Company Overview

In addition to teaching corps positions, Teach for America offers a variety of opportunities for experienced professionals. Corporations providing funding to Teach for America include American Express, AT&T, BellSouth, and Goldman Sachs. Teach for America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates, of all academic majors, who commit 2 years to teach in public schools in low-income communities. Since its founding in 1989, the organization has placed more than 11,000 recent college graduates as teachers in some of the nation’s most under-resourced urban and rural schools. The organization was started by Wendy Kopp, who envisioned the program as a senior at Princeton University in 1988. Kopp developed a plan for the idea in her undergraduate senior thesis and then secured a seed grant from Mobil Corporation to get started. The program’s popularity has grown considerably since its inception; 17,000 applications were received in 2005. Among them were 12 percent of the senior classes at Yale and Spelman College, 11 percent of the graduating classes at Dartmouth and Amherst College, and 8 percent at Princeton and Harvard. Teach for America has 25 regional sites across the United States as of fall 2006.