The person who has inspired me my whole life is my Mom, because she taught me commitment. She sacrificed. We weren’t dirt poor, but we weren’t real rich or anything. I would always have what I needed, and when I looked in her closet, she would have two dresses. She taught me to be outside of yourself, to get outside of yourself, and to be committed to somebody. That’s the same thing that I try to teach. Throughout my life, my mom has been the person that I’ve always looked up to. She never went to high school. I remember, in an old Polish way, she said, “Mike, I went to the eighth grade twice because the teacher liked me.” She had great, self-effacing humor, and loved life. I really admire her.

He was one of those persons, certainly, but my sister, my grandmother and uncle who raised me, who taught me, by their actions, that it was good to be good, that it was nice to be nice, influenced me more than any other persons have since that time.

Donald Crouch in high school said, “Do you like these words?” I was then writing words of my own. He said, “Do you like these words? Do you like the way they sound in your head?” He said, “Well, they sound ten times better when you give ’em out in the air. It’s too bad you can’t say these words.” He began to challenge me, to nudge me toward speaking again, and by using my own poetry — and then other poets because he himself was a compatriot of Robert Frost, he himself was a poet. He himself said he learned a poem a day. In case he went blind, he’d have a whole book of poems in his head. And he nudged me toward that, toward acknowledging and appreciating the beauty of words.

I definitely had some teachers who were important. My fifth grade science teacher, Mr. Jake, was really the first teacher to express confidence in my academic abilities because I was the only person who could identify a rock, which was obsidian and it was because of the reading that I had been doing because after I got through with the animal books, I went to plants, and when I finished all the plant books, I went to rocks because we lived on the railroad tracks and there were a lot of rocks, so I became an expert in geology, and this was while I was still a dummy in the class. So, it was like the first time that I had an opportunity to raise my hand and demonstrate my knowledge because nobody else knew the answer. Everybody was absolutely flabbergasted, but Mr. Jake said to me, “Benjamin, that’s incredible.” He said, “Why don’t you come by the laboratory after school and we can talk about starting a rock collection for you.” And, from there I started going to the laboratory every day, getting involved with feeding the squirrel, a red squirrel named Maynard. There was a tarantula, crayfish, a Jack Dempsey fish and I got involved in all this stuff. There was a microscope and I started looking at water specimens and learned all about paramecium and volvox and amoebas, and it was just incredible. That really was what started me on my way.

The Fountainhead , I think, pretty much saved me in the initial years of Teach For America. I loved that book, but I’m not sure books were the seminal thing that guided my path. ... I think it was sort of about “the creator against the world,” and I was probably feeling at that point that I was up against lots of boulders, to pull off the big idea of Teach For America.

Wendy Kopp: Education needs a systemic change - Mediamax.am

I applied to one firm in every sector. This was the most half-hearted job search. “I’ll apply for that management consulting firm and this investment bank…” and I applied for five jobs altogether, because my heart wasn’t in it. And thankfully… I’m so glad I didn’t get any of those big jobs! Because that made this decision easier.

Kopp ’89 Discusses Education Reform, Looking Beyond the Classroom | Princeton Alumni Weekly

And the most fulfilled, centered, grounded, happy people I know are people who made the choice to be part of an effort to actually make the world a better place. ... I would say, to me, the path of least regrets is to at least make a short-term commitment to say, “Let me work to make a real difference in the world.” The worst that could happen is you decide to move into something else later, but you’ll always take with you what you’ve given and what you’ve gained through that experience.

We focus on people and on cultivating local leadership: Wendy Kopp