Commencement Address 2008 - Georgetown College

It is a real privilege to be here with you this morning.  First, because I have a great appreciation for Georgetown.  I’ve seen firsthand through our work that you produce committed, visionary, talented leaders, and I hope the faculty and administration here can reflect this morning on the difference you are making for individuals and communities through your work.

And, it is inspiring to reflect on the accomplishment that today represents for you graduates and your families.  I can only imagine the different stories of your lives, the different sorts of opportunities you have each had and challenges you have each faced.  You should feel an incredible collective sense of accomplishment -- for yourselves and for each other -- for what you have learned and what you have achieved.  And as a mother of four little ones, I can only imagine how proud you parents must be.  Congratulations to all of you.

Finally, a special salute to those of you who have signed up for Teach For America.  We are so excited about what you will bring to our work.

I want to talk with you today about your choices at this stage of your lives – about where you decide to channel your energy as you progress over the coming two or three or five years.  Because I feel like I lucked into something, and I wish someone had told me before what I know now since these things are not best left to chance.

When I was sitting in your seats at another good school now nineteen years ago, I was about to embark on a real adventure.  I had become obsessed with the idea that our country should be recruiting the most talented and driven among us to teach in our nation’s highest poverty communities just as aggressively as we were being recruited at the time to work on Wall Street.  I believed that the inequity in educational outcomes that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines in our country is our nation’s greatest social injustice, that the leaders in our generation were searching for something they weren’t finding and would jump at the chance to teach in urban and rural public schools, that our energy and idealism would make a difference in the lives of the nation’s most disadvantaged kids, and that ultimately our nation would be a different place if as many of its leaders had taught in low-income communities straight out of college as had worked on Wall Street straight out of college.

Because my letter to the President of the United States suggesting that he create a national teacher corps got in the wrong stack and resulted in a job rejection letter from the White House, and because I possessed at the time an uncommon share of naivete, I decided to create Teach For America myself.  Thankfully, the timing was right – there was a conducive mood on college campuses, a huge need in school districts, and a strong desire in corporate America to invest in education reform.  And more importantly, this was an idea that would quickly magnetize hundreds of people who were drawn to the core beliefs and values it represented.  So one year after I graduated from college, I was looking out on an auditorium full of 500 recent college graduates who were about to embark on their training and on the first year of Teach For America.

If someone had asked me at the time if this was going to be my life’s work, I would have shuddered at the question.  Not because I had anything else in mind, but because to me, life consisted entirely of the next two years.  It would have been inconceivable that one day I would be forty – that only happened to other people.   Yet almost twenty years later, I am still here.  And I am not alone.  Most of the Teach For America corps members who sign up for two years are still in this work in one way or another as well.  Why?

Because, I think, of what we have learned about the nature of the inequities we are addressing.   

Perhaps the best way to come at this is by sharing a story from Georgetown’s back yard.  Out of 51 states, the educational outcomes in Washington DC rank 51st.  More than half of the students in this city will drop out of high school.  Those who do graduate from college will perform, on average, at an eighth grade skill level.   These inequities limit the life prospects of thousands and thousands of children in the Capitol of a nation that aspires so admirably to be a place of equal opportunity.

But there are four schools, three of which are run by Teach For America alumni, that are proving that these inequities don’t have to exist.  Kids from East of the River and Anacostia arrive at these schools, which are part of a network of schools called KIPP, for Knowledge is Power Program, 2-3 grade levels behind.  They are fifth graders who read and do math at the second and third grade levels.  After an enormous amount of hard work, the fifth graders become eighth graders who outperform kids in Upper NorthWest DC, the most economically privileged part of this city.  They go on to gain admission to this city’s, and the nation’s, top high schools -- National Cathedral School (NCS), Sidwell, Georgetown Day, Georgetown Prep, Georgetown Visitation, Gonzaga, Saint Albans, Landon, The Field School, Deerfield and Andover.

So in the face of the massive problem we are addressing, we see hard evidence that it can be solved – that when children growing up in our lowest-income communities are given the opportunities they deserve, they excel.  I asked the founder of these KIPP schools, a Teach For America alumna named Susan Schaefler who has been engaged in this work for 16 years now, why she is  still in this and she responded immediately: “I don’t know how I can’t do this.  It would be like having a cure to a common problem and not using it.”  We are still in this work because of the magnitude of the problems we see, and because of what we’ve learned about these problems’ solvability.  

I was struck recently to hear Muhammad Yunus’ message when he received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work pioneering and spreading the idea of microcredit – giving loans to poor people without any financial security.  His message, after more than three decades in using this approach to address poverty, was that he firmly believes we can eliminate poverty .  “I strongly believe that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to,” he said.  “In that kind of world, [the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum….  Poverty in the world is an artificial creation; it does not belong to human civilization. We can change it."

Wow.  Most of us view poverty as a massive and daunting problem – a problem we are unlikely to solve in our lifetimes.  We think that because we know that almost half the world’s population – three billion people -- live on less than $2 per day, that approximately 790 million people in the developing world are chronically undernourished, which is the equivalent of every single person in both North and South America going hungry every day.  But Muhammad Yunus deeply believes, based on his work in understanding its causes and solutions, that we can in fact eliminate poverty in our lifetime.

The reason his message struck me so powerfully is that it’s so consistent with what I’ve seen firsthand about educational inequity.  We can solve it.  

For all of us who have attained such rich educations and the opportunities that result, it is so easy to isolate ourselves from the inequities that persist in our nation and world.  We cannot let this happen, especially given the evidence that they are solvable problems.  Because if we can solve them, we must.  If educational inequity, or poverty, is solvable, it is the moral responsibility of those of us who have been given so much to do everything in our power to realize that change.

Now, I imagine that for many there is a temptation to assume that you’ll address the world’s problems later – after you make millions or have families or gain skills and experience.  But there are two big reasons to dive in early which I hope you’ll consider.  

The first is that the world needs your inexperience.  There’s something about the fresh perspective, the naivete, the limitless energy that comes along with youth and inexperience that enables recent graduates to solve problems that many more experienced people have given up on.  

People want to know how I started Teach For America straight out of college, and honestly, my greatest asset was my inexperience.  It proved critical at many junctures.   When I declared in my thesis that I would try to create such a corps myself, my thesis adviser pronounced me “deranged”.  When he looked at my thesis, which included a budget for the first year of $2.5 million, he asked me if I knew how hard it was to raise $2,500, let alone two and a half million dollars.  But aided by my inexperience, I was unfazed by these reactions.  When school district officials literally laughed at the notion that the Me Generation would jump at the chance to teach in urban and rural communities, their concerns too went unheard.  My very greatest asset in reaching this point was that I simply did not understand what was impossible.

I see this same phenomenon every day as I watch 22-year-olds walking into classrooms and setting goals for themselves and their students that most believe to be entirely unrealistic.  Despite the conventional wisdom that there is only so much schools can do to overcome the challenges of poverty, individuals like Joe Almeida, who graduated from Georgetown in 2005 and I believe is here in the audience today, have naively aspired to put their students on a level playing field.     

Straight out of college, Joe began teaching fifth graders in Washington Heights.  He set out to put his kids on the path to college, literally greeting them over the music of pomp and circumstance.  He set for them the expectation that college was in their future and strived to ensure they made the significant academic gains necessary to get on grade level and on a trajectory that would qualify them for good high schools.  When Joe started talking with his kids and their parents about college, other teachers suggested it was too early.  No doubt some who know the statistics – who know that only one in ten students in low-income communities will graduate from college – also proclaimed it unwise.  

But Joe went ahead.   And, he threw every bit of himself into the effort to accomplish his goals.  Among other things he decided to bring all his kids here to Georgetown to help them envision their future as college-going students.  When his school could not pay for all the costs of the trip, Joe just went ahead and raised all the money he needed through bake sales and the like.  

At year’s end, Joe’s students had made significant progress in catching up academically and had adopted the mindset that college was in their future.  As one student said, “This is the first time anyone’s expected me to go to college.”  A mother said, “I didn’t think my son would go to college.  Now I know it’s possible.”

Over and over, I see young, inexperienced teachers make a huge difference by setting big goals for themselves that others would deem crazy.  So one reason not to wait to address the world’s biggest problems is that they need your attention before you accept the status quo, before you are plagued by the knowledge of what is “impossible.”

The second reason to engage in addressing the world’s biggest problems early is because accomplishing big things takes time.  It has taken Susan Schaeffler sixteen years to find and build a path to leveling the playing field for kids growing up in DC.  But for the kids she reaches, and their families, and for the example she sets for all of our schools, imagine the difference it made that she taught beyond her initial two years.   

Similarly, as much as Teach For America wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for my naivete, I soon learned the value of time and experience.  This year, 5,000 corps members poured their hearts and souls into leveling the playing field for the students they are teaching from rural areas like the Indian reservations of South Dakota to central cities like those in Chicago or Hartford or Las Vegas.  And in communities where we have been placing corps members for a decade or so, from Oakland, California, to Newark, New Jersey, our alumni are emerging as a new force of leadership for fundamental change.  Maybe some of you have seen our alumni here at work in DC, for example, where Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor, her deputy chancellor, many of the leaders on her senior team, 10% of the school principals, and the leaders of a citizens movement to support the new chancellor’s reforms, are all Teach For America alumni who are on a mission to change the reality that our nation’s Capitol sports one of the lowest-performing school systems in our country.  As the momentum around our efforts has grown – with this year, 25,000 graduating seniors applying to Teach For America – people have asked me whether I envisioned this – whether I ever dreamed we would reach this point.  The thing is, I did envision it – I thought we’d reach this point in year two or three!   What I didn’t envision was what it would take and how long it would take.  And even now, when I contemplate where we are today, all I can think about is how much more there is to be done to fulfill our true potential.  And I know that’s all the Susan Schaefflers and Michelle Rhees and Joe Almeidas can think about as well.  

So this is the second reason to start in on addressing these issues now – because these problems are massive and inconceivably complex.  Finding and implementing the path to success takes time.  

So as you head out today I hope you’ll reflect on the extent of the disparities in our world, on the fact that those who spend their lives addressing them inevitably come to see their solvability, on the enormous assets you possess due to your youth and inexperience, and on the kind of long-term, sustained commitment necessary to see through their complexity and have a chance at actually solving them.

I said earlier that I feel so lucky to have landed on this pursuit, and I really can’t say that loudly enough.  I have spent not one minute of my last nineteen years searching for something I wasn’t finding, because I happened into a pursuit that, while exhausting and challenging, is unbelievably fulfilling.  I wish you the same good fortune.  

Don’t wait to solve the world’s problems.  If you’ve already matriculated to grad school or signed up with corporate America or with another pursuit entirely, seize the opportunity of those learning experiences but remember one or two or three years down the line the contribution you can make by channeling your energy against the disparities in our world.  We can realize a new day – a day free of many of the inequities that exist today.  The only question is whether enough of our world’s future leaders will decide to take them on, sooner rather than later.