Teaching America a Lesson : Education: A year and a half after she launched her ‘Peace Corps for teachers,’ Wendy Kopp has attracted converts and critics.

Lyell Champagne is looming above his fourth-graders in all his youthful authority-figure splendor. He’s the picture of the casual Ivy Leaguer in his who-gives-a-hoot Yale sweat shirt and sneakers. Indeed, he is living testimony to where listening to the teacher will get you.

“Keep the classroom clean,” Champagne says solemnly. “You never know who’s going to come in.”

Sure enough, a small entourage has just come in, led off by Betty Seward, principal of Inglewood’s teeming Highland Elementary School, where this scene is being played out. Seward is being trailed by a few people, one of whom is a soft-spoken blonde in a long, pleated white skirt and preppy pearls.

“Some of you are interested in becoming teachers some day,” Champagne continues. “Remember Teach for America. That’s the program I’m with. It was started by this young lady here,” Champagne says, gesturing toward the woman in the pearls. “She’s not much older than you are.”

In a world where everything is relative, that’s relatively true. At the tender age of 23, Wendy Kopp is barely out of school herself.

It’s been only a year and a half since she left the ivory towers of Princeton to haunt the corporate high-rises of America, coaxing out millions of dollars so she could bankroll and run her nonprofit brainchild, Teach for America (TFA).

Kopp envisioned TFA as a Peace Corps for teachers in inner-city and rural schools, a competitive lure for some of the country’s best new graduates to do good somewhere in their own back yards rather than overseas. Kopp’s idea is to help stem teacher shortages in some of the hardest-hit areas with some of the sharpest young talent.

“Having the brightest kids acting as role models for these kids is great,” says Joe Alibrandi, a member of Teach for America’s advisory board and chairman and chief executive officer of Whittaker Corp., a Los Angeles aerospace and biotechnology company that has given $10,000 to the program. “Right now the role model (for inner-city youth) is the drug dealer, and to just have a role model that says, ‘If you work hard and get a good education, you have a shot at being a major contributor to society,’ I think it’s a tremendous idea.”

Indeed, by all accounts, Teach for America is a great idea. But now Kopp watchers are trying to determine whether it’s a great reality.

Kopp’s young corps hits the schools amid a revived national debate about national service programs, an issue that has found proponents on both ends of the political spectrum.

Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia has led a band of Democrats who are pushing a bill that would create a “citizen corps”; the proposal calls for young people, as many as 3 million, to earn college grants or tax credits in exchange for lending a hand to federal social programs.

Meanwhile, conservative thinker William F. Buckley is kicking in his own plan for national service with his new book, “Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe Our Country” (see Josh Getlin’s story, E1).

But while plans for national service programs pick up steam and converts in these days of shrinking budgets and mushrooming deficits, they have also attracted their share of controversy--and Kopp’s corps is no exception.

New York City-based Teach for America has come under fire for trying to do too much too soon, for recruiting insufficient numbers of minorities, for its administrators’ lack of teaching experience, for its “youthful arrogance,” and for throwing new teachers into such difficult situations that enlisting in TFA can seem more like a stint in the Green Berets than the Peace Corps.

Such barbs have been hurled by Op-Ed writers for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal--not to mention by corps members themselves.

Still, Kopp has laid claim to accomplishments far above those of her peers. She is running a $2.7-million-a-year operation, whose annual budget is projected to double in the 1991 fiscal year. She is mobilizing 500 keen young members this year for two-year gigs--1,000 next year--many of whom never seriously considered teaching before joining Teach for America.

And she’s earning accolades from some of the country’s top educators and executives in the process. In some quarters, Kopp has become a media darling. Glamour magazine, for example, will crown her one of its 10 Women of the Year in its December issue.

“I’m constantly amazed at Wendy’s ability to get things done,” says Teach for America board member Joe Alibrandi. “She really comes across as somebody who honestly has a deep conviction for what she’s doing. She gives a sense of confidence that if you invest in her you will be damn sure she will get things done.”

Kopp came by her business smarts naturally. Her parents put out guidebooks to Dallas and Houston for convention-goers. And as Kopp was growing up in Dallas, she did “complete plebe work for many years” for them, packing books and doing office work. Her early brush with business forged an “absolute decision that I never wanted to do anything like that. I only saw the grunt work, and I thought I would never want anything to do with business.”

That changed at Princeton. Enticed by an interest in journalism, Kopp fell into writing about student entrepreneurs for the student-produced Business Today magazine, published by the university’s Foundation for Student Communication. Kopp’s involvement quickly expanded to an intense 70 hours a week.

In spite of herself.

“It was so weird how I got drawn into this,” Kopp says. “I absolutely didn’t want to do it, but the thing is there were so many holes in the organization that there was tons of opportunity. I was an associate editor two months after I started working there.”

When Kopp signed on at the foundation, the magazine was struggling at 32 pages a pop.

“We were bringing in $300,000. We couldn’t sell ads and couldn’t publish some issues. There was a whole group of us who really worked to turn things around. We totally did. It became a complete obsession. We built it up to the point where it made $1.4 million. At one point, we put out a 140-page magazine.”

Kopp, who headed up the foundation and its magazine in her senior year, had hit upon a strategy that would later serve her well--targeting high-level executives for help, rather than currying the favor of their minions.

Initially, Kopp says, “it was so frustrating, and we would meet with assistant managers and they would love it, but they wouldn’t come through with money. I happened to be interviewing a high-level executive (for the magazine), and I said, ‘We’re about to go under. Can you advertise with us?’ We sold six ads in two weeks.

“No one could believe what hit the organization. Money just came.”

The foundation was also bringing students together with top execs at national conferences. And it was at one such conference that the idea for Teach for America was born. The setting was San Francisco, the year was 1988 and the conferees were brainstorming ways to improve education.

Kopp looked around and realized the answers were sitting all around her.

“Everyone was throwing out typical things--raise teacher salaries and increase accountability,” she says. “Those things need to happen, but they won’t happen tomorrow. It just occurred to me that all these students we’d selected through the application process, it hit me--let’s recruit students like this. We’ll recruit selectively and surround it with an aura of status.

“Then I was completely obsessed.”

Kopp decided her public policy thesis topic would be a plan for implementing a Peace Corps for teachers one year after she graduated. Her thesis adviser, Princeton sociology department chairman Marvin Bressler, initially pooh-poohed her proposal.

Bressler recalls: “Her plan would involve raising huge sums of money from private sources and developing cadres of students from the best universities who would be afire with idealism, and then to train these students in a summer institute with all-star faculty, to obtain credentials for them, and to dispatch them to inner-city schools,” and all within a year.

“I said, ‘You are deranged.’ ”

“He hated the idea,” Kopp says, “because he loves to hate things.”

Bressler eventually became one of her greatest supporters. He lauds her thesis as “brilliant.”

And he admires the quiet determination that enabled her to politely brush aside his objections, with all the naive faith of the relatively untested. In fact, he counts himself among the Teach for America supporters who say Kopp has done as much as she has, not despite her youth but because of it.

“It’s always an advantage not to know that something can’t be done,” he says. “The great mythology of age is you can think of any number of reasons why something can’t be done and, out of what purports to be wisdom, to surrender. She was never afflicted with that.”

And at Teach for America, Kopp is not alone. Much of the organizing and recruiting has been done by people just barely out of school themselves. From a pool of 2,600 applicants culled from 100 schools nationwide, TFA selected 511 new teachers. Trying to appeal to successful students’ competitive edge by making the program selective was part of the strategy.

The students converged last summer on the University of Southern California for training and student teaching under a faculty assembled by Carl Grant, a professor of education and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Then they were dispatched to needy schools in New York, Louisiana, North Carolina and Georgia as well as Los Angeles. About 200 members teach in 96 schools in the L.A. area. After Teach for America trains them, local school districts pay their way, from $17,000 to $29,000 a year.

Now that they’re on the job, some corps members say that TFA did not plan for the expenses they would rack up--fees for teachers’ exams and obtaining credentials as well as the cost of setting up housekeeping in a new city. Twenty-six Teach for America members have already dropped out of the program, some because they decided teaching was not for them, others because they couldn’t afford to continue, corps members say.

“We were told to come to California and come to this (summer) institute and not to worry about money because things would be taken care of,” says Yale graduate Vicki McGhee, who teaches fifth grade at Highland Elementary. “We didn’t know about a lot of the costs and they didn’t know. And that’s criminal. I know people who left the program because of money.”

Also troubling to some is the potential cost of throwing inexperienced teachers into some of the grittiest battlegrounds of American education.

The Wall Street Journal’s Barbara D. Phillips expressed her worries on the paper’s Op-Ed page last summer:

“Even those who now plan to spend a lifetime teaching will go AWOL if they enter a school in which learning is a very low priority and find that idealism, intelligence and an understanding of cultural differences can go only so far in a poisoned, bureaucratic atmosphere.”

McGhee, who plans to go on to medical school, agrees. “You throw a person into teaching where a lot of the kids are not as motivated about school, they don’t value education as much, that makes what you have to do as a teacher three times as hard,” she says.

Some of the problems might have been avoided, some critics say, if Teach for America had consulted experienced teachers.

Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, says she met once with TFA administrators and offered the union’s support and guidance, but they never took her up on it.

Still, Vito Perrone, a Teach for America adviser and the director of teacher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, defends the corps.

“First years are difficult,” he says. “No one is certain how they will work absolutely. They had a lot of staff to recruit in a short period of time. There was probably not enough time to plan the curriculum and to do everything that in retrospect they may have wanted to do.

“But I would not spend a lot of energy faulting that. I suspect they’ve learned a lot and next year’s program will be far better.”

Indeed, Kopp’s foray into education has found her an eager student. She, as much as anyone else, knows there are lessons to learn.

Kopp says that next year, Teach for America will try to recruit its teacher-training faculty from the cities where the young teachers will be posted, so those with experience can provide continuing guidance. She pledges a more structured curriculum and plans to hire people with teaching experience to help recruit corps members and work at the summer institute.

“Next year will be smoother,” she says. “We learned something every step of the way.”