There was a point last week during Wendy Kopp’s appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California in Silicon Valley that smacked of the sort of smugness that, I suspect, makes some veteran teachers cringe when Teach For America (TFA) is mentioned. Kopp, the founder and CEO of the teacher corps, was describing why TFA has become an ally for urban and rural school districts with the greatest need for eager, committed teachers, when she segued into a discussion of the single most limiting factor to systemic school reform.

“Get any group of education reformers from inside the districts and out of them together and ask them, ‘What is the great constraint? What do you think?’ Always, it’s one thing.”

“Money,” responded interviewer Colleen Wilcox, without missing a beat. As the former Superintendent of the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Wilcox knows a bit about challenges facing schools. Kopp seemed caught off guard for a moment.  “No,” she said in an unqualified tone. “Talent, leadership. That’s all. There’s plenty of money, right? People are getting results, people want to invest in them, and not that we don’t need to spend more money, especially in the state of California, on our schools and school systems, but honestly, it’s not the greatest constraint, it is talent and leadership.”

The comment took me back to a conversation many years ago with Mary Bergan, former president of the California Federation of Teachers. Even back then lawmakers were advising schools that money wasn’t the answer to all their problems. “That may be true,” said Began, “but we’d sure like to try it with [money].”

A powerful program of training, coaching and ongoing support

Kopp knows the importance of money in teacher training. In her first book, One Day, All Children… The Unlikely Triumph Of Teach For America And What I Learned Along The Way, she describes countless hours on the phone to potential funders. Twenty years and millions of dollars later, TFA has honed its recruitment, selection, and training process and is in the enviable position of having a $100 million endowment from private donors led by the Broad Foundation.

The funding enables TFA to create a coveted special sauce of professional development that combines local orientation sessions in communities where its teachers are working, to bring them together for intensive national institutes, to give them experience teaching at summer school programs run in partnerships with districts, and to send coaches into each class to observe their teachers and provide feedback and ongoing support. “Many of our corps members will never have someone come into their building unless they’re maybe from Teach For America,” said Kopp. “There are some exceptions to this, but to give them feedback? No.”

Those exceptions are growing smaller as funding dwindles. Just last month, TOP-Ed reported on an elementary school in San Jose’s Alum Rock Union Elementary School District that’s losing its literacy coach and the funding that spells teachers from the classroom every six weeks to develop collaborative plans for struggling students.

And, while Kopp likes to point to studies showing that principals rate TFA teachers more highly than other teachers they hire, the research is more nuanced than that. A meta-analysis titled “Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence” finds that holds true when TFA teachers without credentials are compared to other new teachers who aren’t credentialed and are teaching in similar types of schools.  It changes when the comparison switches to beginning teachers who are credentialed.

“The question for most districts, however, is whether TFA teachers do as well as or better than credentialed non-TFA teachers with whom school districts aim to staff their schools,” write the researchers. “On this question, studies indicate that the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers.”

Transformational teachers become transformational leaders

However, Kopp understands that TFA is unique and, therefore, is not the answer to the nation’s education woes. Throughout the Commonwealth Club conversation, she referred to Megan Brousseau, a TFA teacher who challenged the conventional wisdom that her 112 ninth grade students in the South Bronx, who were poor and learned English as a second language, didn’t have what it takes to pass the New York State Regents Exam in biology. Kopp’s second book, A Chance to Make History, takes its title from Brousseau’s charge to her students that “This is your chance to make history.” And they did, with nearly all of them not only passing the test, but beating the city average. Yet Kopp acknowledges that, even with TFA’s highly selective acceptance process favoring top students from the nation’s top colleges and universities, Brousseau is one of a kind.

“I think Megan teaches us a lot. She shows us we can truly solve this problem, there’s nothing elusive about it, but there’s something else in her example that I think is really, really daunting, and that is that, honestly, I have met very few Megans in my whole life,” said Kopp. “I think what we see in her example is just clear evidence that this isn’t actually the solution. We’re not going to solve the problem through tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Megans because they don’t exist. We need to change the whole system.”

That will happen, says Kopp, as TFA alumni, and others she describes as transformational teachers, move into positions of leadership in schools and districts, in politics and in journalism. Already, she says, 65% of TFA’s 20,000 alumni are working full time in education. Half of them are teaching, about 600 are school principals, and their numbers are growing in district leadership.

“When we have big crises in the history of our country and history of our world what do we do? We channel our most talented minds against it, and that’s what Teach For America is working to do. It’s working to say, ‘You know what, we need to solve this and what we’re going to do is build a movement of our country’s future leaders to do something about it.’”

Plans are already in the works to put TFA at the forefront of that movement. Kopp said the organization plans to double in size by 2015, with 15,000 teachers in 60 communities across the country. At the same time, Kopp is heading a worldwide effort, known as Teach For All, that has 19 overseas models on every continent.