Schooling corporate giants on recruiting (Teach for America)
Seniors who compete to be Teach for America corps members must endure hours of interviews and tests designed to assess their organizational skills, perseverance and resiliency - critical traits since recruits receive only five weeks of teacher training (albeit grueling) before they get plopped into a classroom in the South Bronx or some other impoverished locale.
As the students voice their qualms about TFA "What if I fail? Won't poor kids reject Ivy League teachers?" Kopp doesn't sugarcoat the obstacles: "It can be really overwhelming and depressing," she warns. "We all have bad days, and people who teach in Teach for America probably have more bad days than most."
Kopp's pitch is part challenge and part cautionary tale, yet the combination has been a winning one. This year, 19,000 college students - including 10 percent of the senior classes at Yale and Dartmouth, 9 percent at Columbia, and 8 percent at Duke and the University of Chicago - applied to Teach for America. (While local school districts cover the salaries of TFA teachers, TFA screens and trains them - and requires a two-year commitment.)
"We recruit insanely aggressively," says Kopp, 39, who accepted 2,400 of those 19,000 applicants this year. That makes Kopp's nonprofit one of the largest hirers of college seniors, according to CollegeGrad.com - bigger than Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Accenture, or General Electric.
Strategic partnershipsKopp, in fact, has built such a mighty recruiting machine that corporations are angling to work with TFA to buff their own images on campus.
Our goal isn't actually to get our people to stay longer than two years, but rather to provide excellent, committed teachers for two years and to build a force of leaders who will work for fundamental change from within education and from positions of influence in every other sector.
We know Teach For America shapes the career paths of corps members, as evidenced by the fact that 60% of our alumni are working full time within education and that many more are working to take the pressure off of schools by improving the quality of health and social services in low-income communities. We think this is important because achieving educational excellence and equity will require long-term, sustained leadership within education. At the same time though, we think it's critical that many of our corps members do enter other sectors, taking with them the commitment and insight that comes from their Teach For America experience so that they can work for the kind of changes in policy and public opinion that are necessary for ed reform to take hold.
We have a couple of motivations behind the corporate partnerships -- (1) to tackle the biggest barrier we face in recruiting more outstanding future leaders, which is the perception that joining Teach For America limits career prospects; and (2) to ensure we're attracting more people who actually will end up in the corporate world. The partnerships take different forms -- in the case of JPMorgan and Google, for example, we're jointly recruiting, and people who get offers from both can defer the corporate offers to participate in Teach For America. Other partnerships involve offering incoming corps members summer internships between the first and second years of teaching and, assuming strong service, full time offers after their two-year commitment.
Schooling corporate giants on recruiting
Wendy Kopp has turned Teach for America into one of the largest hirers of college seniors. Now Amgen, Goldman and others want to partner with the nonprofit on talent acquisition, says Fortune's Patricia Sellers.
(Fortune Magazine) -- Sitting in a lunchroom at Columbia University with the school's star students - the senior class president, the student council VP, the premed triple major and 15 other superachievers - Wendy Kopp is begging them to shelve their career plans to teach in America's most troubled public schools. "This problem has to be this generation's issue," she tells the future grads. "We know we can solve it if we get enough true leaders."
Kopp is talking with prospective recruits for Teach for America, the Peace Corps-like program that she dreamed up 17 years ago when she was a senior at Princeton. As she speaks, she frequently covers her mouth with her right hand, a nervous gesture. But the students too are nervous about the job Kopp is asking them to do.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 11:23 AM
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