Teach For America - History

History

The organization was founded by Wendy Kopp based on her 1989 Princeton University undergraduate thesis. Members of the founding team include value investor Whitney Tilson, former U.S. Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Douglas Shulman and KIPP President and CEO Richard Barth. Since the charter corps was established in 1990, more than 28,000 corps members have completed their commitment to Teach For America. The first ten years of the organization are chronicled in Kopp's book "One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way" . In January 2011, Wendy Kopp released her second book, "A Chance To Make History", which outlines what she has learned over the last 20 years working in American education.

In its first year, Teach For America placed 500 teachers. The organization received more than 48,000 applications for its 2012 corps, resulting in 5,800 new corps members in 46 regions. Of these first-year corps members, 38% identify as people of color, including 13% who are African American and 10% who are Hispanic. 23% are the first in their family to earn a college degree. Among colleges and universities, the University of California-Berkeley contributed the greatest number of graduates to the 2012 teaching corps with 88 graduates.

Read more about this topic:  Teach For America

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
    —Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)

    “Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
    —Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)