The Problem-Solver

She was too naive to know her idea couldn't work. The fear came after she succeeded.

A Brilliant Brainstorm

In 1989, Wendy Kopp was a college student, searching for a topic for her senior thesis. What she found was a calling.

As a public policy major at Princeton University, Kopp couldn't help noticing the educational disparity between students who had gone to public schools in low-income communities and those who had attended prep schools. "I saw students from under-resourced communities who were incredibly driven but struggling to meet the academic demands, and I saw kids from privileged backgrounds calling Princeton a cakewalk. That turned me on to the fact that while our country aspires to be a land of opportunity, where you're born does a lot to determine your educational prospects."

At the same time, Kopp was anxious about finding a meaningful topic for her thesis. And she was getting irritated by the popular assumption that pegged her fellow Gen Xers as self-involved moneygrubbers who only wanted to work for investment banks and management consulting firms.

Then, at a conference on the sad state of American education, Kopp realized she had a solution to all three problems: "Why doesn't this country have a national teaching corps that recruits young graduates to work in low-income communities the way we were being recruited to work on Wall Street?"

She called her brainstorm Teach for America. In 15 years, this "Peace Corps for teachers" has placed over 10,000 recent college grads in more than 1,000 schools in 22 regions around the country. Last year, no fewer than one out of every eight seniors at Yale University and Spelman College competed with some 17,000 applicants for 2,100 slots. Their training and the salaries for their two-year stints are paid out of a multimillion-dollar budget, derived from both government and private funds. The donors include such heavy hitters as Wachovia, AT&T, the Walton Family Foundation, the Xerox Foundation and many of the same Wall Street institutions where Teach for America alumni might once have been headed.

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• Against the Odds
• He was just another dropout -- until he got the measles and a goal.
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• Courage Under Ire
• I had a choice -- cave in to the bully or do what I loved.
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