Educational Leadership

but also an army of leaders, working both in and outside school, who will change an inequitable system that disadvantages the educators working with the children who need the most help. Teach for America’s mission is to help build this force.

A Focus on Immediate Impact Teach for America recruits and develops a diverse corps of outstanding individuals from all academic disciplines to teach for at least two years in a low-income community. From last year’s record 48,000 applicants, we selected a corps of 5,000, who hail from more than 600 colleges and universities, to work in 43 urban and rural communities. Nearly one-third were low-income enough to receive Pell Grants, and one-third are people of color. Although they don’t nearly represent the demographics

Teach for America
recruits strive to have
an immediate positive
effect on students.

just be proficient or effective as defined by some rubric or regulation—they must, instead, be transformational in the lives of students. Having spent more than 20 years studying thousands of our teachers in low-income communities, Teach for America has developed a strong sense of what the pursuit of transformational teaching requires.

A Focus on Transformation
In our most transformational class-
rooms, both teachers and students
display a sense of urgency and focus,
a collective purpose, and a determina-
tion to defy what some call the “destiny
of demographics.” Students own their
progress, are intrinsically motivated,
and engage at high levels with rigorous
and meaningful content. They behave
differently in these classrooms because
their teachers foster the belief that they
can succeed and help illuminate the
path toward a meaningful future.

Leading for Change

of the students we serve, our corps has 30 percent more teachers of color than does the total population of graduating college seniors.

Teach for America recruits strive to have an immediate positive effect on students, often contributing to closing achievement gaps even in their first year in the classroom. Although a majority of recruits were not planning to enter education, two-thirds of our nearly 24,000 alumni work in the field, one-half as classroom teachers and more than 500 as school leaders.