Big ups to Wendy Kopp, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Teach for America, for sending in this guest post:
As college students and recent graduates, you are uniquely qualified to make a difference in the face of entrenched social issues. While experience has its place, I have seen that the idealism, energy, and naïveté that come with youth and inexperience can make an extraordinary difference, and so I believe your choices about where to channel your energy matter a lot. I believe the most important thing you can do is to join and lead the movement to address the unconscionable disparities in educational outcomes that persist in this country of ours that aspires so admirably to be the land of opportunity.
I say this because education is so fundamental to ensuring the quality of life for individuals and for our country and society, and because the problem of educational inequity is both massive and solvable. Today, 13 million children live below the poverty line in our country. By the time they are in fourth grade, they are already three grade levels behind fourth graders in high-income communities. Only half of the students in low-income communities will graduate from high school, and they will perform academically at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities. Only 1 in 10 of our low-income students will graduate from college.
Yet in communities across the country, we see hard evidence that this problem doesn’t need to exist.
Through the work of Teach For America corps members, we see every day that when urban and rural children are given the opportunities they deserve, they excel. Through the work of our alumni, we are also seeing that widespread, lasting change in education is possible. Seeing each day the disparities juxtaposed against the possibilities gives us a moral obligation to do everything in our societal power to ensure educational opportunity for all.
Over and over, I see our young, inexperienced teachers—and alumni, working from inside and outside the education system—make an immense difference by setting big goals that others would deem crazy. Just out of college, they did not wait to pursue their hope of a better world. Neither should you. Educational inequity, poverty, and other problems need your attention now, before you accept the status quo, before you are plagued by the knowledge of what is “impossible.”
We can reach the day when all children in our nation have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. The only real question is whether enough of our nation’s most promising future leaders will step up and decide to lead us there.
Wendy Kopp
Many thanks Wendy. By the way, as mood music, I suggest you listen to James Brown’s often-sampled, Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved, Part 1. Peace.
