Current Teach for America corps member and UCLA alumna Jazmine
Green said her experience with the program has convinced her she
wants to work to address challenges children face for the rest of
her life.
Through the same program, Rachel Kelley, a former corps member
who also graduated from UCLA, taught a class of second-graders in
Baltimore while she earned a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins
University ““ without paying a dime.
And second-year UCLA student Christin Bermudez said her Advanced
Placement biology teacher at John Marshall high school in Pasadena,
who was a corps member, set her on the right track educationally.
After taking his class, she took nine more AP classes. As she puts
it, that’s the reason she’s at UCLA today.
Teach for America is a national corps of recent college
graduates of all academic majors who offer two years of their lives
to teach in public schools in some of the country’s poorest
areas.
The program is rapidly growing ““ applications leaped from
under 5,000 in 2001 to almost 14,000 last year, and the program now
has over 2,500 members teaching all over the country
““Â from South Central Los Angeles to the Mississippi
River Delta; from inner-city Baltimore to rural New Mexico.
The program is growing in scope now, but Teach for America had
humbler beginnings, growing out of a Princeton
undergraduate’s senior thesis.
Wendy Kopps wrote her thesis ““Â “An Argument and
Plan for the Creation of of the Teacher Corps” ““ in the
late 1980s. She sent the plan out to potential funders and got a
good response as philanthropists around the country pitched in more
than $2 million to start up the program.
Early on the program embraced the goal of closing educational
achievement gaps and searched for the most dedicated and vigorous
college graduates they could find. Corps members were sent to areas
where school children had minimal access to health care, were often
underfed or abused and sometimes lived in utter poverty.
In 1990 Teach for America had about 500 corps members, and it
grew steadily throughout the decade.
Programs at some Teach for America locations allow students to
teach in the classroom and simultaneously work on a master’s
degree ““ for free. Additionally, numerous top-notch graduate
study programs will defer admissions for two years to students
accepted as corps members.
After steady growth since its creation, the program last year
exploded in popularity. Those involved with Teach for America
attribute the increase in part to what they see as a post-Sept. 11
desire among the United States’ young people to serve their
country.
“I think that was definitely part of it,” said
Kristina Byrd, recruitment director for Teach for America’s
southwestern team.
Teach for America is affiliated with Americorps, a network of
national service programs that engages more than 50,000 each year
in service to meet needs in areas of education, public safety,
health and the environment.
President Bush commended the corps in his state of the union
address in January, called on Congress to raise its funding and
asked Americans to dedicate at least part of their lives to public
service.
First lady Laura Bush, meanwhile, has called on college-educated
young people to serve their country by taking their talent to
struggling classrooms. In September, she visited classrooms in the
impoverished Mississippi Delta region and announced a $1 million
grant to the program ““ still mostly funded by private
donations ““ from the U.S. Department of Education.
UCLA student recruitment campaign coordinators are hoping to
help the program continue to develop. Bermudez, a second-year
history student; Alana Kadden, a third-year business economics
student; and Matthew Fox, who received a master’s degree in
education last year, just finished up a “blitz week”
that included Bruin Walk tabling and presentations to various
student groups as they tried to find future teachers.
In the summer, the three attended a recruiting seminar in New
Orleans where they networked with recruiters from other campuses,
including Princeton University, USC, the University of Arizona and
Arizona State University.
Recruiters say they are looking for “goal-oriented”
people to help address educational disparities.
“Effective teachers do what effective leaders do: … make
high goals and pursue them,” said Kelley, a UCLA sociology
and communications graduate and current Teach for America
recruiter, at an information session the program held at Covel
Commons Wednesday night.
Green, meanwhile, said program directors are always telling
corps members to “keep your expectations high
““Â keep them high, keep them high.”
In fact, Green, now in her second year of corps service at Nevin
Avenue school in Los Angeles, said one of the biggest challenges is
working with full-time teachers who seem to have lost the passion
the corps members have.
“That,” Green said, “is very
difficult.”
But overall, Green said, the experience has been positive.
“I love it,” she said. “It just really suits
me.”
With reports from Rachel Makabi, Daily Bruin Senior Staff and
The Associated Press. Teach for America will hold another
information session Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. in the Career Center. On the
Web: www.teachforamerica.org.