Leaders must apply discernment and discrimination when making decisions: they must be perceptive of the data and the context in which the decision is being made, and they must bring logic, emotion, intuition, and instinct to bear on the final decision. Once they come to a decision, leaders need to demonstrate fortitude—the courage to stay the course and see the decision through and yet be flexible enough to change direction or even abort the project when needed. In her tenure as founder and leader of Teach For America, Wendy Kopp has demonstrated an ability to hold and to fold at the appropriate times.

Kopp wasn’t a star student when she started at the Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas.¹ She was shy and awkward, and behind many of her peers academically when she entered middle school, but she worked hard and gained ground and thrived in high school. By the time she finished high school, she was accepted at Princeton University, having graduated at the top of her class.

At Princeton, Kopp realized that too many low-income communities in the United States lacked qualified teachers, and she came up with the idea of creating a national teacher corps modeled after the Peace Corps. For her senior thesis, she outlined the business model of what would become Teach For America (TFA), now a $300 million social enterprise. At the time, Kopp’s academic advisor thought her idea was unrealistic and that she was “deranged” and tried to dissuade her from pursuing it.² “I was completely torn by the decision to start TFA,” she says. “There was a voice in my head telling me not to do it—to take a more normal path. I did have one thing going for me, which was that I had been rejected from all the other jobs I’d applied to.”³ Kopp then sent a proposal to thirty CEOs to enlist their support. None took her up on the offer. Finally, just before her graduation in 1989, oil giant Exxon Mobil offered her a twenty-six-thousand-dollar grant, and TFA was born.

In its first year, TFA operated as a nimble start-up with a lean staff of twenty-five members. The team recruited and placed the first group of five hundred teachers from a pool of twenty-five hundred applicants. There were challenging issues surrounding funding and managing growth. Among them, the overworked staff couldn’t keep up with the escalating number of applications, resulting in serious delays in recruiting and placing new teachers. Employees also complained about Kopp’s tendency to micromanage, which was due to her lack of experience leading a rapidly expanding organization. Some help came from Nick Glover, an organization development expert who helped the team develop an effective organizational structure. “Teach For America made it, not only through its launch but [also] through many dark years when we were constantly on the brink of collapse,” she explains.⁴

This experience taught Kopp that sheer grit could take her only so far; she also had to be flexible in the way she ran her organization. As a start-up, TFA was fighting for survival, and she had to begin leading the organization as an enterprise built for scale. That shift in perspective led her to completely reorganize TFA in 1999.⁵ She brought in people with proven experience to head strategic planning, program development, and fundraising, and they managed to put TFA on a solid footing that enabled it to grow and expand its reach.

In 2012 TFA received more than forty-eight thousand applications—12 percent of them from Ivy League students—to fill slots for fifty-eight hundred hundred new corps members. Since 1990, over thirty-three thousand corps members have taught some 3 million students in underresourced areas nationwide.⁶ Although many education groups continue to challenge TFA’s model, the overall academic achievement of students being taught in the program gets good reviews, and Teach For America remains a bold idea in the movement to improve America’s failing schools. And it is certainly a major accomplishment for Kopp, who displayed flexible fortitude during the struggle to establish the organization.

Kopp told us that what sustained her perseverance over the years were her core values and the eagerness to serve a noble purpose: give low-income kids a fighting chance in life through better education. Kopp’s purposeful tenacity is widely shared by her TFA members. “It is always hard to challenge the traditional notions about the profession of teaching and how teachers should be trained,” she said. “For a lot of Teach For America teachers, staff, and alumni, the key to success is perseverance. And what sustains their perseverance is their deep belief in this mission.”⁷

In our analysis, Kopp tapped into her willpower to let go of her “smart” way of micromanaging Teach For America and embraced a wise leadership approach based on delegation. There are still many question marks about TFA. Critics are continuing to challenge its approach, but Kopp is continuing to learn, grow, and transform TFA to make it more effective.