KARACHI: “Where kids are born in our country is where they also end up,” said Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America and founder and CEO of the Teach for All network at the annual reception of Teach for Pakistan held at a hotel here on Tuesday.

Ms Kopp, some 25 years ago, proposed the idea for Teach for America in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton. “After finishing college my peers were looking to join big management companies and consulting firms, but I knew that we were all searching for something else. That’s when I thought that instead of working on Wall Street why not dedicate our first two years after college to teach underprivileged children in their schools. Besides helping the children it was also a way of reshaping our own priorities,” she said.

And the idea, shared by many other like-minded people, did great from the start. Looking to eliminate education inequity by recruiting high-achieving college graduates, today more than 50,000 fresh university graduates apply to teach in America’s most under-resourced communities. What started with 500 fellows in 1990 has now grown to a nationwide movement with 11,100 fellows in 48 schools across the US.

“We live in a era of quick fixes. We think that maybe if we give a computer or tablet to children they may be able to teach themselves. But it is not so simple and once you get into this, and experience first-hand, you realise the complexity of the whole situation. These kids have such complex issues and the schools they go to are not equipped to take care of it. Still programmes such as Teach for America can be a significant amount of fuel to fight the forces of gravity,” she said.

Today, Teach For All, built on the model of Teach for America, is a growing network of 34 independent partner organisations with a shared vision for expanded educational opportunity in their countries. It started in 2007 with 12 countries expressing interest and has now grown to incorporate 34 international partners.

Here Teach for Pakistan is an initiative of the Aman Foundation. Founded in 2010, it is a nationwide movement of outstanding graduates who commit two years to teach under-resourced schools and go on to become lifelong leaders working to expand education equity.

Noor Masood, CEO of Teach for Pakistan, said that while studying at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in the US she got her wake-up call when her cousin was shot back home in Pakistan in a targeted attack. “He made it but still I felt I had to come back and do my bit in ensuring that something like this didn’t happen again to anyone else. No one at first believed that young university graduates from the top schools in Pakistan would want to teach at government schools but they did and they do and have become part of the change,” she said.

For the Teach for Pakistan programme this year 55 fellows from a pool of 2,256 were selected. Bareerah Horani, a Teach for Pakistan 2012 alumni, spoke about her transformational journey as a class seven teacher of a government girls’ school. She spoke about her star student Kainat, who walked a long distance from home each day to reach school, then sat on the uncomfortable school benches to attend her classes, didn’t have access to clean drinking water and even though she was studying in class seven she was at a level of class three. In comparison, the rest of the class was even worse, at an average level of class one.

“But I took on the challenge of working hard with my girls. For that I had to make them stay after school for extra classes but Kainat’s parents, like several others’, didn’t want their daughter to spend extra hours in school. Still we wanted to also make the parents active participants in the education of their daughters, which we did eventually,” she said.

“This fellowship is not just about making a difference in kids’ lives, it is also about making a difference in us and how we perceive the world” she added. “By the end of the two years my girls took ownership of their education and from the level of class one, the class seven students climbed up to class five level while Kainat came up to class eight level.”

Speaking about the Teach for Pakistan movement, Ahsan Jamil, CEO of the Aman Foundation, said: “We are proud to be the founding member of this brilliant project. Education should never be linked with socio-economic backgrounds. A majority of our children are denied an education that prepares them for success in an increasingly competitive world. Teach For Pakistan is an initiative to endure sense of possibility for our students, communities and nation to become the best in the world. We are focused on achieving maximum outputs and excellence despite the numerous challenges we face. Youth and energy can make a huge impact. We can leapfrog while we are behind.”

Published in Dawn, August 6th, 2014