| Teach For America

Teach For America is an extraordinary network of leaders who are driving impact across the country to achieve our vision that one day, all children in our country will have the opportunity to achieve an excellent education.

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Who We Are Executive Team

Who We Are

Teach For America is a force of over 72,000 alumni, corps members, and Ignite Fellows working in over 9,000 schools nationwide. As a collective—educators, advocates, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and community members—we fight for the aspirations of students and their families. Together, we shape the conversation about what's possible. From classrooms to districts to statehouses across America, we’re reimagining education to realize the day when every child has the opportunity to learn, to grow, to influence, and to lead.

Significant progress in educational outcomes is happening in communities across the country. And the Teach For America network is playing an essential role.

Our TFA Network

Teach For America is a community of changemakers and coalition-builders. We are leaders who teach, teachers who lead. Our network is large and growing every day.

More than

corps members

More than

68K

alumni

Approximately

2.1K

Ignite Fellows

Through teaching in our public schools and partnering with children and families in communities that are most in need, this network of changemakers is helping strengthen the education system and shape the future of our country.

Our Regions

Executive Team

Our executive team includes national and local leaders who have devoted their careers to ensuring educational excellence for all, several of whom are Teach For America alumni. Regardless of whether they started their career as corps members, our executives bring decades of experience from the education field and other fields that impact education.

Aneesh Sohoni

Twin Cities '09

Chief Executive Officer

Management Team

Aneesh Sohoni began his career as a high school English teacher in the 2009 Twin Cities corps, where his classroom experience sparked a lasting commitment to expanding opportunity for all students. Aneesh went on to serve as Executive Director of Teach For America Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana and most recently led One Million Degrees, a nonprofit focused on advancing economic mobility for community college students.

Steve Majors

Executive Vice President, Chief External Affairs Officer

Management Team

Steve Majors is the Chief External Affairs Officer at Teach For America. In this role, Steve leads 5 exceptional teams with his over two decades of extensive experience in communications, marketing, and media.

Alan Murray

Executive Vice President, Chief Data & Technology Officer

Management Team

Alan Murray is the Chief Data & Technology Officer at Teach For America, where he leads both the Technology and Digital Experience group (TDX) and the Program Impact, Learning, and Evaluation (PILE) organization. These teams leverage scalable digital systems, data, and learning to create seamless experiences, enable evidence-informed decision-making, and position TFA as a strategic engine for growth and impact.

Joy Okoro

Greater New Orleans '08

Executive Vice President, Chief Impact & Operating Officer

Management Team

Joy leads Teach For America’s regional teams and the executive leadership body, who are charged with ensuring our network of corps members (teachers), alumni and staff members deliver on our promise to partner to create local change and expand educational opportunities for all students.

Whitney Petersmeyer

Executive Vice President, Growth & Program Officer

Management Team

Whitney Petersmeyer is the Executive Vice President for Growth at Teach For America. She leads the work of the teams focused on scaling talent offerings through collaborative partnerships, addressing educational disparities and fueling Teach For America’s talent pool growth.

Michelle Gieg

Greater Baton Rouge '06

Senior Vice President, Chief of Staff

Management Team & Office of the CEO

Michelle Gieg most recently worked with Democracy Prep Public Schools as Chief Operating Officer and Chief of Staff and earlier founded and led their Baton Rouge region. She holds a Master’s Degree in Public Education Management from Yale University’s School of Management through The Broad Center. Early in her career Michelle led TFA’s Delta Institute.

Ashanta Evans Blackwell

Greater New Orleans '95

Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary

Office of the CEO

Ashanta leads the work focused on managing Legal, Risk, and Compliance across the organization and is a strategic advisor for team leadership. Ashanta has served on several boards including the Mount Holyoke College Board of Trustees and as Board Chair for the Gestalt Community Schools network. She began her career as an elementary teacher in the 1995 Greater New Orleans corps and has over two decades of experience as an attorney. Ashanta graduated from Mount Holyoke College and Vanderbilt University School of Law.

Dr. Barbara Logan Smith

Senior Vice President, Chief of Experience & Belonging

Office of the CEO

In addition to her role as Chief of Experience & Belonging, Barbara facilitates training seminars for emerging corporate executives. After earning an M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction and B.S. in Education (K-8) and Psychology, she earned her Ph.D. from the School of Education at Cardinal Stritch University in Leadership for the Advancement of Learning and Service

Regional Leadership Teams

Teach For America has nearly 50 regions, each led by an executive director and an advisory board. To learn more about our regional leadership and regional boards, visit our individual region websites.

Our Regions

Board of Directors

Our Board of Directors plays a critical role in developing Teach For America’s strategic plan and ensuring that we are able to meet the ambitious goals we set for ourselves.

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Lifetime Directors

Our Lifetime Directors have played a critical role on our national board for many years. We are deeply grateful for the ongoing advice, support, and advocacy that they continue to provide.

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National Advisory Board of The Collective

The Collective is Teach For America's association for alumni of color. The National Advisory Board of the Collective is composed of alumni of color who help lead national initiatives and provide strategic guidance to Teach For America's senior leadership.

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Get Involved

Join the Corps

Join our Staff

Research drives our practice at Teach For America. As a data-driven organization, we use internal and external reviews to learn, evolve, and strengthen our work and impact.

Learn about how we we use research and insights to help measure our positive impact on students, corps members, alumni, and communities.

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Learning and Insights Our Impact On Students Our Impact On Communities Partner With Us

About Our Research

At Teach For America, we operate with curiosity and embrace new ideas in order to learn and improve continuously. We work with corps members, alumni, and staff to gather data across all levels of our organization. We conduct internal research and evaluation with these data, as well as partner with highly regarded external researchers to lead rigorous, high-quality research. Our research interests include our organization's impact, innovation in the broader education field, and interventions that contribute to the pursuit of an excellent education for every child.

We take pride in being one of the most researched nonprofits in the country, and we continue to support independent research and reviews that help us gain a better understanding of our impact on students and strengthen our work and results. Learn more about research on our impact and how we are turning insights into action.

Learnings and Insights

Curious about what we’re learning? This is where we share findings, perspectives, and lessons learned. Check out our latest briefs and op-eds to read more about our work and insights.

Dive In

Our Impact on Students

Teach For America corps members’ students perform as well as other teachers’ students on standardized tests of math and reading. This is true when compared to both novice and experienced non-Teach For America teachers. In some cases, TFA teachers’ students perform even better than non-TFA teachers’ students, and that is especially the case for TFA educators teaching math, science, and social sciences, as well as for TFA alumni teachers across subject areas. Research findings on TFA teachers’ instructional impact—which span multiple regions, subject areas, and grade levels—have remained consistent throughout the organization’s history, suggesting that the results are not due to chance, error, or the particular statistical method.

Recent Studies

Tutor to Teacher Pipeline: The Effect of Working as a Tutor on Interest in Teaching

A Meta-Analysis of Teach For America Teacher Impacts

Texas Impact: 2023 Evaluation Report For Teach For America

Teaching and Leading: An Evaluation Of The Impacts And Professional Trajectories Of Teach For America Participants In Indianapolis

Persistent Teach for America Effects on Student Test and Non-Test Academic Outcomes

The Effects of High-performing, High-turnover Teachers on Long-run Student Achievement: Evidence from Teach For America

Impacts of the Teach For America Investing in Innovation Scale-up

Our Impact on Communities

Communities across the country are making meaningful progress in educational outcomes, and Teach for America alumni and corps members are playing an essential role, working alongside many others. TFA alumni are more likely to vote than their non-participant counterparts, and they also continue to be active in the community around educational issues long after their initial two-year commitment. Research on TFA’s alumni networks shows that key roles associated with ecosystem change in communities were elected officials, advocacy/nonprofit leaders, state and local education executives, and principals.

Recent Studies

Civilian National Service Programs Can Powerfully Increase Youth Voter Turnout

Alumni Networks, Key Roles, And Systems Improvement: Insights From Eight U.S. Cities