It started out a typical day for Carl Finer ’04 B.A. (P.St.). The student walked into his seventh grade English class at Los Angeles Academy Middle School in South Central L.A., a half-hour late, the same as almost every other day.

Teach For America started as the Princeton senior thesis of founder Wendy Kopp, who viewed the gap between rich and poor, white and minority children as the greatest domestic challenge facing the United States. Modeled after the Peace Corps, her idea was to recruit graduating seniors from top colleges to teach at urban and rural schools for two years. Within a year of graduating in 1989, she had recruited enough volunteers and corporate sponsorship to field her first class of 500 teachers. Today, in its 15th year, the organization receives more than 17,000 applications annually for approximately 2,200 positions, becoming more selective than many of the nation’s law and business schools. According to media reports, one out of every 12 graduating seniors at Harvard and Princeton applied last spring to Teach For America. At Yale, it was one out of eight.

“Teach For America attracts bright young people who want to contribute to society while keeping their career options open, or take a break before professional school, while building an ever more impressive resume,” says William Coplin, director of the Maxwell School’s undergraduate public affairs program. Coplin wrote a chapter about Wendy Kopp in his book, How You Can Help. “It’s an extremely prestigious job if you can handle it.”

Instead of recruiting students with newly minted teaching degrees, the organization looks for students with demonstrated achievement—the average GPA is 3.5—who have persevered under difficult circumstances and who have strong critical thinking skills and the ability to influence and motivate others. In other words, leaders.

“We really target students who are actually planning on being leaders in other fields—doctors, lawyers, business, etc.—and divert them for a bit,” says Susan Crandall, a 2004 graduate of Coplin’s program who spent her first year out of college as part of a Teach For America recruitment team. “If they stay in education, that’s great. But if not, they can use their experience to affect education policy in whatever they go on to do.”

The approach seems to be working. An evaluation last year by Mathematica Policy Research found that Teach For America teachers produce slightly higher math achievement. And a June 2005 evaluation by Kane Parsons & Associates found that, in schools where there is a TFA presence, 63 percent of principals find Teach For America teachers more effective than the overall faculty.

Coplin calls TFA “one of the most important innovations of the 20th century in terms of trying to ameliorate a social problem that doesn’t seem solvable,” and believes part of the genius of the program is that it doesn’t recruit students of education, concentrating instead on the best and the brightest, regardless of major. “The conventional process of becoming a teacher is so laborious that it turns a lot of students off,” he says. “Undergraduate [education] programs, in particular, are so structured that students don’t have room to explore anything else.”

Coplin has recruited for Teach For America since the beginning, a major reason so many Maxwell students have participated in the program. “It’s a measure of the success of the Maxwell mission: the number of students who participate,” he says. “It’s something for Maxwell to be very proud of.”

Roughly half of the 93 Syracuse University students who have participated in Teach For America (including 37 at present) have come out of the Maxwell School—more than a third of them out of Coplin’s program. It’s a natural fit.

“How are you going to make the world a better place?” are typically the first words Coplin speaks to undergraduates majoring in policy studies (the name of Maxwell-based public affairs degree programs for undergraduates). It’s a question with a lasting imprint.

The program develops professional skills through a unique mix of research and community service. Policy studies students tutor through the SU Literacy Corps, mentor young people at the inner-city Wilson Park Community Center, and teach at the Maxwell-affiliated High School for Leadership and Public Service in New York City.

“Kids who take policy studies want to make the world a better place, but they don’t want to sit around and B.S. about ideology. They want to get out there and do something,” Coplin says. “The philosophy of the major is to give you the skills to do well and the character to do good.”

The “do-gooder” symbiosis between Maxwell and Teach For America doesn’t end there, however. Much as undergraduate alumni head for TFA, TFA alumni sometimes head for Maxwell, where they are given special entrée to the M.P.A. program. Over the past decade, each M.P.A. class has regularly included one to three Teach For America alumni. Since 2002, a formal partnership has guaranteed TFA veterans scholarship support in public administration.

Many Teach For America veterans leave their teaching experience with a desire to influence education policy at a higher level. Maxwell’s M.P.A. is a top choice, with its emphasis on providing students with concrete skills in public policy analysis and program management, and a thorough understanding of the public sector and institutional context.

“It’s a win-win,” says Lora Cover, a TFA teacher from 1996-98 who earned her M.P.A. in 2002. She is now TFA’s managing director of recruitment. “Maxwell is bringing in a set of people who are interested in public service and making changes in this country,” she says. “And Teach For America alumni typically are pretty focused in their studies, because they know what they want to do. Personally, I think my application to Maxwell was stronger because I knew what I wanted to do in policy.”

While most M.P.A. graduates go on to positions in government, nonprofits, NGOs, and the like, a rare few take their policy training back to Teach For America. Before Maxwell, Steve Francisco ’02 M.P.A. had worked for a human rights nonprofit; he came to learn how to run an organization. But then he took Professor John Yinger’s urban policy course. “Yinger made us look deeper into urban education and presented such a dire picture of what was happening and what needed to happen to change it,” says Francisco. “That planted the seed that maybe my place was making the change in the classroom.”

Francisco is in his third year teaching third grade at P.S. 35X in the Bronx, just 10 blocks from where he went to elementary school himself. He finished his Teach For America term last year and chose to continue teaching at the school. “I didn’t expect kids so young could learn so much,” he says. “I’m having a blast teaching while working to become the best teacher I can be.”

If “making the world a better place” is cliché, that makes it no less true. The fundamental, underlying connection between the Maxwell School and Teach For America is that shared mission.

“Improving the lives of American children and not wasting human capital—if that’s not about making things better, then I don’t know what is,” says Francisco.

“There’s no other job where, when you wake up in the morning, it makes such a difference whether you go to work or not,” echoes Hattie Quarnstrom, a current Maxwell M.P.A. student who previously taught first grade at P.S. 48 in the Bronx through Teach For America. “You’re going to walk into work and see 20 faces that tell you you’re making a difference.”

But it’s not just the faces that tell the story. It’s the data. The other attitude that links the two institutions is a pragmatic reliance on analysis—a hallmark of Maxwell’s public affairs programs.

“Wanting to help people is great, but totally ineffective if you don’t quantify your efforts,” says Susan Crandall, who, after working in TFA recruitment, is now in her first year teaching eighth-grade special education at P.S./I.S. 308 in Brooklyn. “The Maxwell approach is all about using survey research and statistical analysis to influence public policy making.”

That’s important to Teach For America, a results-oriented organization that emphasizes using concrete data to measure improvement. “We use various diagnostic tools to measure students’ skills when we start, halfway through the year, and then at the end,” says Crandall. “In a situation with little structure, I cling to that. I influence what I teach tomorrow based on what I see my students learning today. In my individual classroom, I see that paying off.”

“The way I run my classroom is very data-driven,” says Carl Finer. “The students always know what the class average was on tests. There are charts up all over the room. They know if they’re improving or not improving. How one assignment impacts the other. That’s a policy studies thing—getting good data and using it to inform your practice.”

Francisco’s data analysis, for example, demonstrated that he is especially successful working with students who are learning English as a second language. As a result, his school made him the designated third-grade English language teacher; third-graders considered to be still learning English are placed in his classroom. “Normally, that kind of data would not be in the hands of the average teacher,” he says. “But because I had it, I was able to make a change that might have a lifelong impact on some of these kids.”

And that’s the bottom line: change through leadership. “Both the Maxwell School and Teach For America understand the importance of leadership, whether it’s leadership in the classroom or leadership in government,” says Francisco. “That’s the common blood type between them—the individual as the leader, grooming and cultivating leaders.”

Despite challenges beyond his imagination—having to invent a curriculum from scratch, turning a chaotic classroom into an orderly one, threats from parents and students—Carl Finer plans to teach a third year in order to complete his teaching certification. (He’s put in for a transfer to a different building.) He has no plans to teach long term—he’s considering education reporting—but you never know.

In mid-March, Finer and two other teachers ran the Los Angeles Marathon with 10 students they’d coached through the process since September (down from a group of 50 that started). Each of them finished the 26-mile race and nearly the entire staff from the school turned out to cheer them on.

A week earlier, the principal gave the runners and coaches a half day off to attend the Marathon Expo in downtown Los Angeles. Finer made sure to padlock all his cabinets before he left. The last time he was gone, some of the troublemakers stole and destroyed a bunch of stuff.

“Although I’m a little burned out at this point, working with this group gets me back to my core feeling about things. In spite of how crazy the school environment is, kids are still kids and they can accomplish some amazing things if given a path to follow,” says Finer. “To me, these kids are heroes and I hope they see that in themselves, too.” 

This article appeared in the Spring 2006 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2006 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.