Top Graduates Line Up to Teach to the Poor - New York Times

Top Graduates Line Up to Teach to the Poor - New York Times: "Teach for America grew out of a senior thesis by Wendy Kopp, a Princeton student, proposing a national teacher corps. Ms. Kopp quickly got seed money from Exxon Mobil, then, with a small staff, began a grass-roots recruitment campaign that yielded 500 fledgling teachers, who were placed in six regions in 1990. Teach for America has grown rapidly, with backing from corporate partners, philanthropists interested in education reform and Americorps, which provides the teachers with $9,450 after two years, to repay education loans or to pay for future schooling. Since 2001, the group has benefited from the same surge of interest that has brought record numbers of applications to long-established groups like the Peace Corps.

Teach for America is a growing presence in many school districts, including New York City's, which has about 800 of the group's members this year, twice as many as last year. All told, Teach for America has about 3,700 teachers - 2,190 in their first year and 1,520 in their second - teaching in 22 areas, from Los Angeles and Baltimore to the Arkansas Delta and the Pine Ridge Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The group only operates in regions certified as high need by the federal government and willing to employ teachers who lack certification.

As much as anything, Teach for America is a triumph of marketing. The group, based in Manhattan, recruits on more than 500 campuses and spends about a quarter of its nearly $40 million budget on recruitment and selection. The bulk of its members come from 141 top schools where it hires students, at about $500 a semester, to help organize recruiting events and act as headhunters.

'It's very intensive recruiting, to meet the goals Teach for America sets for us,' said Mike Kalin, who was a Harvard recruiter his junior and senior years, and teaches in the South Bronx. 'Some of my friends might h"

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