Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  But others had so much going on outside the classroom that it consumed them. Take Eduardo, a big, sullen Latino boy who so far had done zero work in her class. He was obviously bright. What was he doing in room 241?

  One day at the end of September, Rachelle was teaching her fourth-period kids how to take notes in preparation for an upcoming exam. The notes were projected on the front board, and the kids were dutifully copying them. Eduardo, dressed in a long, inside-out black T-shirt, just sat there frowning, a faux diamond sparkling in his pierced ear. Then, in what was becoming his classroom MO, he crumpled his paper into a ball and drained it into the wastebasket. “I made it!” he proclaimed.

  “Yeah, you made it,” replied Rachelle. “But I’m not impressed. How are you going to do on the test?”

  “I’ll just flunk it,” he said, drumming loudly on his desk.

  “You need to at least be quiet,” said Rachelle. “If you fail, you fail by yourself.” Then she turned to the others. Eduardo stood to leave.

  “No! Sit back down!” she ordered, as some of the others stood and the low classroom murmur rose a decibel. Now she tried a usually reliable bribe. “If you sit down, I’ll play the radio.” Eduardo remained standing and the talking continued.

  “I’m not talking over you!” she warned—to no effect. Finally, defeated, she said in disgust, “Okay. Forget it.”

  Eduardo sat back down and she walked over to his desk to find out why he was refusing to work. He unloaded. He told her that three days before, on Monday, he had been jumped on the way to school by a bunch of Bloods because he was wearing a blue T-shirt. He was still upset by the incident—and obviously frustrated. He didn’t give a fuck about his schoolwork, he said.

  Rachelle listened, and when he stopped talking she said: “Do you feel safe now?”

  Eduardo jumped up and began to pace like a caged animal. Then, at her urging, he took his seat again.

  “I want you to graduate; I want you to leave Locke,” she said, whispering so the others couldn’t hear. “I don’t want you to have to worry about what color you’re wearing.”

  “I want to get out of the ghetto,” he replied, his voice steady and serious.

  “You can get out,” she urged. “With an education. You are a smart boy. You can do this. But you have to get this work done to leave here.” As she talked, Eduardo pointed his forefinger at another kid and flipped his thumb down, as if to shoot him. He didn’t appear to be listening. Rachelle switched tack and started to joke: “What color is it okay to wear? Brown? Pink? Should we get you a pink shirt?”

  He ignored her jests. “Why do I need to copy it?” he asked, referring to the notes on the board, his fingers urgently rapping on the desk.

  “It’s the way your brain processes information,” she explained as his drumming became louder and more insistent. “Stop!” she finally said, her voice rising with impatience. “Please stop. I’m gonna go nuts, man. Just stop. Get it done. Do you want to go to the office?”

  “No,” he said.

  “If you have to put your head on the desk, then just do it,” she said. Now he was up again and headed toward the door. Rachelle stood at the threshold, her arms spread wide, blocking the exit.

  “I’m leaving,” said Eduardo.

  “No,” she replied. “Sit down. Stay for a minute.” Eduardo began pacing again. In the meantime, she turned her attention to Dante, who was back after his two-week detention for urinating in her classroom.

  “We need to get you caught up, Dante,” she said. “Is it nice to be back?”

  “I don’t know,” he said as the bell rang. “I’m just kidding. It feels good. It feels good. Good-bye, Miss Snyder!”

  “Thank you very much, sweetheart,” she said, smiling at Dante’s attempt to joke. As she was talking to Dante, Eduardo slipped away. It would be weeks before she saw him again.

  TFA expected each teacher to set a big student achievement goal of 80 percent mastery of state standards. Rachelle decided the brass ring for her students would be a little different. She wanted 80 percent to get a C or higher, the minimum grade required for admission to a state university. The first test she gave showed her just how high that bar would be for many of them. A few of her students did well, like her all-girl class, which averaged 75 percent. They proved her point; they had no business being in special ed. But some of the others! She had had no idea that there were so many ways to misinterpret a question. Her fourth-period class of unruly boys made her heart sink. They got an average grade of 20 percent.

  Rachelle decided that, given the range of her students’ abilities, her grading policy would be based on attendance and work in class. The only way to fail Miss Snyder’s biology class was going to be not to show up. Even so, some kids ended up flunking. It was sad, because there probably was a reason they were ditching her class; she probably wasn’t engaging them. But when the time came to write out the F’s, she didn’t feel nearly as bad as she thought she would.

  TFA had urged all the CMs to assess their kids as early as possible. Rachelle tested her students for science content knowledge but soon realized that the problem in room 241 was actually a lack of basic reading and writing skills. When she gave them the San Diego Quick Assessment, she discovered that most of her kids were reading at a third-grade level. More than a few couldn’t read at all. She could tell they were secretly embarrassed. They all wanted to do better; they all wanted to know how to read. So she decided she needed to do more literacy work with them. How could they use a textbook if they couldn’t read?

  But she was a biology teacher, not a literacy coach. That presented a dilemma. While it was no doubt good for her students to be able to conduct biology experiments, she knew that being literate would be of more benefit to them. It’s criminal to allow them to graduate from high school without being able to read! I want to teach them how to read, and push them into general ed. But I don’t feel qualified. I need to be more active. I need to get qualified to teach them.

  Rachelle started searching on the Internet for material on literacy. The stuff was kind of childish, but if her kids couldn’t do it, how would they ever make it in the world? She found a picture of a kitchen to be used as a prompt to write a sentence. But then she thought: Do they even know the words for all the parts of a kitchen?

  Still, she pushed ahead. Everything she did in class had to do with literacy. At least once a week, she reviewed grammar and simple sentence structure. She even worked on spelling. They misspelled nearly every term she gave them; one kid even managed to misspell DNA! It wasn’t exactly biology, but who knew? There were no consequences at Locke. She could be playing patty-cake in room 241 and no one would be the wiser.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dropping Out

  Chad was feeling worn out and ugly, but he had been teaching long enough to know that this was just about the time when every teacher was at a low point. It was late fall. The adrenaline surge from the opening days of school had petered out. Thanksgiving was approaching, but that break hardly counted; it only whetted the appetite. Christmas was a long way off. For some reason, Chad had fooled himself into thinking that things would be different in this new job, that as an administrator he would have more power, more control, that he’d be happier.

  What he had was more responsibility, more headaches, more in-your-face evidence that a big, underperforming school in a big, underperforming district was a tough ship to turn around. He now found himself doing all the things he had bad-mouthed the previous year’s administration for. Like all the other assistant principals, he was spending a disproportionate amount of his time just putting out fires, or, as Wells liked to say, responding to 911s. The yellow-jacketed security team couldn’t handle all the safety issues at Locke. APs had to pitch in, too. Each administrator was assigned a specific area of the campus to monitor during lunch breaks, and in the event of a 415, the campus code for a fight, if they were within reach, they were expected to drop whatever they were doing and respond.


  As a teacher, Chad had railed against the administration’s failure to effectively address academic issues; as an administrator he now understood that safety had to be a priority. And he now found, oddly enough, that his presence alone could defuse a potentially explosive situation.

  Wells’s first order of business in 2004 had been to create a safe school environment, and that had actually worked to Chad’s advantage as a small schools coordinator. While Wells was busy establishing his authority on campus that fall, Chad and his partners were basically given free rein over their small school, which they had named the School of Social Empowerment. SE was one of the six small schools carved out of Locke that year in compliance with a district directive to reorganize or face a possible state takeover.

  A few teachers, like Chad and four or five other core SE founders, saw the mandate as an opportunity for real change; they worked all spring and summer on their plans. Most of the rest, more skeptical, didn’t bother. Locke already had three or four so-called academies, founded on grants that had long ago run out. Many veterans saw the small learning communities as a new iteration of the old academies, yet another half-baked idea handed down from above. They had no appetite for spinning their wheels on a reform with no shelf life, so they chose a school or were assigned to one, and reported to work in September. SE teachers insisted that those students who wished to join their school be allowed to. The rest of the schools had no substantive plans and thus no demands, so kids were assigned by lottery.

  The deconstruction of Locke into small learning communities was in line with a growing national movement, supported by the Gates Foundation and other school reformers, to replace the failing large high school exemplar with one in which instruction took place in smaller, more intimate “learning academies.” The hope was that the small schools on the big campuses would foster a much-needed feeling of intimacy and investment, making both teachers and students more accountable for academic achievement.

  Locke’s reorganization was announced in the spring of 2004, and it came just in time for Chad. It was his third year of teaching, and he didn’t think he could go on at Locke much longer. He had been reading everything he could about the small-schools movement, and over beers at Sharkeez he and the other happy hour regulars would fantasize: What would happen if we started our own small school?

  Earlier in the school year, he had even gone so far as to contact Steve Barr, the charismatic political activist who was putting LAUSD on notice by creating successful charter schools in Los Angeles’s toughest neighborhoods. Barr, founder of Rock the Vote, was a firebrand from the sixties who had adopted education reform as his latest cause. His goal was not to found x number of charter schools in Los Angeles; he wanted nothing less than the overhaul of the entire L.A. Unified School District. He reckoned that if his Green Dot schools showed the way, the community would demand that LAUSD replicate their success by establishing similar small, autonomous schools staffed by skilled teachers and visionary principals.

  Barr met with Chad and a group of like-minded Locke teachers. Could Barr help them set up a charter school at Locke? The idea was interesting, but Barr encouraged the Locke corps to teach at one of his Green Dot schools first. Nothing came of the talks. Barr wasn’t ready to take on a big school like Locke. Chad and the others weren’t ready to give up on it.

  When Dr. Rousseau announced the plans for the school’s reorganization, everything clicked. By signing up with Rousseau, Chad and the others could effect the change they longed for without having to abandon their kids at Locke. It was like a dream come true.

  They began to hammer out a plan. They decided that more instructional time was needed if their kids were to succeed, so they added an extra period to the day. SE’s seventh period would officially be called College Prep Seminar, though everyone referred to it as guidance. It would be modeled after the highly successful college-prep program for underachieving students called AVID. Later, once the school was established, SE took on the intractable issue of truancy. In its second year, Andy Osterhaus, a young, commanding chemistry teacher who had left his home in Washington State to teach in Los Angeles’s mean streets, was made attendance czar. Mr. O got time out of the classroom to chase down ditchers. SE’s attendance rates started to climb.

  SE’s emphasis on attendance, and the extra period of instruction, got results. Test scores rose. So, too, did resentment among many of the staff. SE was the “white” school (meaning there were no black teachers), and SE got special privileges: an attendance czar (a position no one else planned or asked for) and a separate schedule to accommodate a longer day (which no one else wanted).

  But few disputed that the entire large school benefited from SE’s success. It was contagious. For the first time in several years, Locke was able to test enough students to qualify for a state academic performance score (API) and a federal annual yearly progress score (AYP), the two complementary yet confusing yardsticks for achievement. The very fact that the school earned a score at all was considered a triumph. That the school showed improvement by meeting the target the government had set for growth that year was cause for celebration. Though Locke’s API score was the second lowest in LAUSD at the end of the 2004–2005 school year, the entire faculty was buoyed by the upward trend.

  Wells had set the stage for improvement by ejecting troublemakers and making security a priority. He basked in the accomplishment and was determined to repeat it. In 2005, his second year as principal and Chad’s first as an administrator, Wells summoned the ninth-grade students to an assembly during the first full week of school. He and his posse of deans were going to head off misconduct at the pass by laying down the law right from the beginning.

  Dr. Magee, the AP in charge of safety and security, started off the meeting in the open-air cafeteria. “Welcome! You all are the graduating class of what year?” he asked the ninth-graders seated on benches before him. There was no response.

  “You don’t know?” he chided. “Okay, it’s ’09. Say it at the same time. I need you to say: ‘The class of 2009.’” The kids begrudgingly complied. “Now, look to the left and right of you. Statistics tell us that a lot of your counterparts are not going to be in the graduating class with you. It’s always the way it happens. Now look to the left and right of you and say: ‘I’ll be graduating, and I hope you graduate, too.’” The kids mumbled the refrain.

  Then he introduced the freshman class to Dr. Wells. Wells, dressed in a suit and tie with a stern demeanor to match, knew how to get the attention of a crowd of yappy fourteen-year-olds. Just as he finished saying “Good morning, class of 2009!” but before he could begin his talk, he made his move. “One thing I don’t tolerate is talking,” he barked. Then, turning to the security guards, he pointed out two girls who were chatting: “Send those two girls home,” he ordered. As the girls were marched out, Wells addressed the remaining kids: “This is an assembly. If you don’t listen and cooperate, you don’t stay at school. We take conduct very seriously here.”

  Wells went through the litany of dos and don’ts—which turned out to be mostly don’ts. First came the dress code: “You can’t wear hats here unless they say ‘Locke High School.’ Effective immediately, we take hats. You can’t wear wave caps or do-rags. We take them and trash them. Any red, blue, purple, or white T-shirts? Today’s the last day you can wear them. What do we do if you wear a white T-shirt? We send you home, period. We instituted this rule last year because of safety issues. It is not open for negotiation. Students are prohibited from wearing any gang attire. Period. And at Locke, we wear clothes properly—no showing the midriff, no overly revealing stuff, no pants drooping.”

  Next up were cell phones: kids could have them, but they’d better not be visible. If the phones were lost or stolen, it was not the school’s problem.

  Then the code of conduct: “We take fighting and violence very seriously,” Wells announced. “There is an automatic five-day suspension, and we don’t care who started it. In most cases you a
re hauled out of school. There is zero tolerance. If you are thinking about fighting, think again.” He added that the school banned the use of profanities, expected students to adhere to instructions from staff, and required daily attendance.

  “Defiance can get you suspended,” he warned. “And if you are suspended, you can’t come back till you meet with school police. If you are sick, you need to come back with your parent. When you miss a class, we call home. Cutting is prohibited. Any ninth-grade student ditching first lunch gets an immediate Saturday detention. And if you fail to attend that, you get a two-hundred-fifty-dollar fine. We are very serious. Detention is not very nice. It gets real ugly. But we don’t want you to go down that road.

  “Robbing and stealing, we don’t do that. Those culprits go to the youth authority. I’m not gonna mention weapons, because any kid with a weapon is in Big-Time Trouble. Not only that, they automatically go to jail. We take that very seriously.”

  The last thing he mentioned was “teaching and learning.” The school took them very seriously, too. Wells announced that there was a “Saturday academy” for students who could use extra help with their schoolwork, and he explained why: “We know if we don’t help you in ninth grade, you struggle. And by tenth and eleventh, you drop out. We don’t want that.”

  Wells left the issue of lockdown—which by pure happenstance was declared only hours later—to Dr. Magee, who explained that in most cases lockdown was declared when police were looking for a suspect in the area. For obvious reasons, during lockdown no one was allowed on or off campus, and students were restricted to their classrooms. It was not suprising, then, that some students freaked hours later when the school went dark. In one second-floor classroom that faced the street, kids figured there was an L.A. terrorist group on the loose just outside the window: “We gonna die!” they screamed when told that no one could leave the room.