Case Study:
Wendy Kopp-the Recruiter
Sitting in a lunchroom at Columbia University with the school’s star students-the senior
class president, the premed triple major, and 15 other superachievers-Wendy Kopp is
begging them to shelve their career plans to teach In
America’s most troubled public schools.
“This problem has to be this generation‘s issue,”
she tells the future grads.
“
We
know we can
solve it if we get enough true leaders.”
Kopp is talking with prospective recruits for Teach for America (TFA), the Peace Corps-
like program that she dreamed up when she was a senior at Princeton. As she speaks, she
frequently covers her mouth with her right hand, a nervous gesture. But the students, too, are
nervous about the job Kopp is asking them to do. Seniors who compete to be Teach for
America corps members must endure hours of interviews and tests designed to assess their
organizational skills, perseverance, and resiliency- critical traits since recruits receive only 5
weeks of teacher training (albeit grueling) before they get plopped into a classroom in the
South Bronx or some other impoverished locale. As the students voice their qualms about
TFA-“What if I fail? Won‘t poor kids reject Ivy League teachers?”-Kopp doesn’t sugarcoat the
obstacles:
“It can be really overwhelming and depressing,” she warns. “We all have bad days,
and people who teach in Teach for America probably have more bad days than most.”
Kopp’s pitch is part challenge and part cautionary tale, yet the combination has been a
winning one. [In 2006], 19,000 college students-including 10 percent of the senior class at
Yale and Dartmouth, 9 percent at Columbia, and 8 percent at Duke and the University of
Chicago-applied to Teach for America. (While local school districts cover the salaries of
TFA teachers, TFA screens and trains them-and requires a two-year commitment.) “We
recruit insanely aggressively,” says Kopp, 39, who accepted 2,400 of those 19,000
applicants this year. That makes Kopp’s nonprofit one of the largest hirers of college
seniors, according to CollegeGrad.com- bigger than Microsoft, Procter & Gamble,
Accenture, or General Electric.
Kopp, in fact, has built such a mighty recruiting machine that corporations are angling to
work with TFA to buff their own images on campus. “One of the few jobs that people pass up
Goldman Sachs’ offers for is Teach for America,” says Edie Hunt, Goldman’s co–COO [chief
operating officer] of human-capital management. (First-year pay at Goldman averages $65,000,
about twice what a TFA corps member makes.)
Wendy Kopp never wanted to be a corporate role model. She just wanted to reform public
education. Growing up in Dallas (where her parents owned a travel-guide business), she
moved from parochial school to public school in sixth grade and went on to be valedictorian
of her high school. Her interest in the failures of America’s public schools began at Princeton,
where she helped organize a conference on education reform during the fall of her senior year.
Her senior thesis was entitled “A Plan and Argument for the Creation of a National Teacher
Corps,” and she wrote a letter to then President George H. W. Bush, urging him to establish
such a 2-year service program. “I received a job-rejection letter in response,” she recalls.
Rejection spurred her on. Failing to land a job after college (she was turned down by
Morgan Stanley, Goldman, McKinsey, Bain, and P&G), she decided to launch the teaching
corps herself. Though she describes herself as ”very shy,” Kopp drummed up the courage to cold–
call scores of CEOs and foundation leaders. A Mobil executive named Rex Adams agreed to
give her a seed grant of $26,000, and Dick Fisher, then CEO of Morgan Stanley (and a
Princeton alum), donated office space. A letter to the chairman of Hertz got her six cars for TFA’s
skeleton crew of recruiters (who included Richard Barth, now Kopp‘s husband). Other early
believers-Merck, Union Carbide, Apple Computer, Young & Rubicam, and fellow Texan Ross
Wendy Kopp-the Recruiter
Perot-chipped in, building her first-year budget to $2.5 million. That was enough to recruit,
train, and place 500 teachers.
Kopp wants to continue the success of TFA. “We’re trying to be the top employer of recent
grads in the country,” she says. “Size gives us leverage to have a tangible impact on school
systems.” [And this she has done.]
Objective:
Explore student values related to their career choices.
Summary:
Wendy Kopp is a prime example of college student with a clear personal values code who made a
career decision based on her vision to create a Teach for America (TFA) initiative. This effort was
designed to recruit college graduates to give at least two-years teaching school in a poverty area of
the U.S. It is an excellent case for giving students an opportunity to identify and act on their personal
and professional goals.
Discussion Questions:
1. How would you describe Wendy Kopp’s success based on what you have learned in this
chapter?
2. Would you apply for a TFA job? What are the ethical implications of your answer?
the impact of those individuals who have lived their positive values.
Teaching Notes:
✓ This is a perfect opportunity for you to share why you chose a teaching career. Your
students will look forward to discussing your choice.
✓ The IBM story by Thomas Watson, Jr. is a good lead-in to the case assignment. It is based
on his book, A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas that Helped Build IBM.
a) IBM policies and actions are built on the organizations’ values;
b) IBM leaders must adhere (live) these values; and
c) IBM must be fluid to change their processes and culture to succeed, but they must not
change their core values, p. 105
✓ As leaders, we must know and live couragesly by our Code of Values, p. 106
Wendy Kopp-the Recruiter
✓ An excellent pre-class assignment is to have the students complete the “Full–Swing Values”
exercise which demonstrates that we each need to Know, Cherish, Declare, Act On, and Act
Habitually on our Core Values, p. 110.
✓ We always review the text section on “Personal Values,” pp. 114 – 120 and refer to a local
company – for us, it’s Procter & Gamble (P&G) and their Code of Values, p. 125.
✓ We also have each student write a “personal vision statement” before class to help them
clarify their ethical code. As instructors, we each share copies of our personal “code of
values” and our current “vision” statements one week before the assigned team discussion
class to give them an example of how we use a vision and values code in our own lives.
✓ Students are encouraged to keep their vision statements and ethics code while reviewing
them weekly and changing them as needed. For most students, this exercise will continue
throughout their leadership careers, both professional and for their family life. Many students
have told us that this assignment was a defining moment in their studies.
✓ Each student will share their level of self-assessment of their personal values with the team
for this case analysis.
Related AOL 6 Text Information to Support Your Class Discussion:
o Explore the components of an effective vision, which must be leader-
initiated, pp. 55 – 71.
o Identify the role of values in explaining the visioning process, p. 62.
o Ask students to determine their personal values by having them complete
Exercise 7 – 1 “Personal Values: What Is Important to You?” pp. 114 –
121.
NOTE: We routinely research the subject of our specific case assignment to determine changes
in vision, mission, leadership team, new product development, financials, current
national/global news events, etc., prior to the class discussion. An example of this is found in
the Introduction section preceding our suggestions for using Case Analyses in your class. We
have used Hewlett-Packard as a sample for all the cases since this form of organizational
information is fluid and possibly time sensitive.