On September 17, Loyola Marymount University recognized Wendy Kopp with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree for her service to education; she founded Teach For America in 1990 and co-founded the global Teach For All network in 2007.
Wendy Kopp proposed the idea for Teach For America in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton University to marshal the energy of her generation to address the issue of educational inequity in the United States. Today, 11,000 Teach For America corps members are in the midst of two-year teaching commitments in the nation’s highest-need urban and rural regions, and more than 30,000 corps members have completed the program. After leading Teach For America’s growth and development for 24 years, Kopp moved into the role of chair of the board in 2013.
Kopp is currently CEO and co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations that have adapted TFA’s model to expand educational opportunity in their own countries. Six years into its development, Teach For All is a growing network of independent organizations in 28 countries around the world.
As Teach For America’s exclusive university partner in California, the LMU School of Education provides graduate training, mentoring and support for corps members in Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose. Founded in 2000, the LMU/TFA Partnership is one of the organization’s largest and most successful university partnerships in the country, with more than 500 current corps members teaching in urban schools. Since 2009, more than 90 percent of LMU/TFA Partnership graduates have remained in education following their two-year commitment.
Event photos can be found on Facebook.. While visiting the LMU campus, Kopp was interviewed in LMU Magazine.
