Biography
Wendy Kopp is the president and founder of Teach For America, the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in pursuit of educational excellence and equity. Teach For America’s mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our country’s most promising future leaders in the effort.
Kopp proposed the creation of Teach For America in her undergraduate senior thesis in 1989 and has spent the last 17 years working to sustain and grow the organization. In the 2006-2007 school year, 4,400 corps members are teaching in our country’s neediest communities, reaching approximately 375,000 students. They join more than 12,000 Teach For America alumni who—still in their 20s and 30s—are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform. Under Kopp’s leadership, Teach For America is in the midst of an effort to grow to scale while maximizing the impact of corps members and alumni as a force for short-term and long-term change. Kopp serves on the board of directors of The New Teacher Project, and the advisory boards of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship and the National Council on Teacher Quality. Kopp holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She resides in New York City with her husband Richard Barth and their three sons. |
