ATLANTA - Teach for America, the education organization that places recent college graduates in low-income public schools, is getting $100 million to launch its first-ever endowment in hopes of making the grass-roots organization a permanent fixture in education.
The program - which is now in communities from Atlanta to rural New Mexico to Los Angeles - announced Thursday that four philanthropists are joining to create a stable, long-term source of money. It's welcome news for an organization that had more than 46,000 applications for just 4,400 teaching slots this academic year.
"A few years ago we embraced the priority of making Teach For America an enduring American institution that can thrive as long as the problem we're working to address persists," said founder Wendy Kopp, who dreamed up Teach For America for her undergraduate thesis and launched it in 1990. "I think it's only appropriate in our country - which aspires to be a place of equal opportunity - that we have an institution which is about our future leaders making good on that promise."
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It's also likely to be unwelcome news for teachers' unions and other opponents, who say Teach For America puts inexperienced 20-somethings with just five weeks of training in classrooms and most of don't stay after their two years of service.
"I don't want anyone to practice or test out whether teaching is their profession on children," said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, a teachers' union with 3 million members.
Teach for America says one-third of its alumni keep teaching after two years, and two out of three remain in the field, some as public-policy analysts or school administrators.
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Find out more about Teach For America at: www.teachforamerica.org
