RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News with Steve Inskeep in New Orleans. I’m Renee Montagne in Washington.

Fifteen years ago, Wendy Kopp was a senior at Princeton, and she proposed a national teacher corps as part of her college thesis. That became Teach for America. Over the last 15 years, her idea grew into a hugely successful nonprofit organization. It places teachers in some of the toughest classrooms in the country. Wendy Kopp is still running Teach for America, and she joins me now.

Good morning.

Ms. WENDY KOPP (Teacher for America): Good morning.

MONTAGNE: What got you thinking about this?

Ms. KOPP: I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they’re already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities. I just thought, `Why don’t we have a national teacher corps in this country that recruits talented people of all different majors as aggressively as we were all being recruited at the time to work on Wall Street, but to work in classrooms in our country’s lowest-income communities?’

MONTAGNE: The two-year stints teaching in these very difficult schools, do they have an impact on, though, making the school better?

Ms. KOPP: You know, the corps members themselves, many of them continue on in education, and so some of the most successful schools in low-income communities today are run by Teach for America alumni. This year’s National Teacher of the Year is a Teach for America alum. And at the same time, some of our corps members do leave the field of education, and we think that that’s important. We need journalists and policy-makers and business leaders who, we all know, have so much to influence our policies and our practices that fosters reform.

MONTAGNE: Was there a moment when you, say, went somewhere, like the delta or an inner-city school, and you saw something that made you realize that for you, this was really something special?

Ms. KOPP: You know, a woman named Nicole Sherin(ph), who was a middle-school math teacher in Phoenix in an extremely low-income community there, literally tells the story of looking out on her students on the first day of school and just seeing a sea of disengaged faces. And three-quarters of her eighth-grade students, who had at the beginning of the year been the lowest-performing students in not only her district but all the surrounding districts in Phoenix–three-quarters of them outperforming all the other students in their district and surrounding districts. And it’s what leads us to really believe that we can realize the point where all kids have the chance to attain an excellent education, and truly the real question, I believe, is will enough of our country’s future leaders step up and say, `We’re going to lead our country to that place’?

Now he’s at graduate school and then…Teach for America.2?

Teach for America produces some excellent teachers along with some miserable failures, but I suppose traditional teacher education programs do the same.

In that podcast I mentioned in an earlier blog comment, Don Tapscott calls our current “Jobless Economic Recovery” an oxymoron. He says the “No. 1 choice for Harvard undergrads is to go to Teach for America”.

I wonder what other options they see today.

Just like making money available for housing that has little chance of being paid back I think we will see student loan default rates rising. The government solution to that will be to forgive portions of the student loans if the students agree to work in places and jobs that the government wants.