Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Teach for America (whose research I wrote about here last year) is having a big geek-out festival in DC from Feb. 11-13. Along with James Carville, Whitney Tilson and Kira Orange Jones, I’ll be doing a panel on the media’s role in the country’s noisy education debate.

I remember when Wendy Kopp came to my high school to recruit for a wacky start-up called Teach for America. Hard to believe that was 20 years ago…

Teach for America is now bigger than the Peace Corps, which is nice. But more important than its active teachers are its alumni—who are influencing education reform in ways that are hard to overstate. (Some people actually think there is a giant conspiracy of ed reformers, almost all of whom can be traced back to Wendy Kopp. Those people are not entirely wrong.)

Hope to see some of you in DC next month.