Teachers must take a more aggressive approach toward educating students, said Wendy Kopp, Founder and CEO of the non-profit organization Teach For America, on Monday.
About 300 Bostonians gathered at the Boston Public Library to listen to Kopp engage in a question and answer session with David Gergen, a senior political analyst for CNN and a professor of public service at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government
Kopp spoke about her new book, “A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing Excellent Education for All,” and her experiences at Teach For America.
“[In writing the book], I wanted to communicate what I’ve learned from our corps members, our alumni, others who are working alongside us in urban and rural communities about what is working, and what it’s still going to take to scale that success so that we can ultimately realize a day in our country when all kids in our country have a chance to achieve success,” Kopp said.
Teach For America celebrated its 20th Anniversary with a summit in Washington D.C. this past week, Kopp said.
The summit had more than 11,000 attendees who were past or current members of the Teach For America corps, Gergen said.
The number of applications for Teach For America was at an all-time high this year with 48,000 applicants seeking to work for the organization in the fall, Kopp said, including 18 percent of Harvard University’s senior class and 10 percent of Boston College’s senior class.
“We’ve made so much progress in these last 20 years in this fight against the injustice of educational inequity, and yet there’s so much farther to go,” Kopp said.
Kopp addressed several issues in educational reform, such as the debate over charter law, the need for teachers and both policy and method reformation within the education system.
“We have 15 million kids today who are living below the poverty line,” she said. “By the time they are in fourth grade, they’re already three years behind other fourth graders in high-income communities. Half of our kids growing up in poverty will not graduate from high school, and the half who do will graduate with an eighth grade skill level.”
Although Kopp acknowledged the difficulty of overcoming challenges as an educator, she said, “when you meet kids who face so many extra challenges with high expectations and provide them with extra support, it is possible to ensure that they attain educational excellence.”
The approach to teaching needs reform, Kopp said. She said she wants schools to take a more aggressive approach to ensure the academic enrichment of their students and to advocate for educators to guarantee that every child learns the material, without regard to ability or disadvantage.
“It takes an extraordinary leader [of a school],” Kopp said. “And we need to free up those extraordinary leaders to make decisions as far as how they’re spending their money and who they hire, in exchange for accountability and results.”
Kopp said she hopes that some Teach For America alumni go into public policy to achieve this goal, since they know how the system works and what needs to be done.
“Our big ideas ultimately become silver bullets if we don’t understand how it all needs to work together,” Kopp said.
Teach For America employees said they were excited to hear Kopp speak.
“It was great to hear her talk about and elaborate on her experiences,” said Jolene Jones, a Teach For America fundraising staffer. “As staffers, we all got the book delivered to our door and I couldn’t wait to read it, and tonight I got the chance to hear about some of the events in it first-hand.”
Chad Urmston, former member of the rock band Dispatch, and his wife, Sybil Gallagher, work with Teach For America to raise money for the organization and other education non-profits.
Through a social action program called “Amplifying Education,” Urmston and Gallagher said they hope to raise awareness about educational reform and raise funds at Dispatch’s upcoming summer reunion tour.
“It does seem that, from the top down, there needs to be some policy changes [in education],” Urmston said. “If the government can put the kind of emphasis on education the way they do with something like defense, we could channel a lot more into education and get a lot more out of it.”
Knopp said that while teaching is not magic, “there’s no way around the very hard work of doing whatever it takes to put our kids on a different path.”
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