Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  The state could take over the school. But who are they going to send in? The governor? The school could go charter, but who’s going to charter a dying public school in the inner city? Green Dot’s Steve Barr? He had his chance and took a pass. The school could be reconstituted by firing all the teachers and hiring back only the good ones. But how do you do that? The ones worth their weight might tell you to go to hell, and then Locke would have even more open positions that couldn’t be filled. The other big consequence—replacing the administrative staff—has already happened three times since 2001. How is yanking the principal just as he is getting to know the school supposed to improve Locke?

  Chad had a daydream. The answer to Locke’s problems would come from the students themselves. Locke had 3,100 kids, 5 administrators, and a faculty of 131 or thereabouts; the people being controlled far outnumbered the controllers. The students could rise up and take charge. They could stage a sit-in, call the district, get the media to come, and demand change. If the kids decided they wanted something, they would get what they needed. It could happen.

  But the chances were slim.

  God knows Chad wanted change. He had tried to be a force for change, a leader. But he couldn’t even keep his own job. How was he supposed to support teachers in theirs? After the new vice principal in charge of counseling arrived and took over Chad’s office, Wells urged Chad to apply for a newly created position of small-schools coordinator, a job that paid ten thousand dollars more and was perfectly aligned with Chad’s ambition. At first Chad was excited about the possibility, but as the weeks passed and nothing happened, he became depressed. Eventually he was advised that he was technically ineligible for the job because he did not have five years of teaching experience. Still, Wells held out the hope that he could find a way around the red tape that was tying up Chad’s appointment. In the meantime, Chad became the AP for leftover jobs. He worked out of an empty third-floor room he converted into an office, and from there he found himself shagging all the curveballs that came his way.

  Chad didn’t feel empowered by Wells, and he in turn didn’t feel he was empowering the teachers he supervised. There were no systems in place at Locke. Teachers hoarded supplies, and books that had been ordered and paid for were never distributed. There were no tutors for the two-year-old AVID college-prep program, and the school counselors didn’t have functioning computers. There was a budget, estimated to be around twenty million dollars, but nobody ever saw it. Though the school was allocated funds for site improvement, money was wasted—or not spent—at every turn. The adults at Locke were failing the kids. Chad felt increasingly helpless.

  And so it was that he began to think that he, too, would join the ranks of Locke’s recently departed. He was wracked with guilt. Not the Great White Guilt. He didn’t feel guilty because he had come from so much privilege and his kids from so much deprivation. He felt guilty because he had always had a strong faith that Locke would get better if enough of the right people stayed. He felt guilty about abandoning that hope, about walking away from the kids and his commitment to them. But as he evaluated the reasons he remained at Locke, it was more about the guilt he would feel if he left than the hope for the future if he stayed. And that was unhealthy.

  Chad contacted Steve Barr, the education reformer who operated the Green Dot charter schools in Los Angeles. Though nothing had come of their meetings a few years before, their long discussions over chips and margaritas had put Chad—and Locke—on Barr’s radar.

  Barr was an impolitic politico with a knack for the sound bite and a love of the spotlight. He had come to his mission as school reformer rather late in life. The son of an Irish immigrant who abandoned the family when Barr was three, he was raised by his single mother, who waited tables to make ends meet. As a boy, he was a C-minus student in what was then an A-plus school system. But by the time Barr graduated from high school, California had embarked on its inexorable decline from the number one state in student achievement to the forty-eighth. Proposition 13, the taxpayer revolt of 1978, had put a cap on property rates—the death knell for fully funded public education in the state. Twenty years later, California’s school system was in shambles, and Barr was in the middle of a midlife crisis.

  A writer by trade, Barr had established his reformist credentials in 1990 when he cofounded Rock the Vote, the mostly online movement that encouraged young people to become politically active. Seven years on, he was looking for a new cause. How could he broaden the reach of Rock the Vote to engage Los Angeles’s politically disenfranchised immigrant population? The answer, he thought, was in school reform. Education would connect Los Angeles’s youth, many of them new to the country, to the political process—and ensure the financial and social success of the city he loved by making them into an educated workforce.

  He resolved to create a prototype of the Great American High School. His effort would be called Green Dot, a reference to the number of wired schools in California at the time. (While researching a story for George magazine, Barr had found an online map on which green dots represented the state’s wired schools, and discovered that there wasn’t a single one in Los Angeles.) His new school would be built on six tenets that the noneducator had identified as key to high-performing schools: they would be small, safe, and autonomous, with high expectations and accountability for students and teachers, an extended school day, parent involvement, and a greater share of government dollars going directly to the sites. The first Green Dot school, Ánimo Leadership Charter High School, opened in 2000. Four more followed. They worked. Graduation rates at the Green Dots averaged 81 percent compared to 47 percent for LAUSD, and API scores on average were up more than one hundred points.

  But Barr had never wanted to be an operator of a chain of successful charter schools. His long-term vision was to reform the whole district. The question was: How many green dots would it take to reach the tipping point for all of Los Angeles? By early 2005, he was ready to find out. He began to look for a large, existing high school that he could turn around by using the model that had proven successful in his small schools. He thought of Locke and Chad, and remembered their meetings.

  “Chad was a very quiet kid,” Barr recalls. “When he walked into a room, you didn’t think ‘John Kennedy.’ But he’s one of those guys who rallies people around him by outworking everyone around him. It’s amazing how many people follow him, and he does it by example.” Given Chad’s leadership skills and the school’s obvious need, Barr seriously considered making a play for Locke—until another low performer, Jefferson High, erupted in a series of racial clashes. Barr figured that he had to pick the place that would generate the most heat. At that moment, Jefferson was already hot; Locke was not.

  So, in a move that enraged the union and the school board, Barr proposed to take the struggling Jefferson High School off LAUSD’s hands. Barr’s hostile takeover bid, which he subsequently outlined in a white paper published in March 2006 entitled “School Transformation Plan,” called for the deconstruction of Jefferson into a cluster of six autonomous small schools. The four-year process would begin by “incubating” each new school off-site, starting with a ninth-grade class and adding an additional grade each year. Once the schools were at full capacity with four grades, five hundred students, and an established culture of achievement, they would reoccupy the original Jefferson High site and share common facilities. (Because the resulting retention rate would be so high, two entire schools would remain off-site.)

  Barr reckoned that his plan could be adopted across the district, transforming forty-six large failing high schools into five hundred discrete high-performing schools within a decade. He argued that nineteen billion dollars in bond money recently raised for new school construction in Los Angeles could be used to finance the incubators and to renovate existing sites to accommodate the new autonomous small schools. When his offer was rebuffed, he was unbowed. He pledged to reform Jefferson anyway. He announced that he would be opening small incubator school
s around the Jefferson campus and filling the seats with the kids who would have been Jefferson’s incoming ninth-grade class.

  Barr got everyone’s attention—Chad’s included. The union, school board, superintendent, and mayor became locked in a heated battle over Jefferson, at just about the same time that Chad was reaching the boiling point at Locke. When Chad made contact, Barr was eager to see him, and this time the meeting was quite short. After a four-minute interview, Barr offered Chad a job as principal of one of the six new charter schools he intended to open in the fall of 2006. He knew that Chad had been conflicted about leaving Locke the first time he offered him a job. He sensed that joining the shock troops outside the district walls would still be a painful decision for Chad. Barr respected that and felt honored by it.

  Chad didn’t officially accept the job right away. But he did talk to the six teachers he wanted on his dream team. His first pick was Josh Hartford as vice principal. The rest were other key members of Locke’s School of Social Empowerment. Chad got the sense they felt much as he did. They were all ready to jump.

  He gave Wells the heads-up a few weeks later. It was late on a Friday when he stopped by the principal’s ground-floor corner office before heading home. Chad told Wells that he had been asked to apply for an administrative position with Green Dot, had done so, and had been offered a principalship. When and if he accepted the job, he said, Frank Wells would be the second person to know.

  Wells didn’t skip a beat. He told Chad it sounded like a great opportunity and he would support him if he decided to accept it. But then he sounded a note of caution.

  “I would like you to consider the ethical implications of taking your entourage with you,” he said, noting that the new Green Dot schools would no doubt have a wide pool of qualified applicants from which to draw. (In fact, eight hundred teachers—many of them TFA alums—ended up applying for eighty-five positions.) “It doesn’t seem right or fair that you would take some of the best teachers in this school with you.”

  Chad didn’t respond. He couldn’t trust himself to speak. He objected to Wells’s use of the word “entourage,” and if Wells wanted to talk ethics, well, he was the one who had an ethical obligation to keep and continue to attract good teachers based on the vision he’d established as principal. If they leave, it won’t be because they blindly follow me; it will because they’ve made an informed decision based on their experiences here. Still, it was hard to dismiss Wells’s admonition not to poach Locke’s best teachers. Chad didn’t like the delivery, but he saw his point.

  So the internal dialogue he had been conducting for weeks continued:

  I would be taking only six people…But others might leave, too, once they see the SE exodus.

  I care about Locke and I don’t want to steal teachers away…

  But a lot of them would leave anyway, and I could offer them an opportunity that could change the face of public education in Los Angeles.

  I’m not hassling them; I only told them I’m interested if they’d like to consider coming on board. If they come, it’s their decision…But if I hadn’t approached them, would they really leave?

  Wells is right, there are other qualified candidates in L.A. besides my entourage…But I want the most capable people working with me. I’d be remiss not to ask the people I know and have worked so well with.

  While key members of the so-called Chad entourage were contemplating the abandonment of the small school they had just built at Locke, Vanessa Morris was planning to create a new one. At that point, Locke had six small schools, only a few of which were actually functional. SE was by far the most successful of the lot, and Morris, the nationally board-certified science chair, thought there was plenty of room at the top. Her idea was to give birth to a technology-heavy small school that would better prepare Locke students for college by offering three years of both math and science, a requirement for admission into the University of California system. She knew the administration would be hard-pressed to refuse her. Kids at Locke tested better in science than in any other subject; 5 percent even scored advanced, an admittedly small number but one that made Morris proud and gave her clout.

  She had observed the SE team as they built their school, so she knew the key to success: good teachers. Morris herself was a graduate of UCLA’s well-regarded Teacher Education Program, a two-year urban ed master’s program. But she was a huge fan of TFA. Over her five years at Locke, she had had only positive experiences with TFAers. They shared her concern for social justice, and they were, without exception, energetic team players. Some of them, like Soleo and Hartford, had become close friends. They had her back and she had theirs. Without them, she wasn’t sure how long she would have lasted at Locke. During the week they all worked like crazy; on Fridays they ranted and raved like crazy. Morris considered Friday-night happy hour her form of therapy. In fact, it was better—more fun, and a lot cheaper. So when she went casting about for teachers, it came as no surprise to anyone that she looked to Teach For America first. When she had finally assembled her team and introduced them at a faculty meeting, one teacher quipped: “What is this? A TFA school plus Morris?” Four of the eight were TFAers. Among them were Taylor and Hrag.

  Taylor was excited to be joining the team. Morris had invited her and a handful of others to the Olive Garden restaurant for an exploratory meeting, which turned out to be a three-hour working dinner. It had been exhilarating. Ideas were flying around the table, and a vision of what the new school could be took shape. At the end of the night it was decided that the school needed to have a cheer—and a motto. And while they were at it, they joked, maybe they would schedule all the PDs for the new School of Math and Science at the beach. Taylor was hooked. She told Morris she’d do anything she could to help. How could she not? She loved her colleagues, and she really loved teaching. What she didn’t like was the disorganization, the chaos, the constant feeling of impending doom waiting outside her classroom door. With a leader like Vanessa Morris, maybe that would all go away. Maybe they could make their little school work.

  The ninth-grade academy, the school Taylor was in, sure didn’t. It was divided into two “houses,” and the classrooms were located in the rows of tacky trailers at the back of the campus along Avalon Boulevard, a big gang thoroughfare. The ninth-graders had been segregated from the rest of the school for the past few years—the gates to the back lot were actually locked shut during the school day and opened only for lunch and the passing time between periods. The thinking had been that the ninth-graders were the biggest at-risk population in the school; they were the hardest to manage and the cohort most likely to drop out. Separating them from the upperclassmen might ease the transition from middle school to high school, foster a better class culture, and keep them at Locke.

  The experiment was a nonstarter. There was no coherent leadership, no shared curriculum, and no proven academic benefits. Kids were still dropping out like flies, and the ninth-grade teachers were so disaffected that many didn’t even bother showing up for the weekly meetings. As far as Hrag was concerned, they were like every other meeting at Locke: people sat around, argued for a bit, and left. Nothing ever got done. And there was no downside to being a no-show, because there were no consequences. So Hrag ditched the meetings. The only reason Taylor attended was that they were held in her classroom during the lunch hour. She had nowhere else to go.

  Morris had conducted her talent search primarily in the ninth-grade houses because she did not want to antagonize other small school leaders by poaching their teachers. But she would have gone trolling in the back lot anyway. That’s where many of the TFAers were clustered, because that’s traditionally where most of the openings were—veteran teachers preferred not to have to deal with ninth-grade challenges. Morris scooped up Taylor, Hrag, and his roommate, Mackey, along with first-year UCLA grad Jinsue and second-year TFAer Josh Beardall.

  Choosing Taylor was easy. She had been teaching only six months and already had a reputation as one o
f the best English teachers in the school. Taylor was in a state of constant panic—she sweated all day long and had trouble sleeping. But the doubts she harbored about her efficacy in the classroom weren’t obvious to her more experienced colleagues. Mrs. Jauregui, who oversaw the two ninth-grade houses, was almost deferential to her, treating Taylor as if she were the head of the ninth-grade English department. Jauregui sent Taylor to special professional training sessions, and when Taylor announced that she wanted to do more literature-based instruction, Jauregui happily ordered the books. Taylor could tell she was getting little perks that the other teachers didn’t—like unlimited access to paper—and she suspected she had Jauregui to thank.

  Dr. Wells was an unabashed fan, too, though it was unclear to Taylor if he actually knew her name. He called her “lady.” When he mandated an intensive after-school CAHSEE prep for seniors, he handpicked the teachers he wanted to lead them. Half were TFAers, among them first-year corps members Phillip and Taylor. Phillip politely declined the offer. Taylor felt like she was ready to take on something new. Only one kid showed up for her first class (she never had more than a handful of students attend), though she sent out a bunch of flyers and phoned the kids on her roster. She thought the CAHSEE prep was a total waste of time, but she got paid two thousand dollars for it, and God only knows how many brownie points she scored. During the presentation of the proposal for Morris’s new school, Dr. Wells stopped her and said, “You know, I really like you,” to which she replied, “I like you, too.”