Organizations
How companies, institutions, and movements embody the sixteen values.
Teach For America
Every child deserves an excellent education
Teach For America was founded on Wendy Kopp’s thesis-turned-movement: that the educational inequity between low-income and high-income communities was a solvable problem that required the commitment of talented people willing to spend two years teaching in under-resourced schools. The organization’s legacy-orientation is expressed in the recruitment of high-achieving graduates to serve communities that have historically been unable to attract them, creating both immediate impact and a generation of alumni whose careers in education, policy, and civic life carry the experience of that teaching into institutions that shape educational equity.
Teach For America
Every child deserves an excellent education
Teach For America was founded on Wendy Kopp’s thesis-turned-movement: that the educational inequity between low-income and high-income communities was a solvable problem that required the commitment of talented people willing to spend two years teaching in under-resourced schools. The organization’s legacy-orientation is expressed in the recruitment of high-achieving graduates to serve communities that have historically been unable to attract them, creating both immediate impact and a generation of alumni whose careers in education, policy, and civic life carry the experience of that teaching into institutions that shape educational equity.
A generation of alumni in positions of educational and policy leadership who understand resource inequality from direct experience. Two-year commitments that have brought rigorous academic instruction to classrooms that would otherwise have faced sustained vacancies. A political constituency for educational equity built from alumni who experienced its absence.
A model that has at times been used to justify the replacement of experienced unionized teachers with two-year rotating staff in ways that serve cost reduction rather than educational quality. The tension between the organization’s meritocratic recruitment model and the structural critique of educational inequity that its own work implies. The ambiguity of a two-year commitment as a solution to an intergenerational problem.
The 1990 launch with 500 corps members in five cities, demonstrating that Kopp’s undergraduate thesis had correctly identified a supply of motivated graduates willing to teach in under-resourced communities, and that the organization to recruit and support them could be built.