The Walton Family Foundation

Teach for America

Working to eliminate educational inequality in the United States, Teach for America enlists outstanding recent college graduates, of all academic majors and career interests, to teach for two years in low-income urban and rural public schools.  These young adults — our nation's most promising future leaders — go on to pursue professional careers in their chosen fields, and many become lifelong advocates for expanding educational opportunity.  More than 60 percent of TFA alums continue to work in education — many as school leaders — and more than 90 percent report that they support TFA's mission through their careers, volunteer activity or graduate study.

Teach for America, with the assistance of the Walton Family Foundation, currently has a corps of 157 young teachers in the Delta region of Arkansas and Mississippi, striving to close the academic achievement gap for some 13,350 students there.   Amanda Kraft exemplifies TFA's potential to transform schools and students.  When she arrived in 2005 to teach instrumental music in a Hughes, Arkansas, high school, she discovered that the school had no instruments for the students to play.  Undaunted, Amanda cajoled friends and family into donating gently used instruments, searched internet auctions for instruments needing minor repairs, and organized fund raisers to pay for it all.  She recruited band members and taught them to play the national anthem in time for the first home football game.  By the end of the academic year, Amanda had taught her students music theory and performance according to state music standards, and they had played in two concerts and at the school's spring sporting events.

In addition to fulfilling their two-year commitments, many teachers in the region are doing much more.  In Helena, Arkansas, for example, corps members organized a local chapter of the Boys & Girls Club, convening a governing board, hiring a director, and raising needed funds.  Nearly half (42 percent) of the 2003 corps remained in the Delta for a third year, a figure that increased to 52 percent with the 2004 corps.  Paul Barnhardt is one of more than 80 TFA alumni who continue to live and work in the Delta region, contributing directly to the life of the organization and helping fulfill its vision of making a lasting contribution to communities there.  After teaching in Mississippi for three years, Paul served for a year as TFA's recruitment director in the Delta.  He went on to achieve a master's degree in educational leadership at Delta State University and now serves as assistant principal of Greenwood High School in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Visit the Teach for America Web site.

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