Fountain Valley School of Colorado could not have been more different from East Los Angeles. Layla was one of the few minorities in the school and—as would become the pattern in Layla’s life—she was underestimated. When she arrived she heard murmurs of “affirmative action kids” who were taking spots away from other, more deserving students. But Layla did her thing, unfazed by the unwelcoming climate.
She studied alone and kept to herself. She didn’t make many friends. She focused on proving everyone wrong. At the end of her first semester, she was ranked number one in her class. Her classmates were stunned.
She remembers mumbling to her detractors: “Affirmative action my ass.”
DESPITE NEVER HAVING BEEN a great student, I found my stride at the Kennedy School. Layla and I took an almost identical course load and did all of our work together. We did well. Probably the most surprising thing to me about my experiences at the Kennedy School was my affection for statistics.
In high school I had struggled through calculus. I never liked math at all and completely avoided it in college. Logarithms, sines, and cosines made absolutely no sense to me. So when I saw that we were required to take quantitative classes as part of our course of study, I shuddered.
But statistics spoke to me in a completely different way. It wasn’t about abstract concepts; it was completely logical and concrete. I quickly learned the value of statistics. We read the newspaper, see stories about a study showing that eggs are bad for our health or that kale is good for us, and take them as fact. We might believe what we are reading and change our behavior based on the information, often based on statistics.
What I learned at the Kennedy School is that data can be manipulated. Two academics can look at the same set of data and come to two wildly different conclusions based on the biases they bring to their research. The most valuable skill I learned at Harvard was to never take numbers at face value, to always dig in and analyze to see what’s really happening in any given situation.
WENDY KOPP AND I had kept in touch during my time at Harvard. She was aware that I had done well at Harlem Park and that I had decided on graduate school. We had emailed a few times and followed one another through friends. She knew I was clearly still committed to working in public education in some capacity. I had applied for fellowships that would have allowed me to work for a foundation on education reform, but nothing was panning out.
Out of the blue, I got a call from Wendy’s office. She was in town giving a speech in Boston and wanted to meet with me. They wanted to know if I was available.
We met for lunch. She wore that intense look on her face. I detected that distinctive cross-armed lean-in that she does when she’s trying to talk someone into something. I’d seen her turn on her persuasive, almost magnetic charm before—usually to wring something from funders or school district officials. This time I was the target.
“We have all of these school districts that are begging us for more teachers,” she said. “At TFA we can’t recruit and train them fast enough. The school districts are asking, ‘How do you develop these teachers? Bring us some more.’ ”
She paused. She sipped her water. She leaned in.
“We are not growing at Teach For America,” she said, “so we can’t fulfill their needs. We have no plans to grow anytime in the near future. School districts need some help. So why don’t you start an organization that could help them recruit more and better teachers?”
It made sense. After my experience in Baltimore, I knew that excellent teachers could make all the difference for students and schools. I agreed to start an organization that would help school districts and states find the best teachers.
Wendy managed to get a grant of $50,000 to pay my first year’s salary. She gave me a desk and an office at the Teach For America headquarters on Wall Street.
Each day I would trudge into the office, read my books, and try to figure out what I was doing. After a while, I felt that I needed to start producing something, so I began to write the business plan for the new venture.
By the time I finished what I thought was a solid draft, I decided I needed some feedback. I was reluctant to take it to Wendy until I got some validation that it was a decent start. I did some research and found an organization, called SCORE, that matched fledgling entrepreneurs with retired business executives. One morning I went to the New York SCORE office, where I was given a number and asked to wait. About thirty minutes later I was seated across from an older gentleman who had been an executive in the textile industry. He was short, wiry, and condescending. His tiny bow tie was knotted high on his neck, like a nut and bolt with wings.
“Where’s your stuff?” he demanded gruffly.
I pulled out my draft plan and handed it to him. He flipped through the pages.
“Young lady,” he said, “I have no idea what it is that you are trying to do here.”
I said, “I’m trying to start a new company. A nonprofit organization that helps school districts and state departments of education hire new teachers.”
“Who are the shareholders?” he asked.
“There are no shareholders. It’s a nonprofit organization.”
“You have to have shareholders. If not, you have no equity.”
“We don’t need equity; we are a nonprofit organization.”
“You don’t want to make a profit?” he asked, shaking his head and looking at me like I was a moron.
“No. This is a nonprofit!”
We were fifteen minutes into what was scheduled to be a forty-five-minute session.
“Young lady,” he said, “you are wasting my time. You can’t sell a business plan that has no profits attached to it. No one is going to invest in that. I don’t know why you’re here, but come back when you have a real plan.”
I am not a violent person, but I wanted to punch the guy. I’m also not a crier, but at the same time, the exchange almost brought me to tears.
“Really?” I thought. “Is it that hard to understand?”
He stood up, shook his head, shook my hand, and said, “Good luck.”
As it turns out, my concept was hard to understand, but I knew in my core that it made sense. I was trying to start a nonprofit organization, but I didn’t want to do it in the traditional way. I hate asking people for money, and I didn’t want to spend all of my time fund-raising. So I decided that the organization should be a revenue-generating, nonprofit organization.
I’d been around education long enough to see a huge number of nonprofits whose leaders spent inordinate amounts of time explaining how their do-gooding was doing someone some good. If it was that hard a sell, I thought, then you had a problem. My idea was to start a business where we would sign contracts with school districts that needed our services. They would pay us to provide great teachers. Our model would charge the district only for the amount it cost to do the work, no profit added. If we were providing valuable services for the district, it would be willing to pay for them. If we weren’t, then we didn’t need to be in business, and we would fail.
People didn’t get it, but it seemed crystal clear to me. And since it made sense in my head, I pursued it. The first order of business was to lay my hands on some start-up capital.
DON FISHER, LEGENDARY FOUNDER of the Gap, was beginning to invest in a major way in education reform. He was a big supporter of Wendy and Teach For America as well as the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools, and Wendy thought he was the ideal candidate to become our angel donor.
I continued working on the business plan, made it as good as it was going to get in my hands, and went to meet with Scott Hamilton, the head of Fisher’s foundation.
Scott was a jerk to me. He was skeptical, dismissive, and condescending—a younger version of the elderly fellow with the bow tie. During the course of several meetings he poked holes in all of my assumptions and berated the plan. He was arrogant and a pain in the butt, but he had my money, so I suffered through it.
My ide
a was definitely unconventional. Wendy had established TFA based on the goodwill and good faith of rich donors. They operated in a world where everything was done by grants. Philanthropists gave money based on compelling ideas they felt would help the world become a better place. The nonprofits would do the work and then try to convince the donors of all the good their donations had brought and ask for more money to do more good work.
I wasn’t trying to convince Don Fisher and Scott Hamilton that I was doing good for the world. I was trying to convince them that I had a viable concept for a self-sustaining organization and that I had the ability to lead that organization and bring my off-the-wall idea to fruition.
After weeks of meetings and what he called due diligence Scott Hamilton called Wendy Kopp.
“I’m not sure I have confidence in Michelle as a leader—or in her plan,” he said.
“I do,” Wendy said. She called and appealed directly to Don Fisher.
He was inclined to give me the money, only because he believed in Wendy. Scott still thought it was a bad idea. So he fashioned a compromise.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll give you the $833,000 in start-up capital.”
I knew there was a catch.
“But,” he continued, “if this revenue-generating concept of yours actually pans out, then that means you should be recouping those dollars. We’ll give you the money as a loan, not a grant. And we’ll expect repayment. With interest.”
I saw Wendy lean forward in her chair ready to push back and push for a grant.
“Done,” I said, without skipping a beat. “When can I expect the check?”
MY FIRST TASK WAS to find some clients. But to attract them, I had to make it seem as if I ran a viable business.
With the first installment of Fisher money in the bank, I set to work designing business cards and letterhead. Okay, designing might be a stretch. I tried out different fonts and colors and ended up with a clean green logo that read “The New Teacher Project.” I never liked the name, but I didn’t have time to mess around, so I went with it.
I had originally wanted to come up with a cool name. I created a list of hundreds of options. At an afternoon meeting with Wendy and Fiona Lin and Karolyn Belcher—two friends from TFA who had become trusted advisers—we tried out all the names on the list for size. The candidates ranged from “TEACH!” (a failed earlier TFA effort) to “The Woodhull Group” (after Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president) to “Teacher Recruitment Services.” But Wendy kept returning to “The New Teacher Project.”
“The name has to explain what we do,” she said, “but it also has to be different and innovative.”
Karolyn and I weren’t buying it, but we both knew that arguing with Wendy once she got something stuck in her head was a waste of time and sanity. After two hours of idea after idea being shot down I said, “Okay, we’ll go with this for now. New Teacher Project it is.”
“The!” Wendy insisted as I was walking out of her office. “The The is critical. It’s not ‘New Teacher Project’; it’s ‘The New Teacher Project.’ ”
And The New Teacher Project was born. But if I wanted it to survive its first month, I needed to find some clients and bring in some revenue.
I had absolutely no idea where to start and less of an idea of how to sell our services, but I was fortunate. Wendy, in her travels coast to coast building TFA, had established good relationships with school districts and foundations across the country. She used those contacts to get me some initial meetings, and I hit the road. In the first month I traveled to Houston, Dallas, Austin, Boston, Philadelphia, Compton, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Kansas City. I met with anyone and everyone who would meet with me.
In the process, I watched myself develop some skills as a persuader. Things started out a bit rocky as I tried to explain what it was that TNTP was trying to do: provide a steady supply of quality teachers, for a fee. I could read what resonated with people and what didn’t. I honed my pitch quickly. By the end of the first month, I had a solid sell down. And even though I hated asking people for money, I began to revel in the pitch sessions. Here I was asking established school district officials to spend money on a person with no track record and a business model that was untested. I found it both perilous and exciting—and I was getting better at each meeting.
That year, 1997, there was a significant teacher shortage crisis. School districts were having trouble staffing their schools, and urban school districts were hit particularly hard. They often opened the school year with hundreds of vacancies. We found ourselves selling into a buyer’s market.
In relatively short order, we had two contracts, with the School District of Philadelphia and the Austin Independent School District. David Hornbeck was the superintendent in Philadelphia at the time, and a TFA alum, Ben Rayer, had become his special assistant. Hornbeck had just hired Marge Adler, a professional from the corporate world, to run his human resources department. She was amenable to the idea of hiring consultants but skeptical about our ragtag new operation.
“So who exactly is this organization?” she asked. “Where are you headquartered?”
“You know,” Hornbeck said, “Wendy started Teach For America in her dorm room at Princeton. This is probably like that, and look how successful Wendy was!”
With that, they signed the contract. Our job was to consult with the school district to design better recruitment and selection functions that would generate a larger and higher-quality teacher applicant pool.
Needless to say, Marge Adler was a little shocked to see me show up as their consultant a few weeks later, but she went with it at her boss’s insistence.
The third contract was a bit tougher. I was close to closing a deal with the Compton Unified School District, just outside Los Angeles, but state-appointed superintendent Randy Ward proved to be a difficult negotiator.
In Compton, we had proposed starting a new program, Teach Compton!, that would recruit one hundred midcareer professionals to Compton to become teachers.
“Yeah, yeah,” Randy Ward said, “I know what you say you’re going to do. But what if you don’t? Then I’m out one hundred thousand dollars with no new teachers, and you’ve got my money in New York City taking Wendy out to lunch!”
“I assure you, Dr. Ward,” I said, “that will not happen. That’s not how we operate. We deliver.”
“Listen, honey, you’re good. You talk a good game but that is not going to help me if I shell out my money, and you don’t deliver me any teachers. I need a guarantee!”
“What kind of guarantee?” I asked.
“A guarantee that I don’t get screwed!” he boomed.
“Okay,” I said.
“And show me what you’re actually going to do first. All this talk better not just be talk!” With that, he left the room.
That night I got on the phone with my team. I had hired my first four employees, and their paychecks depended on my bringing these contracts in.
“No way,” said Tracy Spitzberg and Jennifer Rose, two women from the corporate world I’d brought on board. “We can’t sign a performance-based contract!”
They argued that we would have to spend money to recruit teachers. If we didn’t deliver the teachers, he would want his money back, but it would already be out the door. We wouldn’t be able to repay him!
“We can’t take on that kind of risk!” said Charity Mack, my director of operations, who was responsible for tracking our finances.
“We won’t have to repay him because we are going to get the teachers,” I responded, “and if we don’t, we’re losers and deserve to go out of business anyway.
“Oh,” I added, “and he wants to know what we’re actually doing. Let’s show him a mock-up of the recruitment ads we’ll be doing.”
We spent all night on the phone coming up with potential ideas. None worked. As it neared 1 a.m., the group was getting tired, and I was getting frustrated. After more bantering back and forth, we stumbled on it: “Compto
n’s Kids Deserve a Beverly Hills Education.” I don’t even remember who came up with it, but it was brilliant. Since we were short on cash, we skipped the idea of a full graphic presentation and mocked up a sign on paper with a black background and white letters that spelled out the phrase.
I loved it. So did Randy Ward.
I hired Layla Avila to run the contract, and we were off to the races. In weeks we were fielding dozens of requests for future teachers.
The last contract of that first year was the Massachusetts Department of Education. Commissioner David Driscoll and his young deputy, Alan Safran, had set up a meeting with Wendy to help replenish their teacher ranks. Wendy said she couldn’t do it. She suggested TNTP and opened the door for me. I went in for the sell.
“I can’t believe Wendy pawned us off on you!” I remember Safran saying. “I mean, no offense, but come on! I want TFA, I need TFA, and now I’ve got some unproven, new project?”
I can endure plenty of abuse, especially when I have a lot on the line, but this guy was making me mad.
“Look,” I said, “if you don’t think we can help you, that’s fine. I am not going to try and talk you into working with us.”
“What are you talking about? Isn’t that why you’re here? To convince me that you’re as good as Wendy?” he said. “What have you got? What can you do?”
Safran started talking like a man possessed.
“I want something big,” he continued. “I want something better than TFA! TFA is small potatoes. TFA is so yesterday. I want something new and fresh and exciting. I want to take all of the candidates away from TFA!”
In the midst of the rant, I realized I kind of liked Alan Safran. I appreciated his wild energy and decided to add my own. We started to exchange ideas. After an hour, we came up with the plan. We would start the Massachusetts signing bonus program. The first of its kind, the program would offer $20,000 bonuses to people who came into the program and agreed to teach in a low-performing school district. The bonus would be paid out over four years, but that was a detail we didn’t trumpet. Instead the $20,000 number was the headliner.
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