Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote Read Free Book Online Page A

Street?
    In the end, she applied to Morgan Stanley, McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Procter & Gamble, and a commercial real estate venture. Kopp, impressive résumé aside, was turned down by every one of them. When she sent her idea for a teaching corps to the White House for consideration, her proposal was mistaken for a job application and she was rejected there as well.
    So she decided to turn her thesis into reality. Though Bressler scoffed at the notion that Kopp could actually raise the $2.5 million needed to start a national teaching corps, he thought enough of the project to put her in touch with Princeton’s director of development. The day after she turned in “A Plan and Argument for the Creation of a National Teacher Corps,” Kopp whittled her thesis down to a thirty-page proposal and headed over to the college library for a listing of the country’s top CEOs. Within a week, some thirty proposals went out across corporate America, each topped with an eye-catching red cover and a letter requesting a meeting. By the time Kopp graduated from Princeton, she had secured a $26,000 seed grant from Mobil and donated office space in Manhattan from Union Carbide.
    With three trash bags of clothes and a sleeping bag, Kopp moved into a New York apartment with two other girls. She spent the summer crisscrossing the country in search of funders and wise counsel—with mixed results. It was hard to argue with her stated goal of closing the achievement gap. But was sending the teachers with the least amount of experience into the classrooms with the greatest need the right solution? Was it even fair? Skeptics argued that the way to close the achievement gap was to reform teacher education, not to undermine it by sending teachers into needy classrooms with a meager few weeks of training. What’s more, they charged, TFA’s limited two-year commitment would only add to the problem of teacher retention in underserved communities. TFA could actually turn out to be an enabler of dysfunctional school systems. Would providing underperforming school districts with ready-made teachers for the hardest-to-fill spots allow them to put off true reform?
    Kopp had an answer for every concern. Her plan to close the achievement gap was based on a two-pronged theory of change. In the short term, she believed, the most talented graduates in the country would almost certainly be successful in the classroom if they worked relentlessly and were committed to the mission. In the longer term, she was convinced, the TFA experience would be so profound that it would inform whatever its members decided to do afterward. Inevitably, she reckoned, TFA alums—the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academics, policy makers, and, yes, the schoolteachers and administrators who got hooked and never left—would eventually force and lead the systemic change necessary to level the educational playing field.
    Professors in the schools of education may have complained about the possible negative consequences of hiring TFAers, but at least some superintendents in the trenches indicated they would jump at the chance to hire young college graduates from premier universities for their toughest slots. The alternative, they knew, was to contract with permanent subs—many with no training at all, some without even a college degree. In the face of a national teacher shortage, taking a chance on a TFA recruit was a no-brainer.
    So Kopp forged ahead. That fall she assembled a skeleton crew to help realize her vision. Sustained by cold pizza over a seemingly endless string of all-nighters, the group of five moved into larger quarters (this time donated by Morgan Stanley) and began to work out how to recruit, select, train, and place a prospective five hundred new teachers.
    In one respect, the selection process was easy. Kopp and her band were looking for people just like themselves—hard-driving, high-achieving twenty-somethings who,