Radical (7 page)

Some of the parents were scared, too, at first. “You're not taking my baby on a plane,” one mom said to me. But most relented, and quite a few said, “I'm coming with you.” So we had plenty of chaperones, but the trip required much coaxing and explaining.

The kids knew I was from Ohio. “How are we going to talk with the people out there?” one student asked. “We don't speak Ohio.”

I laughed. Since I was Korean, they had assumed Ohio was full of Koreans who looked like me and spoke a different language. I set them straight about that. And off we went: about ninety-five students out of a class of 110, and nearly twenty chaperones, mostly parents and a few teachers. We went to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, ate all we wanted at the Old Country Buffet, went to see a movie, and spent an afternoon at the Children's Museum of Cleveland. We had a blast. By the last day everyone was exhausted.

My parents had driven from Toledo to see us in action and come along on some of our adventures. I remember walking into my parents' motel room Sunday morning. Inza and Shang were asleep—with one of my students dead asleep between them.

Everlyn Strother, the teacher who swept me into her room my first day at Harlem Park, came along as a chaperone.

“I knew you had the potential to be all right,” she said. “But this—this was something else.”

B
Y THE END OF
my time at Harlem Park, my kids who had been with me for the second and third year were soaring. I would have put them up against kids from any private school in Baltimore. One student's mother was dying of AIDS. Another student had been sexually abused by multiple men over many years, and now she was living with her drunk grandmother, who neglected her. More than a few came to school hungry. These were children who had life stories that I couldn't even imagine. Despite all that they came to school every day. They'd come early, and stay late. They came on the weekends. They worked hard. They fought through all the noise and the people telling them, “Don't do what that Chinese lady is telling you to—come out and play instead.” They'd do their two hours of homework. And they went from being at the bottom to being at the top academically.

It was then that the light went on for me: I realized that their low academic achievement levels weren't about their potential or their ability or anything else. It had to do with what I was doing as a teacher, what we were doing as a school, and the expectations that we set for them. That's what it was all about.

The parents understood. When I was a first-year teacher, the savviest parents took their kids out of my classroom. They knew my classroom was out of control. But by the end of my third year, the parents were requesting their kids be assigned to my class. When word got out that I might be leaving Harlem Park, many said, “You can't leave. My baby is coming into the third grade. You
have
to teach her.”

I
GOT SERIOUS ABOUT
leaving Harlem Park in the winter of my third year.

I was happy and doing well as a teacher. My principal, Linda Carter, recognized our success and appreciated our work. Wyatt Coger, principal of the entire Harlem Park campus, which included a middle school, offered me the chance to become a lead teacher. I could stay and improve outcomes for students, one class at a time.

But I was unsettled by much of what I had experienced at Harlem Park. I was outraged at the condition of the school, the low expectations for the students, and the poor quality of education in some of the classrooms. On one hand, I was happy that I was able to make progress with my students, but I wondered, “Why isn't this happening everywhere?”

I also started researching urban schools nationwide, and what I found disturbed me even more. There were Harlem Parks in every city across the country. Generations of children were getting shortchanged. I could not stand for that.

I started considering graduate school. I wrestled with the decision and applied to several law schools and, on a whim, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I knew I could stay in Baltimore and have an impact on this group of kids, but I began to believe that public policy had to change: how we run schools and select our teachers, how we train them, how they relate to the students—so much had to change for all kids who look like my kids to have an equal shake in life.

The Kennedy School admitted me, and I decided to accept. I knew I wanted to have a broader impact on education reform and policy. I also was terribly sad, especially during and after the Cleveland trip. I had gotten to know the kids and their parents better. It focused me on how much the kids deserved and how they could blossom, if they were given a chance.

I had no idea what the Kennedy School would bring, but I came away from Harlem Park with a combination of rage at the broken system and belief in every child's ability to learn—with a great teacher.

3

Recruiting Teachers

I
figured I had complied with my mother's wishes—twice—when I earned degrees from Cornell and Harvard. But when I described my plans to start a business that would supply teachers to public schools, Inza was not impressed.

“What do you know about starting a company?” she asked. “Why would someone think you could do that?”

Many American mothers today would see this line of questioning as hurtful, certainly not confidence building. Not so with Inza. She was a pragmatist. She asked the questions that other people were thinking but were too polite to ask. Rather than cheering me and my brothers on blindly, she was always shrewdly skeptical. It kept us on our toes and taught us to defend our ideas intelligently.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked. “Maybe you should stay in school.”

My father supported my devotion to public education. Shang, son of an educator, always honored teachers. “You can do this,” he said.

This time, though, Inza had a point. I knew absolutely nothing about starting a new organization. But that didn't mean I was going to take her caution to heart and wilt. Instead I went to Barnes & Noble and bought as many books as I could find on starting a business, including
Business Plans for Dummies
. Not the most illustrious start ever, but a start.

Who would be right: Inza or Shang?

W
ENDY
K
OPP, FOUNDER OF
Teach For America, came to speak at Harvard sometime toward the end of my second year. I had managed to navigate my way through the Kennedy School, meet people who would become important in my future endeavors, and hone my skills in statistics. I was twenty-six but didn't know what my next step would be.

“What are your plans?” she asked. “I'm curious about your next move.”

I told her I was thinking of working for a foundation that gave money to education reform initiatives.

“You don't want to do that,” she said. “That's not where you're going to have the kind of impact you want. Trust me.”

And I did. Five years earlier I had put my life in Wendy Kopp's hands. I had left the prestigious halls of my Ivy League university, and instead of heading to Wall Street or graduate school, I went to teach in inner-city Baltimore. I wasn't the only one who cast practicality and her future aside to follow Wendy Kopp's vision. Five hundred other recent grads from the best colleges across the country had made the same choice.

Why?

When you meet Wendy, you don't think she's the type to start a movement. She grew up amid privilege in Highland Park, Texas, a wealthy suburb of Dallas. She's smart as a whip and driven, but she's not a particularly inspiring orator. So why were so many of America's most talented twentysomethings willing to toss it all in for Wendy? Simple: Because she had an incredibly compelling idea.

During her senior year at Princeton, Wendy turned an idealistic notion that she had been harboring for years into her thesis. She wrote about the need to inspire the next generation of leaders to be focused on fixing public education. The way to do it? Recruit, select, and train the most outstanding young people in our country to spend two years teaching in some of the most troubled urban or rural public schools. While they were in the classroom, they would fill a huge need for talented new teachers. After their two years—and whether they stayed in teaching or went to law school, medical school, Wall Street, or Capitol Hill—they would be lifelong advocates for public education.

Wendy was one of us. She had graduated from college only three years before I had. She knew that many college graduates were seeking meaning in their lives in a way that taking a regular job couldn't provide. In forming the concept of Teach For America, she tapped into that search for fulfillment beyond the almighty dollar.

Wendy is an odd duck—a painfully shy woman who has become a truly effective leader. During our summer training institute she was a bit like Mr. Snuffleupagus from
Sesame Street
—a mythical creature whose sightings would be tracked by corps members trying to determine whether the legend was real. She was only twenty-five at the time.

The first time I laid eyes on Wendy we were at a dance party at the Teach For America Summer Institute, toward the end of our training. We were cutting loose, celebrating and preparing to leave for our placement sites. Wendy is a notorious workaholic. Apparently, on this evening, her staff had convinced her to let her hair down and party a little. In hindsight, it probably wasn't the best idea for the founder of Teach For America to be cavorting with the corps, but the staff advising her were twentysomethings with a burning desire to have some fun.

I remember dancing with my roommates when the room started buzzing. The crowd parted like a scene out of a movie, and in came Wendy with some of her trusted staff. I couldn't take my eyes off the woman who had inspired so many. There she stood, in the middle of the dance floor, looking unbelievably uncomfortable. As she started to dance, she nervously jerked around to the music for a moment, without much success at rhythm, and then her bra strap slipped off her shoulder. She tried to push it up. But with the herky-jerky of her body, it fell down over and over again. Finally, thinking better of it, she slipped behind one of the large speakers to fix her bra.

“Really?” I thought. “That's our leader?”

But Wendy's tentative moves on the dance floor were no reflection of her tenacity as a leader. She proved to be an incredible advocate for her program—a woman who got things done. She was absolutely relentless. TFA suffered in its first few years from a lack of funding and a vicious attack from the education school elite who wrote mercilessly about how Teach For America allegedly damaged kids. She braved her way through what she calls “the dark years,” talking wealthy donors into shelling out millions of dollars to build the program. She tried her best to stave off the criticisms that TFA was an ineffective program that did nothing more than make do-gooders feel good about themselves and pad their résumés.

All the while she not only built a brand—she built a movement.

Today, nearly 20 percent of the graduating classes of Harvard and Yale apply to Teach For America, and most get rejected. TFA alumni can now be found running school districts, leading the best charter schools in the country, working in leading think tanks, serving as governors' education advisers, and even taking on the call of elected office.

The shy, awkward girl from Highland Park, Texas, had created a popular phenomenon.

So when she asked to meet with me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was eager to hear what she had to say.

A
T
H
ARVARD
I
HAD
enrolled in the master's in public policy program, with a concentration in education policy. When I enrolled, Harvard didn't have a stand-alone concentration in education policy, so I made one up. There was an approved concentration in health, human services, and education, so I tweaked that by taking all the education-related courses at the Kennedy School and some at the Graduate School of Education.

Harvard was a foreign world to me, almost as strange as Korea in some respects. I had never experienced anything like it. It made my years at Cornell seem like a walk in the park. I was not an outstanding student and never had been. Harvard, I quickly found out, was full of people who have always been the smartest kid in the class.

On the first day, we had been assigned a case to read before class, and I watched the nauseating ritual of students working overtime to make a good first impression on the professor and their peers. In graduate schools like the Kennedy School and law schools throughout the country, students form study groups. These groups serve both academic and social purposes. People jump to form groups as quickly as they can, but it has to be done carefully. The goal is to identify the smartest people possible and form a group with them.

I sat in the classroom the entire day without uttering a word or impressing anyone. Despite that, I was invited to attend the first session of a study group by Michael Simon, a guy I vaguely knew from the Teach For America Summer Institute. I thought it might be a mistake to completely eschew the ritual, but I joined it with a dose of skepticism.

The group that convened was large. Too large. Clearly the leaders had decided to treat the first session like a tryout. A bit annoyed, but still wanting to prepare for the discussion of the case the following day, I dug in and participated during the group. I'd read the paper carefully and brought up a few insights.

As the session was drawing to a close, a small Latina woman approached us.

“Hey,” she said. “My name is Layla. I'm in your section. Do you mind if I join your group?”

Obviously, they did.

“Actually, I think the group is too large already,” one of the students replied. “I don't think we have room. Sorry!” Everyone turned their heads to their papers.

“Well, if we don't have room for her, I think I'm going to join her and start a separate group,” I said quickly.

“Uh . . . ,” said the spokesman, having to calculate the benefits and risks quickly. “I guess one more person can't hurt.”

And with that, my friendship with Layla Avila took root. In my eyes they were judging both her and me on our race. They figured an Asian student could keep up, but a Latina might be a drag. They didn't want her to join our group, because they didn't think she'd add value.

They ended up being wrong. Very wrong. Layla was brilliant. She and I got along so well that after that first semester—both of us still bitter from the interlude that brought us together—we decided to break off from the group and form our own. We always worked together and then picked up strays here and there, depending on the class and who might be left out.

Layla and I could not have been more different on paper. She was born to a Mexican mother in East Los Angeles. Her father wasn't in the picture, and her mom had multiple sclerosis. Layla spent much of her childhood taking care of her mom, often skipping school to do so. She lived in one of the toughest sections of Los Angeles and attended one of the most notoriously bad middle schools, Stevenson Junior High.

It was there that a teacher, Don Mitchell, took notice of Layla's undeniable intellect. He saw how easily she grasped concepts, how diligent she was when motivated, how well she completed her assignments. Mitchell also knew that if no one intervened, Layla would attend Roosevelt High School, the worst-performing high school in the city, where she'd likely become a statistic.

He told Layla about a program called A Better Chance. It plucked kids like Layla out of the ghetto and sent them to private schools throughout the country. Mitchell knew this was Layla's only chance. He convinced Layla and eventually her mom that she should apply. She was accepted into ABC and was placed at a private school in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Deciding to leave her sick mom was tough, but even back then she knew that if she got a great education, it would make all the difference—so off she went.

Fountain Valley School of Colorado could not have been more different from East Los Angeles. Layla was one of the few minorities in the school and—as would become the pattern in Layla's life—she was underestimated. When she arrived she heard murmurs of “affirmative action kids” who were taking spots away from other, more deserving students. But Layla did her thing, unfazed by the unwelcoming climate.

She studied alone and kept to herself. She didn't make many friends. She focused on proving everyone wrong. At the end of her first semester, she was ranked number one in her class. Her classmates were stunned.

She remembers mumbling to her detractors: “Affirmative action my ass.”

D
ESPITE NEVER HAVING BEEN
a great student, I found my stride at the Kennedy School. Layla and I took an almost identical course load and did all of our work together. We did well. Probably the most surprising thing to me about my experiences at the Kennedy School was my affection for statistics.

In high school I had struggled through calculus. I never liked math at all and completely avoided it in college. Logarithms, sines, and cosines made absolutely no sense to me. So when I saw that we were required to take quantitative classes as part of our course of study, I shuddered.

But statistics spoke to me in a completely different way. It wasn't about abstract concepts; it was completely logical and concrete. I quickly learned the value of statistics. We read the newspaper, see stories about a study showing that eggs are bad for our health or that kale is good for us, and take them as fact. We might believe what we are reading and change our behavior based on the information, often based on statistics.

What I learned at the Kennedy School is that data can be manipulated. Two academics can look at the same set of data and come to two wildly different conclusions based on the biases they bring to their research. The most valuable skill I learned at Harvard was to never take numbers at face value, to always dig in and analyze to see what's really happening in any given situation.

W
ENDY
K
OPP AND
I had kept in touch during my time at Harvard. She was aware that I had done well at Harlem Park and that I had decided on graduate school. We had emailed a few times and followed one another through friends. She knew I was clearly still committed to working in public education in some capacity. I had applied for fellowships that would have allowed me to work for a foundation on education reform, but nothing was panning out.

Out of the blue, I got a call from Wendy's office. She was in town giving a speech in Boston and wanted to meet with me. They wanted to know if I was available.