As part of the female leaders in education and philanthropy series, I am excited to share with you a recent exchange I held with Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-Founder of Teach For All. Teach for All is a global network of organizations in over 60 countries that are developing leadership to ensure all children can fulfill their potential. Previously, she founded and led Teach For America for 24 years, creating an unparalleled source of educational leadership in the United States before launching Teach For All in 2007. The author of two books on education, Kopp holds a Princeton degree and numerous honors including the WISE Prize for Education, recognition in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People, and honorary doctorates from 15 universities. She's the mother of four and lives in New York City.
Dear Wendy, thank you for taking the time and for sharing your reflections with me. I'd like to start with some background information to better understand your journey in the education sector. How has your perspective evolved throughout your career? Were there any pivotal moments or challenges that shaped your leadership approach?
Such big questions.
What brought me to this - it's hard to believe, but I came to this idea that initially became Teach For America and ultimately Teach For All about 35 years ago when I was a college student. Our generation was searching for a way to make a real difference against the inequities in our country. I had come to believe that education was the key to freedom and saw that where kids were born did so much to predict where they ended up in our country.
This led to the idea: why aren’t the most outstanding recent graduates being recruited as aggressively to commit two years to teach in low-income communities as we were being recruited to commit two years to work in banks? I became obsessed with this idea and the immediate impact it would have in the lives of kids in urban and rural areas. I also thought this would influence the priorities of our generation - to have our first two years be teaching in low-income communities rather than working in banks.
That was the original idea, and it's kept me going ever since. I couldn't have understood at the outset just how powerful this would prove to be. Those two-year teaching commitments were not only important for the students in classrooms but also transformational and foundational for the teachers' long-term leadership trajectories. Ultimately, these folks never leave the work - they become an incredible force of people working throughout the system, some in classrooms, some as school leaders, some as school system leaders, and others as social entrepreneurs and advocates.
What has changed in my perspective over time is that I’ve come to see this work as a long game. I've learned that people change systems, and with enough leadership, we can change anything.
Ultimately, I realized that our work was generating what we've come to call "collective leadership" - diverse stakeholders who work throughout the ecosystem around kids, all on the same mission, who have networks and relationships and collaborate and learn together. That's what's kept me in this for as long as I've stayed with it.
Thank you for sharing that impressive journey. I'd like to build on your last point about connections making the system work. Everyone talks about 'systems change' nowadays - how is this concept unfolding within Teach for All? In your view, what's the biggest barrier to systems change in education today, and how are you trying to address it?
When I hear the word "systems change" in education, I think we're talking about changes that would improve aggregate outcomes for kids across whole communities or whole systems. This means we need both policy change and changes in practice and culture of the system.
Many people seem to equate systems change with policy change, but there's no way to change outcomes for kids through changing policy alone.
What we're now seeing around the world is a bunch of systems whose outcomes are declining - the PISA results show us that, and the RISE Programme research shows us that's true across low and low-to-middle income countries, and it’s not for lack of trying - we need much more attention to the question of what truly changes systems.
The findings of the RISE research were really important in pointing us to the answer. They showed that while almost all of our educational energy goes into what they call the "technical practices" of education, the X factor that really differentiates the systems that are improving is a shared sense of purpose felt throughout the system, so that all those technical practices are done with intention.
So the big question I think we should all be asking as it relates to systems change is: how do we develop the collective leadership we need? How do we get to the place where we have enough people working at every level of the system, inside and outside the system, who are all on the same mission to ensure all kids learn and develop?
And, of course, that's what this work is about, and we’re on a constant learning journey in this pursuit.
A year ago, we worked with others to do an evidence review about what works in collective leadership development. It showed that there are many things that ultimately generate the collective leadership we need. It takes attracting and developing the leaders we need and supporting them to deeply engage in the process that puts them on a real mission towards ensuring the system actually serves kids.
But what we also saw was that it's not enough to have a whole bunch of individuals working away towards the same purpose if they're not stepping up from their individual pursuits and building relationships with each other, reflecting and learning together. This is, in fact, one of our learning edges as a network - how do we build the muscle to create that space that enables relationship building, collective learning, and ultimately the collaboration necessary to accelerate progress?
I read an article long ago, and probably hundreds of times since then, called "The Dawn of System Leadership" by Peter Senge and others. It looked at their decades of examining what drives system change across multiple sectors. One of their conclusions was that this is a very elusive piece - the space, the pulling of individuals up into a space that enables relationship building and collective learning and debate. It's far harder to do than you would think, but it's something we need to cultivate.
Thank you for these reflections. One last question about implementation and achieving different outcomes. Your network organizations worldwide focus on individuals and then bring them together in collective leadership setups. How do you balance the tension between supporting individuals on their journeys while ensuring you have regional impact and move toward systems change? How do you create that space for collective leadership? In essence, how do you balance the depth of impact with the breadth of reach in your programs, both within individual countries and worldwide?
The question of how to balance breadth and depth is what led us to the network approach we’ve taken to scale our work globally.
I started with a focus on my own country in the US, where the inequities are massive and there's so much to do. Then I started meeting people from all around the world who were determined that something similar needed to happen in their countries. They were looking for help, and it seemed very overwhelming. What we ultimately decided to do was to launch a network of independent, locally-led organizations in different countries with a global organization that would help everyone learn from each other.
What I've learned through taking this network approach is the power of fostering locally-led and globally-informed development. I've seen that it enables very deep impact because you have people within communities and countries who deeply understand their own cultures and contexts and who are able to foster deep, contextualized impact. At the same time, they're part of a network that enables them to learn what's working and what's possible from many other places.
Now, this network, 15 years in, has high-capacity organizations in more than 60 countries with 30 more in the pipeline.
I've come to think of networks as a very under-appreciated strategy for scaling social impact—for scaling deep impact across national contexts as well as across global contexts.
Our core learning in this approach is that the combination of local ownership, entrepreneurship and leadership on the one hand, and investing in enabling those local leaders to learn from each other on the other, is very powerful. It's really challenged my original learning within Teach For America about what it takes to scale with quality. We've also learned that relationships are foundational for everything in a network like this, as is a deep commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. To have a successful network working across so many different cultural contexts, we need to invest in building our collective consciousness about each other's histories and cultures, and operate in such a way that enables people from very diverse backgrounds to feel a sense of belonging.
Thank you for sharing that additional insight - that really resonates with my background in social anthropology. Now, moving toward your personal experience as a woman leader in the education space: How would you describe your leadership style? How has being a woman influenced this approach? Have you faced any specific challenges as a woman leader in the education sector? And do you have any advice for emerging women leaders in education?
I would say that from the very beginning, this movement was really far beyond me. From minute one, and certainly through all these years at Teach For All, I've viewed the leadership challenge as creating an environment that magnetizes and enables the leadership of many other people who are drawn to the same purpose, vision, and values that undergird everything. My approach is much more about creating that environment than operating in an authoritarian or hierarchical manner.
It's hard to answer the question about how much being a woman has influenced this. I think my leadership style is rooted in feminine principles. But there are certainly men who also believe that we need to operate in ways that bring out the leadership of everyone and maximize the diversity of perspectives if we're going to solve big complex challenges.
One of the most inspirational thinkers who has informed my ways of operating and our collective ways of operating across Teach For All is Frederic Laloux, the person who wrote "Reinventing Organizations”. He wrote an incredible book about how different historical eras fund different ways of operating, and in this very participative, highly connected era that we're in now, his thinking has really informed the way we operate across Teach For All. So it's hard to know how much is me being a woman and how much is just a different way of thinking.
Regarding the challenges I've encountered as a woman, I wish we had more research on this question. I often think the dynamics in a room, even in our own organization, are being influenced by gender dynamics, and I wonder, "Would this be happening if I was a guy?" But it's really hard to parse out.
One memorable example is that when I was deliberating about whether it made sense to launch Teach For All, given all that still needed to be done at Teach For America, I went around talking with our board members.
At least four of them looked at me and said, "You can't do this to your kids—you cannot take a global job when you've got four small kids."
That's fascinating, because by the time the fourth person tells you that, you think, "Am I really going to be doing a disservice to my kids?" And yet my kids have, through this journey, gained incredible global exposure and learned so much. It's fascinating to think about that.
I've certainly had opportunities because I'm a woman as well, because women are underrepresented in this space, and I'm sure people's feeling that we need diversity has generated some of the opportunities I've had. So I think it's a mixed picture. My own son, who's a very recent college graduate trying to start his own organization, called me a couple of months into his journey. He asked me how I had done this as a woman, because he was recognizing the ways in which his sharing the gender of the men he was meeting with was leading to a different kind of relationship than I could have developed. So that's why I say there's a lot that's under the surface that people still don't recognize and don't name.
Thank you for those honest reflections and concrete experiences. It's shocking to hear about the questions regarding your kids. Unfortunately, it’s a question that comes up more often than it should, especially for those of us with children at this age. For my final question to close our discussion: What would you like to see change in the education sector over the next decade? Do you have any visionary ideas or reflections to share?
You know, I believe that as educators, we have the greatest role to play in reshaping the world and putting it on a trajectory to peace, sustainability, and justice.
I guess it's a truism – we can look at what's happening in classrooms today and we see what we're going to have in the future. When you look at it that way, it's really shocking that we haven't done more to prioritize rethinking education and ensuring that what we're doing in classrooms is developing the kind of collective leadership we need. We should be developing students' agency, awareness, and connectedness to people and planet, as well as well-being, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills necessary to solve all these increasingly complex problems that we face.
I think we have a huge opportunity, and I hope the next generation of women and men decide to put their creativity towards this challenge. The world's kids are in classrooms that are most often doing the exact opposite of fostering agency and connectedness and even critical thinking skills. Truly, all you need to do is start talking to high schoolers around the world, of any economic class - the most marginalized kids and the most privileged kids - and you realize how far we are from providing them the kind of empowering educational experience that would truly equip them to lead differently than their predecessors.