Chicago non-profit

In Illinois and across America, educational inequity persists along socioeconomic and racial lines. The achievement gap between high-income and low-income students severely limits the life prospects of the 14 million American children growing up in poverty today; because African-American and Latino/Hispanic children are three times as likely to grow up in low-income areas, these disparities disproportionately prevent children of color from truly having equal opportunities in life. Teach For America believes that the achievement gap is our nation’s greatest domestic challenge. Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort. We accomplish this by building a national corps of outstanding recent college graduates from diverse backgrounds who commit to teaching for at least two years in our nation's lowest-income communities. During their initial two-year commitment, we support our teachers as they go above and beyond traditional expectations and meaningfully narrow the achievement gap for their students. In the long term, alumni of our program become life-long leaders and advocates for educational equity.