CEO & Co-Founder, Teach For All and Founder & Chair, Teach For America
Wendy Kopp is CEO and co-founder of Teach For All, which is fueling a global movement for ensuring educational excellence and equity by accelerating the impact of national organizations that are enlisting their nations’ most promising future leaders in the effort.
Wendy is also the chair of Teach For America, which she founded in 1989 to marshal the energy of her generation against educational inequity in the United States. Today, more than 10,000 Teach For America corps members – top recent college graduates of all academic disciplines – are in the midst of two-year teaching commitments in the nation’s highest-need urban and rural regions, and Teach For America has proven to be an unparalleled source of long-term leadership for educational change.
Just six years into its development, Teach For All is a growing network of 26 independent organizations around the world, including its founding partners Teach For America and the U.K.’s Teach First.
Wendy has been recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards for public service. She is the author of A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing an Excellent Education for All (2011) and One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way (2000). She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She resides in New York City with her husband Richard Barth and their four children.