News > September 20, 2007

By Molly Nevola | Staff writer

It started as a senior thesis proposal for one student at Princeton University in 1989 and now has grown to an organization with more than 5,000 members in 26 regions across the country, reaching almost 3 million students nationwide. Today, Teach for America is one of the most widely known post-undergraduate non-profit programs that recruits graduates to teach for two years in low-income communities across the United States.

Its mission is to afford all children the opportunity to attain excellent education, while encouraging its leaders to continue pursuing educational equality in America. Since the program first launched in 1990, 17,000 individuals have participated, impacting the lives of 2.5 million children nationwide.

As the program’s many college recruiters report, today in America educational inequity is a reality along both socioeconomic and racial lines.

Children growing up in low-income families are behind their peers in high-income communities, and half of them will not even graduate from high school.

The other half, statistics show, will read and do math at the level of an eighth grader.

Caroline Davis, the head recruiter at the university and an alum of Teach for America in Washington, D.C., said the program aims to get 10 percent of the senior class from each university with access to a recruiter to apply yearly.

Last year, Davis said about 80 people applied, 19 were accepted and 16 enrolled in the program.

She noted that the applications at the university generally attract more of those candidates who will be competitive in the process.

“Recruiting wise, we hope that Teach for America will get to the point where consulting firms that come to campus are,” Davis said.

In recent years, Teach for America has become an increasingly visible presence on college campuses, thanks to college students who work as recruiters, identifying students with strong backgrounds in leadership, academics and service.

Recruiters search for students of all majors to apply, offering them a full year’s teaching salary and benefits, as well as transitional grants and loans if needed.

The schools in these low-income communities need more help than those in other areas to live up to the standard of education.

Part of Teach for America’s mission is to find those teachers who are willing to overcome challenges to ensure the success of their students.

“We need people to see how they can impact this national injustice,” Davis said.

The benefits to working for the organization, both personal and academic, are numerous.

This year, Teach for America jumped from No. 43 last year to No. 10 on BusinessWeek’s Best Places to Launch a Career list, which annually ranks the top U.S. employers for young professionals entering the workforce.

Teach for America has made partnerships with companies, graduate schools, medical schools and law schools that allow students who participate to follow their long-term plans after teaching for two years.

Many of these offers, listed on the Web site, www.teachforamerica.org, include companies such as JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, KPMG and Wachovia among others, as well as over 100 graduate schools that allow a candidate to defer his or her offer while at Teach for America and then resume schooling.

Anna Edgerton, ’07, recounted her experience in her first year teaching in the Bay Area in California. Edgerton teaches English as Second Language in Richmond, Calif., a city known for its high murder rate.

“My students live in a reality that is unfathomable to me, and it is humbling to try to teach them grammar when they have so many more serious concerns,” Edgerton said, adding that while most prospective candidates of Teach for America hear abstract terms such as “educational inequity” and “low income,” the problems are extremely real.

“The gangs are serious, the police are all but powerless and school is far below secondary in this community. But there are moments that both break my heart and keep me going at the same time … and I’ve only been here a month,” she said.