Teach For America is one of the most influential educational organizations of the past few decades. Starting 35 years ago as an undergraduate thesis, TFA’s aim was to bring high-performing college graduates to teach in high-need schools and create a generation of leaders. Since then, it has grown into a national enterprise with a vast web of alumni in educational leadership roles. Elisa Villanueva Beard, who is stepping down as CEO after helming TFA since 2013, is one of its more than 70,000 corps members and alumni. She joined TFA in 1998, teaching elementary bilingual education in Phoenix. This month, she is ceding the role to Aneesh Sohoni. It seemed like a good time to sit down with Elisa to talk about where TFA has been, what’s changed, and where it’s headed. Here’s what she had to say.
—Rick

Rick: Elisa, what are a couple of highlights of your tenure as CEO?

Elisa: My tenure at Teach For America has been about driving impact for the students and communities we serve. We’re entering our 35th year of growing and innovating, having modernized our operations to meet this generation of college graduates. At the same time, we are providing more opportunities for our more than 66,000 alumni to connect, learn, and pursue collective impact to help make our vision of all children having access to an excellent education a reality.

Rick: Is there a particular initiative of which you’re especially proud?

Elisa: I’m very proud of innovations like our Ignite tutoring program, which is now in its fourth year. We started with just over 100 tutors in a pilot in Phoenix. This year, we have over 3,200 tutoring groups reaching 38 communities across the country. The impact is significant as we accelerate the learning for students in literacy and math. In the 2023-24 school year, 4th graders with Ignite tutors saw more than four times their expected growth in reading, and 6th graders saw two to three times their expected growth in math. Students with Ignite tutors are also more engaged with school, helping address the current crisis of chronic absenteeism. And Ignite, which is made of college students and former participants in other TFA programs, is a pipeline for the next generation of educators: Almost 7 percent of our 2024 corps members came from this program.

Rick: What about your role as CEO has surprised you?

Elisa: If someone had told me that we would revamp our entire training curriculum and execute a virtual training for incoming teachers successfully in just 10 weeks, I would never have believed it. But in 2020, we had to do just that. We typically train our incoming corps through summer school teaching, but the pandemic shuttered the schools we partnered with. This forced us to accelerate a planned transition toward modernizing and digitizing our training and support model to allow for greater personalization. And it was effective—the corps members who went through training in 2020 felt their training was more effective than the previous cohort. Because of this work, we now have a more consistent corps member experience that draws on best practices from across our regions, the latest evidence-based solutions in teaching and learning, and improved access to student-impact data. I learned that when we center on what’s best for kids, we can meet any moment with agility, focus, and innovation.

Rick: What was the biggest challenge you confronted?

Elisa: It became apparent shortly after I became CEO that we needed to evolve our strategy to attract a new generation of college graduates. That was a massive undertaking because things that might have worked well in 2005 or 2015 are less relevant today. Like any generation, Gen Z has values, interests, and expectations. They want community; they understand that education is an upstream issue that matters to the health of our country; they are skeptical of institutions. We reviewed our overall strategy and business processes to better align with those interests and motivations. For example, they prioritize mental wellness, but our assignment process involved a lot of uncertainty that could create anxiety and discourage prospects from participating in Teach For America. To address this, we gave applicants more agency; now, they apply directly to the region where they want to teach, and we no longer make that decision for them. That required a philosophical change for the Gen X-er in me—recognizing that some of the things that made us successful with my generation held us back later.

Rick: What post-pandemic challenges has TFA faced?

Elisa: The National Assessment of Educational Progress scores we just saw show that we are still experiencing our biggest post-pandemic challenge—students are not thriving in their academic and overall wellness, and our educators and kids are stuck in an outmoded system. Our most vulnerable students are bearing the brunt of this setback and facing the greatest challenges in recovery. The implications are profound because education affects the very fabric of our society. Our country’s success hinges on our ability to provide every child with an excellent education.

The good news is that we know a lot more about what works than we did when I started 27 years ago. Advancements in neuroscience have deepened our understanding of how the brain learns new information. Many evidence-based practices, like high-dosage tutoring and the science of reading, have become mainstream. And we know young people can do anything when we hold them to the highest expectations, care for them, and provide the additional support they often need. We are putting all of that to work while making room for innovation at Teach For America to accelerate our impact and learning.

Rick: What do people get wrong about TFA?

Elisa: Because we have “Teach” in our name, people sometimes focus only on our teacher corps. It is true that the corps is critical to our impact, and we remain one of the largest sources of teachers for low-income communities. However, our network also includes tutors and more than 66,000 alumni working inside and outside education to ensure every child has what they need to learn, lead, and thrive. Almost 17,000 alumni continue to lead classrooms, schools, and school systems, with many recognized as educators of the year in their communities as well as at the state level. We’ve had 12 state commissioners of education run K-12 policy across Democratic and Republican states. Teach For America alumni serve in elected offices ranging from local school boards to Congress. Our alumni go on to be journalists, philanthropists, doctors, judges, lawyers, and much more. Over the last 17 years, over 60 of our alumni have been named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for their leadership. All to say, the leaders who say yes to teaching in urban and rural America often come to realize that this is a lifelong commitment.

Rick: Obviously, TFA faces its share of critics. In light of that, what’s the best case for TFA’s positive impact over time?

Elisa: Over 35 years, we’ve grown a network of leaders who are in this for a lifetime. Teach For America was never about two years, as our alumni will tell you and my own experience as an alum demonstrates. When I started as chief operating officer in 2005, we were in 22 regions with a network of 14,000. Today, we’re a network of more than 70,000. We reach more than 40 regions with our teachers and tutors, and our alumni are working in every state. We’ve grown our teacher corps by almost 50 percent over the last three years, 44 percent of our corps are first-generation college graduates, and 43 percent teach STEM. About 10 percent of the corps today are what we call second-generation corps members, meaning they themselves were taught by corps members as K-12 students, which is a fantastic affirmation of our work. And our teachers continue to have a meaningful impact on student learning and growth. You may have seen the recent meta-analysis from the American Institutes for Research that looked at two decades of research on Teach For America and found that our teachers have had a consistent and significant impact on students’ academic achievement. The researchers analyzed 23 studies spanning 24 years—including over 63,000 teachers and over 5 million students. These results testify to the hard work, commitment to student learning, and tenacity of our network and everyone we work alongside.

Rick: How has the shifting political landscape affected TFA’s work?

Elisa: For some time now, change has been happening at the state level—that’s where most of the resources are and where there’s the ability to set a policy agenda grounded in local conditions that is evidence-based and rooted in a rigorous and coherent theory of change. That’s where we’ve got to be fiercely focused, ensuring that those who have decisionmaking power are considering the full evidence base; are working alongside students, families, educators, business people, city agencies, and all who shape the conditions for a thriving education system, so they have a plan for every child in every community; and are considering how to ensure that plan is properly resourced.

Rick: If you could have one do-over from your tenure, what would it be?

Elisa: Knowing what I know now about the opportunities and challenges for education presented by artificial intelligence, social media, gaming, and other technology and the struggle during the pandemic to provide every child with rigorous, engaging remote learning, I would have launched Teach For America’s research and development arm, the Reinvention Lab, years earlier than 2019. The rise in chronic absenteeism underscores the need for innovation, and Teach For America is uniquely positioned to drive this because of our reach in rural and urban communities and our broad network of leaders who are envisioning and building new school models, creating e-tech grounded in their classroom experience, and developing resources and tools to support students at every step of their learning.

Rick: The next CEO of TFA will be Aneesh Sohoni, an alumnus of TFA and the CEO of One Million Degrees. What advice do you have for him?

Elisa: Aneesh is a bold visionary and a collaborative leader who always centers on the impact that happens through community. He takes a rigorous, thoughtful approach to problem-solving. He’s going to bring all of that to this role, and I’m excited about the future of Teach For America with him at the helm. He’ll bring a fresh perspective that will take TFA to the next horizon.

Rick: One last question. What is one thing you have learned about what it takes to attract and nurture talented educators?

Elisa: Putting aside the question of pay—because inadequate compensation is the number one issue for many teachers, especially those working in low-income communities—the data are clear about the conditions that support teacher recruiting and retention. Teachers want to feel deeply supported in their roles, with the right tools and high-quality professional development to help them succeed in what they signed up to do. They also desire a great manager who has the training and support to create an environment of learning, rigor, camaraderie, and deep support for everyone in the school. Additionally, teachers want quality colleagues and to be part of a strong, joyous, learning-oriented community. They rely on their colleagues to help navigate the challenges of this difficult work, fostering a sense of teamwork and mutual support.