Wendy Kopp
President and Founder
Teach For America

Wendy Kopp is the president and founder of Teach For America, the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates. These dedicated individuals commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in pursuit of educational excellence and equity. Teach For America's mission is to help to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our country's most promising future leaders in the effort.

In 1989, Kopp proposed the creation of Teach For America in her undergraduate senior thesis and has spent the last 15 years working to sustain and grow the organization. Today, more than 4,400 corps members are teaching in our country's neediest communities, reaching approximately 375,000 students. They join more than 12,000 Teach For America alumni who are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform even though they are in their 20s and 30s.

Under Kopp's leadership, Teach For America is working to grow to scale while maximizing the impact of corps members and alumni as a force for short-term and long-term change.

Kopp serves on the board of directors of The New Teacher Project, and the advisory boards of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Kopp holds a bachelors of arts degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.