Alumni of Teaching Charity Pursue Variety of Public-Service Career Paths

By MEG SOMMERFELD

When Wendy S. Kopp started Teach For America, she fully anticipated that many of the

recent college graduates who signed up with the group for two-year stints as teachers would pursue long-term careers with public schools.

But she also had another less obvious hope: to inspire others to tackle inequities in education for poor students from other vantage points — including working with nonprofit groups.

Ms. Kopp wasn’t exactly sure how the second part of her objective would play out. But studies that have monitored former participants over Teach For America’s 10-year history show promising signs.

Some 60 percent of the group’s 5,000 alumni have gone on to work at schools or in other education-related jobs, including 7 percent who work for education-related nonprofit groups.

An additional 4 percent of former participants work for other types of charitable organizations. And at least eight alumni have gone on to start their own charities, while a dozen others have started so-called charter schools — public schools that operate independently from regular school districts.

Soccer and Academics

One nonprofit organization started by a former Teach For America participant is America Scores, a national program based in Washington that sets up soccer leagues in low-income neighborhoods and also provides participants with after-school tutoring.

Another, the Learning Project, in New York, designs and operates new schools.

Perhaps the best-known are the two KIPP Academies, in Houston and New York, started and run by David Levin and Michael Feinberg.

The schools use the teaching method — known as the Knowledge is Power Program — that the two men designed together while working as Teach For America participants in Houston.

KIPP’s success in improving the academic achievement of poor minority students has been profiled on the television program “60 Minutes,” and was cited by Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican nominee, during the second presidential debate.

Most recently, KIPP Academies received a major lift when Donald and Doris Fisher, founders of the Gap clothing chain, pledged $15-million to start the KIPP Foundation, a nonprofit organization that will help educators start schools that use the teaching methods developed by the two men.

‘Where Credit Is Due’

Not all of the nonprofit groups started by Teach For America alumni focus on education.

Mark Levine, who taught math and science at a South Bronx, N.Y., junior high school from 1991 to 1993, started a charity called Credit Where Credit Is Due, which worked to create a federally chartered credit union in Washington Heights, a poor New York City neighborhood with few banks.

Mr. Levine says he was struck by the stories he heard from his students about how difficult it was for their families to open a bank account or get a loan. So when he got his master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government after he left teaching, Mr. Levine used his thesis to put together a business plan for the nonprofit group.

Today Mr. Levine’s credit union has 3,200 members, including 200 small businesses and 50 nonprofit groups. “People are literally bringing in money from under their mattresses,” says Mr. Levine.

Since its inception three years ago, the credit union has made $2-million in loans, and it recently opened a second branch.

One Teach For America alumna, Janna Wagner, helped create a nonprofit group that helps welfare recipients with children solve employment and child-care problems simultaneously.

The group, All Our Kin, in New Haven, Conn., trains participants to become early-childhood educators, enabling them to spend time with their children while they learn how to establish daycare programs in their homes or work for existing daycare centers.

The group currently enrolls about a dozen individuals at its two sites. In the morning, half the participants take classes while the other half care for the children. In the afternoon, the groups trade places.

Ms. Wagner, who was a psychology major at Yale University, says she had planned to become an education researcher before spending three years teaching third grade in the South Bronx through Teach For America.

That experience, she says, made her realize that she wanted to work directly with children instead of studying them from afar in laboratories or libraries.

After earning her master’s degree from Harvard’s education school, Ms. Wagner co-founded the charity with Jessica Sager, a Yale Law School graduate.

The women were frustrated that parents on welfare were finding it hard to locate affordable, safe daycare as new state welfare laws sent them hunting for jobs. Such parents, they felt, should not have to choose between a job and the well-being of their children.

Ms. Wagner says Teach For America gave her the added inspiration — and a network of people she could turn to for advice — that made it less daunting to start a charity. Not only does the program convince a person “that you can change the system,” she says, but “it makes you feel like it’s your duty.”

NONPROFIT GROUPS CREATED BY TEACH FOR AMERICA PARTICIPANTS