by Donna Foote
Teach For America gleaned from the research that in an effort to shed its grassrootsy image from the nineties, it had swung too far in the opposite direction. Now it risked being seen as too corporate, so it moved to reemphasize the importance of the real work it does. Images of kids, which had been downplayed in earlier marketing material, came roaring back. Research showed, too, that the Millennials were savvy to the media—and hated being spinned. TFA learned that it may have over-scripted its recruiters, and that candidates were coming away from meetings not convinced that they were getting the real story. TFA responded by launching a “knowledge building” initiative for recruiters, with field trips to regional classrooms so that they could speak with greater authenticity about the TFA experience. TFA also softened its previous pitch suggesting that it was a springboard to bigger and better things, fearing that recruits would see teaching in an underserved community as a great bullet point to put on a résumé rather than as a truly transformative experience.
In the summer of 2006, TFA redesigned its website and increasingly used it as a major marketing vehicle. Video clips of real people—CMs, alumni, parents—talking frankly about the mission were laced throughout the site, as were testimonials from leaders of America’s top grad schools and hottest post-college employers. The list of TFA’s blue-chip employer and graduate school partnerships included all the usual suspects: Harvard, Yale, the universities of Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Michigan among the schools; JPMorgan, McKinsey & Co., Wachovia, Google, and GE among the corporate highflyers. TFA offered career services through its Office of Career and Civic Opportunities, and even ran a job bank for potential employers looking to recruit from the ranks of TFA’s smart, high-achieving corps members.
TFA built a recruiting framework around the issues the research had probed: brand awareness, knowledge of the issue and TFA’s mission, and the considerations that were barriers to joining the program. Campus AKC—awareness, knowledge, and consideration—was further tested in an online Facebook survey of coeds at forty of the four hundred major college campuses at which TFA recruited. The results showed that 62 percent were aware of TFA, 41 percent had a significant knowledge of what TFA does, and 23 percent would consider joining. The takeaway: TFA was missing whole swaths of potential CMs.
Recent alums could play a role in reaching them. Ongoing research indicated that there was a widening gap between campus perceptions of TFA and the realities of the job on the ground. The role of the CM in demystifying the work—without hurting the mission—was crucial to growing the movement. A well-known alumnus like Phillip, who was doing so well as a first-year CM, could help boost the number of Connecticut College Camels applying to help close the gap.
As it turned out, Phillip was a no-show. When he arrived at LAX on Saturday morning, he learned there was a nor’easter due to hit New England that evening. He got as far as O’Hare only to discover that all flights to the East Coast had been canceled. In the storm that became known as the blizzard of 2006, Connecticut received more than two feet of snow, setting state records. After holing up at a hotel near O’Hare that night, Phillip gave up and flew back to Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon.
The trouble started on Tuesday. His eyes welled up with tears just thinking about it. The kids were sassy, even defiant, in periods one and three. Even his best-behaved students were out of whack. Phillip felt like he had lost control and was floundering at sea. And he felt angry. That afternoon he had stayed for the faculty meeting, when what he wanted to do was go straight home to his room. But that wasn’t an option; it was his turn to cook for his roommates. He made dinner, but he had taken that bad day home with him, and he couldn’t engage in small talk. I need to be on my own and calm down. I have to get my spirits up so I can go back in tomorrow.
Wednesday wasn’t any better. He was still angry at the kids—and at himself, too, for feeling that way. He decided he had to do something drastic to get their attention. So he made them queue up outside the door, then let them in three at a time.
“This is your warning,” he said as each trio entered. “I will call home and kick you out. Go to your chair, sit down, and don’t say a word!” Then he started the class. But he had trouble almost immediately with Grant, a special ed student who had recently transferred into period three. Grant had not been assigned a seat, so he chose his own. Phillip insisted he move. Grant refused, saying he didn’t like his appointed seatmate. “Fam, I’m doin’ my work!” insisted Grant. “Why are you doin’ this? I’m payin’ attention.”
“Don’t call me ‘fam,’” snapped Phillip. “It’s not my name. What does ‘fam’ mean anyway?”
“It means you’re like family to me,” said Grant, his voice rising. “I don’t say it to other people.”
It was a test of wills and Grant lost. Phillip called Chad and asked him to remove the kid from the class. Then Chrystyna, a usually good student, started in. Phillip had called her grandfather the day before, and she was mad. “Who does he think he is?” she muttered, just loud enough for Phillip to hear. Next up was Paola, the smartest girl in the class, and she wanted to use the bathroom. Phillip refused. Paola, whom Phillip thought of as a hot tamale, just packed up her stuff and left the room. As she was leaving, Phillip was dialing Chrystyna’s home number. Seeing that, Chrystyna got up and walked out, too. The next thing he knew, Chad was at the door with Paola, who wanted to be readmitted. She had needed to use the restroom because she was menstruating. Phillip should not have refused her request then, and he certainly could not refuse her request now. He balked. Finally, Chad ordered him to take Paola back. Phillip went home that day even angrier than before. He started calling parents. I will break these kids, even if I have to call every single parent.
The parents he phoned that night were supportive; each one urged him to call whenever he had a problem. And most said they had never heard from a teacher at Locke before. The next day, everything was different. The kids all fell in line, and Phillip learned an important lesson: parents have an enormous impact on their children’s lives. Kids are afraid of them at some level and want desperately to please them at another.
After that, Phillip had his ups and downs. And so did the kids. But that week was a watershed for him. He never lost control of a class again. In fact, he learned to look past some of the behavior he had once found so disrespectful. Many of his kids had such hard shells covering such fragile interiors; he had to remind himself, as TFA would say, that it wasn’t about him. He really did have to understand where they were coming from before he could get them to see things through his lens. So he tried not to take things personally. He knew the kids didn’t hate him; it was just the opposite. They liked him because, bottom line, he treated them with respect.
He let loose on the reins. He began to feel more and more like a facilitator and less like a traditional teacher. He got Wells to agree to let him pilot a special geometry class the following year, a class for high-achieving kids that would be entirely student-driven. He was less militant, more familiar with the kids. Some mornings he almost felt high. He’d get up early, grab a Jamba Juice for breakfast, and take the long way to school so he could get a view of downtown from the freeway overpass just as the sun was rising. Then he would play music as the kids entered each period. His favorite song was Destiny’s Child’s “Stand Up for Love,” and he was a big fan of John Legend, the wholesome soul singer. The kids said they hated his music, but he didn’t believe them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Significant Gains
Once spring break had come and gone, the campus felt different. The purple blossoms on the jacaranda trees outside the school were dazzling, and the rose garden was in full bloom. The days grew hotter and longer, the kids and teachers more restive.
The garden was somewhat of an anomaly at Locke; a riotous patch of color against an industrial palette of grays and creams. Dr. Wells had planted the garden soon after he arrived in 2004, to mark the spot of that first racial standoff just two days into h
is tenure. When he suggested it, people thought he was crazy. The garden would never survive, they argued. The kids would destroy it. But Wells insisted, and his boss, Dr. Rousseau, green-lighted the ten-thousand-dollar project. The rose garden thrived and became a special spot, untouched and unspoiled, in an otherwise blemished landscape.
When Taylor stepped off the institute bus and onto the Locke campus for the first time, the garden was one of the first things she noticed. It was a foggy day, and she was dressed in her new professional clothes—her grandmother had taken her to an Express store the day before, and they had practically bought the place out. She was with some of the other new CMs, and somebody exclaimed: “It’s not that ghetto!”
At first glance, the school didn’t look that different from Santa Barbara High. The façade was painted a dark teal and light gray. A marquis outside the main entrance flashed the week’s events for locke high school, home of the successful saints, with a playful halo hovering above. Inside the main three-story building—the last high school to be built by the district in forty years—the gray linoleum floors were polished to a high gloss, and the peachy cream-colored walls looked freshly painted. Bungalows extended from the main building back to the cafeteria and assembly hall, forming an interior, green grass quad with the garden as its centerpiece. The roses were a pleasing distraction—from the chains and the fences, the locks on the doors and the bars on the windows. It wasn’t until the corps of 2005 actually started teaching that they began to see those accoutrements of safety as a metaphor for conditions in the community: locked in and locked out.
Taylor got her assignment to Locke early, at one of the first TFA job fairs, in May 2005. TFA liked to place the locals right away, before the rush of CMs arrived for institute and things got crazy. The fair started with a crash course in No Child Left Behind, the Williams decree, and inclusion—some of the legal issues LAUSD teachers had to be mindful of. Then everyone was given a card with a list of three schools. Taylor’s card read: Bell, Locke, and Fairfax. Included on the card was a description of each school, noting size, location, tracks, and the number of TFAers assigned there.
The CMs were corralled in a holding room adjoining the auditorium where interviews were being conducted. When Taylor’s name was called, she was taken to the Locke table and introduced to Mrs. Jauregui and another Locke staffer. She was wearing a cute sweater set and a little skirt. She’d been on tons of interviews, and she knew the drill. They asked her about her background, and she glossed over the fact that she had been doing PR for J.Lo. They told her about the new small-schools setup at Locke and asked her a question about classroom management. And that was it. She was hired. She signed the paperwork then and there. She announced the good news to the other waiting CMs, who were as excited as she was. Where would she be working? As soon as she uttered the word “Locke,” their faces changed. “Oh,” someone said. “I hear that’s pretty rough.” Taylor couldn’t bring herself to look the school up on the Internet. She called her boyfriend and asked him to drive her home to Santa Barbara. She had a raging headache.
A year later, she was well into the second semester and still found herself in the same state of emotional confusion—happy to be teaching but anxious about the circumstances. On the one hand, she knew her classroom was working; she could teach, and her kids were learning. But on the other hand, the novelty of being this young person doing this noble thing had worn off. She could no longer tell her friends and family stories from her great “Adventure in Watts.” In fact, she now got offended when they asked. Yes, the kids did cute things and they were really funny, but at the end of the day, it’s not funny when the best seven teachers leave to start a charter school, and your best friend gets punched in the head and has his car broken into.
Everyone who knew and loved her told her to get the hell out of Locke. She was very close to her family. One brother lived near her in Marina del Rey, and she spoke to her grandparents daily. Her mother, sensing Taylor’s unease, sent her a link to a website on anxiety. Her father started trying to find her a teaching job in Santa Barbara. But Taylor had been jumped in. She couldn’t go back to the world she once inhabited, and she didn’t want to. She was a mass of contradictions. One minute she’d be on cloud nine, and the next, another cloud, a dark cloud, would move in and take over. Am I happy? Am I sad? I don’t know!
She and Hrag were inseparable. It was great to finally have someone at Locke who “got” it just the way she did. They had a partnership. He calmed her down, and she was there for him. If one of them was having a particularly bad day, the other was just a call or a text message away. Just hang in there till three. Then they’d go out that night and decompress until the early-morning hours. Taylor felt responsible for Hrag in a funny way, like a host almost. He was so far from home, and she was a native Californian. So she arranged their road trips.
One Friday night she dragged him down to San Diego, where they slept for four hours before signing up for a wild and crazy fifty-mile bike ride along the coastline of Baja California, Mexico. It was a semiannual event, much beloved by the college set, which started in Rosarito Beach and ended in a finish-line fiesta down the coast in Ensenada. Taylor was a bike rider from her days at her hippie middle school. Hrag had ridden a total of ten hours in his entire life. It was all spur-of-the-moment. Taylor forgot her fanny pack, so she stuck their money in her sports bra. Hrag’s borrowed bike broke, and they had to walk uphill for seven miles. In Ensenada, it was one big party with music and food and plenty of beer.
Taylor had been on the grunion misadventure. She’d left at around nine and missed seeing Hrag get clocked. Good thing. She didn’t know what she would have done. It was bad enough seeing the aftermath. Hrag was so disillusioned and disappointed. Like him, she had been uneasy at the picnic. It was like no field trip she had ever been on. When her high school class traveled to Ashland, Oregon, it was safe. She didn’t know what constituted safe for a Locke High trip, but the grunion trip wasn’t it. In the scheme of things, nothing truly catastrophic had happened. But the potential for catastrophe had been real and perfectly obvious. After working at Locke for a year and seeing so much go down, both she and Hrag felt like they’d been pushed to the limit.
She had known she was in trouble even before the school year started. She had heard through the grapevine—there never was any official communication between the school and the new teachers—that she was supposed to report to the Locke library for pre-school planning. She canceled the trip she had scheduled and went to work. But only three of the nine teachers in the English department showed up to write the year’s teaching units and create assessments—and they were all TFAers.
Taylor had no idea what she was doing. She had left institute just weeks before not really knowing how to plan lessons or write assessments. One of the seven institute binders was called “Instructional Planning and Delivery,” and there had been a number of CMA sessions on planning and assessing. But institute was a blur. There had been so much information thrown at them that nothing had been internalized. It didn’t matter, she was told by the veterans from other departments. The tests were bullshit. But Taylor and Dan Ehrenfeld and Josh Beardall forged ahead anyway. In retrospect, they should have listened to the others. Nothing they prepared over the summer was ever used during the school year.
When Hrag arrived at the library that summer, he was handed a textbook and told to create an entire year’s worth of assessments. But since he was the only biology teacher there, he realized the absurdity of the situation right away. He tried helping Jason Beattie, a second-year TFAer, write the chemistry assessments, but that seemed even crazier—to be planning for a subject he wasn’t going to teach. So he spent his time online, buying furniture and looking for a car. Whenever someone came by to ask how he was doing, he said he was doing fine. And he was. He found himself a bed and managed to kit out his whole apartment.
Sometimes Taylor thought about what it would be like to teach at a school that worked, that
had systems and set curriculums. At her high school, every department had a curriculum, and the delivery was synchronized, so that every student was learning—and being tested on—the same thing at the same time. The only department at Locke that seemed to have a curriculum was biology—and even that was kind of loosey-goosey, not tightly bound to state standards.
The new English teachers were entirely on their own. Taylor tried to plan with the other ninth-grade teachers, as Chad had urged, but it felt like a bad class project. She got help from second-year TFAer Jessica Miller and the UCLA coaches. When she asked one of the veteran English teachers for plans that had been used in the past, he said he’d look around. But Taylor recognized the evasion right away. He doesn’t have any lesson plans. So, for the most part, she made up lessons on her own, mapping out what she intended to do six to seven weeks in advance.
She was a quick study. When Samir came to her classroom for the round-three observation, he brought a camera for a videotape observation he was piloting. He hadn’t given her any warning that he would be filming her, but she had a great lesson planned that day. Samir was so smart and had been so helpful that she was happy to accommodate him. She had offered to pitch in earlier, in January, when he had mentioned that he was overwhelmed with calls from apprehensive would-be recruits who were still weighing the TFA offer. “Send them my way,” she said. “I was in a sorority. I know how to do rush. Just send me the talking points.”
Samir demurred. He had just lost two CMs—Dave Buehrle and Dave’s roommate, Grant. He didn’t want to lose a single one next year. “That’s not what I’m looking for,” he told Taylor. “I want people to be honest. I want the recruits to know what they’re getting into. It’s crucial to the success of the mission that they honor their two-year commitment. It has to be about the kids. If you don’t want to make a contribution through education, this is not the place for you.”