"The power and potential of an excellent education is limitless." From that guiding principle, Wendy Kopp, chief executive officer and founder of Teach For America, has created a vision for enabling the potential of children in schools around the world.

Twenty-one years into her own learning process about what it takes to provide an outstanding education, Kopp says the most salient lesson has been the inherent solvability of the problem Teach For America is trying to address. "The most motivating lesson in our work is that [educational inequity] doesn't have to be. All kids can have a decent education, and that's what fuels our work in this area," Kopp said at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

When she was a college senior at Princeton, Kopp recalled, most of the recruiters swarming the campus were trying to lure the best and brightest into careers on Wall Street or to management consulting firms.

Kopp felt the whole world was open to her because of the quality of her education. But she was also struck by the notion that many students' college education was predetermined by the quality of their kindergarten through grade 12 education. "How can it be that where you're born predetermines your educational outcomes?"

By looking at opportunity through the early education lens, Kopp's questions about why the best and brightest college graduates weren't recruited to teach where educational inequity was rampant led her to start Teach For America, a national corps of outstanding, recent college graduates (representing all academic majors) who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and, along the way, become leaders in education and many other fields.

Kopp has learned socio-economic circumstances predetermine most individuals' educational outcomes. The question of bringing educational opportunities to the disadvantaged, she said, is a matter of innovating change and educational reforms on a system-wide basis, so improvements can be made to public education in any location.

"There is nothing magic, nothing elusive that creates the solution," Kopp said. "This is about talent, leadership, accountability, improvement and improving cultures" and not prejudicing our own expectations of what is possible for any student guided by a truly committed teacher.

There are 14 million children growing up in poverty in the United States, but their educational experiences can be shaped by innovators who create "the foundations of unstoppable movements" to ensure equitable education for everyone.

Within five years, Kopp expects to build the Teach For America corps to 45,000 teachers, which she thinks will be the point when transformation in the educational system will reach critical mass. The Teach For America model is now being adopted by other countries, notably Chile, which set a goal of conquering educational inequality within five years.

At the end of the day, Kopp said, commitment and talent are what's needed to resolve educational inequity and help more children reach their full educational potential. "We need to focus on the talent pipeline in education," Kopp said. "You can only succeed if you have tremendous principals and tremendous teachers. We have got to double-down on that. It is the heart of making this happen in the end."

Joseph Daniel McCool
Joseph Daniel McCool is senior contributing editor with ExecuNet and principal of management recruiting/succession advisory firm The McCool Group. He is also the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, recognized widely as "one of the best business books of 2008," and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, Escolhendo Líderes, published in June 2010.

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