Mission

Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in underserved urban and rural public schools. Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort.

In America today, educational inequity persists along socioeconomic and racial lines. Nine-year-olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities. Half of them will not graduate from high school, and those who do graduate will, on average, read and do math at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities. These disparities severely limit the life prospects of the 13 million children growing up in poverty today. In addition, because African-American and Latino/Hispanic children are three times as likely to grow up in a low-income area, these disparities also prevent many children of color from truly having equal opportunities in life.

But it does not have to be this way. While the problem is daunting, we see evidence every day in classrooms across the country that when students in low-income communities are given the educational opportunities they deserve, they excel. It is this clear potential of students that makes the disparities in educational outcomes so unconscionable and fuels our sense of urgency and responsibility to do everything we can to ensure educational opportunity for all.

Therefore, each year we launch an aggressive effort to recruit the most outstanding graduating college seniors and recent college graduates people who will be the future leaders in fields such as business, medicine, politics, law, journalism, education, and social policy.

Our theory of change is that building a corps of our country's most promising future leaders who commit two years to teach in low-income communities has an important short-term and long-term impact. During their two years, corps members go above and beyond traditional expectations to ensure that more students growing up today have the educational opportunities they deserve.

Over the long-term, Teach For America has an impact on two levels:

1) By changing the career paths of the majority of our alumni, who remain long-term in education or in related efforts in low-income communities, Teach For America builds a unique pipeline of leadership for education and social reform.

2) By building a force of leaders who assume positions of influence in all sectors and who have the rare perspective and commitment that comes from their teaching experience, Teach For America ultimately influences our national priorities and the prevailing ideology.

Programs

Firsthand experience has shown us that, when given the opportunity, students in low-income communities can and will achieve at high levels. Armed with this knowledge, our corps members and alumni work relentlessly to increase academic achievement and expand educational opportunities for their students.

Since our inception in 1990, the Teach For America network has grown to include more than 20,000 individuals. Currently, some 6,200 Teach For America corps members teach in 30 urban and rural areas profoundly affected by the achievement gap. They are working extraordinarily hard to ensure that their students achieve academic success despite the inequities they face.

Our alumni are a powerful and growing force for change. By exerting leadership from inside and outside education, our more than 14,000 alumni leverage their corps experience to improve outcomes and opportunities for low-income students and to fight for systemic reform.

Because of the impact our corps members and alumni are having in the short and long term, there is tremendous demand within communities and larger education reform circles for Teach For America. In fact, we are growing our presence in regions where we already place corps members, and will be expanding to new communities for the 2009-10 school year.