Free Radical by Michelle Rhee Page A

pragmatist. She asked the questions that other people were thinking but were too polite to ask. Rather than cheering me and my brothers on blindly, she was always shrewdly skeptical. It kept us on our toes and taught us to defend our ideas intelligently.
    â€œAre you sure this is a good idea?” she asked. “Maybe you should stay in school.”
    My father supported my devotion to public education. Shang, son of an educator, always honored teachers. “You can do this,” he said.
    This time, though, Inza had a point. I knew absolutely nothing about starting a new organization. But that didn’t mean I was going to take her caution to heart and wilt. Instead I went to Barnes & Noble and bought as many books as I could find on starting a business, including Business Plans for Dummies . Not the most illustrious start ever, but a start.
    Who would be right: Inza or Shang?
    W ENDY K OPP, FOUNDER OF Teach For America, came to speak at Harvard sometime toward the end of my second year. I had managed to navigate my way through the Kennedy School, meet people who would become important in my future endeavors, and hone my skills in statistics. I was twenty-six but didn’t know what my next step would be.
    â€œWhat are your plans?” she asked. “I’m curious about your next move.”
    I told her I was thinking of working for a foundation that gave money to education reform initiatives.
    â€œYou don’t want to do that,” she said. “That’s not where you’re going to have the kind of impact you want. Trust me.”
    And I did. Five years earlier I had put my life in Wendy Kopp’s hands. I had left the prestigious halls of my Ivy League university, and instead of heading to Wall Street or graduate school, I went to teach in inner-city Baltimore. I wasn’t the only one who cast practicality and her future aside to follow Wendy Kopp’s vision. Five hundred other recent grads from the best colleges across the country had made the same choice.
    Why?
    When you meet Wendy, you don’t think she’s the type to start a movement. She grew up amid privilege in Highland Park, Texas, a wealthy suburb of Dallas. She’s smart as a whip and driven, but she’s not a particularly inspiring orator. So why were so many of America’s most talented twentysomethings willing to toss it all in for Wendy? Simple: Because she had an incredibly compelling idea.
    During her senior year at Princeton, Wendy turned an idealistic notion that she had been harboring for years into her thesis. She wrote about the need to inspire the next generation of leaders to be focused on fixing public education. The way to do it? Recruit, select, and train the most outstanding young people in our country to spend two years teaching in some of the most troubled urban or rural public schools. While they were in the classroom, they would fill a huge need for talented new teachers. After their two years—and whether they stayed in teaching or went to law school, medical school, Wall Street, or Capitol Hill—they would be lifelong advocates for public education.
    Wendy was one of us. She had graduated from college only three years before I had. She knew that many college graduates were seeking meaning in their lives in a way that taking a regular job couldn’t provide. In forming the concept of Teach For America, she tapped into that search for fulfillment beyond the almighty dollar.
    Wendy is an odd duck—a painfully shy woman who has become a truly effective leader. During our summer training institute she was a bit like Mr. Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street —a mythical creature whose sightings would be tracked by corps members trying to determine whether the legend was real. She was only twenty-five at the time.
    The first time I laid eyes on Wendy we were at a dance party at the Teach For America Summer Institute, toward the end of our training. We were cutting loose,