May 31, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute
One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way
by Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp describes how, as a 21-year-old Princeton University student, she started a national teaching corps to serve disadvantaged schoolchildren.
Ms. Kopp, founder and president of Teach For America, a nonprofit organization that selects and trains recent college graduates for two-year teaching assignments in low-income schools, discusses how and why she created the group and the stumbling blocks she encountered along the way.
She began planning Teach For America in 1988, when she realized that educational opportunity was her generation’s civil-rights issue. Her efforts sprang from a belief, which she echoes throughout the book, that all children, regardless of economic status or ethnic or racial background, should have the “opportunity to attain an excellent education.”
The book describes how Ms. Kopp persuaded donors to invest in her cause despite her relative inexperience, how she dealt with the news media, and how she organized and managed staff and corps members. She assesses the accomplishments of the group and lays out its goals for the future. In addition, she makes several suggestions for the future of U.S. education, including encouraging grant makers to take a long-term institution-building approach rather than focusing on short-term strategies like smaller class size or technology-based teaching.
Publisher: Public Affairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, N.Y. 10107; (212) 397-6666; http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com; 187 pages; $23.00; I.S.B.N. 1-891620-92-4.
