>>View graphic. 
 
Teach for America, the Peace Corps-style organization that recruits graduates of top colleges to spend two years teaching in urban and rural public schools without first earning education degrees, is becoming a big enterprise. It is drawing a growing number of the nation's best and brightest into some of public education's most troubled schools. And they are staying. Rather than completing their two-year tours and moving on to law, banking, and other more lucrative fields, increasing numbers of TFA alumni are continuing to work in education in many different roles, many of them serving the nation's neediest students.

“Why doesn't the country have a national teacher corps to recruit as aggressively as we are being recruited to work on Wall Street?” Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp wondered back in the late 1980s as a student at Princeton. The question led to a senior thesis outlining such an organization, and then, in 1990, to TFA's first cadre of 500 teachers. Today, it has a staff of 350, a $39 million budget, and 3,600 “corps members” in nearly two dozen locations from New York City to the Mississippi Delta.

Nearly 17,300 students applied to TFA in 2005, including 12 percent of the senior classes of Yale and Spelman, 11 percent of Dartmouth's seniors, and 8 percent of Harvard's. On many campuses, Kopp has vanquished Wall Street: TFA was the top employer of graduates from Duke, Georgetown, Scripps College, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of North Carolina in 2005. TFA has become more selective than most of the nation's law and business schools, accepting only 17 percent of its applicants in 2005. What's more, nearly one in five TFA recruits is a math, science, or engineering major—the student who traditionally shuns public school teaching.

TFA spends about $10,000 to recruit, select, train, and support each corps member and gets about $1,500 a year per corps member from the school systems where it places teachers. The investment has paid off. A 2004 study by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., an independent organization, found that their students learn just as much reading as and more math than do the students of the other teachers in their schools.

In fall 2005, the organization announced plans to more than double its size to 8,000 corps members by 2010 with the help of a $60 million capital campaign, a move that would also more than double the number of TFA alumni to over 20,000.

Critics charge that Teach for America is a revolving door and that corps members' interest in education is ephemeral. In fact, while many alumni speak of "surviving" their time in TFA under very difficult teaching conditions, TFA reports that 85 percent of its recruits finish their two-year commitments and over 60 percent remain in education longer than two years.

The alumni have taken on many roles, working on school boards, in state departments of education and governor's offices, as central office administrators, and as education entrepreneurs. Over 50 principals of traditional public schools and more than 80 principals of charter schools are TFA alumni, including two-thirds of the highly regarded KIPP charter schools. And 36 percent of TFA alumni have continued as classroom teachers, including Jason Kamras, the 2005 National Teacher of the Year.

TFA has also cultivated a commitment to education in a generation of leaders in a variety of other fields, as Kopp had hoped. Nearly half of the alumni who have left the education sector do work that helps low-income communities, according to a 2004 TFA alumni survey, and an additional 20 percent do volunteer work in such communities.

“It's probably impossible to do Teach for America and come out seeing the world in the same way,” Kopp told an audience of Yale students in 2005. These are the stories of members of the expanding network of TFA alumni that not only sees the world differently but is working to change it.

Please download the entire 11-page report (see link, above right).

Bridget Kelly is a New York writer and a former editor of the Yale Daily News.