Teach For Taiwan: How a Princeton Graduate Came Home and Convinced 400 Young People to Enter Remote Classrooms

30-second overview: Taiwan's PISA scores rank among the world's best, but disadvantaged students fall as much as six academic years behind their peers. In 2014, 24-year-old Princeton graduate Liu An-ting founded Teach For Taiwan (TFT) with NT$2,000, sending top university graduates to teach in remote elementary schools for two years. Eleven years on, more than 400 TFT teachers have entered 85 schools across nine counties and cities, accompanying over 7,000 children. Eighty percent of alumni remain in the field of education. But the questions have never stopped: Is six weeks of training enough? Do urban elites understand indigenous communities? Is this a systemic solution, or just another well-meaning cultural intrusion?

In June 2016, Liu An-ting stood at the National Cheng Kung University commencement podium and said something to the thousands of young people about to enter society. That sentence was later shared hundreds of thousands of times online.

She did not talk about dreams or the future. She asked a question: "What will you do with your luck?"¹

At the time she was 26, and had already spent two years in Taiwan's most impoverished school districts. She had seen a child named A-Wei, whose father ran a bubble tea stall and whose mother had come from Vietnam as a bride. The family could not afford tuition, and A-Wei skipped school to help sell drinks. After a TFT teacher brought him back, he scored the highest marks among the boys in his class and won an award in a national painting competition for students from remote areas.¹

The word "luck" in her mouth was not a figure of speech. She was saying: the mere fact that you can sit here and listen to a speech is itself the product of an unfair arrangement. What do you plan to do about that unfairness?

A Six-Year Gap: The Number Taiwan's Education System Most Resists Facing

Taiwan's education performance is among the best in the world. In PISA assessments, Taiwanese students have long ranked in the global top ten in mathematics and science. But if the camera shifts away from the average and points at the gap between the highest and lowest scores — Taiwan was once ranked first in the world for that spread.²

The numbers are as follows: students from the most disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds fall as many as six years behind students from advantaged families.³ The probability of a student in Taipei entering a university is 3.32 times that of a student from a remote area.⁴ There are 814 elementary schools classified as "remote" across Taiwan, serving nearly 100,000 students, who represent 5.3% of the national student population.⁵

The average class size at remote schools is 14.4 students — half the national average. The student-to-teacher ratio appears better on the surface (6:1 vs. the national 11.17:1), but this number conceals the real problem: it is not that there are too many teachers, but that students are leaving. Among the teachers who do stay, substitute and contract teachers make up 19.8% (compared to a national average of 14.1%).⁵

Average years a teacher stays at a remote school: 4.5.⁶

"Many remote schools post job openings and nobody applies." Not because salaries are low — teacher pay is uniform nationwide. It is because young teachers do not want to spend some of the best years of their lives in a place with no convenience stores, intermittent mobile signal, and after school hours just one outsider left in the whole village.

This is the question TFT set out to answer: if the best teachers won't go to remote areas, how can the children there ever climb out?

The Princeton Graduate's NT$2,000

Liu An-ting was born in 1989 in Taipei and grew up in Taichung. Both her parents worked for the Linye Foundation, an organization serving single-parent and disadvantaged families.⁷ Watching her parents' work from childhood, she grew up and appeared to choose a completely different path — passing the entrance exam for Taichung First Girls' Senior High School's language gifted program, simultaneously gaining admission to NTU's Department of Foreign Languages, NTU's Department of Political Science, and ten American universities, before accepting a full scholarship to Princeton.⁷

At Princeton she studied at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Her senior thesis was on Cambodian civil society, and it won the departmental thesis prize.⁷ But what truly changed her was not academic achievement — it was the places she went during those four years: teaching elementary school in Ghana, volunteering at a tent school in Haiti, working in an American juvenile prison (her first time standing in front of a classroom to teach), interning in Geneva, working in a Paris slum, and with an NGO in Cambodia.⁸

She circled the globe, witnessed the situation of disadvantaged children around the world, and then asked herself one question: what about Taiwan?

In 2013, at a social enterprise camp organized by the CommonWealth Foundation, she met Stan Shih, Terry Fang, and NTU Professor Lee Ji-ren. They were discussing the "talent problem" in remote education — not a shortage of resources, but a shortage of good teachers willing to stay.⁹ After the camp, Liu An-ting spent six months conducting feasibility research, traveling through remote areas, interviewing principals and teachers, and studying international cases. The model she drew on was Teach For America — a program founded in 1989 by Princeton alumna Wendy Kopp, which placed top university graduates to fill teacher shortfalls in America's impoverished school districts.¹⁰

In 2014, TFT was formally established. Capitalization: NT$2,000.¹¹

The first cohort of nine people entered eight schools in Tainan and Taitung.⁹

A Two-Year Teacher for 7,000 Children

TFT's operating model is simple to describe: recruit exceptional young people, give them six weeks of intensive training, and place them as full-time teachers in remote elementary schools for two years. Monthly salary: NT$40,000. Over two years, participants receive more than 500 hours of in-service training.¹²

Behind the simplicity is a rigorous selection process. Data from the sixth cohort: 694 applicants, 63 admitted, 49 ultimately placed in schools — an acceptance rate of around 7%. The selection has three stages: a document review, an online interview, and a full-day in-person interview (including a live teaching demonstration). The last week of the six-week training program is a teaching practicum.¹³

By 2025, TFT had cumulatively trained more than 400 teachers, placed in 85 schools across nine counties and cities, serving over 7,000 students.¹⁴ In the Hengchun Peninsula in Pingtung, more than 40% of schools have TFT teachers on site, with a cumulative total of 90 teachers placed.¹⁴ In southern Hualien, coverage exceeds 45%.¹⁴

TFT uses a framework called "3A" to define its goals: Access, Achievement, and Aspiration.³ By their own assessment, more than 70% of TFT students meet grade-level learning standards — while the national figure for remote schools is that over half of students do not meet the standard.¹⁴

At Zhengmin Elementary School in Yunlin, 90% of teachers entered through TFT. The school abolished monthly exams, replacing them with "assessment weeks." Every day before students leave, there is a "sunset circle" where children sit together and share what they learned that day.¹¹ None of these practices appear in any Ministry of Education curriculum guidelines. They are things TFT teachers brought in — and they took root there.

Curator's note: In TFT's "3A Framework," the most easily overlooked is the third A — Aspiration. Children in remote areas lack not only teachers and materials; what they lack is an adult who makes them believe "I can do this." Numbers can quantify the first two A's, but the third can only be measured in stories.

"Don't Believe in Me as an Individual"

TFT's growth was not an unbroken hero's journey.

In 2013, Liu An-ting's talk at TEDxTaipei transformed her overnight from an unknown to a media fixture. But the narrative frame this exposure created was not one she wanted — "Princeton honor student gives up high salary to go teach disadvantaged kids in rural Taiwan." The story became an inspirational tale of personal sacrifice rather than a structural problem of systemic educational failure.¹⁵

She later said in an interview with Cheers magazine: "Don't believe in me as an individual... what has influence is not me personally, but the beliefs I hold."¹⁶

She also acknowledged that she had been away from Taiwan for too long, and that her impact at the TED stage far exceeded what she had expected. The media had framed TFT as a "hero story" rather than a systemic movement.¹⁵

Is Six Weeks Enough? — Criticism and Controversy

The criticism directed at TFT has never stopped.

The most systematic critique came in 2014 from an article in NPOst (Common Welfare Exchange Station) that raised five objections:¹⁷

First, six weeks of training is not enough. Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels tells us that the distance between "knowing" and "being able to apply it in a real classroom" spans several cognitive tiers. Can six weeks bridge that gap?

Second, TFT addresses only teaching, not children's survival problems. The difficulties faced by children in remote areas extend far beyond a shortage of good teachers — 43.9% of students in remote schools cannot pay tuition, 17.9% take their lunch home (meaning there is nothing for dinner), and 8% of families have debt collectors after them.¹⁷ Can a two-year teacher solve any of this?

Third, the sharpest question: does rural education have to look like urban education? Sending urban elites into indigenous communities — is that "helping" or "cultural invasion?"¹⁷

Fourth, the question of motivation: is TFT serving the needs of those it aims to help, or satisfying the volunteers' desire for self-actualization?

Fifth, oversight and accountability: how do you assess outcomes after the two years end? Can TFT demonstrate that it is genuinely improving the situation?

On PTT's teacher discussion board, grassroots teachers also expressed reservations: TFT teachers enter schools as substitute teachers without formal teaching licenses, creating tension with the regular teacher certification system.¹⁸

These criticisms are not malicious attacks. They point to a core question: is good intention enough? If not, what else is needed?

Making the System See Remote Areas

TFT did not directly bring about legislation, but it was one of the important forces that pushed rural education issues into public debate.

On November 21, 2017, the Legislative Yuan passed the Act for Development of Remote Area Schools — a 24-article law allowing remote schools to hire up to one-third of teachers on contract, creating a "specially appointed teacher" system, stipulating that teachers newly assigned to remote areas must serve a minimum of six years before they can transfer, and providing retention bonuses.¹⁹ In 2018, the Ministry of Education officially recognized the TFT teacher training program as a legitimate channel for teacher practicum certification.⁴

In 2018, Liu An-ting married Lu Guan-wei — chairman of the Junyi Academy Education Foundation and head of Taiwan's largest online education platform.²⁰ More than 700 people attended the wedding, which the education community called "the wedding of the century in education." But more important than the gossip is what these two people represent: two distinct paths in Taiwan's educational reform. TFT addresses "places where people cannot reach"; Junyi addresses "places where resources cannot reach." Together, they cover nearly both dimensions of the challenges facing remote education.

In 2024, TFT entered its second decade. Liu An-ting passed the executive director role to Shih Hui-wen and moved to the position of founder and board member. The new board chair, Lin Yen-hsi, took over.¹⁴ The organization has transformed from one woman's personal project into an education foundation with professional governance.

What Happened to Those First Nine

Of the nine people who entered remote areas in 2014, not all of them left when their service ended.

First-cohort teacher Wu Chia-hui, after completing her two-year service, founded the ThereforEd Association, dedicated to developing English teaching materials suited to the context of remote communities.¹¹ She had discovered that the scenarios in American-made textbooks — shopping malls, baseball stadiums, Thanksgiving dinners — bore no relation to the lived experience of her students. She needed materials that grew from the soil of where her students lived.

Across TFT's full alumni body, more than 80% remain working in areas related to educational inequality. Sixty percent continue directly in education (as teachers, school administrators, or education researchers), and 30% have moved into social innovation and public policy.¹⁴

This number may be TFT's best defense: if all these people left the educational field after two years, the critics would be right — it was simply a gilt-edged volunteer experience. But if 80% of them choose to stay and continue the same work in different forms, then those two years changed not only the children, but also the way these young people see the world.

In 2025, TFT held an event called the "Sensory Festival" at the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, combining music, a market, exhibitions, and cross-disciplinary dialogue.¹⁴ The organization that started with NT$2,000 eleven years earlier now has more than a hundred corporate and public-good partners and reaches over 10,000 young people each year.¹⁴

The twelfth cohort is currently recruiting.¹⁴

The fluorescent lights in some remote school classrooms flicker. The mountains outside are quiet. When the bell rings at the end of class, there are only a dozen or so children's voices on the playground — but that sound carries far.

Further reading:

• Taiwan's Remote Area Education — If you want to see the overall structure first, rather than just this one organization, that article lays out the four circles of children, schools, family and community, and societal conceptions of success together
• Taiwan's Low Birth Rate Crisis — The declining birth rate is the fundamental pressure on whether rural schools survive; the ongoing loss of student numbers pushes small schools toward consolidation
• Taiwan's Indigenous Land Justice and Traditional Territories — Many of the schools TFT operates in are in indigenous communities, where educational issues are intertwined with land justice and cultural continuity
• Stan Shih (嚴長壽) — One of TFT's catalysts, founder of the CommonWealth Foundation; his educational experiments in Taitung and TFT are two tributaries of the same river
• Taiwan's Volunteer Culture and Civic Participation — Taiwan's civil society tradition of volunteerism is the soil that allowed TFT to recruit 400 people
• Zashixiao (雜學校) — Another alternative education startup from the same post-318 Movement era; the organizationally driven TFT and the festival-format Zashixiao represent two different curatorial approaches to education

References