Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  “I’m gonna ride my bike,” he replied. “I just wanted to say hi.”

  It made her feel good. That’s what I’ve got going for me. I’m not good at special ed or teaching. In fact, I’m pretty bad. But I think most of them know I care.

  But she knew that wasn’t enough. She had to make changes in her classroom. She had spent the first few months on the scientific method. She was bored with the material; she could only imagine how the kids felt. She was going to pick up the pace. At first she didn’t know how much the kids could do, and she didn’t want to stress them out. Now she knew they were perfectly capable of achieving. There was so much to learn in biology that was cool—Samir had made that point the last time he was in. He said that her kids were learning. And he had some suggestions that he thought could help them even more.

  She was going to get better organized, too. She had recently connected with a second-year TFAer named Jill Greitzer, who taught special ed algebra to many of the same students Rachelle taught. Rachelle went to see Miss G teach and was really impressed with how she ran her classroom. She decided to adopt many of the techniques she saw.

  Miss G was into setting small goals. She had a daily activity log in which students rated their performance in class. Then she compared their assessments with her own, added up the totals, and gave the kids daily grades. That way they could see what happened when they didn’t come to school and what happened when they worked hard.

  Rachelle was going to get stricter, too, even though it was against her nature. Like Miss G, she was going to have the kids sign contracts. And there would be new rules. She wasn’t going to open the door to kids who were late for class. Under the new behavior plan, kids would be given classroom jobs; there would be rewards. Twenty tickets got you a lunch with Rachelle. The big prize was dinner. Other people coming into her room might think: What the hell is going on here? It looks like a circus. But she was going to hang on to the small gains and remember that these boys were just kids.

  She vowed to work harder herself. Truth be told, she felt like she’d been slacking off.

  She ditched her plan to teach literacy. She didn’t know how to do it. And it didn’t appear that anyone else did, either. Locke’s UCLA literacy coach for science devoted two entire professional development days to “read-alouds,” a strategy to aid comprehension. It was maddening. Rachelle got the concept immediately; she didn’t need to waste two days reviewing it. Besides, her kids were not just “below level.” She had kids who didn’t even make phonemic connections, who didn’t know the sounds certain letters made. She could spend three days just teaching the word “cat.”

  Her four-to-nine evening credentialing classes at Cal State, Dominguez Hills, twice a week weren’t any more helpful. For the most part, they were a waste of time. She couldn’t understand how anyone could major in education. It seemed that if she had really paid attention, she would have learned everything she needed to know at the five-week summer institute. In fact, even that could have been condensed!

  What was particularly upsetting was that as useless as she thought the credentialing program was, she felt like she was falling behind. Her dad suggested that it was probably because she was exhausted. And that was true: she knew from experience that tired kids had trouble focusing. It was no different for adult students.

  At one point, early on, it looked like she was going to get kicked out of the credentialing program over some bureacratic snafu. Sweet! That frees up my nights! But her mother put on her attorney’s hat and informed her that without being in a credentialing program, she could get fired for teaching under false pretenses. State law required that every teacher of record be credentialed or working toward a credential. “You don’t want to get fired, do you?” her mother asked.

  “Yes, yes, I do want to get fired!” she replied. “I really do!”

  She really didn’t. She liked her job. And she loved the kids. She wanted to expand their horizons, to give them experiences beyond Watts. But even that proved difficult. She had signed up to take a handpicked group of students to see a play in Pasadena. It was disappointing. Only one kid showed up. And when she arranged through some friends with Hollywood connections to have Kenyon play basketball with Snoop Dogg, he was a no-show.

  Then, one day, she got a call from someone she had met at the Palm Springs science conference that she and Hrag had attended a few months before. Rachelle had signed her name to every flyer she found at the conference—she was looking for freebies for her kids. One of the things she apparently signed up for was a field trip. When the phone rang, the voice on the other end wanted to know if Rachelle was serious about taking her kids to an outdoor learning camp. The shortest, cheapest program his company offered was a three-day academic camping trip to Catalina, the biggest of the Channel Islands, located just off the coast of southern California. The cost was $190 per child, and the instruction was pitched to a fifth-grade level. There was an opening at the end of May.

  It sounded perfect. Most of her kids had never been on a boat—or even to the beach, though it was only a twenty-minute ride from school. Most had never been anywhere beyond Watts. Rachelle’s mind began to race. How cool would that be? But is it feasible? Is it even worth doing? Where will the money come from?

  She began to plan. Maybe she would get online and apply to donorschoose.org for a grant. Or maybe the school would pay. Or maybe not; there would almost certainly be liability issues. But Rachelle would argue that the kids who were allowed to go would be carefully chosen. She was not going to take anyone who could potentially embarrass her or the school. She’d start the ball rolling and set good citizenship as one of the prerequisites for being included.

  She knew she could take only a limited number of students. And as far as she was concerned, they were all going to be from the special ed department. No offense to Vanessa Morris, the science department chair, but her general ed kids were not welcome. The last science field trip had been to the aquarium in Long Beach. Hrag’s kids had all gotten to go. Special ed kids had not. They were not on the radar at Locke. Rachelle’s students were second-class citizens in a lot of other ways—they didn’t need to be put down at school, too. So, no, this would be a special trip for special ed. She’d ask Jill Greitzer if she wanted to come along. Between the two of them, they would decide who’d be on the boat.

  There was, of course, the little matter of running it by Dr. Wells. His first reaction was positive. He said the field trip would be a great use of Title I money, the federal funds granted to schools whose children live below the poverty line. Rachelle nearly jumped for joy. She intended to surprise the kids once all the details were worked out. But she couldn’t help herself—she was so excited that she told them. They were going to Catalina!

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Corps

  Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., like clockwork, Samir Bolar and the other Los Angeles program directors met in the conference room in TFA’s Los Angeles regional headquarters downtown. The TFA offices were on the ninth floor of a twelve-story building. The first thing Samir saw when he stepped off the elevator and into the office was a banner printed with Teach For America’s core values. The vision statement “One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” was written along the bottom.

  The L.A. suite also posted the Teach For America Los Angeles time line, a snapshot of TFA’s history there over the past fifteen years, and a not-too-subtle reminder to staff and visitors alike that Teach For America is an organization that keeps score.

  Los Angeles was one of the six original charter sites in 1990, when TFA fielded its first class of five hundred corps members; it also hosted the first summer training institute, a tumultuous affair, as disorganized and chaotic as it was inspirational, according to founder Wendy Kopp. That inaugural year, close to 100 recruits were assigned to Los Angeles. Over the remaining years of the decade, the size of the L.A. corps waxed and waned with the organization’s fortunes. In
2002, Los Angeles had 500 alumni. By 2005, when Hrag, Taylor, Phillip, and Rachelle entered the corps, TFA had more than doubled the incoming Los Angeles teachers to 223, making a total of 276 CMs teaching more than 22,000 students in 82 schools in the Los Angeles area. Most of the TFAers were employed by LAUSD. But in a district with more than 35,000 teachers, their numbers were tiny.

  And the achievement gap in L.A.—and in virtually every other region in which TFA operated—persisted. “I think if you look at the overall statistics, you will not see a significant narrowing of the gap,” conceded Kopp as the organization began its second five-year growth push. “That’s one of the reasons we don’t feel satisfied. That fuels our sense of urgency.”

  Los Angeles was exactly the kind of city TFA was built to serve. In few regions in the country was the gap more pernicious than in the City of Angels, home to the second-largest school district in the country. In the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the kids in LAUSD’s low-income areas were three grade levels behind their wealthier peers, and seven times less likely to graduate from college. The district’s dropout rates were among the highest in the state, test scores among the lowest. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger characterized the way LAUSD was run as “horrible.” An independent audit of the troubled district in 2007 concurred; the 115-page report described a pervasive and shocking lack of accountability throughout the district on all levels.

  But Los Angeles had deep pockets. Of the $2.6 million raised from funding sources in the Los Angeles region in 2005, 31 percent came from individual contributors to TFA’s Sponsor a Teacher program. Perennials on Hollywood’s A-list—Casey Wasserman, Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, Paul Newman, Jerry and Linda Bruckheimer, and Sherry Lansing—were among them.

  Much had changed since Los Angeles had hosted the first four summer institutes. Wendy Kopp traveled to the West Coast often then, mining for gold. In those days, Teach For America’s financial health was precarious; too often it lurched from paycheck to paycheck, forcing Kopp to spend much of her time raising money. She used the same tactics at TFA that she had employed at the struggling business magazine she headed as an undergrad at Princeton: she went right to the top. In her book, One Day, All Children, she recounts sneaking into one of Mike Milken’s lectures at the UCLA business school. Afterward she introduced herself. Milken was pleased to meet her and offered to fly her back to the East Coast on his private jet the next day. They spent the three-and-a-half-hour transcontinental journey in earnest debate. Nearing touchdown, she asked the infamous financier and philanthropist for a million dollars. The money would make the difference between life and death for Teach For America, she told him. Milken seemed inclined to write the check but in the end didn’t pony up. Others did—against all odds.

  “She goes to where her fear is,” explains Greg Good, an alum who was TFA’s Los Angeles executive director in the mid-1990s. Good remembers traveling around L.A. in his Honda Accord hatchback hitting up the city’s top guns for cash, his long dark hair flowing, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, with Kopp, dressed in business attire, riding shotgun. By then the early seed money from the foundations had dried up. TFA was forced to turn to private funders, corporations, and the government to survive. Kopp became a traveling saleswoman. She bunked in Good’s Venice pad and arose each morning at five for her daily run. Then she spent the rest of the day and night shaking money out of trees. She excelled at it, but, as Good recalls, she wasn’t necessarily comfortable with it. Inevitably, he says, just before walking into a high-level meeting, Kopp would turn to him and confide: “I am scared to death.” And then she would walk through the door, deliver a compelling pitch, and, cool as a cucumber, conclude with “I’d love to see you come in at a million dollars.” The first time she did it, Good nearly fell out of his chair. She was like a laser beam, plowing right through her fear, drawn to the challenge. She didn’t always succeed, but she never let TFA fail.

  It came perilously close. In 1994, Kopp recalls in her book, there was open rebellion at TFA’s summer institute when she invited questions from the corps at a meeting midway through the training. Angry recruits stood on chairs, shouting out their complaints. Among the many: Kopp herself had never taught. Kopp suffered, observes Good, from the pedestal syndrome. Because she was so engaged in the business of just keeping TFA alive, she wasn’t present at every on-the-ground team meeting. The result was that she was seen by some as remote, removed from the trenches, a kind of figurehead—revered but not loved. Because her head was so far above the parapet, she made an easy target when the going got rough.

  In the early days, it got rough a lot. Kopp maintained her cool throughout the institute ordeal, now remembered as “the night of a thousand suggestions,” but there were more assaults ahead. It was just weeks later that Linda Darling-Hammond published her scorching analysis of TFA, “Who Will Speak for the Chidren? How TFA Hurts Urban Schools and Students,” in Phi Delta Kappan.

  “It is clear from the evidence,” wrote Darling-Hammond, “that TFA is bad policy and bad education. It is bad for the recruits because they are ill-prepared…. It is bad for the schools in which they teach, because the recruits often create staffing disruptions and drains on school resources…. It is bad for the children because they are often poorly taught…. Finally, TFA is bad for teaching. By clinging to faulty assumptions about what teachers need to know and by producing so many teaching failures, it undermines the profession’s efforts to raise standards and create accountability.”

  The blistering critique from such a big name in the field of education caused some of the organization’s major supporters to balk and cast a pall over the efficacy of the mission that would last for years to come. When the fiscal year drew to a close at the end of September, TFA had a $1.2 million deficit.

  It was make-or-break time. Kopp and her top money man, Richard Barth, who later became her husband, cut two million dollars from the budget, resulting in the termination of the sixty program directors. TEACH!, a TFA initiative set up to help school districts recruit and develop teaching talent, was shuttered. Another TFA start-up called the Learning Project, a summer school program headed by TFA’s very first hire, Daniel Oscar, had already left the TFA stable to become an independent nonprofit. Having finished pruning, Kopp launched a three-year plan to transform TFA into a “stable, thriving institution.”

  The years of struggle had taken a toll on morale and tainted the mission’s culture. Kopp moved to define the organization’s core operating principles. Over time, the foundation of how TFA works was articulated in five core values: relentless pursuit of results; sense of possibility; disciplined thought; respect and humility; and integrity.

  Kopp knew that in order to succeed, TFA needed better management—and it had to start at the top. She herself had to become a much more effective manager of a much improved product. But she was a young twenty-something who was learning on the job. And she didn’t have the stereotypic personality of a dynamic leader. There was no flash, no flourish to Wendy Kopp. No memorable anecdotes, either—except those that underscored a clarity of focus and an unshakable confidence that caused her to work harder and longer than anyone else around her. Kopp, a runner of marathons, could go the distance. Oscar recalls one particularly exhausting night in the early days when everyone was crashing, and Kopp sent them all home at 1 a.m. to get some much needed rest. She stayed on, alone in an empty New York high-rise, endlessly making copies at the point when others on the team didn’t have the strength to push the start button.

  “She can’t be described as charismatic,” notes Dr. Bressler, her Princeton thesis advisor. “She’s not eloquent, and she doesn’t have the attributes associated with extraordinary leadership. What she does have is a kind of calm conviction that the thing is possible, and she conveys that. She’s almost amused at a recitation of obstacles.”

  She was new to managing, but she embodied the key TFA operating principle of “constant learning.” An autodidact on busines
s management, she read voraciously and picked the brains of every smart person she encountered. Like the organization she led, she was obsessed with getting better. (Ironically, she consulted with Linda Darling-Hammond in the very beginning, when TFA was not much more than a senior thesis.) Nick Glover, a vice chairman for Whittle Communications, advised Kopp on how to structure the organization and management team in the very early nineties. By the end of the decade, TFA had developed formal working relationships with a number of consulting firms, including the Monitor Group, which assisted in the development of the 2005 and 2010 growth plans, and McKinsey & Company, which helped with selection and recruitment. Several of the outside consultants eventually took jobs with TFA—including Matt Kramer, from McKinsey, who was named president in 2007.

  According to members of her top management team, Kopp was strongly influenced by the writing of Jim Collins, author of the bestselling books on business management Built to Last and Good to Great. In Good to Great and the Social Sectors, Collins describes a great organization as one that “delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long time.” He also notes the hallmarks of great leaders: they are ambitious for their institution—not themselves—and possess a paradoxical blend of personal humility and intense professional will. The goals TFA announced when launching the 2010 five-year plan read like Collins’s definition of a great institution. As for his take on the distinguishing characteristics of great leaders, Kopp has them in spades say those close to her—and she looks for those qualities in the people she hires.

  That doesn’t mean she—or the organization she heads—is “nice” in the conventional sense of the word. “‘Nice’ is not part of the self-concept,” observes Matt Kramer. “Civility and humility are there, but that’s not the same thing as nice. Nice is saying it matters more how people feel than how they perform, and whether they deliver results. Nice is: ‘Here’s what we’re working on, we didn’t get to where we’re going, but that’s okay.’