Teach for America seeks applicants

Teach For America is inviting UW–Madison students to apply to participate in its program.

Teach for America is an organization of recent college graduates and working professionals — of all academic majors, backgrounds and career interests — who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders for expanding educational opportunity for all children.

The application deadline is Friday, Sept. 19.

Unique to other teaching programs, Teach for America is open to students with any educational background.

“While we’re so excited to accept students who are pursuing a teaching career,” says UW–Madison liaison Garrett Bucks. “We are also interested in accepting students who are going into the other career majors, whether they’re going into law, business, public affairs or anything else.”

The 17-year-old organization, which places recent college graduates into low-income school districts with teaching shortages, has grown from 500 members in its second year to more than 5,000 members for the 2007-08 school year.

The 5,000-plus corps members are teaching more than 440,000 students — making Teach for America approximately the same size as Chicago’s school district — in areas of the country ranging from New York City to New Orleans to the Rio Grande Valley.

UW-Madison has increased from being the 11th largest contributor in 2006-07 to the third largest source of core members in 2007-08 — jumping eight spots in rankings in just one year. Last year, 65 of 200 UW–Madison applicants were accepted.

“For a very selective program, it was a great testament for all of these students getting in,” Bucks said “Seventeen-thousand people go through the program, the one thing that’s been true for everyone: We’ve done something real and done something that makes an impact.”

The first round of the application process consists of submitting a resume and two 500-word essays to the organization’s Web site. A portion of applicants are called back for a second-round phone interview and for a third, in-person interview that lasts the entire day and involves individual as well as group discussions of the program and current issues in education.