A wonderful article in today's NYT about Wendy Kopp/TFA and Richard Barth/KIPP:

Ms. Kopp and Mr. Barth are a power couple in the world of education, emblematic of a new class of young social entrepreneurs seeking to reshape the United States’ educational landscape by creating new schools, training better principals and getting more smart young teachers into needy classrooms. The couple may not be as well known as Bill and Melinda Gates, but their fast-growing organizations have become incubators of new ways of thinking about education.

Teach for America, founded in 1989, has 14,000 alumni, some of whom have founded charter schools and other educational start-ups, or are rising leaders in school systems nationwide. Among them are Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging schools chancellor in Washington, D.C., and Dave Levin and Michael Feinberg, who founded KIPP in Houston and the Bronx with schools on an extended-day schedule and the slogan “no shortcuts.”

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2 School Entrepreneurs Lead the Way on Change

By SAM DILLON

Published: June 19, 2008

www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/education/19teach.html

As the founder of Teach for America, a nonprofit program that recruits elite college graduates to teach in low-income schools, Wendy Kopp has presided over many triumphs, and the group’s annual dinner last month was another. It raised $5.5 million in one night and brought so many corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York that stretch limousines jammed Park Avenue for blocks.