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I'm excited to be here and just thought I would share a bit about my story of the last now 18 years in this work.
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And just a few observations that might be pertinent to the topic of leadership.
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As Deborah said, I guess it's a somewhat well-documented story how I got into this 18 years ago, but I'll just quickly share that.
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I was a senior in college at Princeton.
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And this was in 1989, our generation was known as the Me generation.
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And supposedly all we wanted to do was go work on Wall street and make lots of money.
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And I found myself just searching for something that I wasn't finding as I tried to figure out what I was going to do after I graduated.
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And I had a sense that I wasn't alone, that there were thousands of other graduating seniors out there who were searching for something that would give them a real responsibility right out of college, but also enable them to make a real difference in the world.
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And I'd been, as a public policy major and just a concerned college student, had been really focused on this issue of educational inequity in our country.
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Just the fact that where you're born in our country does so much to determine your education, educational prospects, and in turn, of course, your life prospects.
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And one day, and this all sounds, I was in the depths of depression actually for the first time in my life.
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I didn't want to apply for any jobs.
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And I think it took getting there for inspiration to strike.
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One day I just thought, why aren't we being recruited as aggressively to teach in our country's lowest-income communities as we were being recruited at the time to work on Wall Street?
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So that was the germ of the idea, I needed a thesis topic and decided to propose this in my thesis.
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And as I progressed through that process, just became obsessed with this idea and with how powerful it could be to recruit some of the most talented, driven graduating seniors in the country.
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And channel their energy into classrooms in our highest poverty communities rather than into those firms on Wall Street.
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And I thought that could have a huge impact in the lives of the kids they reach.
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And also that there would be this almost higher order power that by taking our future leaders and having their first experience out of college, be teaching in urban and rural areas.
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Rather than working on Wall Street, that maybe we would influence our countries consciously and its priorities and ultimately its policies and practices.
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And I thought that ultimately that would lead to real fundamental change in our country that would be a positive thing.
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So that was the idea, I was a very naive graduating senior.
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The more obsessed I became.
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I wrote a letter to the President of the United States suggesting that he start this.
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I was just convinced that this was brilliant and that that letter would get to his desk, which it did not.
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It landed in the wrong stack, I guess.
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I got a job rejection letter from the White House. >> [LAUGH].
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>> Speaker 1: Part of this, and not to be deterred, there was a front page article in Fortune magazine, actually the spring of my senior year, saying that corporate America was taking on education reform.
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So that became my next angle.
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I thought, well, maybe the President isn't going to start it, maybe I could start it as a non-profit organization.
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So I wrote letters to the executives in that article.
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But part of this idea, to me, I mean, this wasn't going to be kind of a model teacher education program like that wasn't the idea.
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This was going to be about building a movement among our future leaders to do something about this social injustice that persists in our country.
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And so part of the idea in my mind was that it had to start on a certain scale.
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And actually in researching the history of the Peace Corps, I discovered an original paper, a 30 page paper that Sergeant Shriver had told one of his staff members to write, analyzing what the most appropriate scale for the startup of the Peace Corps was.
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And it was an incredible analysis that concluded that the lowest possible number of Peace Corps volunteers in the first year should be 500.
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That that was a number that was manageable but also big enough to convey a sense of urgency and national importance.
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So I grasped onto that and that became the plan that in the first year we would inspire thousands of people to apply to Teach for America and recruit and place no fewer than 500 of them.
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I mean, the timing was absolutely perfect.
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I think if I hadn't done this six months, months later, someone else would have.
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It was one of these things where you would tell people this idea and they'd say, doesn't that already exist?
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The mood on college campuses really was, I mean, it wasn't just me, it was sort of the tail end of a big boom.
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And I think people were really searching for something different.
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At the same time, corporate America was looking to do something about educational inequity and they didn't know what to do, which was a huge enabler of this entire effort.
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There were headlines at the time that were far more extreme than anything we see today about teacher shortages in urban and rural areas.
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So there were many reasons that this was able to take off and very quickly be far beyond me.
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It was also one of these ideas that just magnetized people very quickly.
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So I spent the summer working off of a seed grant that one of those executives quoted in the article made and meeting as many people as would meet with me to try to build support for this idea.
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Everyone I met said, great idea, it will never work, college students will never do this.
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You're not going to get students from Stanford to want to teach in urban and rural areas.
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And that was the one thing that I had reason to have conviction about.
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So the idea was in my mind, I'll show these people.
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And with some other recent grads, we distributed flyers under doors at the time because, amazingly, there was no email then.
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But 2,500 graduating seniors responded to those flyers and applied to Teach for America within four months, which was news like, where is this outpouring of idealism coming from, from the Me generation?
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And so that generated media.
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And at any rate, one thing led to another.
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Just about exactly one year after I graduated from college, I was looking out on an auditorium full of 489 recent college graduates who were heading into their training and about to start teaching in, at the time, six urban and rural areas across the country.
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That was really just the beginning.
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I mean, I think in so many ways, the real story of Teach for America starts after that.
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We spent a decade in intense learning curves around how to actually do this well.
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Starting with the programmatic learning curve.
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It is just incredibly challenging to actually take people straight out of college without work experience, let alone teaching experience or teacher education, and place Them in the most challenging teaching situations in the country and expect them not just to survive, but really to excel with their students and to take the right lessons and not the wrong lessons.
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So that they, in fact, would become committed advocates and would advocate ultimately for the right things and not the wrong things.
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So we began what continues today to be a steep learning curve around which recent college graduates have the personal characteristics necessary for this, around how to train and develop them so that they are successful, and ultimately about how to foster their ongoing leadership.
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So there were huge programmatic learning curves, but also huge learning curves on other fronts.
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And probably the most significant of them was just the learning curve around management.
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I mean, I started out having actually just complete disdain for the concept of spending my time on the mundane details of administration and management, and just had this idea which, again, I said I was one of the more naive graduating seniors, but that the people who worked within Teach for America, because we're all driven by the same kind of mission, shouldn't need a lot of management.
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And this was basically a recipe for disaster and led to some very difficult initial years.
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I mean, I was straight out of college, our entire staff was straight out of college.
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And even as of our second year, we had a $5 million organization with 50-plus staff members based out of 10 offices.
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And you could readily see the evidence of the lack of management going on.
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And at one point, I realized that the only way we were going to accomplish our mission was if we became great at management and I became obsessed with it actually.
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I did look for a business school grad to come in and save the day, but because I couldn't find anyone crazy enough to come into the mess we'd created to save the day, I realized I'm just going to have to do this myself.
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Which was the best decision I ever made, I think, because it did lead us through some learning curves that have led us to so deeply internalize all the basic lessons around.
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How do you build a strong culture and create an organization that is obsessed with results and accountability and continuous improvement?
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How do we ensure talent at every level of our organization and such.
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There were huge financial learning curves.
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We did start off with various big seed grants from corporations and foundations.
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But as of our third year, for many reasons, not just because those organizations moved on to the next thing, but for many reasons, started dropping off in huge chunks.
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So as of about our fourth year, we were looking at an $8 million funding base that we had to completely convert to new sources.
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And that led to three years that I think of as the dark years of Teach for America, where it was literally just sweating every payroll every two weeks for three years, which is a miserable way to be.
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But we persevered through that, there were political challenges and such.
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But as of our 10th year, so the year 2000, eight years ago, we had worked through many of those huge learning curves and had gained stability.
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We had 1,000 corps members at any given time in the midst of their two years.
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At that point, we were getting about 4,000 applicants a year.
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We were working in 13 urban and rural communities across the country.
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We had a $10 million budget.
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And we realized we had accomplished the big goal that we had set for ourselves in year six, which was to become a stable, thriving institution.
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And so we asked ourselves the question at that point, we stepped back and said, now what?
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And ultimately asked ourselves, how can we maximize our potential as a force for change?
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And just reflecting on our theory of change on our mission, which is to fuel the larger movement, to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our country's most promising future leaders in the efforts.
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As we ask ourselves, how do we maximize our potential?
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In this, we came to believe we'd have to do three things.
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We'd have to get much bigger, we'd have to do a lot more to ensure that all of our core members are as effective as the most effective of them.
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So that they are, in fact, changing the academic trajectory that their kids are on, both for the sake of the kids they're reaching and for the sake of the lessons they learn in the process.
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Because achieving success with kids as a classroom teacher Is the foundational element of long term educational leadership and of advocating for the right things.
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So we became obsessed with growing in scale, but also with increasing the measurable impact of our core members during their two years, and ultimately, too, in accelerating the leadership of our alums.
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Because that the kernel of the idea in my head that this would change the consciousness of the country, that there would be this kind of higher order power around influencing this future generation of leaders.
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I think as we've progressed, that part of our theory of change has become much more concrete and probably much more important in our minds.
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The way we think about it, you know, as we see our corps members go on well beyond their two years, many, many of them stay in this work.
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So in fact, the majority of them continue on in the field of education in related social sectors like public health and social services and such, which do so much to contribute to this problem in the first place.
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And we know and see every day that that is critical, that we will not ultimately solve this problem without long-term sustained leadership from within, you know, from within schools and systems and the related systems.
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And at the same time, we do think it's important that some of them leave, that they go into business, that they go into policy, that they go into other sectors.
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Because we know that we can't solve the problem from within alone.
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That we need to create a context, an environment in which people know what you know after you've taught successful in a low-income community, which is that we can solve this problem.
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If we were giving kids the opportunities they deserve, they would excel academically.
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And ultimately we need policymakers who have a grounded understanding of how to solve the problem as well that comes from succeeding in the classroom.
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So as we asked ourselves, how do we increase the long-term impact of Teach for America?
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That too led us back to not only growing in scale and maximizing the impact of the core members, but doing more to get them, our alums, into positions of influence earlier into school principalships, earlier into elected office earlier, to start social enterprises earlier.
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So the theory as of our 10th year was that the combined impact of those three strategies, growing increasing our teachers impact and growing our alumni's leadership, would exponentially grow our impact.
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And, really we have over the last eight years, I think, acted on the lessons of our first decade as we have aspired to pursue some pretty ambitious goals in those areas.
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And there's tremendous momentum.
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This year, 25,000 graduating seniors applied to Teach for America.
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Between 5 and 10% of the senior classes of 100 colleges and universities applied.
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16% of Spelman's senior class applied, 11% of Yale's senior class.
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We have a corps right now in the midst of their two years of 5,000 members, we'll have 6,500.
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This coming year, we brought 4,000 people in to Teach for America in our first decade, and so far in this decade, we've brought 13,000 people into this work.
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And this year we'll bring in another 4,000 in this year alone.
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And I've never been so charged up by Teach for America because I feel like we can see evidence of the potential of this strategy.
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To become a fundamental force for real change against the larger problem of educational inequity.
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And I say that because of what we now see happening in communities where we've been placing a steady stream of our people for a decade or so.
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You see something very different happening in those communities.
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And we could tell the stories of anywhere from actually here in the Bay area, Oakland, California, to Newark, New Jersey, to New Orleans to Houston, in Washington, D. C.
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We have somewhat unique situation, but it's interesting, I mean, we've been placing 50 people there since 1991.
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And now we have a new day in Washington D. C.
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with a school's chancellor who's a 37 year old teach for America alum, whose every other word is sense of urgency.
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The rule in that district is that every single decision gets made based on the rule of what would be good for kids, which is truly represents a complete shift in mindset in that system.
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But beyond Michelle, the school's chancellor, the deputy chancellor is a Teach for America alum.
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The majority of the senior team, 10% of the school principals, one of the two right hands to the mayor for education policy, one of the two newly elected state board members.
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And I just look at that picture and knowing behind the scenes the revolution that they're bringing about in that system.
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And it gives me hope because I think about the fact that every one of the people in that picture came in to Teach for America in the 90s.
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When we brought in a total of 4,000 people, let alone, the 4,000 we're bringing in this year alone.
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So I just think in five or ten years, we could truly build something that will in fact have the chance to effect serious, long-term systemic change.
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Stepping back from all this because I think I was asked to talk about what makes a good leader.
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And I think at some level, I don't think a lot about that question, I think a lot more about how do we have organizationally a greater and greater impact.
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But let me share just a few reflections, I guess based on what I've seen in the last few years, in this, the first would be just the incredible power of inexperience.
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And I say that not just reflecting on my own example, but also looking at our teachers and our alums.
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Because when I think about great leadership, I think about people who set really big, outlandish goals and visions.
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And from what I've seen, at least in the context of a massive entrenched societal problem like the one that we're addressing, those goals are often set because of inexperience.
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I think about Teach for America's initial year and honestly, people ask me all the time like, do you think you should have taught first and gone to business school first?
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I mean, maybe that would have been better, and I really, I mean, clearly we suffered, and this will get me to my next point, but from inexperience as well.
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But I just sort of wonder, if I had known what I was doing, would I have done this, would I have said yes?
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In the first year, we're going to get thousands of people to apply and we're going to train and place no fewer than 500 of them.
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Which I do think was a fundamental decision in starting Teach for America on the trajectory that it has then built on.
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I think about a woman who I got to know last year, Katie Pierce, who finished her two year commitment in the Bronx last year.
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Who diagnosed her kids at the beginning of the year and found out that her sixth grade bilingual students.
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Some of them did not know that there should be spaces between words, that they had never had a social studies class before, she was their writing and social studies teacher.
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And stepped back and said, you know what, if I'm going to have a meaningful influence on my kids lives right now.
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This year as their teacher, I'm going to have to get them all to the sixth grade standards by the end of the year.
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This is a crazy goal, her kids thought it was crazy because she told them, here's where you are and here's where we're going to be at the end of the year.
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The other teachers thought she was crazy, but she literally accomplished it.
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And I just think if she had known what she was doing, would she have set that goal?
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I think about these two guys, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, who at the age of 20, 23, after teaching for two years in Houston, Texas.
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Decided, you know what, they watched their fifth graders going off into dysfunctional middle schools and they said, we can't let this happen.
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We're going to start schools, and at the age of 25, started the first KIPP academies and next year there will be 80 KIPP academies in low income communities across the country.
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Which are truly showing that not just in classrooms but in whole schools you can take kids who face all the challenges of poverty and truly put them on a level playing field with kids in other communities.
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And again, I think, how did they do that?
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It was just they didn't know enough to know better, so I make a big deal of that because I hear a lot.
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I actually just think that the decisions you make when you're really young really matter and they matter to the world.
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So when I think about the huge societal problems out there and I hear people talk about how they're going to go off and get a lot of experience and then retire and do good things.
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I just think, I wonder if it's the right call because there is such a value in the fresh perspective and the naivete and the idealism that I think young people bring.
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My second reflection is sort of the flip side of that, and that has to do with what I've learned about the value of experience, the value of just time and ultimately, I guess, of just of perseverance.
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There were many points, well, I myself, we were at sort of the depths of despair at Teach for America at our sixth year or so.
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In fact, there was a headline in a U.
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S news & World Report magazine saying Teach for America closes its doors.
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And there was much evidence that there was just no other option, I mean, the money wasn't there, it was a disaster.
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But we stepped back from that and we set this goal of gaining stability.
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And my thought was, I'm going to put this on stable footing and then I'm going to go.
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And I'm just so grateful that I didn't go because when I think about the impact that Teach for America is having today versus even three years ago.
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Let alone five years ago and ten years ago, it's just at a whole different level.
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And I mean, I'm definitely not a believer that anyone is indispensable, and if I left today, there'd be other great leaders of Teach for America.
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But the point being that I just think there's such value in sticking with something and just learning the lessons that come along with time and with a relentless focus on attaining bigger and bigger results.
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I just think that people probably would never have believed if you looked at where we were eight years ago, that Teach for America could be at the level that it is at Now, and I guess I say that because it's very rarely that I meet people who are young, who stick with things for a long time.
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And I do think that there's kind of an ethic in our collective generation around you do this for two years and then you do that for two years.
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And obviously, in part, that's a search for what you really want, which, as to my next point, is, I think, critical to undertake.
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But I just think that there is serious value in sticking with something.
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I think about a guy named Chris Barbick who actually, like Dave and Mike, taught in Houston.
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And the parents of his kids were so, he opened their eyes to what they should expect from their teachers.
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And those kids, too, went into a very dysfunctional middle school in Houston.
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And the parents went to the school board and insisted that they give this guy, who was at the time about 25, a building.
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So he started a middle school.
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And then when his kids were about to graduate from middle school, he realized, I got to start a high school.
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So he started a high school.
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And I just, I've heard over many years now, this is a guy who just came into this committee two years.
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I mean, he wasn't going to stick with it, but he has stuck with it.
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And now he's been at it, I guess, 13 years he's been working to build his schools.
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And I spent a lot of time talking to Chris and hearing about all the many challenges he's faced in truly building this high school.
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But what is amazing to realize, if you look at Newsweek's list of top 100 high schools in America, which is an absolute ranking of high schools based on the percentage of the kids in the schools who are taking college level classes and actually getting college credit.
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His school is the number 38 on the list of top 100 high schools in America.
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It's the only school on the list from Houston.
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So according to Newsweek, you're better off in Chris's high school, which serves kids who are 80% of whom qualify for free and reduced lunch.
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It's one of two schools on the list where more than 70% of the kids qualify for free and reduced lunch.
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So Chris has stuck with things much longer than mere mortals would, but he just has so much to show for it.
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His school is showing the world what it is possible for kids growing up in poverty to achieve.
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So that's my second thought.
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Just the value of perseverance and time.
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The third is the importance of finding your passion.
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And this sounds maybe a little trite, but I think I feel so lucky.
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I mean, I feel nothing but lucky that I somehow landed in something that I believe so passionately in and that I just cannot imagine leaving.
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And I think that so much of the culture of Teach for America actually is, which I view as a collection of many leaders.
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It's a culture of kind of relentless pursuit of results, where all that matters is getting better and better results and getting better and better impact.
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So there aren't a lot of people who think a lot about themselves at some level, or even their own leadership at some level.
27:28
It's just all about the work.
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And I think that accounts as much for, at least, knock on wood, the success to this point of Teach for America as anything else.
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And I think the reason it's that way is just because the people who are here have found their passion.
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And as a result, once you have your passion, you're going to focus on what you're doing and not get caught up in other things that matter a lot less.
27:58
So I guess I'll just close on that thought.
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I guess just the thought that I think leaders in this work spend not a lot of time thinking about their own leadership and a whole lot of time thinking about how we can get greater and greater impact.
28:17
And I think maybe there's some sort of leadership lesson in that.
28:24
So with that, I'll open it up to have a discussion with you all.
28:28
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Speaker 2: Continues to be a force for change.
28:39
Sorry, A force for change in a system that's essentially broken, right?
28:45
The state of public education and the inequities you're talking about are being helped dramatically in the Teach for America schools and in some of those areas.
28:54
But compared to the overall problem, it's still pretty small.
28:59
And I would just wonder, especially in sort of a hot election year, what's the short version of your call to policymakers, to state boards of education and so forth to enact some of those changes?
29:13
And what are the changes that will start to change the public education system more systemically, I guess?
29:20
>> Speaker 1: I first have to comment on the first half of the question because I guess Teach for America is an effort to affect radical systemic change.
29:32
I mean, that is how we view our work.
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And our theory here is that there is really only one path to that, and that is to get as many of our future leaders as possible to channel their energy against this massive problem.
29:50
And the idea is that ultimately, like long-term, it will be their leadership and initiative together with the leadership and initiative of the others who are focused on this problem.
30:02
But that will be critical to effecting systemic change.
30:06
So, when you look at the aggregate picture right now, though, to your point, I mean, little has changed, I mean, in a decade or two decades of this work, the aggregate data about the state of the achievement gap, I mean, nothing has changed and yet I'm really optimistic. So why is that?
30:27
And just to throw out a couple of things on that, I think about the fact that a decade ago there were maybe five schools in the country that were taking kids who are maybe starting out at like the 30th percentile against the national norm, which is pretty classic for kids in low income communities.
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And truly getting them to a totally different place so that they could compete for entry to the best practice private schools in the country and get in and get full scholarships.
30:57
Now, there are probably 200 of those schools.
30:59
So we went from 0, 15 years ago to 5 to 200.
31:04
And there's something in that.
31:06
I mean we need to get to hundreds and thousands ultimately.
31:10
And I'm not taking credit for the small school movement, although I don't think we would have it without Teach for America, just because I think the guys who pioneered the concept of the Kipps schools, which is the basis of so many of those, were Teach for America Alumnis.
31:23
And about half of the schools that are out there, half of the 200 or so, are actually run by Teach for America Alumnis.
31:30
But I think that shows us what is possible and I think that those schools have also shown us how to do it.
31:36
At some level those schools show us the path.
31:39
Now we need to figure out how do we have whole systems of those schools.
31:44
People listen to that and they say, yeah, we know how to do it at the school level, but we don't know how to do it at the system level.
31:50
And ultimately, I guess, let me share.
31:54
So you know the DC story I told where we've got a whole bunch of Teach for America folks at the center of this district and it's It's not the fact, I mean, okay, so they're Teach for America, but the results might not change, and sure, I mean, they might not.
32:06
And we don't have any results because they've only been in their jobs for eight months or less.
32:11
But I just spent a couple of hours listening to them share sort of the inside view around their approach and all.
32:20
Because I think it answers even your policy question, what do I actually believe is the real solution here?
32:28
So Michelle is a rare leader of a school system.
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Rare in the sense that she is a rare talent, I mean, we need more rare talents managing our school systems.
32:40
But she also just has a very rare level of conviction.
32:43
When she taught in Baltimore, she moved a class of kids from the 13th percentile against the national norm to the 90th percentile.
32:51
She taught the same kids for two years.
32:53
And what you know after you've done that, you've gotten to know the kids and the families and you watched kids who were not going to be on track to graduating from high school and you put them on track to compete with any kids in the country.
33:09
I mean, you just know at the bottom of your heart that you can solve this problem.
33:13
We don't have the problem because kids can't do it or because the families don't care, clearly they just weren't given the opportunities they deserve.
33:22
And whenever, do a Google search and type in Michelle Rhee and watch the interviews, you realize that that's where she's coming from at every juncture.
33:32
Like nothing, she will consider no special interest if it is not about the kids.
33:36
And the other thing is she has the value of youth and inexperience, right?
33:43
So she's come into this job and she's just assuming change is possible now.
33:50
So she has left nothing on the table and she's gone into things like union negotiations, just saying, you know what, let's consider a grand bargain here.
33:58
Radical increases in compensation in exchange for certain other things that every union leader in the country says are not possible.
34:05
And evidently progress has happened and big changes and announcements are going to be announced in May.
34:13
But the other thing about Michelle and her team is that they reject any silver bullet ideas, right?
34:21
And that's what happens when you teach in an urban or rural area.
34:25
You come out of this knowing this is not going to be solved by giving every kid computer, there is not one curriculum that is going to solve this problem.
34:33
You just Know that it's about doing all the things, it's about doing everything right at some level.
34:39
All the things that anyone knows account for success in any sector, that's what we need in our schools, that there's no magic to this and there's also no way around the hard work of just making it happen.
34:51
So it's all about ensuring talent at every level of the system, building strong cultures, systems for accountability, continuous improvement, and it's just all the basics.
35:01
So when you look at what they've done in DC, so Michelle comes in, and this sounds so basic, right?
35:07
What I'm about to say is so basic and yet this is not what happens in school systems.
35:11
And she says, okay, first two weeks of the school year she and her deputy chancellor Kaia Henderson are going to get into every school in the system and their school system is manageable enough to be able to do this.
35:21
And the context, by the way, Washington DC is the 51st lowest state in student achievement levels out of 51, I mean it's just dismal. They have 50,000 kids.
35:34
So they got into every school, they just went out and they said we're going to meet with the principal and we're going to ask the principal to see the two best teachers and the two worst teachers classrooms in the school.
35:43
I mean, just even like the handsonness of that, right?
35:49
Their entire agenda is human capital, they fought and won the ability to put all of the central staff, have them be at will employees so that they can fire them if that's what they need to do.
36:01
And then they proceeded to immediately ask 100 of them to leave and, say, and much more change is about to come.
36:10
They have 130 principals and are replacing about 50 of them this year, they went into those union negotiations saying we're going to make it more attractive to work in Washington DC than in any school system in the country.
36:22
I mean, they are doing all of the basics.
36:26
So, I guess seeing all of that is what gives me hope that actually, I mean, we're just seeing a tiny beginning of what we will ultimately see in, say, 10 years from all of this.
36:37
What would I say to policymakers?
36:39
I think it's really tough for that reason, I think that we as a country want to see our presidents stand up and solve our educational problems, and I really wish they could.
36:48
And I look at the federal no Child Left behind Act, which represented people coming together across the political aisle to say we're going to hold ourselves accountable for results.
36:58
And it seemed like a good thing.
36:59
But then you hear all the stories of how it backfires, and you hear the stories about the principals who take the kids out of their classrooms and put them in cafeterias for two months of test prep so that they can get their federal money.
37:11
And you just think, the best of intentions, but will a federal mandate ever substitute for genuine local leadership and commitment?
37:22
So I guess if I was a president talking to a presidential candidate, I would ground myself in this basic reality and I would think about what can we do at the federal level to build the capacity that exists in our local communities.
37:39
And when you think about capacity, it's a lot of different things, but human capital is huge, technology, it's just crazy.
37:47
You think about a GE, and I'm sure they do nothing the same that they did ten years ago in terms of technology, and our school systems, nothing is happening, I mean it's just completely crazy.
37:58
Everything done in schools is done the hardest way possible with no leverage from technology.
38:03
So I would make radical investments in trying to figure out how do we inspire much greater local capacity.
38:11
>> Speaker 2: So I have a question.
38:12
You mentioned that you thought it was important for some of your alums to go into fields other than education, like business.
38:20
What do you look for from them and potentially from other non-teacher America alum business.
38:27
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, well, one of the reasons I say that is because, I mean, we all know the influence that our corporate leaders have on policy among other things.
38:41
Interestingly, Michelle, we just had a big Teach for America alumni summit in DC to bring hundreds of folks together to say, okay, how can we support the reform effort?
38:51
And Michelle Rhee, the school's chancellor, was asked this exact question, question.
38:56
And her answer was, you would be surprised what a difference you can make.
39:01
And actually she'd gotten a couple of Teach for America alums, or I don't know, I guess she would say she didn't get them to do it, but they are doing it.
39:09
They created this network of people who just are wanting to support the reform effort.
39:17
And so whenever she has something that she needs from the city council, which is the big decision making roadblock for her, she just puts the word out and they get calls now, which they never used to get.
39:31
So it used to be that they would just hear from all the people who didn't want the changes to happen, the people who are the special interests in the school system.
39:39
And that's just who the city council would hear from.
39:42
And now the city council is being deluged by reform-oriented folks who are saying, make this change happen.
39:48
So people from the outside are wondering, how did they get the city council to approve this?
39:52
How'd they get the city council to let them fire all the central staff?
39:55
No one thought these things were going to happen.
39:57
So I think part of it is, I mean, her message was a little engaging.
40:00
Engagement matters a ton.
40:02
So I think it's looking for ways to support the agendas of reform minded folks who are working within the system.
40:16
>> Speaker 2: So along this journey, I just want to know what was one of the hardest decisions that you had to make to remain true to your mission and your strategy?
40:24
Like, was there something you had to say no to?
40:30
>> Speaker 1: It's funny because in the first like month after I graduated, I met with someone who had started City Year, which is an urban Peace Corps, and he was giving me advice and his big piece of advice was just say no. Just learn to say no.
40:46
Like everyone's going to try to get you to do things other than your mission.
40:49
And at the time I was just, okay, that didn't seem too meaningful.
40:55
But I have since learned, I mean, probably not a day goes by.
41:00
I mean, I feel like that's my job.
41:02
My job is to listen to everyone all day long.
41:06
I mean, really who want us to do all sorts of other things and evaluate when they are right, which there's always the potential, but just. >> [LAUGH] >> Say no.
41:22
And I do think that I didn't realize the importance of that enough initially.
41:28
I mean, clearly we've been pretty single minded even at the beginning.
41:31
But we ourselves, I mean there was so much momentum in the very early years of Teach For America and we thought we could do anything.
41:39
And we also thought that this effort itself wasn't going to solve the big problem.
41:44
And to your point, that much else was needed.
41:46
And so we started launching new initiatives that started seem like great ideas one of them to say, okay, how do we take everything we've learned and help districts do it?
41:55
Which seems like a very relevant idea, but is actually a very different theory of change.
41:59
It requires very different core competencies.
42:03
But we did that and actually view that as one of the big bad decisions.
42:07
Although I'm sort of glad we did it because we spun it off and it's a thriving organization now.
42:12
But it was not good for Teach For America.
42:15
So I do think that just being so clear about what our theory of change is and about what our core competencies are and letting that drive our everyday decision making is just so critical. Well.
42:34
>> Speaker 3: Since you now have so many more applicants than you at least have spaces for right now?
42:39
How do you think about these future leaders and who they should be as they come to these positions in the classroom?
42:44
And then whether or not they stay, who are the people that ae going to make that progress going forward and stay with the education reform?
42:52
>> Speaker 1: So you're saying, how do we think about who we bring in?
42:54
And I think there was even probably some, I mean, there may have been some assumption in that question, or maybe not.
43:06
But I mean, one thing that we deeply believe is that the critical question is who are the people who have the leadership characteristics necessary to excel with their kids and ultimately to assume influence in our country?
43:21
We're not looking at who do we think is going to stick with this.
43:24
And we're not looking at that for a couple reasons.
43:27
One, we've seen no correlation between what people think coming in and what they decide two years later.
43:31
None, this is such a transformative experience.
43:35
Probably the first two years out of college in general are transformative, but this is uniquely transformative, I think.
43:41
But secondly, I mean, I guess we really do believe.
43:46
I mean, we believe that we need many people to stay and many people are staying, but we really do believe that we need many people to go.
43:53
I mean, thus this year we struck up all these corporate partnerships with companies from McKinsey to Goldman to whatever to GE to say okay, if you get an offer from one of our firms.
44:04
And you get a Teach For America offer, you can defer our offer to do Teach for America.
44:07
And we did that in part because we started realizing we're not getting enough of the people who are determined to go into business. And we think ultimately.
44:13
And my answer even to your question was incomplete.
44:16
I mean, and I'm going to get back to your question really quickly.
44:18
But I sit around with all these corporate leaders who have so much influence but who don't understand this problem, who fundamentally, some of them do, but some of them really don't.
44:30
And a lot of people in our country have sort of given up on this problem and believe that we have this problem because of all the challenges of poverty, because of low parent involvement or lack of student motivation or whatever.
44:42
And I guess I think that that's very damaging to our effort.
44:46
It's not true, our core members come out of this experience having worked with kids and families, knowing it's not that the kids aren't motivated, it's not that the parents don't care.
44:54
That might seem like what you see if you just look quickly at the situation, but that's like those are outpourings of other deeper problems in the system.
45:07
And so ultimately, we need more business people who really get it, who understand we could solve this problem if we were making different choices. So what do we look for?
45:15
We've done a ton of research over time.
45:17
We continue to do more to look at what are the personal characteristics that differentiate the people who succeed with their kids from those who succeed, but not at high levels.
45:27
And what we've seen is that people who demonstrate high levels of past achievement, the ability to influence and motivate others in a sophisticated way, people who persevere in the face of challenges, that's a number one.
45:40
People who want to do this, who want to work relentlessly in the pursuit of this mission and are not looking at, for balance in life at this particular juncture in their life.
45:52
I mean, it takes people who are just going to pour themselves in and who do have high expectations for kids in low income communities.
46:01
>> Speaker 2: When you first started, how difficult was it to have the schools, which are very established institutions, accept your teachers and what advice do you have for us when we want to make change?
46:14
And institutions that are very ingrained in what they do?
46:17
>> Speaker 1: There was a huge enabler when we started, which was a huge teacher shortage.
46:24
And now we'll go into school systems that don't necessarily have a shortage.
46:31
Meaning they have open spots, but they've got plenty of people who want the spots, who might have come through other channels.
46:37
And they have to decide do I want Teach For America people or do I want people trained by another teacher at institution.
46:43
But at the time there were just huge vacancies.
46:47
And so, I mean, I just still remember sitting down with the personnel directors in the Los Angeles Unified School System, in the New York City school system.
46:55
And showing them a list of 100 top colleges where we were going to recruit and having them be like, yeah, you get students from these schools who want to teach in our schools and we'll hire them.
47:05
So that was not the challenge for us initially.
47:11
I think that's it, thank you. >> [APPLAUSE]