Teach for America unlocks opportunities to transform the education system with Microsoft Azure

In a Phoenix middle school, the social studies, science, and language arts departments welcomed a host of new teachers from a variety of lived experience and academic backgrounds. They combined in-depth training from the national education nonprofit Teach for America (TFA) with a whole lot of enthusiasm to inspire classrooms full of young learners. “She makes us feel safe,” one student says of her TFA teacher. “He makes me feel like I want to be here,” says another. “He talks to me so I feel confident,” adds one student. To sum it up, another teen says, “He’s like the greatest teacher ever.”

For 35 years, TFA has recruited, trained, and supported a network of dedicated and justice-minded leaders to help transform the US education system. Each year, more than 4,000 recent college graduates join the organization's teacher corps, committing to working in some of the country’s highest need schools. In addition, TFA is broadening its programs to expand opportunities for young people most impacted by inequity and double the number of children in communities who reach crucial educational milestones by 2030. 

TFA recently completed a cloud migration to Microsoft Azure, replacing its inflexible and costly data center. The nonprofit’s cloud transformation has unlocked countless avenues to improve program design and delivery, direct the most possible funds toward its mission to ensure all kids have access to an excellent education, and evolve to offer the best learning options inside and outside the classroom.

“Our cloud migration, plus our digitally enabled and digitally focused program design, enable us to operate efficiently and at scale,” says Alan Murray, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Teach for America. “That powers our commitment to addressing educational gaps and making sure every child gets an excellent education.”

Reaching more students with scalable infrastructure

While TFA is best known for its corps of teachers that it trains and deploys across the US, the pandemic made TFA leadership realize the importance of versatility in reaching students no matter their location or availability of nearby options. Now the organization offers virtual tutoring through its Ignite initiative, summer programs, and new partnerships with external collaborators. The nonprofit’s migration to the Azure cloud enables this strategic shift toward a multiprogram model that provides even more opportunities for young learners.

To begin, TFA adopted Microsoft Entra ID. The cloud-based identity and access management service replaced six separate directory and access platforms, creating a single experience for TFA staff, corps teachers, and partners. The one-stop-shop enables users to access training materials, easily find resources, and communicate with their TFA contacts. "The ability to make sure you’re authorized and authenticated unlocked so much more,” Murray says.

Next, TFA is replacing what Murray calls a “scrappy hodgepodge” of spreadsheets, free survey platforms, and apps that ambitious educators put together on the fly in response to urgent pandemic needs. The team is rebuilding a scalable ecosystem within Azure to empower qualified tutors to virtually support students in communities from Atlanta to Hawaii. This unified infrastructure includes Azure Data Lake Storage for centralizing and organizing program data, Azure App Configuration for security and credential management, Azure OpenAI for understanding large amounts of unstructured text through data science, Power BI for reporting, and more. This easily scalable, cloud-based system is enabling TFA to expand Ignite to 130 schools nationwide, with plans to reach even more communities in the future.

“This infrastructure helps us think and act broader,” says Omar Colon, Technical Lead of Applications Architecture at Teach for America. “It helps us have even more impact to reduce the disparities in our education system.” 

Saving resources to maximize impact

Both rising costs and an upcoming data center renewal prompted TFA to approach its cloud migration with some urgency. Data center power bills had recently tripled. Its VMware vendor significantly raised prices. Further, maintenance overhead of hardware took a meaningful bite out of the nonprofit’s budget.

Switching to the Microsoft Cloud made financial sense, Murray says. TFA decommissioned redundant services, reduced the number of virtual machines (VMs) by 60%, and eliminated the need to build a secondary backup data center. The IT team provisioned an Azure Firewall without needing to contract an external firm, saving the organization $50,000.

Ultimately, transitioning away from legacy, on-prem infrastructure is projected to reduce operating costs by 20% each year. 

Further, Azure offers transparency into infrastructure cost. “When we operated with our data center, I couldn’t tell my leadership peers why IT cost what it did, at least not without any precision,” Murray says. “Now I can literally tell them, to the penny, what everything costs, what it’s forecasted to cost, and how much it takes to turn something on or off.”

This allows TFA’s departments to take budgetary ownership of the infrastructure that supports their projects and operations. With that visibility, they can make more informed decisions on how to invest funds. Murray says, “That gives us the power to reach our impact goals.”

Azure also provides TFA its first fully built-out disaster recovery backup. While it did store a backup of its data in case of an emergency, Murray estimates restoring it would have taken at least three months. “Now with the Microsoft Cloud, disaster recovery is part of our baked-in strategy,” he adds. All TFA’s Azure apps and services are self-documenting, which would enable the team to rehydrate the environment then restore backed up data. "This protects us and ensures we can continue to drive our mission, even if there's a disaster," Murray says.

Advancing agility to meet evolving needs

TFA intentionally avoided a lift-and-shift approach to its cloud migration. Instead, the nonprofit has been rebuilding apps, processes, and services in Azure, optimizing as they go. “Not only have we been migrating, but we’ve been interrogating the way we do things. Building natively in the Cloud gives us the ability to be agile and shift our direction after quick experiments,” says Chris Trupp, Senior Product Manager of the Cloud Platform Team at Teach for America.

For example, the IT team used to wait until the recruitment off-season to make any changes to the applicant-facing platform or the internal system that evaluates submissions. Then the team rebuilt the connected systems with Azure App Service and spun up Azure Cache for Redis. The platform as a service (PaaS) backed by the in-memory cache enables the IT team to make updates to the system as needed without downtime during the high-usage recruitment season.

“We can deploy changes whenever we want without the risk of creating a poor user experience,” Colon says. The newfound capability empowers the recruitment department to request changes to the application, such as adding a new question, or TFA’s proprietary selection criteria. “This increases our confidence and ability to attract, evaluate, and retain leaders who are the right fit for our program.” 

Upskilling to deliver more change

The flexibility of Azure also supercharges the IT team’s learning opportunities without slowing down business-critical upgrades. “We're able to learn, provision, and stand up these technologies without extending our timelines,” Trupp says. “That’s the velocity that gets unlocked by Azure.”

The wealth of Microsoft documentation empowers the team to self-teach as they go, and Azure enables them to get hands-on in a low-stakes way. “We can learn and play with this technology in a protected sandbox environment that doesn’t break the bank,” Murray says. For example, they have been experimenting with the AI app and agent platform Azure AI Foundry, gaining in-demand skills as they create potential value-adding applications to further advance TFA’s mission.

Importantly, migrating to the Microsoft Cloud sets the foundation for TFA’s future ambitions. The nonprofit is currently pursuing AI solutions to further streamline operations, powered by Microsoft Copilot. In addition, TFA is in the initial stage of embracing a unified data ecosystem through Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Fabric, and Azure Synapse Analytics.

“Teach for America is about more than teachers. We’re empowering leaders who enable systems change,” Colon says. “That’s what we’re doing with Azure, too. At its core, technology can enable anything.”

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