Some time back in the late 80's, Wendy Kopp was a student at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. For her senior thesis, she described a public service organization modeled loosely on the Peace Corps which would recruit newly minted college graduates to teach in some of America's toughest and most under-resourced schools. Her advisor told her that it was a wonderful thesis, but of course it would never really work in practice. So immediately upon graduating, Wendy set out to prove him wrong, and with the corps of '90, Teach for America was born.
TFA was started with several goals in mind. Foremost, of course, was to provide young, energetic teachers to schools that traditionally had difficulty attracting faculty: specifically, those in the inner cities and in extremely rural areas. A secondary goal was to attract people to the teaching profession who otherwise would not have considered it. For this reason, the program recruits primarily among college graduates without an education degree. Candidates selected for the program are trained intensively over the summer and placed in classrooms under alternative certification rules already on the books in most states.
Although in its first few years TFA experienced some opposition from teachers' unions and others in the education establishment, by working with its critics the program was able to smooth over such difficulties. Meanwhile, the responses from teachers, principals, and students directly exposed to TFA corps members has been overwhelmingly positive. Although many corps members choose to move on after fulfilling their two year commitment, a substantial fraction do stay in the teaching profession, as envisioned when the program was created.
After the initial influx of donations from foundations ran out, TFA was in a very tight financial situation for a time. That has since eased, in part due to generous contributions from individuals. In 1994, TFA became affiliated with the Americorps National Service program.
My own experience with Teach for America was definitely a positive one. I might easily have taken a job after college, and worked just as hard or harder at it, but I have trouble imagining another job where I could have gone to sleep at the end of a long day and felt absolutely confident that what I had done that day was worthwhile because it made a difference in people's lives. While I don't plan to continue teaching at the high school level, if I had to go back and decide again what to do for my first two years out of college, I would certainly make the same choice.
Note: I wrote this in the fall of 1995, soon after completing my two-year commitment as a Teach For America volunteer in Arkansas. At the time, there were relatively few TFA resources on the web. Now there are quite a few, many considerably more accurate and complete than my own. I haven't removed this piece because it is an accurate reflection of my impressions of the program at the time, soon after I had experienced it.