The Letter That Went to the Wrong Stack
In the spring of 1989, a twenty-one-year-old Princeton senior wrote a letter to the President of the United States suggesting he create a national teacher corps. The letter landed, by some clerical misadventure, in the wrong pile. What came back was a form rejection — a polite brush-off from the White House personnel office, thanking her for her interest in employment. Wendy Kopp did not have a job. She did not have a thesis advisor. She did not have, by any conventional measure, a plan. What she had was an eleven-page proposal, a set of convictions so outsized they would later be described by the man who graded them as "quite evidently deranged," and the particular species of naïveté that is, in retrospect, indistinguishable from vision.
That rejection letter became an origin myth — the bureaucratic accident that forced a young woman to build the thing herself rather than petition someone else to build it for her. Within a year of graduating, Kopp had raised $2.5 million, recruited 500 college graduates, and placed them in some of the most underfunded classrooms in America. Within a decade, she had built Teach For America into one of the largest employers of recent college graduates in the United States. Within three decades, the model had been replicated in more than sixty countries. And the woman at the center of it all — the person who had organized this vast machinery for getting talented young people into the nation's most broken schools — had never taught a class.
This is the tension that has animated Wendy Kopp's entire career, the paradox her critics never tire of pointing out and her supporters regard as beside the point. She is the founder of a teaching movement who is not, herself, a teacher. She is the architect of a system designed to produce transformational classroom leaders who understood, almost from the beginning, that the classroom alone could never be the solution. "I look at where am I going to have the most impact — if I do this for three years or if I teach for three years," she once explained, with the unsentimental calculus that has both drawn admirers and infuriated the education establishment. "I also think if I had taught, I wouldn't have started Teach for America."
By the Numbers
The Teach For America & Teach For All Empire
72,000+TFA alumni in the United States
62+Countries in the Teach For All network
1.3MStudents reached by Teach For All teachers in 2024
$300MTFA annual budget at peak
500Corps members in inaugural 1990 class
89%TFA applicants rejected (at Forbes reporting)
15Honorary doctorate degrees
The Bubble and What Lay Beyond It
Wendy Sue Kopp was born in Austin, Texas, the daughter of parents who ran a small business — a newsletter advising visitors of Austin's attractions, which they enlarged into a guidebook and parlayed into modest success. The family moved from Austin to San Antonio and finally to Dallas, settling in the Park Cities area, an affluent enclave that its residents, with a candor bordering on self-parody, called "the Bubble." The local schools were among the highest-rated in the state. The lawns were manicured. The diversity was negligible. Kopp was an outstanding student, an enthusiastic joiner, the kind of kid who ran everything she touched — and she arrived at Princeton, in the mid-1980s, "really very unaware of the disparities that exist in our country."
Her education in those disparities began with her roommate, a freshman from a public school in the Bronx who was brilliant but initially struggled academically. "That was a little window into what is obviously a much, much bigger problem than you could ever realize the depths of at Princeton," Kopp later recalled. It was, she understood even then, not just a window but an indictment — of a system in which the zip code of a child's birth could predict, with devastating accuracy, the trajectory of a child's life.
At Princeton, Kopp majored in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which sounds like preparation for this kind of work but was, in her telling, mostly a backdrop for the extracurricular obsessions that actually shaped her. She threw herself into the Foundation for Student Communication, organized a conference on educational inequity, and spent her senior year in what she described as "a total funk" — the last student in the Woodrow Wilson School to settle on a thesis topic, unconcerned with the thesis itself but consumed by a question she couldn't shake.
The question was simple, and explosive: Why were the most talented graduates of the most prestigious universities being aggressively recruited to commit two years to investment banks and management consulting firms, but no one was recruiting them with equal urgency to commit two years to teaching in the country's most underserved schools?
The Deranged Thesis
Every origin story requires a reluctant mentor, and Kopp found hers in Marvin Bressler — the chair of Princeton's Sociology Department, legendary for his extraordinary personality and brilliance, and the only faculty member available to a delinquent senior who had waited until the last possible moment. Bressler had his own obsessions: mandatory national service. When Kopp came to him proposing what amounted to an advertising campaign for teachers, he redirected her. "No, you can't propose an advertising campaign for teachers in your senior thesis," he told her, "but I'll tell you what: If you propose mandatory national service, I'll be your thesis advisor."
Kopp said OK. She didn't speak to him again until she turned the thesis in.
The document was called "A Plan and Argument for the Creation of a National Teacher Corps." It was not, by academic standards, a work of scholarship so much as a business plan disguised as one — a detailed blueprint for a Peace Corps–style organization that would recruit elite college graduates, train them intensively, and deploy them to the schools where they were most desperately needed. Bressler called her into his office four days later. He tells people he said she was deranged. He basically did. But he loved it. She got an A.
By the time the grade came back, it was irrelevant. Kopp had already decided to build the thing. She wasn't waiting for permission or institutional sponsorship or the kind of feasibility study that would have, almost certainly, killed the idea. She was sending copies of her thesis to every business leader she could find who had ever expressed interest in education reform. She was cold-calling corporate executives. She was twenty-one years old and operating with the cheerful disregard for convention that is available only to people who have not yet learned what is supposed to be impossible.
Five Hundred and a Bleak Barn
The logistics of turning a senior thesis into a national organization in twelve months would be comical if they weren't also genuinely remarkable. Union Carbide offered Kopp free office space in New York City. Mobil Oil gave her a seed grant to live on. A grant from the philanthropy Echoing Green enabled her to hire a small staff of four. Morgan Stanley donated larger office space. The philanthropy of H. Ross Perot — the Texas billionaire who had made education reform a personal crusade — came through with a three-to-one challenge grant that unlocked further donations. By the summer of 1989, Kopp was in New York, lining up donors, visiting school districts, recruiting a board of directors, and operating with the frantic energy of someone who understood, instinctively, that momentum was her only asset.
She was also discovering what would become a recurring theme: the gap between the elegant simplicity of the idea and the ungovernable complexity of the reality. School districts laughed when she showed them lists of the colleges where she planned to recruit. "Really, you think you're going to get students from Stanford who want to teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District?" one administrator told her. "I'll tell you what: You make that happen, we'll hire all 500 of them."
She made it happen. In 1990, Teach For America sent its inaugural class of 500 corps members into six regions across the country. The young recruits — freshly minted graduates of Ivy League and top-tier universities, most with no education background whatsoever — received five weeks of summer training and were placed in some of the most challenging classrooms in America. It was, depending on your perspective, either the most audacious experiment in education reform in a generation or an act of staggering hubris.
Because my letter to the President of the United States suggesting that he create a national teacher corps got in the wrong stack and resulted in a job rejection letter from the White House, and because I possessed at the time an uncommon share of naïveté, I decided to create Teach For America myself.
Kopp set up headquarters in what she would later describe as a bleak barn overlooking Wall Street — a spartan office whose only personal touches included a photograph of her shaking hands with Al Gore. She hadn't taken a vacation in two years. She was distractedly twirling a used teabag over a paper cup at her desk while wearing a black power-suit that no longer looked crisp. She was, in the observation of a New Yorker writer who visited in 1994, a Wall Street analyst who had been working late every night for a month — except that instead of analyzing bonds, she was trying to reinvent American public education from a nonprofit office with no endowment and a founder who had never set foot in a classroom as an instructor.
The Frumpy Professor and the Blonde in the Scrunchy
The critics arrived almost as quickly as the corps members. And the most formidable among them was Linda Darling-Hammond — a professor at Columbia Teachers College who had, like Kopp, Ivy League credentials (she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1973) and had herself joined a program much like TFA, spending a year as a public school teacher after college. But unlike Kopp, Darling-Hammond had then acquired a doctorate in education and produced a curriculum vitae that filled sixteen pages. Married and a mother of three, she described herself as "a frumpy professor, neither young nor blond" — a self-deprecating contrast with the media-friendly founder who still wore her hair pulled back in a scrunchy.
The contrast was not merely cosmetic. Darling-Hammond represented the institutional education establishment — the schools of education, the research tradition, the accumulated professional knowledge about pedagogy and child development that Kopp's model implicitly challenged. In 1994, Darling-Hammond published a thirteen-page, thickly footnoted demolition in Phi Delta Kappan, one of education's most distinguished journals, documenting accounts of overwhelmed TFA recruits "flying blind in the classroom." The article described an organization without a structural framework, without a clear sense of what a teacher needs to know, sending untrained teachers into elementary schools where children had to learn how to read.
"When I started teaching, I was considered enthusiastic and hardworking," Darling-Hammond said. "But only later, when I went to ed school, did I discover that there was knowledge around — about how children learn, how different children learn differently, and what to do when children have difficulties — that would have enabled me to save kids. Teach for America sends untrained teachers into elementary schools. To me, that's throwing those kids away for a romantic idea that has never worked."
Kopp's response revealed the combative pragmatism that would characterize her leadership for decades. She acknowledged that her earlier positioning had been a strategic mistake — she had allowed herself to be introduced on panels as "the alternative to traditional university-based schools of education," a framing that painted a target on TFA's back. "Three years ago, I was set up," she said. "When I appeared on panels, I would be introduced as 'the alternative to traditional university-based schools of education.' I would allow that. And now I'm painted as a brash maverick."
But the deeper conflict was not about messaging. It was about a fundamental question that remains unresolved in American education: Is teaching a skill that requires years of professional training, or is it an act of leadership that talented, driven people can learn on the job? Kopp believed the latter. The education establishment believed the former. The children caught in between had no say in the matter.
Near-Death Experiences
The first decade of Teach For America was, by Kopp's own account, a series of near-death experiences. The organization grew too fast, trained too superficially, placed corps members in situations they were not equipped to handle, and faced funding crises that threatened to end the experiment before it could produce any meaningful evidence of success. Kopp later wrote
One Day, All Children… in part as a survival manual "for all the poor social entrepreneurs that will come after me asking, 'How do we do this?'"
Robert Roth, the chairman of the Department of Teacher Education at California State University, Long Beach — hired by TFA itself, at New York State's suggestion, to evaluate the summer training program — offered a carefully calibrated verdict that managed to be both complimentary and devastating. "Teach for America's public documents reveal no structural framework, no sense of a curriculum or what a teacher needs to know," Roth said, "and yet they believe that in five weeks they can make a teacher who's capable of taking on a classroom." His recommendation was precise: TFA should focus on what it does best — recruiting talented college graduates for urban schools that are hard to staff. "T.F.A. fills a niche," he said. "The problem is going beyond that and wanting to be a player."
Kopp wanted to be a player. She had always wanted to be a player. The niche was never going to be enough. She proposed that school districts license teachers on the basis of their TFA training, their classroom time, and ongoing mentoring — a move that, to the education establishment, had "the appearance of outright hubris," as the New Yorker put it. For someone who had never taught or studied teaching to set herself up as an alternative to traditional postgraduate teacher training was, to Darling-Hammond and her allies, not reform but vandalism.
And yet the organization survived. It survived because school districts, whatever their reservations about TFA's training model, were desperate for warm bodies in classrooms that no one else wanted to fill. It survived because the corps members themselves — idealistic, overworked, frequently overwhelmed — brought an energy and commitment that principals recognized and valued, even when the pedagogy was rough. When principals were surveyed and asked how they would rate TFA training versus the training of other teachers they hired, they rated TFA more highly. Not because five weeks was sufficient. But because the people who emerged from those five weeks were, on average, more driven, more reflective, and more willing to do whatever it took.
Teaching as Leadership, Leadership as Teaching
The intellectual breakthrough that transformed Teach For America from a scrappy recruiting operation into something approaching a theory of change came gradually, through the accumulated evidence of what Kopp and her team observed in classrooms across the country. The best TFA teachers were not following lesson plans. They were not implementing curricula. They were doing something that looked, to Kopp's eye, less like pedagogy and more like management.
"Good teachers are good leaders, people who can move children from point A to point B," Kopp said. "When observing effective teachers, I feel like I'm not watching the equivalent of surgery, where the key thing is the precision of every single movement. Basically, management and leadership ability is what I see."
This was the insight that became TFA's organizing philosophy: teaching, in the most challenging environments, is fundamentally an act of leadership. The teachers who produced transformational results — the ones who got three-quarters of their students coming to school every Saturday, who rewrote their entire curricula, who convinced ninth graders from the Bronx to pass the New York State Regents Exam in Biology with scores nine percentage points above the city average — were not doing what education schools trained people to do. They were setting visionary goals, motivating others to work toward them, and operating with a relentless focus on outcomes.
The exemplar Kopp returned to again and again was Megan Brousseau, a second-year corps member teaching 112 ninth graders in the Bronx. Her students arrived far behind grade level — almost all below the poverty line, many learning English as a second language, 20 percent reading significantly below grade level, with virtually no exposure to science. Brousseau walked in on the first day and said, "This is your chance to make history," and called upon them to pass the Regents Exam in Biology. She rewrote her entire curriculum. She got students coming at seven in the morning and staying until six at night. A year later, all 112 passed.
What great teachers do, great leaders do. Megan stepped back and created a vision for where her kids were going to be at the end of the year, motivated others to work with her, and operated in a very goal-oriented way. There is nothing elusive about this; it's something we can replicate.
But Kopp was honest enough to follow this insight to its uncomfortable conclusion. "I have met very few Megans in my life," she admitted. "Teach for America doesn't have 8,000 Megans. Megan's the best of the best." The math was devastating: if the solution depended on producing tens of thousands of Megans, the solution was no solution at all. The system itself had to change.
The Eight-Year-Old's Question
The most incisive critique of Teach For America came not from Linda Darling-Hammond, not from the education unions, not from the academic journals, but from Kopp's own eight-year-old son. He was interviewing her for a school assignment — "you're supposed to interview someone who solved a problem" — and Kopp thought they were done when he said, "You know, Mom, one more question. I don't really get it. If the poor quality of education in high-poverty communities is such a big problem, why would you get people who are so young to just commit two years to solve it?"
The question landed because it was the question — the one that had dogged TFA since its founding, the one that critics from both the left and the right returned to with metronomic regularity. How could a two-year commitment, preceded by five weeks of training, address a systemic crisis that had persisted for decades? How could the revolving door of well-intentioned twenty-two-year-olds provide the stability that the most vulnerable schools desperately needed?
Kopp's answer had evolved over the years from defensive to expansive. The two-year commitment was not the solution. It was the entry point into a pipeline. Sixty-five percent of TFA's 20,000-plus alumni were working full-time in education, half of them still teaching. Six hundred had become school principals. Growing numbers were in district leadership, in policy, in advocacy. The point was never that two years of teaching would fix anything. The point was that two years of proximity to the problem — the visceral, daily experience of what educational inequity actually looked like in a classroom of thirty kids who couldn't read — would produce a generation of leaders who would never forget what they had seen and would spend their careers trying to change it.
"All you have to do is teach to realize we're not going to solve this problem from within classrooms alone," Kopp said. "We need some of these folks to leave and go out and change our policies, go into business and influence our policies, and go into journalism and change the public consciousness around this problem."
This was the second great reframing of TFA's mission — from teacher corps to leadership pipeline. The classroom was not the destination. It was the crucible.
The Thirteen People in Thirteen Countries
In 2007, something happened that Kopp had not planned for, could not have planned for, and yet in retrospect seems inevitable. "There was a particular year when we met 13 people from 13 different countries who were determined that something similar needed to happen in their countries," she recalled. Social entrepreneurs from India, the UK, Chile, Lebanon, China, and elsewhere had independently concluded that the TFA model — recruit the best, train them fast, immerse them in the hardest schools, develop them as leaders — could be adapted to their own contexts. They weren't waiting for Kopp to franchise the operation. They were building their own versions and looking for a network.
Kopp co-founded Teach For All to be responsive to that demand. It was, in structure and philosophy, deliberately different from TFA. Where Teach For America was a single organization with centralized control, Teach For All was a global network of independent partners — each adapting the core model to local realities, local cultures, local politics. The UK's Teach First had already been running since 2002. Teach For India, founded by Shaheen Mistri, was taking root in Mumbai and Delhi. By 2024, the network encompassed more than sixty-two countries, with 15,000 teachers collectively reaching 1.3 million students — from Afghanistan to Armenia, Uzbekistan to Zimbabwe.
In 2013, after twenty-four years as CEO, Kopp stepped down from running Teach For America. The board chose Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva Beard — a TFA corps alumna from rural Texas — to share the CEO position. Kopp became board chair and turned her full attention to Teach For All. The transition was not seamless. Nonprofit organizations are notorious for struggling after their charismatic founders move on. But Kopp had been building for this — cultivating successors steeped in her leadership philosophy, establishing systems that did not depend on any single personality.
The global expansion also shifted her thinking. "How much faster we can move when we're learning from each other across borders," she said. "We're finding that the problems are eerily similar, and the silver lining in that is that the solutions are shareable." A teaching strategy developed in a favela in São Paulo could travel to a township in Johannesburg. A leadership model incubated in rural India could inform practice in the Mississippi Delta. The network was not just scaling the model. It was creating a laboratory for educational innovation that no single country could have built alone.
The Constraint That Isn't Money
Ask any group of education reformers what the greatest constraint on progress is, and most will say money. Kopp disagrees. "Honestly, it's not the greatest constraint," she said. "It's talent and leadership. That's all. There's plenty of money. People are getting results; people want to invest in them."
This conviction — that the binding constraint on educational progress is not funding but human capital — is the thread that connects every phase of Kopp's career. It explains why TFA was designed as a recruiting operation before it was designed as a training operation. It explains why the organization invested so heavily in selection — developing a predictive model that tested for perseverance, the ability to influence and motivate others, high expectations for students from low-income communities, respect and humility, and a willingness to work relentlessly. It explains why, when Kopp surveyed the landscape of education reform, she saw the same bottleneck everywhere: not money, not policy, not technology, but a shortage of the kind of leaders who could make all those things work.
The numbers she cited were damning. In Oakland, 14 percent of African-American boys graduated from high school. Fourteen percent. Fifteen million children in America grew up below the poverty line. By fourth grade, they were three grades behind their peers in high-income communities. Half would not graduate from high school. The half who did had, on average, an eighth-grade skill level. These were not abstractions. They were children. And the system charged with educating them was, in Kopp's analysis, failing not because it lacked resources but because it lacked the human beings capable of deploying those resources with urgency, creativity, and moral clarity.
"When we have the big crises in the history of our country, in the history of our world, what do we do?" she asked. "We channel our most talented minds against it."
Collective Leadership and the Limits of the Solo Visionary
The final evolution of Kopp's thinking — the one she has been articulating with increasing conviction in the 2020s — is a departure from the heroic individual leadership model that defined TFA's early mythology. She calls it "collective leadership," and it represents a reckoning with the limits of everything she built in the first two decades.
"I've grown in my conviction about how important it is that those who have themselves experienced the inequities we're addressing guide and lead the work," she said. "I've seen how vital it is to have some of the most privileged people in society and members of the establishment gain proximity to inequity and determination to address it. But I've also seen that we move faster, more responsibly, and more sustainably when the push for change is defined and owned by the people within communities who know their reality and their aspirations."
This was a significant concession from a woman who had built her career on the premise that elite college graduates could be catalysts for change in communities they had never lived in. Kopp was not renouncing that premise — she still believed in the transformative power of proximity, of putting the most privileged people in society face-to-face with the consequences of structural inequality. But she was acknowledging something her critics had said for years: that reform imposed from outside, however well-intentioned, was incomplete without the leadership of the communities it claimed to serve.
Collective leadership, in Kopp's framework, had three dimensions. First, leadership across the whole ecosystem around children — from parents to health workers to policymakers to teachers, all aligned around a shared vision. Second, a coalition between the establishment and those who had experienced inequity themselves. Third, the relational infrastructure — the space to build trust, reflect together, learn together, develop shared vision, and collaborate.
It was a philosophy that sounded, in its emphasis on coalition and community voice, nothing like the brash founder who had proposed, at twenty-four, that school districts license teachers based on five weeks of TFA training. Whether that distance represented wisdom or retreat depended on whom you asked.
In the Midst of a Very Depressing Decline
In 2025, at fifty-seven, Kopp was named to the Forbes 50 Over 50 list and the CNBC Changemakers list, recognition that testified both to the scale of what she had built and to the distance still remaining. The crisis she had set out to address thirty-six years earlier had not been solved. It had, by some measures, gotten worse. "We are really in the midst of this very depressing, huge educational decline," she said in a 2025 CNBC interview. "Educational outcomes on average in the developed countries, the OECD countries, have been declining since before Covid, and for something like 30 years-plus, they've been declining in low to middle income countries."
She has launched Rising Generation, a campaign to counter the declining participation of recent graduates in social impact work and to challenge the prevailing narrative that lucrative careers are the best path for the brightest students. The data is dispiriting: more recent graduates are choosing finance, consulting, and tech over public service than they did a decade ago. The generation that Kopp believed, in 1989, was simply waiting for someone to recruit them differently now appears to be choosing differently for reasons that a more aggressive recruitment pitch cannot fully address.
And yet. Seventy-five percent of Teach For All alumni worldwide, across all different majors and career interests, end up committing themselves to the mission long-term. The two-year commitment — the thing that sounded so temporary, so insufficient, so counterintuitive that even an eight-year-old could identify the flaw — continues to produce what Kopp has always believed it would: people who cannot unsee what they have seen.
She lives in New York City with her husband, Richard Barth — the president and CEO of KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, one of the most prominent charter school networks in the country, and himself a figure in the education reform world that TFA helped create. They have four children. She holds honorary doctorates from fifteen universities. She has written two books and delivered commencement addresses at more institutions than most people visit in a lifetime.
But the image that lingers is an earlier one — a young woman in a bleak office overlooking Wall Street, distractedly twirling a used teabag over a paper cup, her PowerBook and her black power-suit the only things that seem crisp, surrounded by the evidence of an idea that was too big for one person and too urgent to wait for anyone else. The photograph of her shaking hands with Al Gore is on the wall. Somewhere in a filing cabinet is the rejection letter from the White House. She hasn't taken a vacation in two years. She is twenty-six, or thirty-three, or fifty-seven. It doesn't matter. She is still building.
