Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  Taylor Rifkin and some of the other ninth-grade teachers were in the staff lunchroom finishing up a planning session for the first freshman social when the lights went out. Taylor was pleased that the veterans had invited her to join them. She hadn’t expected them to be so welcoming to a new TFA teacher. The power failure barely registered with her. There had been plenty of little technical glitches these first few days of school; she figured this was just another one. Her fifth-period class was due to start in minutes, so she finished the fried chicken from the fast-food place up the street, clipped up her long brown hair, and made her way back to room A22, one of the makeshift bungalow classrooms on the outer reaches of the campus built years before to relieve overcrowding. Outside, the sunshine was blinding.

  Her ninth-grade English students entered the bungalow joking that since there was no power, there would be no lesson that day. Taylor’s green eyes flashed. “Class, I do not care whether we have power or not,” she announced, carefully enunciating every word. “I am not prepared to let this class slip further behind my other classes because of a technical difficulty. We will continue our lesson as scheduled. Please open your books to page fifty-eight.”

  The students quieted down. Taylor knew they would. She had spent the previous week on rules and procedures. She was tough, no doubt about it. She didn’t mind if the kids considered her a bitch. She wasn’t the buddy-buddy type anyway. She was a realist. She had x number of ninth-graders—figure twenty in a class, five classes—one hundred or so. She wasn’t going to be the teacher driving them home at night and baking them cookies. She was going to be the teacher who taught them English and actually gave them the strategies they needed to graduate. She didn’t care if they loved English, and she didn’t care if they hated her. What she cared about was helping them make it through the state standardized tests. That was her big goal. Forget the TFA do-gooder crap.

  Still, even she was surprised by her tough-love shtick. I didn’t know I had this in me. Where did this voice come from? And the false enthusiasm? What an act! Whatever. It’s working.

  It didn’t come out of nowhere. As a communications major at the University of Southern California (USC), Taylor had gotten used to addressing large audiences. The toughness, she knew, was in her DNA. Though her parents were now neighbors of Oprah Winfrey’s in Montecito, California, they had worked hard and long for that address. Her father started out as a teacher. The Rifkins made their fortune when they bought some of the first California Weight Watchers franchises and later sold them.

  When Taylor was in the eighth grade, she became anorexic and lost forty pounds. Her parents pulled her out of school and had her admitted to the eating disorders program at UCLA Hospital. Taylor spent five weeks in treatment. When she was released, she returned to the alternative school in which she had been enrolled. The school administration asked her to address the student body and speak frankly about her ordeal. Taylor was ashamed and embarrassed, but she did it. After that, she was more cautious about revealing too much of herself to anyone. And she was careful not to try too hard to be perfect.

  That wasn’t easy. Particularly when she was surrounded by the type A high achievers in Teach For America. Taylor had a difficult time at the summer institute and was so put off by the experience that she didn’t bother to attend the closing ceremonies. Her family had reservations, too. They didn’t think she could handle the pressure.

  But Taylor left TFA’s summer school confident that she had mastered the key to being a successful teacher: classroom management. She learned that lesson the hard way. It still upset her to think about that day in mid-July. It was a Wednesday, her third day of teaching. She began by allowing the kids one minute to “get the talking out of them.” She knew immediately that it was a big mistake. When she called the class to order, the chatter continued, and she tried to speak above them.

  “I would like you to write a paragraph about your favorite childhood memory,” she said, her voice raised. Another mistake.

  “I don’t have one,” shouted one student.

  “I wasn’t born,” quipped another.

  “It was the day my dad beat me up,” said the kid in the corner.

  Taylor changed tack. “If you can’t remember a childhood memory, then tell me what you did yesterday,” she said.

  “Nothin’” was the first response.

  “Took naps” was the second.

  It didn’t get any better. Taylor decided to illustrate the elements of a good paragraph by using a handout with a line drawing of a stoplight. But the kids argued over which color went where. She herself became confused. When she suggested that yellow meant “slow down,” they corrected her: “Not in L.A.!” Soon all the kids were talking out of turn. One kid started whistling; others took up the refrain.

  She was paralyzed. What do I do? Finally, the faculty advisor observing in the back of the room had to step in to restore order. She kept the students after class and gave them a stern lecture. Then she gave Taylor one, too.

  It stuck. The next day Taylor went in with guns blazing. She walked up and down the room and addressed the class: “You will NEVER disrespect me again,” she barked. Then she proceeded to lay down the laws of her classroom. The kids were spellbound. Taylor never had a problem with discipline again. At the end of summer school, students came up to her and thanked her for maintaining control and allowing them to learn. They told her they wished she had been even stricter.

  Now, in the darkened classroom, she began the lesson she had meticulously planned the night before on exploring narration and point of view in the short story. “Open your books,” she repeated. “Check this out.”

  She stopped. Someone was talking.

  “When I’m talking, you’re not; when you’re talking, I’m not,” she said, repeating her pet phrase for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. “I’ll wait till it’s quiet.” She stood staring at Billy, a Latino boy in the front row who’d been talking. “I’ll wait…Raised hand, please. Thank you, Billy. Question?”

  Taylor was halfway through the lesson when there was a knock on the door. She knew something was wrong as soon as she saw Mr. Wooden, one of the ninth-grade deans. He turned his face away from the students and spoke in a clipped whisper. The school was on lockdown. Under no circumstances was she to allow any student to leave the classroom. Taylor nodded knowingly. Meanwhile, her heart was racing. What will I tell the kids when they ask why the dean came? What happened? Are we all in danger?

  She tried to pull herself together and continue the lesson. But it wasn’t easy. As she taught, the internal monologue kept running through her head. Taylor, keep calm, damn it! You are in control of this classroom. Don’t let them know anything is wrong. Just keep teaching. Wait a second. Lockdown! We are all going to die! A terrorist is running in the hallways of the main building and is headed out here to the bungalows to kill us next! All she could see were images of Columbine.

  Now a kid was raising his hand—as required—and asking to go to the bathroom.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t.”

  “Why not?” the student asked.

  “Look,” she said. “You can’t go to the bathroom because nobody is leaving right now.”

  Twenty pairs of eyes were trained on her. Then Irvin, one of her smartest students, called out: “It’s because we’re on lockdown, isn’t it?”

  She could hear the fear in his voice for sure, but there was something else there, too, something knowing, almost cynical. Irvin had been down this road before.

  “Yes, we are on lockdown,” she conceded, as if this were as routine as lunch period. “There is nothing to worry about. But we will not be leaving this classroom until we are instructed to do so.”

  Taylor continued the lesson. By the end of the period, the lights were back on. There had been no foul play. Locke—and some two million other customers—had lost electricity when a utility worker at a distribution plant accidentally cut a power cable.

  CH
APTER TWO

  The School and the Movement

  Although education has long been considered a cornerstone of American democracy, there was an achievement gap in this country long before Teach For America started sending graduates like Phillip, Taylor, Hrag, and Rachelle into schools like Locke. The shocking disparity in academic achievement between students in low-income areas (predominantly children of color) and their higher-income counterparts (usually white) reaches back to the earliest days of our nation’s history and remains today—seemingly immutable. The potential consequences of this great divide are dire: to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, no enduring nation can be both ignorant and free.

  Until Teach For America decided that higher education’s best and brightest would raise up K–12’s lowest and poorest, the job of closing the gap was left to an educational system only marginally responsive to efforts at reform. But a swing in the civic sensibilities of America’s young elite in the 1990s coincided with a federally backed move toward outcome-based instruction, and TFA—slowly at first, but then faster and faster—became a force for change. Not only did TFA fill spots in schools like Locke, which saw the teacher corps as a risk-free option, preferable to hiring longtime subs and district castaways; it also began to build a farm team of education reformers who held out hope for a more just and lasting change—a change that would close the gap once and for all. It was a change that seemed all but certain to occur when Locke was built.

  Locke High School arose out of the ashes of the infamous Watts riots, a six-day spasm of racial violence in August 1965 that stunned the nation. The immediate cause of one of the bloodiest episodes of civil unrest in America’s history was a routine traffic stop that turned ugly. It was an unbearably hot summer night. The police officer was white; the two brothers he pulled over on suspicion of drunken driving were black. Locals, driven out of their homes by the heat, gathered at the scene as twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye took and failed a sobriety test, and then proceeded, along with his brother and mother, to resist arrest. Police reinforcements arrived, and so did more spectators. Within minutes, the size of the crowd swelled from twenty-five to one thousand; the mood morphed from curious to furious. Eventually, a half dozen or so people were arrested after tussling with police. As the last squad car left the scene, a bottle hit the rear fender of the black-and-white and shattered.

  The riot had begun. When it finally ended nearly a week later, the siege covered an area twice the size of the island of Manhattan. A heavy toll had been exacted on the mostly black community of South Central Los Angeles: thirty-four people were dead, one thousand were injured, and more than six hundred buildings were damaged or destroyed. Some four thousand of the estimated ten thousand rioters who ravaged the city were hauled away in handcuffs. The financial losses were put at $40 million; the psychic cost was incalculable. When the rage was spent and an exhausted calm finally descended, the community looked like a charred battlefield.

  The Watts riots occurred a little more than a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The landmark federal legislation was aimed specifically at addressing and eliminating racial inequality; in fact, it protected the civil rights of all by banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Though the law promised to usher in a new era in race relations, riots broke out in a number of cities within weeks of its passage. In the meantime, a number of states maneuvered to eviscerate some of the legislation’s key reforms.

  California was one such state. In a move to circumvent the fair-housing components of both the federal legislation and California’s own Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963, Proposition 14 was put on the 1964 ballot. Under the terms of the proposition, a new amendment would be added to the California Constitution that would give owners the right to decline to sell, lease, or rent property to anyone they chose, essentially legalizing race-based housing discrimination. The proposition passed by a whopping two-thirds majority, setting the stage, many believe, for the following summer’s holocaust.

  The city was still smoldering when California governor Pat Brown appointed ex-CIA chief John McCone to head a commission to investigate the causes of the civil unrest. In a report entitled “Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning?” the McCone Commission set out a detailed chronology of events, probed the riots’ immediate and underlying causes, and suggested prescriptive actions to prevent a recurrence.

  The violence caught the city by surprise. Just a year earlier, when other American cities had erupted in race riots, Los Angeles had remained quiet. Indeed, in 1964 the National Urban League named Los Angeles the best city in the country for “Negroes” to live in—and so it seemed. The McCone Commission noted that the opportunity to succeed in L.A. was “probably unequaled in any other major American city.” It described the “Negro districts” of Los Angeles as “neither slums nor urban gems” most housing units located there were single-family structures on well-maintained streets. Compared with conditions in most other large cities, the lot of blacks in Los Angeles was declared “superior.”

  But the report also conceded that the city should have seen “trouble gathering under the surface calm.” A wave of black immigrants from the South had resulted in an explosion of the African American population of Los Angeles—from 75,000 in 1940 to 650,000 in 1965. The realities of life in southern California often collided with the newcomers’ dreams. Los Angeles may have offered better living conditions than other, grittier cities, but it was far from color-blind.

  It took the commission one hundred days to issue its report. Its conclusion: the area that gave rise to the violence was home to bad schools, chronically high unemployment rates, and “resentment, even hatred of police.” Though some black leaders complained that the riots had been studied through the distorted lens of the ruling white middle class, the commission’s analysis of the underpinnings of the riots was generally accepted.

  The commission recommended urgent action to reverse a spiral of failure. The affected areas were in desperate need of jobs, better community policing, and improved schools. Failure to address the inequities, it warned, would be a costly mistake, a mere “curtain-raiser for what could blow up one day in the future.”

  The city’s principal responses: the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission was established to liaise between the city and the community; the number of minorities on the police force was upped; the Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center was opened, giving some 1.5 million people living in a ninety-four-square-mile radius easier access to a hospital; and the L.A. Watts Summer Games were established to engage disaffected black youth. The games, modeled after the Olympics, were first held in 1968 at the newly opened Locke High School.

  But McCone’s dark warning proved prophetic.

  Twenty-seven years after the fatal Watts riots, Los Angeles erupted again. The spark that ignited six days of rioting in April 1992 was the aquittal of four white cops charged in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. But, as in the case of the Watts riots, underlying tensions in Los Angeles’s black communities had been building for years. A deep economic recession exacerbated the situation. The verdict, which appeared to blacks to legitimize what seemed to be an open-and-shut case of police brutality, was the tipping point.

  By the time the fires were extinguished, the soot had settled, and the acrid smell of incineration had finally wafted away, the Rodney King riots had made history as the costliest civil disturbance in American history. The toll—in lives and capital—dwarfed that of the Watts riots. Fifty-five people were dead, more than two thousand injured, and ten thousand arrested. Damages totaled one billion dollars.

  The rioters this time were not only African American; Hispanics participated in almost equal numbers. For blacks, the riots were initially a reaction to perceived police brutality; for Hispanics it was seen as a giant giveaway. “People who never had, found an opportunity to have, and they took it,” explains Zeus Cubias, chairman of the Locke math department in 2005, w
ho was a senior at Locke at the time of the riots. The majority of Hispanics had no truck with Rodney King’s plight—or that of his people. They believed King was wrong to resist arrest.

  Though the epicenter of the manmade quake was north and west of the area surrounding Locke, all of South Los Angeles was shaken. Schools were shuttered, allowing students of enterprise to join in the mayhem. Those who didn’t actively go out and loot happily participated in the “Great Riot Sale” later. Eighteen-year-old Cubias, looking ahead to college in the fall, managed to buy a new TV, a stereo system, and a mini refrigerator for fifty bucks.

  The area around Locke High School was mostly residential (few commercial businesses had set up shop in the wake of the Watts riots), so property damage was not as extensive as it might have been. But those who did do business in the area either armed themselves to protect their property or lost their shops to looting. On Imperial Highway, the main east-west artery near Locke, snipers stood atop store rooftops with rifles trained on would-be trespassers. Most unguarded businesses were damaged and never reopened. Liquor stores were a notable exception. They were up and running within days.

  When Locke High School opened its doors in 1967, it was a welcome addition to a blighted neighborhood. In the wake of the Watts riots, the city had promised change, and Locke was a symbol of hope, visible proof that the city meant business. The new school was named after Alain Leroy Locke, a Harvard man who became the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The name alone spoke volumes.

  Early graduates of Locke enjoyed the glory days. At the time, the school was considered a state-of-the-art facility. The staff was handpicked, and Locke was awash in money. Baseball Hall of Famers Eddie Murray and Ozzie Smith were proud graduates. So were songwriter Patrice Rushen and smooth-jazz artist Gerald Albright. The school’s music program became renowned—the Locke Saints Marching Band played at NBA parties, opened for pop star Michael Jackson at the Forum, was featured in videos, and was hired out for parties. “When I came here to Locke High School, I thought I was a movie star because I made the band,” recalls Corwin Twine, a 1984 graduate who returned to Locke as a world history teacher in 2001.