Teach For America's mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in this effort.
We build a diverse, highly selective corps of top recent college graduates and professionals—individuals of all academic majors, career interests, and backgrounds—who commit two years to teach in low-income communities and become lifelong leaders in pursuit of educational excellence and equity. During their two years, corps members go above and beyond traditional expectations to ensure that children growing up in low-income areas have more of the opportunities they deserve. At the same time, the corps members themselves gain the conviction and insight necessary to be lifelong leaders for fundamental change, regardless of their professional sector.
Why does educational inequity exist? At a broad level, we believe we have this problem because socioeconomic challenges in low-income communities—such as inadequate housing, healthcare, and preschool opportunities—put added pressure on schools that generally don’t have the systems, capacity, and resources to compensate. This does not mean schools in low-income communities are worse than schools elsewhere; it means they need to do more, given the additional challenges their students face. Unfortunately, these schools weren’t built that way. For example, there are not enough hours in a standard school day to catch up students who have fallen behind, and schools may not have access to the social services their students need. It is our societal choices, driven by prevailing theories and national priorities, that fuel the existence of the problem.
To overcome these underlying challenges in the short term, we need as many teachers as possible willing to go above and beyond the constraints of the system to ensure that their students excel.
But thousands of hardworking teachers cannot solve the problem on their own. Many things need to happen to effect the fundamental, system changes necessary to truly realize the vision of educational excellence and equity, and we believe two things rise above the rest. First, we need long-term, sustained leadership in education; people and leadership are the most important element in making any organization work, and schools and school systems, and the social services that impact them, are no different. Second, we believe we must change the prevailing ideology around educational inequity; we need to move from a world where most people believe this is an intractable problem to one where it is commonly understood that we can solve this problem if we make the right societal choices.
Teach For America makes a long-term, fundamental impact by moving these two levers for change. The experience of teaching successfully in low-income communities is a transformative one for corps members. It informs and influences career paths for some alumni, thus building a new leadership force for change from within education and related social sectors—a leadership force that has the experience, perspective and moral authority that comes from having succeeded with a class of students. At the same time, Teach For America gives our alumni firsthand evidence that we can solve this problem as well as a grounded understanding of how to solve it; as they assume positions of influence in sectors ranging from policy to business to journalism, they have the potential to change the conversation around educational inequity and ultimately to help us make different societal choices.
Our nation's greatest injustice
Corps and Alumni