Kellogg Foundation and Don and Doris Fisher, founders of The Gap. Among them (not unexpectedly) are Michael Osheowitz of the Edwin Gould Foundation for Children, Rick Love of the Knight Foundation, Jack Mawdsley of the W.K. Still, Kopp is prudent with an eye always to the future, and she names the heroes. Otherwise, it seems, Kopp is too embarrassed to mention that someone went to, say, Kansas State.įor one so early in her career (she’s only 34), Kopp is remarkably candid. An index would be nice so, too, would dropping that cloying Ivy League need to tell the reader where every staffer went to college – that is if they attended an Ivy League school. Kopp’s book is not without its annoyances. That’s life as usual for many founder-directors that lead youth-serving agencies, and it places Kopp, her staff and supporters squarely in the entrepreneurial world of youth services, not that of often calcified public education (at least as it existed before the charter school movement began spooning Drano down its throat). Kopp’s organizational odyssey goes not from school to school, but from payroll to payroll, as she more than once comes up with the $200,000 needed every two weeks with just hours to spare. It is this Perils of Pauline quality that gives Kopp’s portrait of a nonprofit artist as a young woman a plot line filled with the kind of tension so often missing in accounts of schoolhouse redemptions. From then on TFA was on a roll – as in rolling over Niagara Falls in a barrel. (Actually, most of her success stories are about people who function as both teachers and youth workers.) This foolhardy scheme needed only sage advice from a few philanthropic or education reform windbags to deflate Kopp’s cherubic sense of the possible.įortunately, Kopp blissfully shopped her idea elsewhere and landed a $26,000 seed grant from Mobile Oil and the use of vacant Manhattan office space from Union Carbide. Kopp’s success really began not with another good idea and not by her impressive “level of access,” but by being “bold enough to ask for it.” In a single year Kopp, then 21, wanted to raise $2.5 million to recruit, train and place 500 energetic but “unqualified” teachers in urban and rural schools. Good ideas to help kids are as are plentiful as the facile justifications that our most fortunate citizens and their political leaders come up with to sanction a status quo that leaves 12.4 million children in poverty. The greatest strength of Kopp’s ardent yet entertaining book is her recounting of the organizational evolution of TFA’s tumultuous first decade. In Kopp’s case it led to her audacious start of Teach For America (TFA), which has placed 6,000 exceptional college graduates in some of the nation’s worst and most neglected public schools. While a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, no knowledge at all can liberate. Thousands of poor children trapped in often shabby schools can thank God that Wendy Kopp never took a course in nonprofit management, attended a teacher’s college or had a clue about the “proper” way to raise money when she graduated from Princeton in 1989. Wendy KoppPublicAffairs, New York 187 pp., $23 The Unlikely Triumph of TEACH FOR AMERICA and What I Learned Along The Way
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