Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote Read Free Book Online Page B

when contemplating their futures, were filled with a mix of idealism and indecision, in equal measure. “I think it’s very hard for college seniors to think about their futures,” Kopp explains. “At that age, you think the next two years are the rest of your life. It was certainly true for me. I assumed, honestly, I really believed all the momentum [for this movement] would exist after two years. I fully thought it would happen. I had no long-term plans for the future. None.”
    After researching selection models and consulting with successful principals, the start-up crew hammered out a rigorous admissions process. Long and heated debates resulted in a list of twelve character traits thought necessary to succeed in the classroom: persistence, commitment, integrity, flexibility, oral communication skills, enthusiasm, sensitivity, independence and assertiveness, ability to work within an organization, possession of self-evaluative skills, ability to operate without student approval, and conceptual ability/intellect. Candidates applying to Teach America—as it was tentatively called—would be judged on each trait based on a sliding six-point scale. (It turned out that Teach America was a name already taken by a medical company. Kopp tossed around a number of other names, like Teach U.S. or U.S. Teach. The idea of inserting the word “For” and making the name Teach For America came to her during a late-night ride on D.C.’s Metro. “Even better,” she wrote in her book, “in that it was a call to action and communicated a sense of service.”)
    The first Teach For America Institute was held in June 1990 at the University of Southern California. Dr. Marvin Bressler was the keynote speaker. His advice to the five hundred graduates who came from one hundred colleges was fittingly self-effacing: “Whatever you do as teachers, never discourage your students.”
    The institute started on a high note, and then things went rapidly downhill. The eight weeks of training were disastrous, recalls Kopp. Corps members sparred with one another, the training was inadequate, the housing spartan; on top of all that, recruits were ineligble for the loan forgiveness from the federal government that TFA had promised them. People skills were not Kopp’s strong suit; she holed herself up in a suite of dorm rooms to avoid all the conflict. Teach For America barely survived its first summer institute. There would be many more challenges during the so-called dark years of the early and mid-nineties, when the organization’s very existence was at stake.
    Linda Darling-Hammond, a highly regarded professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, almost sank the flagship in 1994 when she published a scathing critique of Teach For America in the September issue of the
Phi Delta Kappan,
the premier academic journal of the education community. Noting the unequal status of TFA recruits and their charges, Darling-Hammond alleged that the “frankly missionary program” was a quick fix that was harmful to students most in need of qualified teachers. For recruits, TFA’s true beneficiaries, it was a handy “pit stop” on the road to their “real” jobs in law, medicine, or business. The “slapdash” teacher-training program devalued teaching as a profession, she continued. And the “revolving-door trip into and out of teaching” only exacerbated the critical problem of teacher retention in the ghetto. The assault hurt Kopp personally and Teach For America publicly. Funding, always an issue, became even more precarious. Some supporters got the jitters. Internecine fighting broke out among staff. Kopp wrote in her memoir that the organization at that point reminded her of
Lord of the Flies.
    The financial turnaround began in 1996; structural and programmatic improvements followed. By the time Teach For America was ten years old, fifteen hundred