2008
ELISA VILLANUEVA BEARD
CEO, Teach For America
TEACH FOR AMERICA
When I arrived at DePauw University as a freshman in 1994, I knew college would be a big change. I was going from my hometown in the Rio Grande Valley, a place that was ninety percent Mexican American, to a college in upper-middle-class white America, where only three percent of the students were Latino.
I thought that difference would be the hardest part of my experience. But as it turned out, being surrounded by people who weren’t like me was exhilarating. Academically, however, I floundered. My high school had not prepared me well enough for the rigors of college. Two things kept me from quitting. I was an athlete and had learned discipline and focus through sports, and I had a mom who was very tough—loving, but tough. I wasn’t allowed to come home until I graduated.
By sophomore year I was thriving, but I started to wonder—how had this happened? How could I graduate high school without being ready for college? Why weren’t more Advanced Placement classes offered at my school? When I met a Teach For America (TFA) corps member and learned more about the challenges of education, everything clicked. I was mesmerized by her passion and commitment to make sure kids got the education they deserved, and I resolved to join TFA myself.
I’ve been able to watch the organization grow and evolve ever since. By the time I stepped into the classroom as a teacher, TFA had already proved that enlisting some of the most promising future leaders of our country to teach students living in underserved communities could help address one of the most pressing problems facing our nation. The next step for the organization was to expand and to increase the diversity of our teachers. We now have almost seven thousand teachers across fifty-one communities; forty-nine percent of them are people of color, compared to eighteen percent of public school educators nationwide. We continue to be a highly selective program, with an acceptance rate of around fifteen percent.
Today, TFA’s challenge isn’t growth. Rather, we ask ourselves, how can we strengthen the connections among our network to advance learning and innovation? How can we foster collective leadership in communities? How can we accelerate the pace of change at the systems level?
Our organization’s endowment, spurred by an initial grant from The Broad Foundation, has been critical to this work. One of the things I’ve really appreciated is how the Foundation’s staff understands what it takes to create real systemic change. Developing leaders is a long game, and it requires practice, discipline, work, and time. This is the work of a lifetime.
At any given moment, our endowment gives us the capacity to face massive challenges. We know this work really matters to the future of our country. We must continue to build a connected network of leaders who are anchored in the certainty that this problem is solvable and who work to confront educational inequity from every sector of society. As someone who experienced such inequity as a student and as the leader of a classroom in a high-need school, and who has personally seen it does not have to be this way, I have an unwavering resolve to stick with it until we reach the American ideals of equal opportunity and justice for all.