Charlie Rose talks with Teach for America Founder Wendy Kopp
Charlie Rose featured an interview with Wendy Kopp, the Founder of Teach for America (official website) last week. For anyone interested in education the conversation is a fascinating one, following the recent publication of her book One Day, All Children…: The Unlikely Triumph Of Teach For America And What I Learned Along The Way.
I’m fascinated with Teach for America as a program. It’s most impressive accomplishment in my opinion, is not teacher recruitment or classroom performance, on which most commentators in educational circles understandably focus, but on Kopp’s more ambitious purpose in raising a generation of leaders who understand teaching from the inside. I’ve run into a number of Teach for America alums here in Houston, most of whom are no longer teaching but who remain deeply committed to the issues they were exposed to through the experience. Kopp’s original inspiration, to create an alternative to allow America’s top graduates to explore careers that offered a more meaningful impact on their society than the corporate jobs many were being recruited for, has been a wild success.
Those who have stayed in teaching are doing some remarkable things. KIPP Academy, a charter school founded by Teach for America alums Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg and Chris Barbic’s YES Prep have become widely recognized as exemplary schools. I’ve taught in KIPP’s saturday school as part of the Street Law program at the University of Houston Law Center and the mindset of the kids is remarkable.
- Charlie Rose: An hour on Education with Bob Wise and Wendy Kopp
Kung Fu Dancing with Cats
Photoshopped, unless my spidey-sense deceives me, but brilliantly so. via ffffound!
Houston Ready for its Close Up, Bucks National Economic Trend
Daniel Gross has nominated Houston as the poster child for bucking the recent downturn in the economy in Newsweek’s Houston, We Have No Problems: Houston has become a sort of Silicon Valley for the global energy industry. Urban cowboy? Think suburban geek.
To find a hot spot where soaring oil and commodity prices, and the booming economies of the developing world, are keeping cash registers ringing and construction crews fully employed, you don’t have to trek to Dubai or Moscow. You need travel only as far as Houston. In May, the unemployment rate in the nation’s sixth largest metropolitan area was a measly 3.8 percent. In the past year, Houston-based companies, which include 26 Fortune 500 firms, added 71,000 jobs to their payrolls.
It’s not an altogether unfamiliar role, as the soaring energy prices that sap the margins of industries in other parts of the country tend to fill the coffers of the energy complex that dominates Houston’s economy. As Gross notes, however, Houston has outgrown it’s rough and tumble wildcatter heritage to become an engineering haven built on the minds oil has attracted over the years. For instance, this statistic surprised even me - “The city’s biggest employer: the Texas Medical Center, the nonprofit megaplex that runs two medical schools and 14 hospitals.”
Similar sentiments lead Kiplinger magazine to vote Houston the Best City to Live, Work and Play for 2008 in their annual rankings. The reasons it cites are heavy on the economic scale, with Houston’s higher than average average income and lower than average cost of living tipping the scales in its favor.
Population: 5,542,048
Population Growth Since 2000: 14.9%
Percentage of Workforce in Creative Class: 31.3%
Cost-of-Living Index: 88.1 (100 being national average)
Median Household Income: $50,250
Income Growth Since 2000: 13.1%
Other links of interest: Houstonist, Houston Strategies
Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials
Ed Brayton via Tom Kirkendall notes that American Family Association has a policy at its new outlet, OneNewsNow, never to use the word “gay” but to replace it with “homosexual” - which is all well and good until someone named Tyson Gay turns in a record time in the US Olympic qualifying rounds. The result is an epic poem to double-entendre - “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials”
Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.
His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999.
One of the men who talked about challenging Homosexual in the 100, his former Arkansas teammate Wallace Spearmon, failed to make it to the final by the slimmest of margins. The top four runners advance from each semifinal, and Spearmon finished fifth in his-all of .001 behind Michael Rodgers.
Spearmon, twice a medalist at world championships in the 200, was last out of the blocks and managed to make up a lot of ground, but it wasn’t quite enough. “Aim to win. Got fifth. Feelings are hurt,” Spearmon said. “I’ll make the team in the 200. That’s about it.”
Homosexual didn’t get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal, but by the halfway mark he had established a comfortable lead. He slowed somewhat over the final 10 meters-nothing like the way-too-soon complete shutdown that almost cost him Saturday.
Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: “A little fatigued.”
Preserved in the internet amber of Google Cache.
Study Finds Most Children Not In Favor Of Children’s Healthcare
Video from the Onion News Network. Classic.
Big Bad John, Cornyn That Is
Jumpin jehosaphats, Cornyn, don’t you have focus groups to kill things like this?
Cardboarding, like Snowboarding, but without Snow or Excitement
This Houstonist post brought back fond memories. Since my elementary school had a giant hill behind the playground cardboarding was a frequent pastime in the spring and fall, as was sledding in the winter. How we didn’t break our little faces I’ll never know.
I’m a sucker for a girl with a loop machine…
Theresa Andersson - ‘Na Na Na’
Just the footwork alone is impressive… you know, in addition to everything else.
High Marks for Teach for America
From the Wall Street Journal’s Amazing Teacher Facts -
Eleven per cent of Yale’s senior class, 9% of Harvard’s and 10% of Georgetown’s applied for a job whose salary ranges from $25,000 (in rural South Dakota) to $44,000 (in New York City).
Hang on a second.
Unions keep saying the best people won’t go into teaching unless we pay them what doctors and lawyers and CEOs make. Not only are Teach for America salaries significantly lower than what J.P. Morgan might offer, but these individuals go to some very rough classrooms. What’s going on?
It seems that Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy.
Slate’s Teach for America Grows Up: What TFA can teach the NCLB era. has more on Wendy Kopp as a social entrepreneurship success story.
Table of Contents
Why do I love Design Observer? Because not only will they write a scholarly article about it, they will have a full-on conference about Tables of Contents.