Wendy Kopp Quotes
11 quotes from Wendy Kopp — Founder of Teach For America and co-founder of Teach For All (now in 60+ countries)..
“Education is the most powerful tool countries have for boosting economic growth, increasing prosperity and forging more just, peaceful and equitable societies. Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.”
“Inexperience is an asset. Embrace it.”
“I often hear from new graduates that it's better to wait until you have more experience.... But I'm a big believer in the power of inexperience.... The world needs you before you stop asking naive questions and while you have the time to understand the true nature of the complex problems we face and take them on.”
“The evidence would suggest that there are some great alternative certification programmes and some lousy ones. There are some wonderful traditional education schools, and some that aren't so effective. What's important is less the pathway than the impact on students.”
“Because my letter to the President of the United States suggesting that he create a national teacher corps got in the wrong stack and resulted in a job rejection letter from the White House, and because I possessed at the time an uncommon share of naïveté, I decided to create Teach For America myself.”
“What great teachers do, great leaders do. Megan stepped back and created a vision for where her kids were going to be at the end of the year, motivated others to work with her, and operated in a very goal-oriented way. There is nothing elusive about this; it's something we can replicate.”
“I believed that the inequity in educational outcomes that persisted along socioeconomic and racial lines in our country was among our greatest injustices, that the leaders in our generation were searching for something they weren't finding and would jump at the chance to teach in urban and rural public schools, that our energy and idealism would make a difference in the lives of the nation's most disadvantaged kids.”
“In Oakland, 14 percent of African-American boys graduate from high school. Fourteen percent. Right here in our backyards. We're not giving our kids the chance to have any set of true professional options.”
“The path to happiness is not balance per se, but rather congruence between the values we hold most dear and where we spend our energy.”
“Your inexperience is actually one of your biggest assets. Once you start learning the way the world works, you start accepting the way things are and thinking it's normal.”
“We move faster, more responsibly, and more sustainably when the push for change is defined and owned by the people within communities who know their reality and their aspirations.”
