November 15, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.— Wendy Kopp, founder and president of the national teacher corps Teach for America, will give a talk titled “One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way” in the Cole Assembly Room in Converse Hall at Amherst College at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 4. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Teach for America—an organization that recruits outstanding recent college graduates to teach for two years in the nation’s underprivileged urban and rural public schools—strives for a long-term goal that one day all children will have access to quality education. Kopp considers college graduates to be the driving force: “There is no doubt that our country will be a better place if we can find new ways of inspiring more of our nation’s most sought-after young people to pursue civil service,” she says. “Their persistent idealism, fresh perspectives and endless energy will help us conquer both the new challenges facing our nation and the old and intransigent ones that have plagued us for decades.” TFA is an initiative that Kopp began in 1989 as an extension of her senior thesis at Princeton, and from its humble beginnings the organization has grown into one of the top 10 employers of college graduates in the country, with 4,400 corps members and 12,000 alumni who reach 25 communities across the nation.

Kopp serves on the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation, the boards of The New Teacher Project and the KIPP Foundation, and the advisory boards of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the National Council on Teacher Quality. In 1993 she became the youngest person and first woman to receive Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Award, the highest honor the school confers on its undergraduate alumni. In 1994, Time magazine identified her as one of the country’s 40 most promising leaders under 40. She holds a B.A. degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

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