A Conversation With Catherine Brown

Vice President of Federal Policy, Teach For America
February 2011

Carnegie Corporation awarded its first grant to Teach For America (TFA) in 1990.  For the past 20 years, TFA has confronted the challenge of closing the achievement gap by recruiting, training, and supporting more than 20,000 outstanding college graduates to teach in our country’s highest-need schools. Because of a national focus on service, the current economic condition, and TFA’s sterling reputation and successful recruiting efforts, TFA was confronted with an unexpected challenge: the supply of outstanding applicants exceeded the funding available to place them. In order to seize this unique opportunity, TFA created a 2013 Growth Fund of $80 million to place 3,500 additional corps members in under-served districts across the country over the next five years. With Carnegie Corporation support, TFA reached its goal of $80 million.

Tell me a little bit about Teach For America.

Teach For America recruits our nation's most promising future leaders to help end educational inequity.  And we do this by finding people who will go above and beyond to teach in our nation's most under resourced classrooms, and then go on to dedicate their lives to ending educational inequity through various means--advocacy, leadership, as well as in other realms like policy, media and research.    

Why is ending educational inequity so important?
Children who are growing up in low income communities don't have the same opportunity to achieve their potential as children growing up in higher income communities.  If you're growing up in a low income community, your chances of graduating from college are extremely low.  And that really dims your life prospects.         

How does society benefit from greater equity in education?
When more people have achieved their potential as individuals, and become contributing members of society as innovators or scientists, for example, our overall productivity grows.  And fundamentally, education is a human rights issue.  It's about children having the chance to be all that they can be.  Unfortunately, where you live, in many ways, dictates the quality of your education.         

So there’s a dearth of quality teachers in low income areas?
Children in low income communities need more excellent teachers, more high quality facilities, more decent classrooms, more textbooks and more pencils.  Unfortunately, they’re getting less of all of these.

How are you remedying this inequity?
We're going into colleges and universities across the country, and finding our nation's most promising future leaders.  These are young men and women who have demonstrated that they have the skills and competencies to succeed as teachers in these specific communities. We're recruiting them to teach, and then we're placing them in predominantly low income schools.

What happens at the end of the two years?
After they’ve completed their two year commitment, they take with them the conviction that the problem is not that children can't achieve at the high levels, or that they don't care, or that their parents don't care.  The problem is that the children don't have the same high expectations placed upon them as children in other communities.

Where do they go?
They often continue teaching or serve in a leadership capacity in some other way.  But nearly always leave committed to equalizing educational opportunities for children everywhere.

Why is teaching so important?
Research shows that good teachers make a difference.  And teaching is really about the future of our country, of children, of the world.  The poor educational quality that we're providing, particularly our low income children is the root to much of our nation’s decline in competitiveness.  In order to get America back on track, we have to improve education for all children.