Jessica Irvine
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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.
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
4K
corps members
More than
68K
alumni
Approximately
2.1K
Ignite Fellows
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
4K
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.
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.
Executive Cabinet
Our Executive Cabinet is Teach For America's primary governing body and is responsible for our overall progress towards our 10 year goal.
Joy Okoro
Greater New Orleans '08
Executive Vice President, Field Impact & Integration
Teach For America
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get Involved
Hailey Borja
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About Me
Potential is equally distributed across lines of race and class, but in America today, opportunity is not. Teach For America is working to realize the day when every child has an equal opportunity to learn, grow, influence, and lead.
A Complex Problem
No single solution will bring an equitable and excellent education to every child. Although we look to education to help children overcome obstacles like systemic racism and poverty, our school system was not designed for today’s children who count on school to access opportunity in America. But people designed this system, and so people can reimagine and rebuild it to enable all children to reach their full potential.
What will that take? It will take sustained leadership challenging the status quo from inside and outside the classroom. It will take a broad and diverse coalition—educators, advocates, entrepreneurs, policymakers, community members—fighting for the aspirations of children and their families by pushing for systems change.
“When I saw my students’ unlimited potential and realized that their progress is being stunted by our broken system, I knew I had to commit to fighting for them.”
78% of low-income students graduated high school on time in 2017, compared to 85% of students overall
Students from low-income families dropped out of high school at 2X the rate of higher-income families in 2017
Across the country, many children lack the education, support, and opportunity they need to learn and to thrive. And when millions of children aren’t learning, it affects us all—perpetuating poverty, dividing our society, weakening our economy.
For Too Many, Poverty Is Destiny
For Too Many, Poverty Is Destiny
In America, the circumstances of children’s births predict the opportunities they’ll have in life. Children growing up in historically marginalized and disenfranchised communities lack access to a broad spectrum of resources they need to thrive. The obstacles they face—poverty, hunger, discrimination, trauma, and school systems that do not provide them with the education they need—are overwhelming.
Unique Impact on Children of Color
Unique Impact on Children of Color
Children of color are more than two times more likely to be born into poverty and constitute nearly half of all children in American public schools. They bear the additional burden of low expectations and other biases stemming from institutional racism.
School Hasn’t Changed in 100 Years
School Hasn’t Changed in 100 Years
Students and families count on school to give children agency to lead and shape a better future for themselves. Yet our schools were never designed to unleash the potential of all children. Schools weren’t designed to meet the diverse needs of millions of students who rely on them today. They weren’t designed to help children facing challenges of poverty overcome those obstacles and access opportunity in a dynamic, global world. And our public school system is remarkably impervious to innovation, adaptation, and change.
By the Numbers: America’s Opportunity Gap
When schools fail to meet the needs of a child, it can affect that child’s destiny far after they leave the classroom. We call this the “opportunity gap.”
18% of black 8th graders are proficient or above in reading or math, compared with 47% of white 8th graders
2 year gap in reading—and 1.5 year gap in math—between 4th graders growing up in poverty and their higher-income peers
23% of Latino 8th graders are proficient or above in reading or math, compared with 47% of white 8th graders
3 year gap in reading—and more than three year gap in math—between 8th graders growing up in poverty and their higher-income peers
“Lagging achievement evidenced as early as fourth grade appears to be a powerful predictor of rates of high school and college graduation, as well as lifetime earnings.”
Kahakai Elementary School, Kailua-Kona, Hawai‘i
Our Enduring Hope
The statistics are overwhelming. But our hope and our optimism runs deep. Because we know what children are capable of when given the opportunities they deserve and the support they need.
In classrooms across this country, more and more children are beating the odds. More schools are putting more students on a path to and through college. More school systems are improving student outcomes at scale. In the aggregate, the needle is moving.
- In the last 25 years, the share of American fourth graders fully proficient in math on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) grew by 27%. The share of proficient fourth grade readers grew by 7%.
- In that same period, proficiency among Black fourth graders increased by 18% in math and 10% in reading; Latinx fourth-graders’ proficiency gained 21% in math and 9% in reading.
- In places like D.C, Chicago, Tennessee, the Rio Grande Valley, and New Orleans, academic achievement, high school graduation rates, and college graduations rates are on the rise.
- The 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that the U.S. leads the world in narrowing gaps across lines of race and class.
Community by community, children are showing us that progress is indeed possible. The question for us all is: What will it take to accelerate the pace of change?
Learn about Teach For America's approach.
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.
Learn about how we we use research and insights to help measure our positive impact on students, corps members, alumni, and communities.
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.
Our Impact on Students
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
This study provides the first causal evidence that tutoring can spark interest in teaching careers. Using Teach For America’s tutoring and teacher training programs, the research finds that tutoring in Ignite nearly triples the likelihood of applying to TFA’s teacher program, with the largest effects among men, students of color, and non-education majors. These results suggest that tutoring can serve as both a learning intervention and a scalable strategy to address teacher shortages and diversify the workforce.
(Jilli Jung, Carly D. Robinson, Susanna Loeb, National Student Support Accelerator, Stanford University)
A rigorous meta-analysis that synthesizes TFA’s impact on student achievement across 23 studies spanning 24 years found that on average, students of TFA teachers perform better in math and science than students of similar non-TFA teachers. It also found that on average, students of TFA teachers perform similarly in reading to those of similar non-TFA teachers.
(Citjowicz et al, 2024, American Institute for Research)
Across 5 regions in Texas, students of TFA-affiliated teachers (corps members and alumni) were as likely or more likely to pass the STAAR assessment than students of non-TFA-affiliated teachers. Students of TFA teachers receive the overall greatest benefit in the high school-tested subjects. TFA alumni teachers, in particular, are consistently more effective than non-TFA teachers with similar years of experience.
(Wright et al., 2023, Southern Methodist University Center on Research & Evaluation)
TFA teachers in Indianapolis were, on average, more effective at increasing student achievement than non-TFA teachers, and this effect is especially strong in schools with 5 or more TFA teachers. There is also a net positive effect of hiring TFA educators on student achievement, even when accounting for negative effects from higher TFA teacher turnover—resulting in the need to hire more novice teachers who are initially less effective—as well as positive effects due to TFA Indianapolis teachers’ differential impacts on student achievement.
(Master et al., 2023, RAND Corporation)
TFA teachers in Miami-Dade County Public Schools have been effective at raising the test scores of their students in math and ELA (relative to other teachers in the schools in which they are placed). Students taught by TFA math teachers go on to have better math grades the following year. Students in TFA classrooms are also less likely to miss school due to absences and suspensions.
(Backes & Hansen, 2023, CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research)
TFA teachers who choose to keep teaching as TFA alumni in New York City improve at double the rate of non-TFA teachers over the first five years of their careers. After accounting for differences in turnover rates for TFA and non-TFA teachers, it is estimated that a long-run strategy of TFA hiring increases steady-state student achievement by 0.05 standard deviations (approximately 23 days of additional learning per year).
(Lovison, 2022, Annenberg Institute at Brown University)
In this randomized controlled trial evaluation, Teach For America corps members teaching in elementary grades were as effective as other teachers in the same schools. Students of corps members in pre-K through second grade outperformed their peers in reading by the equivalent of an additional 1.3 months of learning. Teach For America teachers included in this study averaged less than two years of experience whereas the comparison teachers had nearly fourteen years of experience on average.
(Clark et al., 2017, Mathematica Policy Research)
Our Impact on Communities
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
Serving as a teacher in the Teach For America national service program has a large effect on civic participation—substantially increasing voter turnout rates among applicants admitted to the program. This effect is noticeably larger than that of previous efforts to increase youth voter turnout.
(Mo, Holbein & Elder, 2022, PNAS)
Through social network analysis of TFA alumni in eight cities, researchers found that connections and relationships are critical for creating systems change but high connectivity is not enough. Organizing to create systems change requires a combination of alumni working in advocacy and alumni in formal positions of influence, such as local public district executives and elected officials. They found that key roles associated with ecosystem change in communities were elected officials, advocacy/nonprofit leaders, state and local education executives, and principals.
(Acharya & Morris, 2022, Common Good Labs)
Through interviews and social network analyses, researchers found that 35 educational leaders were considered central to policy development in shaping a new local educational policy that shifts school oversight responsibility from the state back to the local school board—eight of whom were TFA alumni. The researchers concluded that the TFA alumni continued to remain active in New Orleans long after their teaching commitments were completed, and TFA alumni continued to drive educational improvements through policy change.
(Kalina & Clifford, 2019, American Institutes for Research)
Partner With Us
Partner With Us
If you would like to partner with us to conduct research, please fill out our preliminary research inquiry form. If you have questions about research on Teach For America, please contact us.
