Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote Read Free Book Online

well in the early days of Teach For America. Instead of hitting up lower-level executives for ads, she realized it was more efficient—and effective—to go right to the top. After that, ad revenues ceased to be a problem. By her senior year, Kopp was president of the foundation and editor and publisher of the magazine. Foundation revenues had jumped fivefold, from $300,000 to $1.4 million.
    The idea for Teach For America was born at one of the foundation’s conferences in November 1988. Kopp had handpicked a group of top executives and leading students to meet in San Francisco that year to discuss the problems facing public school education. Among the many issues on the agenda was a session about teacher quality. Nearly all of the student participants claimed that they would be willing to teach in public schools if it were possible to do so without having degrees in education. Suddenly, Kopp had an idea. As she wrote in her 2001 book: “Why didn’t this country have a national teaching corps of recent college graduates who would commit two years to teach in urban and rural schools?”
    The rest of the tale is now part of TFA lore. Kopp was the very last person in the Woodrow Wilson School to declare a thesis topic that year; she couldn’t find an advisor. So she went to the sociology department chair, Marvin Bressler, who promised to take her on if she agreed to propose mandatory national service as her thesis. Kopp ignored Bressler’s suggestion. She had a better idea: she would write about creating a national teaching corps. When she made her case to Bressler, he quipped: “You are quite evidently deranged.”
    He was joking. Bressler was very impressed with Kopp; he just thought she suffered from excessive ambition. What she proposed seemed to him undoable. But, as Bressler recalls, Kopp was possessed of a kind of “innocent arrogance,” which made it clear that she believed she had already thought of ways to overcome all the obstacles to her plans, and Bressler evidently had not. She was right, says Bressler with a chuckle. “She had this combination of midwestern idealism and a very good practical mind on how to do things, that made her dreams less extravagant,” he remembers. “It was a kind of American conviction that if you have a good idea, it can be put into practice.”
    In April 1989, when she turned in a very detailed proposal for a national teaching corps that she calculated would take $2.5 million to get off the ground, Bressler dismissed it as “a glorified advertising campaign.” Kopp defended her idea, Bressler came around, and the thesis earned an A.
    Kopp recalls that her senior year was difficult. “I was in a funk,” she confides seventeen years later from her small, simple office adorned only with a few photographs, among them one of her wedding to Richard Barth and another of her three small children on the beach. “I was tortured. I could not figure out what I wanted to spend my life doing.” Kopp knew she wanted to make a difference in the world. But she was at a loss as to how to do that. So she reckoned she’d start with a corporate training program—“maybe do brand management, or investment banking, or management consulting.” But her heart wasn’t in it, and she kept searching for more meaningful work. She wrote to policy makers seeking internships, and she even fleetingly entertained the notion of teaching. When she discovered that she was too late for a spot in Princeton’s small teaching program, she researched the maze of teacher certification requirements and talked with a recruiter for the New York City public school system. She gave up when she was told that New York didn’t hire uncredentialed teachers until days before the school year began. But the experience made her wonder:
Why aren’t we being recruited as aggressively to teach as we are being recruited to work on Wall