Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in underserved urban and rural public schools. Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort. In America today, educational inequity persists along socioeconomic and racial lines. Nine-year-olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities. Half of them will not graduate from high school, and those who do graduate will, on average, read and do math at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities. These disparities severely limit the life prospects of the 13 million children growing up in poverty today. In addition, because African-American and Latino/Hispanic children are three times as likely to grow up in a low-income area, these disparities also prevent many children of color from truly having equal opportunities in life. But it does not have to be this way. While the problem is daunting, we see evidence every day in classrooms across the country that when students in low-income communities are given the educational opportunities they deserve, they excel. It is this clear potential of students that makes the disparities in educational outcomes so unconscionable and fuels our sense of urgency and responsibility to do everything we can to ensure educational opportunity for all. Therefore, each year we launch an aggressive effort to recruit the most outstanding graduating college seniors and recent college graduates - people who will be the future leaders in fields such as business, medicine, politics, law, journalism, education, and social policy. Our theory of change is that building a corps of our country's most promising future leaders who commit two years to teach in low-income communities has an important immediate and long-term impact. During their two years, corps members go above and beyond traditional expectations to ensure that more students growing up today have the educational opportunities they deserve. Over the long-term, Teach For America has an impact on two levels: 1) By changing the career paths of the majority of our alumni, who remain long-term in education or in related efforts in low-income communities, Teach For America builds a unique pipeline of leadership for education and social reform. 2) By building a force of leaders who assume positions of influence in all sectors and who have the rare perspective and commitment that comes from their teaching experience, Teach For America ultimately influences our national priorities and the prevailing ideology.