Teach For America
Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors and career interests who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity.
Their mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort.
In the short run, their corps members work relentlessly to ensure that more students growing up today in our country's lowest-income communities are given the educational opportunities they deserve. In the long run, their alumni are a powerful force of leaders working from inside education and from every other sector to effect the fundamental changes needed to ensure that all children have an equal chance in life.
What does opportunity mean to Teach for America or to the communities they work in?
"There are over 15 million children in this country who are living in poverty; these kids have a 50% chance of graduating from high school and only 10% will graduate from college, compared with 80% of their more affluent peers. This educational inequity limits life choices, professional options and incomes, and it weakens families and communities. We believe it is unconscionable that our education system fails children growing up in poverty and that we have a moral imperative to eliminate this inequity. To Teach For America, "opportunity" means receiving an excellent education, going to college and transcending the statistics that currently define low-income communities."