Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  “I’m leading this march,” he replied. Soon groups of students from other schools joined up with the Locke kids. By then, Wells had returned to campus. Zeus decided to peel off, too. He had done his thing on Saturday. This was their thing. He needed to let them do it. He felt like crying. He had forgotten what these wonderful kids are capable of when they are motivated.

  When the marchers from the various campuses converged south of downtown, Roberto discovered that two rival OGs (Original Gangsters) were at the front of the march. He knew them from their tattoos. They were probably in their thirties. And here they were, walking together for a common cause. Roberto was astounded. They fucked up. The senators and the politicians, they fucked up because they are trying to pass a bill that affects all these gangs, and now they are uniting them. They are uniting all of us. We are walking as one people.

  “I’m the leader from Locke,” he announced to the old-school gangstas. Then out of his mouth came “We’re gonna go to city hall.” The OGs were headed that way, too. The march swelled, filling up the streets curb to curb. The paced quickened as they got closer to downtown. Immigrant workers came out of their shops to cheer the marchers on.

  “You are walking for us!” they cried. Now Roberto was thinking of Exodus: My people are walking toward significance…

  When Roberto actually spoke into the microphone at city hall, the crowd quieted. It seemed impossible. “We have accomplished what our parents and ancestors gave us the will to do,” he said into the mike. “To walk for them with all our heart and strength to prove a point. We are the future. We have shown great pride, and that will lead us to even greater strength.”

  Back at Locke, very few students were in class. And the hallways, usually home to the ditchers not caught in the hourly tardy sweeps, were curiously empty. Most Latino students had walked out; quite a few African Americans had, too. Some marched with the Latinos. “I’m down with my homeys,” one black student told Cubias. “I don’t want them to send you guys back!” Others saw a golden opportunity to skip school and took it.

  Taylor, Hrag, and Mackey missed the walkout. Taylor had thrown herself a birthday bash over the weekend at her Marina del Rey condo. A lot of the Locke contingent had joined in the celebration, which ended only when the cops came to write Taylor up for disturbing the peace with all the noise. Later in the weekend, still in the party mood, she and Hrag had hightailed it up to San Francisco on the spur of the moment. Once there, they decided to take Monday off as a mental-health day. Normally, both would have felt guilty about ditching. But Vanessa Morris was a great believer in mental-health days. She encouraged her teachers to take a day off at least once a month to recharge their emotional batteries. It was something she herself did routinely. It was one of the things that kept her sane and teaching at Locke.

  Mackey didn’t go to San Francisco, but he took Monday off, too. He felt bad that they had missed being a part of what could have been a turning point in the national discourse about immigration. Hrag had no regrets at all. He didn’t think experiencing four kids in his classroom, instead of thirty, would have made him feel a part of anything. He was glad he wasn’t there. It was a lost day.

  Rachelle didn’t teach biology the day of the walkout. Instead she ran off some questions about immigration and public protests and gave them to her students to help stimulate a classroom conversation. But many of them, black and brown, had joined the march.

  The walkout came as a total surprise to Phillip. The first he heard of it was when he received a text message from a teacher at a neighboring school. “Is everything okay at your school? Are you on lockdown?” No sooner had Phillip read the message than the announcement of the lockdown came over the PA system. The kids seemed unfazed, and Phillip taught until his third period was over and the lockdown was lifted. But moments after the kids filed out, he heard chanting and loud talking. When he looked down onto Saint Street from his third-floor window, he saw kids running by the side of the building. He strained to see where they were going and what they were saying.

  Curious, he joined others in a colleague’s room with a better view. He was shocked. Below him in the parking lot were probably a thousand students. The ones on the perimeter were banging on the locked gates. It was hard to imagine how this show was going to end. Suddenly, the walkie-talkie of a security guard standing nearby crackled with instructions: “Go to San Pedro! Open the gate!” It was Dr. Wells. The next thing Phillip knew, the principal and a number of teachers had joined the students as they poured out of the campus and onto the street. Phillip was shocked. Why? Why would he open the gate?

  He taught to near-empty classrooms for the rest of the day. It was frustrating. In Phillip’s mind, nothing should ever get in the way of teaching; he could never support anything that detracted from academic learning time. Was an education something to be valued or squandered? Maybe Phillip was just too straight and narrow, but he thought the whole thing was stupid. It was an entire day wasted for children who couldn’t afford to lose a single minute.

  What was even more frustrating was that the next day was affected as well. Though teachers weren’t alerted, the district mandated that every school open on lockdown. Wells imposed a modified lockdown instead; kids would go to only their first and fifth periods, and those would be extended blocks. He got on the PA system to explain:

  “Yesterday, a number of students participated in an organized walk from San Pedro to City Hall. That is done, and we are moving on. I do have to advise you that we have rules and regulations here. Any students engaged in any such action today will be precluded from participating in any senior activities. That’s nonnegotiable and you will be subject to suspension and expulsion…. I am proud to say that the students who did leave school took part in a meaningful and peaceful march, and you should be applauded for that. But that was yesterday, and today is today. Do not use school as a forum. Don’t do it at school. Use your own time.”

  Wells’s handling of the walkout was a matter of debate. Chad Soleo applauded his leadership. Cubias said Wells had performed like a movie-star principal; it was a shining moment. But the TFAers had their doubts. They understood it was a tricky situation, but they wondered about the message that had been sent. How do you, as principal, walk out with the kids one day and the next day declare it an offense punishable by expulsion?

  The announcement of the block periods came in the middle of the first period. Taylor was frustrated. Her class was half empty. She had intended to start a new unit, but she knew if she did, she’d be screwing herself, because she would only have to teach it over again the next day when the rest of the class showed up. Apparently, the entire district was on block periods. Taylor couldn’t figure out why. But then she couldn’t figure out why they had let a walkout happen right under their noses, either: How could this school think there was any instructional time to lose? I have different priorities. I’m concerned that my kids can’t read, and you let them have a walkout.

  She decided to use the extended block time to discuss the march and the issue of illegal immigration. The kids were ready to talk. Her twelfth-graders told her they were scared the day before when they saw so many Hispanic students assembling at the stage area. The stage had traditionally been a flash point for racial disturbances. During the last big one, three years before, kids were throwing chairs, heads were getting busted, trash cans were on fire, and helicopters whirred overhead.

  “It seemed like a war,” recalled one senior. “The Hispanics were on one side and the blacks were on the other. I remember this little short dude, they threw something at him, and his head was dripping with blood. I was scared. I just kept thinking, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’” This time, when she saw the students leave the stage and head for Saint Street, she was relieved—and sympathetic to the cause, as were most of the students.

  “Without the immigrants, the world would be disorganized,” observed one African American girl. “Who would do the things for the whites or the African Americans
here?”

  A Latina agreed. “I’m not being racist, but no white person gonna be sitting here in the sun and working the fields and doing construction,” she observed. “The majority of the people who work for that are Hispanics. Without us, there wouldn’t be a lot of work getting done. I’m not saying we are a big part of the U.S., but we are a part.”

  Another African American girl observed: “For them to say the immigrants are takin’ over the jobs, it is not true. They are not takin’ over jobs from African Americans. They don’t want to do nothin’ but sell drugs. They say Latinos are takin’ over the jobs, but if a Latino not doin’ the jobs, who will? Because the black people don’t want to do it.”

  Then another Latino jumped in: “Hey, there are a lot of Hispanic drug dealers, too. Half of my family, they are drug dealers. Not all Hispanics are the same, and not all blacks are, either. What do you think, Miss Rifkin?” Taylor confessed that she didn’t know the particulars of the proposed changes in immigration law. She urged her students to become knowledgeable about the debate and to think critically about the issues.

  “Whether or not you realize it, soon you will be the majority,” said Taylor. “It’s your time to empower yourselves. Think: Who is in power now? Whites are, and that should piss you off because you are the majority, and it makes no sense. What I’m putting to you is, it is your job to be educated and fill those positions of power, because you are going to become the majority in this city. If you are not seeing people who look like you in power, you should change that. People who say they hate immigrants are ridiculous. This country is a country of immigrants. My family emigrated from Russia—a Jewish family from Russia.” The discussion went on for two hours.

  Phillip didn’t discuss the previous day’s events at all. He taught the lesson he had planned and used the extra time in the blocks to meet with each student. It was great. He was able to review their grades with them and get them caught up on missing work. Other colleagues showed movies during the long block. Not Phillip. He had geometry standards to cover.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Rats on a Ship

  Dr. Wells always talked about his 911s, those little emergencies that seemed to pop up out of nowhere to demand all his attention. But the school’s real problems were actually more like thunderheads—black and menacing—and as the semester progressed they seemed to gather and grow darker.

  March was a long and difficult month, a time of reckoning. The CAHSEE, the California High School Exit Exam, was scheduled for March 21 and 22. Until then, there had been no consequences for failing the state-mandated test. But in 2006, it counted; any senior who didn’t pass would not be allowed to graduate. So the school had gone all out. In addition to Saturday-morning prep classes, vulnerable seniors had been assigned to mandatory after-school preps. On top of that, for two weeks leading up to the tests, the students scheduled to take the exam were pulled out of their normal classes from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day and enrolled in “CAHSEE boot camp.” Taylor, who was teaching one of the after-school preps, thought it was a ridiculous effort at damage control. With three different CAHSEE preps running at the same time, the school was on prep overload, with many teachers reviewing the same material. Once the kids caught on that the preps were redundant, they ditched. It was way too much, way too late.

  In the middle of the frenzied test preparation, the WASC accrediting team (also dreaded) was scheduled to visit. In the weeks leading up to the March 15 date, the district had dispatched two teams to the campus to help administrators prepare. The meetings culminated in a mock WASC visit to various classrooms. The teachers had been forewarned; classrooms were to be tidied up, standards and daily lesson plans were to be clearly posted.

  Administrators were on patrol. Taylor got one classroom inspection right before the mock visit. When she heard the knock on the door, she knew immediately that it was the WASC cops. Sure enough, the visiting AP scrutinized every area of the room. The floors were dirty—janitors didn’t get back to clean up the bungalows as often as they should—and the classroom was cluttered. But the state standards were posted, and so was the day’s agenda. Every teacher at Locke was supposed to have daily lesson plans typed up, but few, if any, ever did. Nevertheless, the visiting AP asked Taylor for her proof of lesson planning and reminded her that it was customary to have it on hand for observations. “If anyone came in and observed this class, they would know that I have a lesson plan,” replied Taylor. And, she added, while she understood that classrooms had to be orderly, she was not about to mop her own floors. (As it was, she swept them regularly.) Though the AP had said she was carrying out a routine classroom observation, the note Taylor got later mentioned nothing about her teaching. Instead, it was a scathing indictment of her messy room. The official WASC team ended up visiting Taylor’s classroom a few weeks later for thirty seconds. She never heard about WASC again.

  Hrag got some company, too. Over a two-week period, four different administrators came to observe his class. One AP visited just as Hrag realized he had screwed up his whole lesson plan. He stood there and carried on, making up DNA strands, faking the entire lesson. If the AP realized it, he didn’t let on. Hrag never got any meaningful feedback from any of them; he figured they were just checking to make sure his standards were posted for WASC. He didn’t really care anyway. He wasn’t trying in the least to impress them. In a way, he was just waiting for someone to say something, because he wanted to unload.

  The matter of unissued textbooks at Locke had finally been resolved just weeks before. As one of the terms of the settlement of the lawsuit Williams v. State of California, which alleged that students in low-performing schools were denied equal educational opportunity, state law required that every student be provided with standards-aligned textbooks or instructional material within two months of the start of the 2005 school year. Until then, it had been common practice among many teachers at Locke and other low-performing schools not to distribute textbooks.

  At a December faculty meeting, Wells had described the Williams case as “the next best thing since Brown v. Board of Education,” and ordered all teachers to distribute books to their students under threat of termination. “We’re out of compliance,” he warned the faculty. “If we fail to adhere, the state can take us over.”

  He was still preaching the same sermon two months later, at the end of February, a day before the county was scheduled to audit the school for compliance in the Williams settlement. “We look pretty good,” he advised teachers. “But if even one teacher is out of compliance, that would kill us. It’s bigger than me, and it’s bigger than you, because we could get taken over. The Williams case is not a bad thing. It’s because schools like Locke were not providing kids with textbooks for the last two decades that this is happening.”

  The next day, Rachelle handed out the biology books in room 241. There were only three kids in her fourth-period class, but she decided to do a little role-playing with them, in case a state auditor just happened to come by.

  “These are your books,” she said. “You can take them home. You now have been assigned a book. I didn’t realize you had to have a book—”

  “What the fuck?” asked Kenyon.

  Rachelle ignored him. “If someone walked in the door with a business suit on and said, ‘Please raise your hand if you do not have a book,’ would anyone raise his hand?”

  When they all responded with a no, she continued: “As a matter of fact, we don’t do many things from the book.”

  “Then why we need a book if we don’t use it?” asked Shandrel, a big, husky football player.

  It was a good question. The day before, in the faculty meeting, Dr. Wells had observed: “It is not normal to have a class of thirty-five students without books.” It was also not normal to have a class of thirty-five students who couldn’t read. The biology department got around that handicap by offering inquiry-based, hands-on instruction. Textbooks were not used. Ever. Not for special ed or for general ed. Like Rach
elle, Hrag complied with the directive but without much enthusiasm. Honestly, we don’t use them. The kids will take the books home, and we’ll be lucky if we get 25 percent of them back. This is such a waste of money and time. Why distribute textbooks that kids can’t read?

  Distributed they were, and the school was found to be in compliance. Having dodged that bullet, the administration zeroed back in on the WASC process. Prior to the scheduled visit, the school had to prepare a status report, outlining its problems as well as its progress since the last WASC visit in 2004. The report submitted by one of Locke’s assistant principals was a disaster. One district supervisor observed that it looked like a brochure—and not a very good one at that. When Chad saw it, he was appalled. It could have been written by a third-grader. Wells agreed.

  He put Chad, the self-described vice principal of leftover jobs, in charge of the rewrite. In the end, Chad asked most of his “entourage,” plus such stalwarts as Vanessa Morris and English chair Bruce Smith, to help out. They divided the report into sections and took the areas they were most knowledgeable about. But there were some chapters, like school finance, for which no one had expertise. “It was hilarious,” remembers Smith. “Some of it was pure fiction. I just wrote what I thought should have happened. All the meetings I referred to? They never occurred. If I told them what really happened, we would have been shut down.”

  It was a matter of expediency. Locke was a perennial on the state’s Program Improvement (PI) roster of schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under No Child Left Behind. Loss of accreditation was a real possibility. After all, Crenshaw High had been stripped of its accreditation the summer before, and it had gotten better scores than Locke. It was do-or-die time.