Teach For America's mission is to enlist our nation's most promising future leaders in the movement to eliminate educational inequality. We accomplish this by building a highly selective national corps of outstanding recent college graduates and professionals of all academic majors, career interests, and backgrounds who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools in our nation's lowest-income communities and become lifelong leaders for expanding educational opportunity. By joining Teach For America, individuals join a network of exceptional individuals who will work together throughout their lives to ensure our country lives up to its ideals.
In the short run, corps members are an important source of teachers who go above and beyond traditional expectations, compensating for the added pressures on kids growing up in poverty and on their schools, to help ensure that more students growing up today have the opportunities they deserve.
In the long run, our alumni become a powerful force for effecting the required change because of the insight, conviction, and personal strength they gain through their teaching experience. Some remain in education in order to build the capacity of our schools and school systems. Others work in fields such as economic development, public health, and legal services to reduce poverty, and its effects, and take pressure off of schools. Still others enter other sectors - from policy and politics to business and journalism to the arts and the sciences - and work from those sectors to impact the priorities and practices of our nation. To learn more about our Theory of Change, click here.
Over the past 16 years, nearly 17,000 young men and women have joined Teach For America, impacting the lives of 2.5 million students. Currently, Teach For America corps members work daily with students in 26 urban and rural communities profoundly affected by the achievement gap.
Who we are
Corps and Alumni