When Michelle Gieg first started teaching, simply lining kids up and leading them from point A to point B was a challenge. Today, she knows children have to be told that they’re expected to face forward, keep their hands at their sides and their mouths shut, and pay attention to the person in front of them.
“As a first-year teacher, you just start walking,” she says in the new Business Report cover story. “Before you know it, there are kids bumping into one another.”
Gieg wasn’t always planning to be a career educator. The Covington native studied journalism at LSU, and joined Teach for America upon graduation in 2006 to learn about education from the inside before becoming a reporter. Instead, Gieg became the founding principal of Democracy Prep Baton Rouge—the charter school housed in the former home of Prescott Middle.
Teach for America is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Its stated goal is “to enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation’s most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.” Put simply, TFA says it wants to help poor kids close the achievement gap.
It launched in 1990 with 384 corps members in six regions, including south Louisiana. In recent years, as many as 190 TFAers, who serve two-year stints in high-need schools and generally do not major in education, could be found teaching in Capital Region classrooms, and its alums increasingly are leading local schools and nonprofits and influencing education policy at the highest levels.
A little more than half of the faculty at Democracy Prep Baton Rouge are TFA alums, which is not an unusually high ratio for a charter school. About two-thirds of the students are from the immediate neighborhood, Gieg says, although some are bused in from as far away as Woman’s Hospital. Most are poor and black, and she says many have special needs.
As the name suggests, it’s a college prep school with a focus on citizenship. While it only serves kindergarten and sixth grade now, the current charter allows for K-8, and the hope is to add two grades each year and eventually a high school.
“Our motto is ‘Work hard, go to college, change the world,’” Gieg says.
Teach for America began as Wendy Kopp’s 1989 senior thesis at Princeton University. As she saw it, public schools, decades after desegregation, still were unable to make up for the long-term effects of poverty, racism and other social injustices.
Her idea to address the problem: recruit high-performing college grads regardless of major to teach in high-need urban and rural schools. In her 2011 book A Chance to Make History, Kopp argues that while experience is valuable, “there’s also a power in inexperience—that it can make a huge difference to channel the energy of young people, before they know what’s ‘impossible.’”
Jennifer Eplett Reilly, the prominent Baton Rouge civic leader and wife of Lamar Advertising CEO Sean Reilly, is the former president of Echoing Green, a prominent local TFA supporter, public records show. Locally, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and its donor-advised funds have been involved from the earliest days, former South Louisiana chapter director Michael Tipton says.
Donna Saurage, of the Community Coffee Saurages, was an early local TFA supporter and later served on the South Louisiana chapter’s board. She recalls a breakfast meeting organized by Reilly with Kopp and several others.
“They were looking to set up a region here in Baton Rouge,” Saurage says. “Wendy [Kopp] really put out her vision of what this teacher corps could be, and it sounded like a great idea to support.”
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