USC Rossier School of Eduction alum Ali Nagle learned firsthand the dramatic difference teachers can make in the lives of others, and there was never any question that she would strive to do the same.

“I always had really great teachers who did so much more for me in terms of academics and personally,” Nagle said. “We were evicted and a teacher in high school took part of my family in. She radically changed my life and helped keep my family together.

“I thought, ‘If I could be that for just one kid, it would be like repaying it.’”

Nagle graduated from USC Rossier in 2004 with a Bachelor of Science in education, a minor in social work and the drive to make a difference.

She spent two years in Manhattan before teaching underprivileged middle school students at TEAM Academy, a public charter school and affiliate of the Knowledge Is Power Program in Newark, N.J.

Ninety-seven percent of the students are African-American and 3 percent are Hispanic at the academy. Seventy-nine percent of the youngsters qualify for free and reduced meals.

Yet students at the academy are in school 60 percent more of the time than students in average public schools – with classes held from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on school days, every other Saturday and three weeks out of the summer.

And academy students consistently have surpassed their counterparts in achievement in every subject at traditional Newark public schools, according to the academy’s 2007 annual report.

Nagle said she’s determined to not just teach her students they can excel in high school, college and beyond. She wants to show them that they can change the world.

After screening a documentary in her class about a school Oprah Winfrey started in South Africa, her students began buzzing about opportunities to help others.

“Here are students who most would consider as having nothing, and they still have great compassion and the ability to give, even though they have so little,” she said.

In May 2006, Nagle founded TEAM Academy in Africa and merged her passion for education with her sense of global responsibility and philanthropy.

“I have truly found a niche and a renewed love for teaching,” Nagle said of her role, which includes heading the literacy department for two middle schools. “It has become my calling.”

The international social justice project links her students in Newark with students in Kenya and Rwanda to enhance the educational experience of both groups.

“Imagine the worst-case scenario, like the schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit, and multiply that by one thousand,” Nagle said of conditions at Kenyan and Rwandan schools she has visited. “Many kids come to school hungry, the classes have no doors, no windows, no electricity, there are three-to-four eighth graders sharing one desk and one book.”

In Kenya, Nagle said, the schools are overpopulated with about 800 students in just eight classrooms, and the government only pays the salaries for four full-time teachers.

In rural Rwanda, schools face other obstacles, she said.

“Because of the genocide, many have missed a big portion of their schooling,” Nagle said. “There are kids in sixth grade who are 11, which is the normal age. Then there are kids in sixth grade who are 16 or 17 years old.

“And, as an 18-year-old boy, you’re much more valuable to your family out of school and working.”

The emphasis on urban education at USC Rossier helped lay the groundwork for these ventures in Africa.

“The preparation I received at Rossier was to serve a population that is typically seen as more challenging and under-resourced,” Nagle said. “That mind-set can be mirrored in terms of what kids in Africa face.”

Nagle said she’s working on securing scholarships for TEAM Academy students to Indiana University, and she and her students hope to raise enough to pay for more teacher salaries in order to reduce class sizes and replace some of the unsafe, dilapidated classrooms in Africa.

Margo Pensavalle, Nagle’s mentor at USC Rossier, said she isn’t surprised by the work Nagle is doing in other corners of the world.

“Ali has such a sense of energy and an incredible drive to get things done,” Pensavalle said. “I think the greatest thing about Ali is she was so willing to try new things. In teacher education, she would take in what she was taught, used what appealed to her and tried to construct other strategies based upon the needs of her students.”

Nagle said she misses USC, but she doesn’t regret taking her eastward journey because she found a charter school in which she believes.

And it is her role at TEAM Academy, she said, “where I feel at home, where I feel challenged, where I feel valued and where I feel I am making a change in the world.”