How to reverse alarming education decline in U.S. and around the world: Teach for All founder Wendy Kopp

CNBC

3 days ago

Wendy Kopp grew up as a member of "the me generation," during a period of time when she says young, highly educated Americans were "convinced that we all wanted to go to work on Wall Street."
But that ideology didn't resonate with Kopp, who graduated from Princeton University in 1989.
When firms were trying to recruit graduates who could commit two years to work at their firm, Kopp asked herself, "Why aren't we being as aggressively recruited to commit just two years to teach in our country?"
She became heavily invested in answering that question.
"It's a big, complex, systemic challenge, and we know that no one thing will solve this problem, that ultimately it will take many things, which means it will take a lot of leadership, at every level of the system, the whole ecosystem around kids," Kopp told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in a recent interview for the CNBC Changemakers Spotlight series. Kopp was named to the 2025 CNBC Changemakers list.
"We need what we've come to call collective leadership, meaning enough people who are on a mission to make the system work for kids, who are all working together, exercising leadership in their individual positions, as teachers, as school leaders, as school system leaders in government, as social innovators, as advocates, but who are also stepping up from their individual pursuits and working together."
Kopp began making that mission a reality decades ago as founder of Teach for America, but the mission has grown. "There was a particular year when we met 13 people from 13 different countries who were determined that something similar needed to happen in their countries," said Kopp. Teach For All, the newer organization where Kopp is also founder and CEO, oversees a network of 15,000 teachers reaching 1.3 million students around the world, from the U.S. to India, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan.
She shared with CNBC her ideas on leadership and what needs to change in the way we educate children, including the role of AI. And she made clear there is still a lot of work left to be done.
"We are really in the midst of this very depressing, huge educational decline," Kopp said. "Educational outcomes on average in the developed countries, the OECD countries, have been declining since before Covid, and for something like 30 years-plus, they've been declining in low to middle income countries."
Education is not failing students for lack of trying, according to Kopp. "A lot of people are throwing a lot at the issue," she said, but added that a key lesson she has earned is that focusing on the technical practices of education, the curriculum, the technology, and getting the buildings open, is important but not sufficient. "We need to figure out how to foster the sense of purpose throughout a system so that all those things are done with intention, and that's really where we've been lacking," she said.
Kopp says AI is a good example of how this lesson can go heeded, or if not heeded, lead to disappointing outcomes. Despite widespread fears about AI, the most important positive from her perspective is that AI has given every teacher a personal assistant.
"That's game-changing," she said. "These are some of the most overworked professionals, and now they can do many, many things much more easily. So that is already a revolution," she added.
But she stressed that it is only the technology "in the hands of an extraordinary teacher" that is an "incredible accelerant of good things for kids."
However, technology in a school "where there's no sense of purpose and where you don't have engaging teachers, becomes the world's biggest distraction."
"We need to be really careful about assuming that the technology will solve the problem, because everything we've seen tells us that if we want to have change in education [and] we want to have positive things happening for kids, we need to first think about the people in the puzzle and cultivate what we've come to call collective leadership, cultivate the teachers and the school leaders and the whole system to be on a mission to ensure that all kids learn and to get kids on that same mission."
It is only in that context, Kopp says, that technology can be revolutionary.
In her early days at Teach for America, Kopp would send handwritten letters to investors and organizations, an era when email did not exist. From 10 letters, she might get one or two positive responses and one meeting with the goal of funding Teach For America.
"I just kept telling myself, as long as I get two yesses, or even one yes ... Because then one person connects you to the next person," she said.
Kopp said right now there is plenty of evidence of current young generations' commitment to justice, and environmental sustainability, and platforms like social media make the world's challenges more visible than ever. She said the "most valuable asset" these generations have is their time and energy to take on the world's biggest challenges and to be part of collective movements to actually solve them.
And she says key to this "boots on the ground" mission will be selling the idea just as she did to the doubters. Back when she was getting Teach for America founded, people in schools and school systems were supportive of the need, but also told her, "this will never work. You will never get college students to do this."
That only made Kopp double down on her mission. "That was the feedback, I thought, 'Okay, well, I know we'll get the college students.' I had real confidence in pursuing it."
But Kopp also stressed that conviction isn't at its best alone. "We've got to walk the right line between confidence and humility," she said. "We need to act on our convictions, on our values, on our big ideas, but also be open to learning and build the relationships and ask for feedback. I think it's getting that intersection right."
As her educational mission has scaled across the globe, Kopp has seen how young graduates from engineers to political science majors can quickly develop a track record of leadership after enlisting for just two years.
"Those two years are so important for their students and so important for the leadership trajectories of those teachers. They're completely transformative. They lead to a lifetime of leadership," she said.
Dating back to the founding of Teach for America, the organizations have brought in 120,000 people who committed just two years "but have never left the work," Kopp said. "75% of them never leave the work after their two-year commitment to teach. They may leave the classroom, but they become those leaders who are working throughout the system, who have the networks and relationships to work with each other and with many others in the system to affect the changes that we need to see," she said.
That has stayed true as the organization's mission expanded globally, and to countries where Kopp worried it would be hard for people to stay long-term. "Yet we saw the same results everywhere, even the same data points. You could be in Chile or Peru or Austria or India, and no matter what, you commit two years, and 75% of you will never leave," she said.
If at first young educators came into the mission thinking of it as a "kind of a technical problem and solution," and they would emerge as civic leaders in other segments of society, Kopp says they came out "really understanding the complexity, the systemic nature, the adaptive nature of the solution."
"What we saw through that research is they really become the leaders we need, who have such a sense of possibility, such a deep understanding of the issues and their solutions, and we also saw that their career trajectories and priorities completely shift," she said.
Kopp says "once you get obsessed with an idea, you can't let it go."
"And that's why we need young people tackling big challenges," Kopp said. "They'll ask big questions and dive in without being held back by all the experience."
Kopp has traveled the globe as a result of her work, and as a result, she has logged plenty of hours failing to solve a problem unrelated to education: jet lag.
But she finally figured it out. "I used to have such severe jet lag when I would go from East to West, back home, and I heard from someone the trick is you don't eat on the plane, and when you land, you go on a run before you eat anything. And for many, many years, I didn't do it. I finally just resorted to it, and I've not had jet lag since."
"I travel so much, and it really has solved my problem."