Free Radical by Michelle Rhee Page B

celebrating and preparing to leave for our placement sites. Wendy is a notorious workaholic. Apparently, on this evening, her staff had convinced her to let her hair down and party a little. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best idea for the founder of Teach For America to be cavorting with the corps, but the staff advising her were twentysomethings with a burning desire to have some fun.
    I remember dancing with my roommates when the room started buzzing. The crowd parted like a scene out of a movie, and in came Wendy with some of her trusted staff. I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman who had inspired so many. There she stood, in the middle of the dance floor, looking unbelievably uncomfortable. As she started to dance, she nervously jerked around to the music for a moment, without much success at rhythm, and then her bra strap slipped off her shoulder. She tried to push it up. But with the herky-jerky of her body, it fell down over and over again. Finally, thinking better of it, she slipped behind one of the large speakers to fix her bra.
    â€œReally?” I thought. “That’s our leader?”
    But Wendy’s tentative moves on the dance floor were no reflection of her tenacity as a leader. She proved to be an incredible advocate for her program—a woman who got things done. She was absolutely relentless. TFA suffered in its first few years from a lack of funding and a vicious attack from the education school elite who wrote mercilessly about how Teach For America allegedly damaged kids. She braved her way through what she calls “the dark years,” talking wealthy donors into shelling out millions of dollars to build the program. She tried her best to stave off the criticisms that TFA was an ineffective program that did nothing more than make do-gooders feel good about themselves and pad their résumés.
    All the while she not only built a brand—she built a movement.
    Today, nearly 20 percent of the graduating classes of Harvard and Yale apply to Teach For America, and most get rejected. TFA alumni can now be found running school districts, leading the best charter schools in the country, working in leading think tanks, serving as governors’ education advisers, and even taking on the call of elected office.
    The shy, awkward girl from Highland Park, Texas, had created a popular phenomenon.
    So when she asked to meet with me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was eager to hear what she had to say.
    A T H ARVARD I HAD enrolled in the master’s in public policy program, with a concentration in education policy. When I enrolled, Harvard didn’t have a stand-alone concentration in education policy, so I made one up. There was an approved concentration in health, human services, and education, so I tweaked that by taking all the education-related courses at the Kennedy School and some at the Graduate School of Education.
    Harvard was a foreign world to me, almost as strange as Korea in some respects. I had never experienced anything like it. It made my years at Cornell seem like a walk in the park. I was not an outstanding student and never had been. Harvard, I quickly found out, was full of people who have always been the smartest kid in the class.
    On the first day, we had been assigned a case to read before class, and I watched the nauseating ritual of students working overtime to make a good first impression on the professor and their peers. In graduate schools like the Kennedy School and law schools throughout the country, students form study groups. These groups serve both academic and social purposes. People jump to form groups as quickly as they can, but it has to be done carefully. The goal is to identify the smartest people possible and form a group with them.
    I sat in the classroom the entire day without uttering a word or impressing anyone. Despite that, I was invited to attend the first session of a study group by Michael Simon, a guy I vaguely knew from the