization with 70 staff members and 14 regional offices with central headquarters in New York City. (There is no Midwest office.) Her sponsors include Merck & Co. Inc., Union Carbide Corp., Chrysler Corp., Morgan Stanley Group Inc., Starr Foundation and Louis Calder Foundation. Presidential candidate Ross Perot has contributed more than $500,000.

This year the organization has 1,200 teachers and 3,000 applications for new recruits. About 45 percent of the recruits are male and 55 percent female.

"We are hoping to become an American institution that each year recruits between 500 and 1,000 teachers and places them in communities across the country. I think that we will continue to add new placement sites, and I think that as we progress we'll find out other directions that we'll want to head within the field of education."

Applicants must submit an essay and three written references, do a sample teaching session and undergo two interviews.

Looking for the right people

Kopp is looking for college graduates who have a good academic record, involvement in extracurricular activities and work experience. She also wants people who demonstrate flexibility, leadership, maturity, effective communication skills and "a respect for all students."

"Our whole goal is to create, to build a corps of people who go above and beyond in an effort to engage their students."

Kopp said she continues to fine-tune the program every year. "We've strengthened everything from the recruitment and selection process that we use, to the way we train corps members and the way we support them in the field . . . We definitely brought about pretty dramatic improvements in our program."

The changes have reduced the attrition rate from 10.8 percent to 4.5 percent, she said.

Teach for America has been likened to the Peace Corps. "We're trying to create the same kind of aura around Teach for America that the Peace Corps created in terms of its selectivity and an aura of service and status that surrounds it," she said.

"But . . . we're really doing something quite different. We're pulling people into teaching in the U.S. with the thought that this experience will shape their interests, that a lot of them will continue on in education and in teaching and all."

Even those who don't stay in education will be lifelong advocates for educational improvement, she believes.

"All of them are going to have a conviction that we need to work for the day that all children in this country have an equal opportunity to an education."