For the last three years, our lives have been jam-packed with courses and club meetings, homework and friends in Tisch, and Sunday brunches at Dewick. Now all of a sudden we are seniors - and the time has come for us to answer that infamous question, "So, what are you doing after graduation?"
Many Tufts students view our seemingly endless post-graduation opportunities with a mix of excitement and fear. There are so many options: graduate school, travel, Peace Corps, investment banking. Wherever our paths may lead, however, we all have at least two things in common: the experience of world-class education behind us, and the opportunity to pursue our dreams ahead of us - whether they include medical school or an acting career in New York City. For many children in our own country, though, these are opportunities they will never know.
In 1989, a Princeton University senior named Wendy Kopp was writing her thesis on educational inequity as she began to notice disturbing trends even among her fellow Ivy League classmates. Her friends from low-income communities struggled at Princeton in ways her wealthier friends did not. Furthermore, many of Wendy's classmates were making choices about what to do after graduation for what seemed like the wrong reasons: for money, for lack of better options, for their parents.
So Wendy put her ideas into action and founded Teach For America, a national corps of outstanding college graduates from all academic majors who commit to teach for two years in low-income urban and rural communities and who become life-long advocates for change. Since its inception in 1990, more than 12,000 exceptional leaders from all academic fields and career interests have joined Teach For America's movement to eliminate educational inequity, including nearly 100 Tufts University alumni.
Today, Teach For America alumni are working as leaders in every field from medicine and business to law and politics, and of course, education. Imagine what the world would be like if every lawyer, CEO, and HMO executive had started their career after teaching in our nation's most struggling communities for two years.
Children in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in wealthier communities by the time they are just nine years old. Fast-forward ten years, and they are seven times less likely to graduate from college. These are startling facts, and many of us are probably tempted to shrug them off, thinking, "What a shame ... but what can I do about it?"
Well, you can do something about it. It is outrageous that so many of our peers are unable to even think about college simply because of their birthplace or elementary school. Children in struggling schools need committed teachers and leaders who will set the highest expectations for their students and do whatever it takes to ensure that they have the opportunity to attend excellent universities like Tufts. This is the essence of Teach For America: it is an opportunity to change lives.
During their two years in the classroom, Teach For America corps members go above and beyond traditional expectations to impact the lives of their students. Beyond their two years, corps members take their insight and added commitment to assume leadership roles from inside education and from every other sector and to work toward the fundamental changes necessary to provide more equal opportunities for all children in our nation.
After four years and $150,000, some of us can imagine nothing but corporate law or a lucrative engineering position in our future. A starting teacher's salary of $39,000 in New York City may not bring the rewards a job on Wall Street can - a closet full of Prada, an expensive car, a vacation in Europe - but it brings the reward of teaching a child to read, helping a high school student with college applications, and the knowledge that had you not been there, the children you interacted with everyday in your classroom may not have made it much further. Negotiating for stock options seems trivial in comparison.
Teach For America is a job. Corps members go to work early, stay late, deal with frustrated parents and often disorganized administrators, and get paid the same amount that any other beginning teacher would, with an added Americorps benefit. Teach For America corps members also change their students' lives. You do not need education coursework to apply - but you do need energy, motivation, leadership, and a desire to make the world a better place on a daily basis. The 96 Tufts alumni who have joined Teach For America since 1990 have majored in everything from International Relations to Chemical Engineering and History. What they have had in common is an exceptional willingness to step up and lead the movement to eliminate
educational inequity.<$>
Maggie Rasor is a senior majoring in history
