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that one can’t see religion, only the manifestations of it—like synagogues, churches, and mosques. Similarly, one can’t see the wind, only manifestations of it—waves in a wheat field, moving branches. What’s another analogy you can draw to the wind?”
    From the very beginning, Kopp believed that in order to make teaching attractive to her peers, tagged then as the “Me Generation,” or even the “Mean Generation,” there had to be an “aura of status and selectivity” around Teach For America. High-achieving college students like Kopp viewed teaching as a downwardly mobile career. Those who didn’t go directly to graduate school after graduation tended to head for investment banks or marketing firms. To most, becoming a schoolteacher was unthinkable.
    Kopp was going to change all that. The 1989 graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University wrote her senior thesis on the idea of starting a “Teacher Corps” not unlike the Peace Corps. The mission would be to take on what she considered to be the number one civil rights issue of her generation: the educational achievement gap between the rich and the poor in America.
    Nothing in Kopp’s past, to that point, had suggested that education would become her issue or social justice her passion. Raised in University Park, an affluent, lily-white enclave of Dallas so insulated from urban realities that it was known as “the Bubble,” Kopp didn’t know exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up. She told her local newspaper,
The Dallas Morning News,
in 1985: “I would love a career that combines speaking and writing skills with economics and politics.” She never seriously considered becoming a teacher.
    Kopp was part of a generation of “extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious” students the author David Brooks wrote about in a much-noticed 2001
Atlantic Monthly
article called “The Organization Kid.” The cohort were rule-following team players who were not trying to buck the system but climb it, observed Brooks. Like others among Princeton’s young meritocratic elite that Brooks deftly profiled, Kopp was goal-oriented—a straight-A student who was valedictorian at Highland Park High School, a perennial on the Best High Schools in America list. Kopp’s credentials—even by today’s overheated standards—were impressive. She was editor of the school newspaper two years running, president of the debate team, a member of the National Forensic League, the lead in the school play (Hannah in Neil Simon’s
California Suite
), and a member of the National Honor Society. Kopp did community service through an organization called Right Turns, which counseled younger children about drug prevention. She also sat at the school’s Round Table, a current-events discussion group. In the summers Kopp worked for her parents, Jay and Mary Pat, who published guidebooks for conventioneers in Dallas and Houston. She loved to play tennis and was an avid jogger. Oh, and she also sewed her own dresses and skirts.
    At Princeton she kept up the pace. Outside of the lecture hall, much of her energy went into the Foundation for Student Communication, a student-run organization that held three yearly conferences and published its own undergrad magazine called
Business Today,
the largest student-run magazine in the country. Within months of joining, Kopp was an associate editor writing about student entrepreneurs for the magazine. But
Business Today
was financially shaky, and soon enough Kopp was working the ad side as well. During an interview with a top executive for a story she was writing, Kopp mentioned the magazine’s financial woes and suggested he might like to buy an ad. She made the sale then and there. More important, she learned an invaluable fund-raising lesson that would serve her