Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award
2005 WINNER -- Wendy Kopp
Watch the streaming video of Wendy Kopp at Fuqua. (RealPlayer required).
DURHAM, N.C. April 12, 2004 — Wendy Kopp, Founder and CEO
of Teach
for America, spoke to over 100 students and community members
at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Kopp, who was there to receive
the 2005 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, shared her belief
that we can reach the point where all kids in our country have the chance
to obtain an excellent education.
Kopp was a freshman at Princeton in the
late 1980s when she first discovered her interest in educational inequality
in the United States. As a public policy major, she spent much of her time
as a student exploring her passion, but it wasn’t until her senior year, when she was “in a deep
funk” about what to do with her life, that she was struck with a powerful
idea that became the topic of her senior thesis. She recalled walking across
campus and suddenly asking, “Why doesn’t this county have a national
teachers corp? We are being recruited aggressively by Wall St. and management
consulting firms. Why not to teach in our country’s lowest income communities?”
"I truly, truly believe that the only question is whether enough of the most talented and committed members of the younger generation will say, ‘We’re going to lead us to that point.’” -Wendy Kopp. |
Kopp went on to develop a plan to build a movement of young leaders committed to addressing the widening educational gap, starting with a goal of placing 500 outstanding college graduates in low-income schools in the first year. “We couldn’t start as a small nonprofit program. We had to start big to create the sense of urgency and national importance that was necessary to build a movement.” Fortunately, Kopp was not deterred when her letter to the President resulted in a standard job rejection. And just one year after graduating from college, she stood before the first 489 recruits as they prepared to enter some of America’s most struggling public schools.
In retrospect, Kopp modestly claims that her greatest asset was her “absolute naiveté and complete lack of experience and any instinct that this might be a crazy thing to pursue.” Despite many skeptics of the “Me Generation,” she was convinced that students would want to participate, and that if they signed up, everything else would fall into place. While she admits there have been numerous challenges along the way, and that she quickly learned the value of experience, Teach For America has undoubtedly had an impact, both directly on the lives and schools its 12,000 corp members have served, but also in training a new generation of education leaders. Among TFA’s 9,000 alumni, 63% are working full-time in education and 40% of the others have jobs that somehow relate to schools or low-income communities. As Kopp related stories of just a few of TFA’s amazing teachers, she drew many parallels between TFA teachers who are successful teaching in low-income communities and leaders in any sphere: they set big visions, mobilize others, are purposeful and mission-driven, and are absolutely relentless in figuring out how to get the resources they need.
Kopp ended her lecture with a charge to the audience to join the fulfilling and challenging pursuit of education equality in our country: "I truly, truly believe that the only question is whether enough of the most talented and committed members of the younger generation will say, ‘We’re going to lead us to that point.’”