Corridor Teach for America alum makes influential list

Corridor Teach for America alum Sarah Newell Usdin has made quite a name for herself. Her latest mention is in FastCompany magazine – as one of Teach for America’s 19 most impressive veterans. The magazine profiles Usdin in a story celebrating the 20th anniversary of the national corps of recent college graduates who teach in the nation’s lowest-income communities. Usdin has spent the last 18 years in education reform. In 1992, after teaching in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship, she joined Teach For America. She spent the next three years teaching in Baton Rouge before becoming Teach for America’s executive director in Louisiana. Believing that more needed to be done to systemically impact the quality of teachers in public schools, she became a partner with The New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit teacher recruiting and training organization. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Sarah formed New Schools for New Orleans to assist in the recovery and reformation of public education. NSNO hopes to build a system of schools, not a school system, by encouraging the schools to determine their individual and collective needs and by supporting them in their growth toward operational excellence and academic rigor. Usdin majored in religion and German at Colgate University, and holds a masters in curriculum and instruction from LSU. To read the full story, click here.