Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  “That’s not the way it is at TFA. At TFA, if something doesn’t happen, it’s terrible, we think about what we did wrong, and we really dive in and change things because we hate when we don’t deliver results. And if somebody says, ‘That hurts my feelings,’ well, the thinking would be: It’s not about you, it’s about delivering results. You don’t let your personal emotions get in the way of results. High-performing organizations are not nice places to work, but they are very challenging places to work, and because of that, they attract people who like challenges. The question is always: What’s good the for kids?”

  Richard Riordan, mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001 and California secretary for education under Arnold Schwarzenegger, was on the TFA advisory committee early on, and he agrees. He and Kopp were fellow Princeton alums; the idea for Teach For America struck him as perfect. Riordan compares Kopp to Mother Teresa, who—he is quick to point out—may have been one of the most giving persons on earth but not necessarily the nicest.

  “Wendy wasn’t some sweet bouncing young girl that God sent down from a star,” he recalls. “She was a tough doer who really believed in what she was doing. To be a champion, sometimes you have to be pretty tough, and that describes Wendy.”

  According to Jerry Hauser, an alum who taught in Compton, California, in the inaugural corps and who returned to TFA in 1999, after law school and a stint at McKinsey, to preside over the first five-year growth plan, Kopp is a caring person who remembers birthdays and takes a real interest in others’ lives. But that’s not what sets her apart as a leader. What makes her unique is her “relentless pursuit of results,” he says. “She sets goals nobody thinks can ever happen, and she runs into obstacles, and she persists. The relentless pursuit of results, that’s the phrase that best captures Wendy.”

  Hauser recalls a particularly tense board meeting at the end of the first year of the expansion plan that was “classic Wendy.” It was the week after the 9/11 attacks, and things seemed pretty bleak. It didn’t look like there was going to be a lot of funding money around; the stock market had tanked by 25 percent. The board appeared ready to rethink the expansion. Then Kopp spoke. She said if ever there was a time to keep growing and going, it was then. It was critical that TFA do it for the country. She argued that the original plan was sound; TFA should stick to it. Some members of the board were skeptical and warned that they would keep a close eye on progress; if they didn’t like what they were seeing, they would ask TFA to change course. That never became an issue. The expansion unfolded pretty much as planned.

  Kopp had called on that same steely determination when she tried to steady the TFA ship in the mid-nineties. After slashing the budget, TFA launched a three-year plan to broaden its funding base, deepen its management bench, and build its reputation. It also decided to get some more grown-ups involved in the mission by strengthening its national board and creating regional boards. Especially after the Linda Darling-Hammond crisis, Kopp realized a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds couldn’t do the job entirely on their own—they needed friends in high places.

  For a while, it looked as if Kopp’s resolve to right her listing organization might have come too late. The federal government, which in 1994 had given TFA a $2 million grant as a member of the newly created network of community-service organizations called AmeriCorps, was not convinced of TFA’s viability. In the spring of 1995, the Corporation for National and Community Service threatened to deny renewal of the AmeriCorps grant unless TFA cut another $1 million from its already skeletal budget and agreed to accept the government’s $5,000 a year education awards for recruits. Kopp said yes, but even with the government’s infusion of $2 million and pledges of another half million dollars, TFA still needed another $150,000 to survive.

  It was the summer of 1995, and for the first time in the six years of TFA’s existence, Wendy Kopp broke down in tears during the local directors meeting in Houston. “She cracked,” recalls Good, who tends to speak in military metaphors when discussing TFA. “There had been a deluge of volleys—Linda Darling-Hammond, AmeriCorps, and the financial factors, with Wendy flying all over the place begging for money—and it all came to a head. Though she had an amazing capacity to not take things personally, and had withstood so many attacks through the years, I think she finally felt the weight of the personal attacks.” Good remembers that Kopp was addressing the group when suddenly she just stopped talking. He had to pause for a second and think: Is Wendy crying? Then she walked out of the room. Good caught up with her.

  “I will go to war for Teach For America,” he said, surprising himself with the intensity of his own feelings of loyalty to Kopp and TFA. When Kopp returned to the meeting, she was still teary-eyed, and she apologized for that. Now, standing before them, the show of confidence was over. The personal bravura had disappeared. Kopp told the gathering of the financial crisis at hand. As Good recalls, she sent out a very powerful message through her tears. “She said we had to change. Period. Because if we didn’t, we would not survive.”

  That was a turning point. By the end of the conference, Kopp had managed to scrape the money together. More important, she had rallied the troops. The so-called dark years were over. TFA had a big goal and a detailed plan for how to reach it. Kopp and her team took off on a relentless pursuit of results.

  By the time TFA celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2000, the financial woes that had plagued the early years had been put to rest; the organization had been operating on a surplus for four successive years. Applications had more than doubled from the all-time low of fewer than 2,000 in 1996 to 4,100 in 2000. American VIPs such as Oprah Winfrey, Henry Kissinger, and football coach Mike Ditka—as well as CEOs from America’s top corporations—had been lining up since 1997 to be guest teachers during the organization’s annual “Teach For America Week.” And Wendy Kopp, hailed by Time magazine in 1994 as one of the country’s most promising young leaders, was given the unofficial Washington imprimatur when President Bill Clinton invited her, together with other young leaders, to the White House for dinner and discussion. That same year, she met with presidential candidate and Texas governor George W. Bush, who was a fan of TFA’s work in his home state. After his election, Laura Bush named Teach For America one of the special causes she would publicly support as First Lady. In 2002, the president called Kopp one of America’s “quiet heroes.”

  TFA entered the new century stronger and smarter. “We’d been pursuing plans to make sure that we would survive over the long haul,” says Hauser. “And then in the spring of 2000, we thought: Gosh, we’ve kind of done it! Our day-to-day existence is not in question.” The immediate next thought was: What’s next? The choice was do more of the same, or step it up to a higher level to make a bigger impact.

  TFA wanted to ratchet it up. As it turns out, so did Don and Doris Fisher, founders of the Gap. The Fishers were supporters of KIPP, Knowledge Is Power Program, a chain of inner-city charter schools started by two former TFA teachers, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. The KIPP schools were staffed to a large extent by TFA alums. One way to grow the KIPP engine, reckoned the Fishers, would be to increase the pool of TFA teachers from which KIPP could recruit.

  Kopp got a call from the manager of the Fisher family’s Pisces Foundation one day in May 2000. The Fishers were interested in expanding Teach For America. Could Kopp meet them at their New York apartment? The meeting lasted an hour. The Fishers ended up giving TFA an $8.3 million grant over three years, which TFA matched on a one-to-one basis in four months. That cash infusion was to put Teach For America on a path of aggressive growth that would help it become one of the most highly touted social entrepreneurships of the new millennium.

  TFA had always relied on the kindness of strangers—and of rich men. In 1990, it was Ross Perot’s $500,000 challenge grant (TFA had to match it three-to-one) that funded the training and placement of the very first corps of five hundred. A decade later, the Fishers, with a grant of exponentially higher magnitude, allowed TFA to think b
ig. In order to truly close the achievement gap, the organization knew it would have to greatly expand its impact. The only way to do that would be to grow in size.

  Once again, TFA set goals. In five years, it wanted to double the number of corps members to four thousand. It would beef up training and support of its teachers to increase their effectiveness, and it would better cultivate alumni as agents of change. The idea was to get more corps members to move more students, to achieve more academic gains. At the same time, it needed more alumni in its leadership pipeline.

  All the big rocks were already in place. TFA had a program that it believed worked, and it had a strong, distinct corps of results-driven high achievers. But it lacked the sophistication and maturity of a great business enterprise. It needed to broaden its financial base, build up its organizational capacity, and attract more managerial talent.

  Every facet of the organization was to be affected by the decision to grow in size and impact: on the program continuum, TFA would enhance recruitment, selection, training and teacher development, alumni affairs, program design, and regional operations. Supporting the growth would be offices of marketing and communications, finance and operations, growth strategy and development, and human assets. Using frameworks and rubrics, it set goals, made action plans, got feedback, collected and analyzed data, and held itself accountable for the results. What emerged was a twenty-first-century hybrid—an organization with the soul of a nonprofit and the brains of a Fortune 500.

  TFA had been underinvesting in recruitment—and missing a lot of potentially great candidates as a result. In order to meet its target of four thousand CMs teaching by 2005, it would have to significantly increase the number of applicants.

  Until then, TFA’s approach to recruiting had been fairly straightforward: it advertised, held information sessions, and then picked the best from whoever applied. But TFA was competing against sophisticated recruiters with big budgets, like Goldman Sachs and the other elite investment banks and consulting firms—and it had to fight against the negative image of teaching as a profession. With advice from McKinsey, and under the leadership of Elissa Clapp, a 1996 alum, TFA began to beef up its infrastructure to support a more vigorous recruitment effort. The country was divided into recruitment territories, the number of recruitment offices was doubled, and progress was tracked.

  And a big new head-hunting strategy was crafted. Rather than waiting to see who would show up for its info sessions, TFA was going to aggressively seek out the people it wanted to apply. “Just casting a wide net would be leaving too much to chance,” explains Clapp. “Given the scope and the extremely high selection bar, we had to go out and proactively find those individuals most likely to be accepted.” Enlisting the help of professors, school administrators, recent alums, and campus activists to identify school leaders and high achievers, TFA then personally reached out to them, principally through e-mail, but later through personal meetings and phone calls. The targeted online communication appealed to tech-savvy coeds. Phillip Gedeon received repeated e-mails from TFA seeking to recruit him as a campus manager before curiosity finally got the best of him and he responded. TFA had Hrag Hamalian in its sights, too, identifying him early as a campus leader. Recruiters also marketed TFA through campus information sessions, job fairs, and strategically placed posters and flyers. But it put a lot of stock in one-on-one coffees and small dinners with potential candidates, many of whom had been preselected for special wooing.

  TFA got to know its target audience better through market research conducted by the Monitor Group. The research revealed that ten years on, TFA was perceived as a grassrootsy, do-gooder organization. To meet its expansion goals, the organization needed to better articulate the power of the TFA experience and reposition itself as smart, serious, and purposeful—an important alternative to Goldman Sachs or grad school. Research also indicated that TFA was reaching only one type of altruists. There was another group of socially conscious people out there who were long-term changers, too, but who thought the way to remake the world was through law school or some other postgraduate study program. TFA believed it could tap into that cohort if it could demonstrate that teaching in a high-needs community could actually provide the kind of insight and perspective that would make them better agents of change. And, far from foreclosing on other career options down the road, the set of “enablers” that TFA had created—the grad school and corporate partnerships—could actually expand them. The argument was that a two-year stint with Teach For America was a win-win proposition: good for low-performing students, good for high-achieving recruits.

  Melissa Golden became TFA’s brand czar in 2001. She was one of the first non-alums to join TFA’s top leadership team, and her input was key. Golden helped to reposition the brand by making sure that potential recruits and supporters understood that there were two parts to the TFA mission. In the short term, TFA teachers would make an immediate, catalytic impact in lower-income classrooms; longer term, they would join a burgeoning army of teacher leaders who, transformed by their teaching experience, would force systemic change to ensure educational equity, whether or not they stayed in the classroom beyond their two-year commitment.

  Since the beginning, TFA had been on the defensive about the short-term nature of the teaching commitment, particularly when talking to school districts and funders. By emphasizing the longer-term goal of the mission, TFA was able to neutralize some of the well-founded concerns around the issue of teacher churning in underperforming schools. It was hard to argue with the idea that true educational reform would require people in leadership positions beyond the classroom. In identifying America’s future leaders—in law, medicine, public policy, journalism, academia, business, politics, and education—and engaging them in this life-altering mission, TFA believed that it was setting the stage for the transformation of the American system of public education. Out of the TFA incubator would come the smart, driven leaders—across all professional disciplines—who would close the gap for good.

  Once TFA had better articulated its theory of change, it moved quickly to bring uniformity to the look and feel of the brand. Until then, the regions had been left to their own devices to create recruiting materials. The result was that TFA was sending out mixed messages. Under Golden’s policing, the marketing team developed general talking points to keep everyone within the organization on point. Recruiters and selectors were provided with scripts to use when interacting with potential candidates. TFA adopted a uniform color palette for internal and external use, and it centralized the creation of all its promotional material. It also built up its website, using it as a key recruitment tool for a generation that had grown up on the Internet. Like everything else about TFA, the site was a work-in-progress, constantly evolving to meet TFA’s changing needs and growing sophistication.

  Kopp believed that there had always been a social-service impulse among American youth—TFA just happened to tap into the urge to make an impact at a time when there were fewer avenues open to them. But ongoing market research—both internal and external—increasingly showed that there were important differences between the first generation of TFAers, Generation X, and the Millennials, or Generation Y, the huge cohort of babies born in the early eighties. As it turned out, TFA was an almost perfect fit with the millennium zeitgeist.

  Harvard Business School professor James Heskett describes Gen-Yers as bright, cheery multitaskers who are focused on their own personal development and want an accelerated path to success. He notes that because they are not willing “to pay the price” and have little fear of authority, they are bad bets for long-term employment. In their book Managing the Generation Mix, Carolyn A. Martin and Bruce Tulgan report that Millennials demand “the immediate gratification of making immediate impact by doing meaningful work immediately.”

  William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of the book Millennials Rising, note that trends in youth behavior suggest that Millennials have a much higher regard for family and commun
ity than do the boomers or Generation X. Indeed, a survey by the consumer research company Yankelovich released in 2006 indicated that Millennials and their parents had actually “zapped the [generation] gap.” Realizing that, TFA added a resource for parents to its website. Like their baby boomer parents, the Millennials were politically interested and socially active. The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that in 2001—the year Rachelle, Phillip, Taylor, and Hrag were college freshmen—a record 82.6 percent of incoming freshmen reported frequent or occasional volunteer work (a requirement for graduation for 28 percent of those polled), and the percentage of students keenly interested in political events made the largest one-year leap (to 31.4 percent) since the 1972 presidential election, the first election many of their parents voted in.

  Perhaps the one most defining characteristic of the new generation was its use of technology. Dubbed “digital natives,” Generation Y used the Internet as an essential tool for socializing, communicating, and accessing information. Millennials were increasingly wireless, too—and thus constantly connected. Their portables—laptops, iPods, cell phones—allowed them to work, study, play, communicate, and socialize in ways unimaginable to their parents. TFA increasingly turned to its website—not only for marketing, but eventually for online training and teacher development, too.

  As it studied the cohort, it adjusted its marketing and recruitment strategies. The trend toward public service played to TFA’s strength. But early research suggested that Millennials were not into group gropes; they believed in the power of the individual to make a difference in society. So, like the U.S. Army, which changed its media message to “An Army of One” to speak to a new generation of soldiers, TFA tried to address the idea of the individual as an agent of change. A subtle shift was made in its promotional material. Pictures in which adorable schoolchildren were once dominant gave way to images of individual corps members in classrooms, hard at work with their students.