Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp
Wendy Sue Koppis the CEO and Co-Founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent nonprofit organizations working to expand educational opportunity in their own countries and the Founder of Teach For America, a national teaching corps...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth29 June 1967
CountryUnited States of America
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School boards can be a steppingstone to higher forms of political leadership.
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As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.
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As a white woman with a privileged education, I'm keenly aware that I founded an organization that can only realize its goal if it enlists many more leaders who share the backgrounds of the students and families we work with.
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As a founder of two organizations that recruit top college graduates to expand educational opportunity, I've spent a lot of time examining what's at work in successful classrooms and schools over the past two decades.
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Common Core results finally give families an accurate barometer of whether our kids are mastering the skills they need to succeed in a knowledge-based global economy, early enough that we can intervene.
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Countries have largely been left alone to handle or ignore their educational problems as they see fit. In part, this was because we assumed that the contexts and challenges were so different from nation to nation that education could not be tackled at the international level.
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Cultivating more leaders who reflect our heterogeneous society depends on universities' transparent use of race as one of many factors in an admissions process that is accessible to all.
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Ending educational inequality is going to require systemic change and a long-term, sustained effort. There are no shortcuts and no silver bullets.
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It's Teach For America's responsibility to ensure that all alumni know their voices are heard and valued, and to surface the range of opinion they represent.
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Education is the gateway to the American Dream. But today our immigration laws make higher education - a virtual requirement for financial security - out of reach for more than one million undocumented students.
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The U.S. has a long history of walking up to the precipice of rigor and then walking away. As voters, let's support leaders who were courageous enough to make the hard decisions necessary to move our system forward. And as parents, let's put our faith in our educators, our children and tests that hold them to their highest potential.
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It's easier to poke holes in an idea than think of ways to fill them. And it's easier to focus on the 100 reasons you shouldn't do something rather than the one reason you should.
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It's possible to train great people, but a person with great training who doesn't have certain characteristics is only going to go so far.
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Dartmouth is such a special college with its rich history, dedicated student body, and, as I've been learning more recently, colorful customs.