Relentless Pursuit (10 page)

Samir was too swamped to bother reviewing the application files before his CM meetings. But he did look at all the information input from institute. Most times, when he saw a questionable review, it had to do with race. TFA always held a series of discussions centered on diversity over the course of institute. The idea was to get the issue of race out on the table and have people talk and think about it in ways they had not before. For many recruits, it was a scary discussion, and inevitably some made questionable statements. The idea that they might be perceived in certain ways based on the color of their skin was unnerving; the notion that race could have an adverse impact on teacher effectiveness seemed ridiculous. The discussions were often heated, the language aggressive. Some CMs of color suggested that white teachers were not equipped to teach minority students. Bullshit, came the angry response.

Taylor's file threw up a red flag. Sure enough, diversity had been an issue for her during institute. When another recruit questioned the motives of the white CMs for joining TFA, she bristled.
Yes, everyone knows that TFA can burnish a résumé, but that's not why whites are signing up in record numbers. Why can't people be taken at face value?
Samir knew something about that question himself. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had been singled out for a particularly disturbing brand of bias. His family had immigrated to the United States from India when he was a child. Assuming he was a Muslim, his students called him Mr. Osama.

It was the note about Taylor's run-in with her CMA at institute that gave Samir pause. There had obviously been a lot of friction. In the file, the CMA suggested that Taylor had acted unprofessionally. Taylor, she alleged, had verbally attacked her. Samir steeled himself for their meeting. In his head he was expecting a lot of resistance.
Oh, I'm gonna have to watch out. She's going to challenge everything I say.

         

For Taylor, the reality of day-to-day life in the classroom was actually much more bearable than the anticipation had been. Teaching felt natural to her. She wasn't faking it. She actually believed that she was providing her ninth-graders with a good education.

She had been careful from the very first day of school to create a safe environment for learning in her classroom. Over the summer she recoiled when she heard kids taunting one another: “Fuck you, you're stupid,” or “Shut up, you dumb-ass nigga.” She knew that kind of classroom culture made kids not want to come to school. If she was going to get them
out
of Locke, she first had to make sure they were
in
Locke.
I can't have an environment where kids are allowed to be mean to each other, or I'm screwed.
So when Taylor heard one kid tell another to shut up, she corrected her and asked the girl to rephrase what she had said. “May you stop talking so much, please,” came the do-over in a heavy Spanish accent. That was better; in Taylor's classroom, at least, kids were going to feel free to express themselves, safe to make mistakes.

But a white, middle-class college graduate's idea of “safe” didn't necessarily correspond to a Locke ninth-grader's understanding of the word. Over the summer, when a fellow corps member gave her students the safe classroom speech, the kids laughed. “Look behind you, Miss,” commanded one student. “How can you say this is a safe place?” The teacher turned around. There was a bullet hole in the window.

Later in the summer, CMs learned—only after the threat had passed—how potentially dangerous teaching at Locke could be. One morning, a student had come to school with a sawed-off shotgun hidden in a guitar case. Another student informed the front office, and a mad scramble was on to locate the gunman (gunchild?) before he could do any damage. When security found him, he was sitting quietly in class with the instrument case by his side.

Taylor had realized early on that at Locke anything could happen. Clearly, the only thing she would have any control over would be her own classroom. She worked hard to establish her authority—setting rules and getting to know her students. Her first test had come on the first day of summer school, during institute, when a cell phone rang in the middle of class. “There are no cell phones allowed in class,” she said to the owner. “I need to take your phone.” The student was big, much bigger than Taylor, and he was wearing a house arrest ankle bracelet. “No,” he replied. Taylor stood there with her hand out, waiting. And hoping. Finally, the boy gave up the phone. And Taylor thought,
Maybe I have a chance of not dying here…

Days into the school year, she had her kids fill out a survey about their goals. Almost everyone listed college. But there was a disconnect. Too many said “Nothing” when asked what they loved about English, and “Everything” when asked what they hated about it. Most couldn't name a favorite book.
How are these kids going to get to college if they don't read? It's one thing to have a dream; they need a plan to realize it.

She waited until the end of the first week to introduce an ice-breaking activity she had picked up at institute. She asked the kids to list four things about themselves, one of which was untrue. Then the class had to guess which item was fiction. When things got a little noisy, Taylor simply said, “Excuse me,” and there was absolute silence.

“Why are we doing this?” she asked. Hands shot up.

Then: “We're functioning as a what in here?”

“A team!” came the response.

“Are we competing against one another?” she demanded.

“No!” came the answer.

So the tone was set. Kids had goals, they knew and respected the rules, and they were bonding as a class. Taylor filled out the required TFA form with her self-reflections on how well she was incorporating the TAL habits into her teaching practice and submitted it. She was ready for Samir's visit.

At least she thought she was. When Samir came the following week and sat in the back of the room and watched, she couldn't tell what he was thinking. He was totally inscrutable. Afterward, when they talked, she got the message loud and clear. Samir told her that she had not yet set the big goal of 80 percent mastery with her students, and that was something she needed to do right away. She also needed to give her kids diagnostic tests ASAP so that she could begin to track their progress toward the big goal. Samir talked to her about student investment, too. He told Taylor she had to make the kids invested in coming to school. Something had to be special about Miss Rifkin's ninth-grade English class.

“Let them know you,” he counseled. “Let your personality shine through.”

Samir saw lots of positive things happening in room A22, but Taylor didn't focus on that part of the discussion. She heard only what she had failed to do. And at first she was defensive, particularly about the big goal stuff.
The big goal is all the kids are gonna get
80
percent or better? What the hell is that? It's not gonna happen. I want them to make it through the competency tests. That's my big goal. TFA says you have to rally around this big goal. But I know I wouldn't have gone for it in high school. Are they kidding me?

She didn't like Samir's advice about letting the kids get to know her, either. She wasn't comfortable putting herself out there for them. She purposely held back. She wore the same black trousers and black ballerina shoes to school every day. And she never wore jewelry. The kids probably thought she was flat broke, without so much as a closet; little did they know she was living in a spacious apartment in posh Marina del Rey. No, they knew nothing about her, and she wanted to keep it that way. Teaching wasn't about her, it was about them. She didn't need to be their friend. She needed to be their teacher.

Taylor had always been a straight-A student. She graduated from high school with a 4.6, thanks to advanced classes, and had a 3.85 GPA when she applied to TFA. After Samir's visit, she felt like she had just gotten a B. That didn't sit well with her. But she knew she would have to follow up on Samir's suggestions, because if she didn't, she'd feel even worse. Besides, she needed TFA off her back. She barely had time to manage graduate school, lesson planning, and a long-distance romance. She didn't need to be thinking about big goals and relentless pursuits. So she went out and paid twenty-five dollars for a brightly colored cardboard racetrack, dutifully tacked it up on the bulletin board, and began to record the progress of each of her classroom “teams.” She gave all her kids the Gates-MacGinitie diagnostic reading test (their reading levels ranged from third to tenth grade), and she had them write essays about their big goals. After she scored the diagnostics and read the essays, she gave them the official big goals talk.

A few weeks later, she gave it to them again. She had just gotten the results of the first school-mandated assessment, and saw that only 52 percent of her second-period class got 80 percent or higher.

“Raise your hand if your future goal is to go to college,” she said.

“Raise your hand if your goal is to be a professional.” When all hands were raised, she said: “Well, it starts here. To be doing well in this class means getting eighty percent or above on all the tests and quizzes. Think to yourself, ‘Am I one of the people getting eighty percent or higher?'”

Her words came in a steady stream. She paused only to toss out admonitions: “Take out your gum!…Excuse me!…No talking!” She pointed to a chart that she had made comparing period two's 52 percent with period three's 75 percent. She told the kids she knew they could do better. She talked about what it would take to reach the goal.

“What about studying?” asked Taylor. “Reading? What about attendance? Is it important?”

“Yes!” they shouted.

“Raise your hands, please,” she scolded. “Why is it important to be in this class every day? Because we cover new material every day! You've got to be here! Okay. Our first big goal is eighty percent of students will show eighty percent mastery of the material. So, what are you waiting for? If you are not doing well in my class right now, why not? You've been here four weeks. The point is, what happens at Locke High School? Do you all make it? No! Only three hundred of you are going to graduate! Do I want all the people in this class to graduate? I DO!”

Taylor then asked them to write out their future goals once again, so that she could pin them on the back wall, the newly named Goal Wall. As they worked, she played some music: “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and the reggae song “Three Little Birds.” Soon the Goal Wall was covered with teenaged dreams. Janine wanted to be a mortician, Vishon wanted to be a football player, and Guillermo wanted to win a scholarship so that he could get an MBA.

They all wanted to go to college. She ran the numbers for them—another TFA tactic. High school graduates made $280,000 more over a lifetime than school dropouts, she reported. College graduates made even more—$1 million more—than high school graduates. So, if the class goal and the personal goal weren't enough to motivate them to do well in school, Taylor asked them to consider the bottom line. A college education would show them the money.

By then she had run through all her prepared arguments for working hard in her class. What she really wanted to say to those who claimed they wanted a college education was:
Why do you come in here and screw around if this is what you really want?

It broke her heart to think about it.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Men of Locke

The assembly—the first of the year—was by invitation only. The kids were told that TV court judge Joe Brown had requested a meeting with the “Men of Locke.” Many of the kids had never heard of the good judge. But this offer was hard to refuse. After all, it was a free hall pass good for missing at least one period of school. So, on this sunny September morning, the Locke men poured out of their classrooms, walked across Saint Street, the internal campus road, and into the gym. They yanked up their drooping shorts and bounded up the bleachers. By the time Principal Frank Wells introduced Judge Joe Brown to his audience, it was standing room only. Most of the faces were black; some were Hispanic. The only females in the cavernous hall were school staff.

If the kids thought they were going to get the boilerplate “dare to dream” speech they had heard so many times before from the well-intentioned guest speakers occasionally bused in to motivate them, they were mistaken. The man with the mike had an entirely different message. And he delivered it in the cadence of a preacher from the Deep South, his voice rising and dipping, thundering one minute, cooing the next. In a mocking singsong he said: “I don't say: ‘Now, boys and girls, you can be whatever you want to be.'” Switching to his hanging-judge voice, he exclaimed, “NO! Quit thinking you can be what you WANT to be. My message is: you can be what you NEED to be. What you NEED to be is about the business of being men.”

Judge Brown explained, this time in the patient, avuncular tone of a community elder, that in the wake of the social and political upheaval of the sixties, the African American male had been abandoned and feminized. The primal betrayal had come at the hands of generations of young, feckless mothers who had themselves been abandoned, first by their own teenaged fathers, later by the boys for whom they unthinkingly opened their legs. The radical feminists had told the girls that they didn't need men at home, that they could do better on their own. The message stuck. The result, intoned Brown in full crescendo: “Sixty-eight percent of live births [among blacks] are born illegitimate. Most young brothers are being raised in households established by women. Now we got six, seven, eight, nine generations who don't know what a man is. If you got sons at home and you don't know what a man is good for, how the hell do you know how to raise one?”

Now he was pacing back and forth in the front of the gym beneath the basketball hoop, furiously spitting out words. “What the hell you puttin' on jewelry for? Look at yourself! You got a do-rag on your head like a damn Aunt Jemima. And the way you dress! Your pants are hangin' off your butts. What that means is you're doin' time. You're in the penitentiary and you've been spoken for. Someone is hittin' you up on a regular basis. You got 'em so low down so that when nobody's lookin' you're ready to bend down and give it up. And your big long T-shirt looks like a dress. You invitin' it! Where did that come from? That foolishness is because you don't know how to be men.”

Brown reserved the most contempt for their single mothers. In high-pitched Ebonics he pantomimed the young ghetto mamas squealing on the phone to their men after their welfare checks from the first and the fifteenth arrived—and afterward in their bedrooms, satisfying their appetites as their children listened to the couplings through paper-thin walls. He dismissed the visiting men with their jewelry and nice cars as mere “houseboys—tricked out, turned out” in some grotesque gender reversal where the women produced the checks and the men primped and preened for the booty. “It used to be you worked hard to get what you wanted instead of living off a woman, but that's not true for a segment of black men.”

In fact, too many black men lack ambition—or the means to succeed, said Brown. “You have no skills or occupation,” he scolded. “And even if you wanted a job, the employer is callin' 911 because you look like you're about to hold the place up!”

Part preacher, part performer, Brown held the audience in his sway for nearly an hour, the kids seemingly mesmerized by the man if not the message. He acknowledged all the black superheroes that once sat in classrooms at schools like Locke. And he reminded his audience that the best and brightest of the stars—like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—used their sports as a means to an end. Like Brown himself, they had recognized the value of an education. He ended the assembly with an appeal to all the boys at Locke—black and brown—to join forces and become the men they were supposed to be.

The kids clapped on cue, hitched up their sagging shorts as they clambered down from the hard wooden benches, and streamed out of the gym. The bright sun made the diamond studs in their ears and the burnished dog tags around their necks sparkle. The inside-out T-shirts reached their knees; some of the shorts nearly touched their ankles. Once the last kid entered the dark, cement-floored breezeway leading to the classrooms beyond, the sliding steel gates clanged shut and the click of the padlock secured the building. As the man-boys made their way back to class, it was hard to see what effect—if any—Joe Brown's tough talking had had on them.

But the judge was right when he said that the African American male is an endangered species. A 2005 report by the Los Angeles Urban League and the United Way of Greater Los Angeles entitled “The State of Black Los Angeles” found that blacks in general were twice as likely as other groups to be victims of violent crimes. They had had the overall highest death rate, the highest premature death rate, and the highest teen mortality rate in the city. Black males, in large part, accounted for the unacceptably high numbers. The most striking statistic was the homicide rate: black males were being killed at a rate four times higher than that of Hispanics, and twelve times higher than that of whites. The incarceration of black men aged eighteen to forty was 13 percent, and the probability that a black male born in 2001 would go to prison during his lifetime was 32 percent. According to an analysis of the 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley, among black school dropouts in their late twenties, on any given day, more were in prison—34 percent—than at work.

         

Locke principal Frank Wells knows something about young black males raised without fathers. He never knew his. It wasn't until Wells was established with a good job and a young stable family of his own that he decided to try to find his dad. He didn't want him to get the idea that he was looking for a father figure—or some money. His mother had told him a little bit about his dad, and Wells did some research on his own. Wells wanted to have a conversation with his father, to learn what could possibly cause a man to abandon his own child.

He found him living right there in the San Francisco area. While Wells had struggled all those years just to get by as his mother made beds and waited tables, his father had been driving a bus not very far away. When Frank Wells finally met his dad, he was struck by the resemblance between them. Wells introduced himself, though he didn't need to. His father had known his whereabouts all along. “I know who you are,” he said. “You're my son.” He seemed like a nice guy. Wells's dad explained why he had walked away. Back then, he didn't know nothin' about daddyhood, he said. He was a teenager, just like Wells's mother was, when she had him at seventeen. He went into the military and got on with his life. His boy was out of sight, out of mind.

Wells doesn't stay in touch much with his father, who went on to have several more families after his only son was born and recently retired after thirty-three years of bus driving. Though he has introduced his three kids to their grandfather, Wells doesn't feel comfortable calling him Dad. “I didn't have a dad, and I'm not looking for a dad,” he says. “I met him to know who he is. I think that's just what happened in the projects. It was babies having babies that they weren't willing to take care of. I'm kind of numb about it. I'm not angry or upset. But I make a real effort to balance my life with my children and work.”

Wells appreciated Judge Joe Brown's appearance at Locke. To the uninitiated, it may have seemed like a misogynist rant, but in Frank Wells's opinion, it was just what the Men of Locke needed to hear. “We don't grow up with a father, we don't have a male role model other than the local drug dealer and pimp, and so we have a misguided sense of what being a man is all about,” he explains. “For them to hear from someone who looks like them, and who they can relate to, helps.”

As principal of an increasingly Hispanic school where one third of the student body are classified as English-language learners, Wells was being forced to look more closely at the academic hurdles facing students whose first language is Spanish. But he believed it was the young African American males at Locke who needed the most attention.

After all, the kids at Locke with limited English proficiency (LEP) performed better on standardized tests than did African American students. And what that told Wells was that teachers were less tolerant of Locke's black kids. There was a reverse bias. He thought it must be a cultural thing. Hispanic students by and large were quiet, easier to manage. African American kids, he knew, were much more vocal, more apt to challenge authority. If they found a weakness, they were more likely to humiliate the teacher and take over the class. And that meant they got referred to the dean's office for discipline issues at much higher rates than the Hispanic kids did. The result: the black students received less instructional time and consequently scored lower than their Hispanic peers. Frank Wells believed that it was the African American students, especially the males, who were getting left behind.

“It is very complicated and complex and yet, at the same time, very simple,” explains Wells. “Our African American boys are dealing with a multiplicity of issues that no other race has to face on a daily basis. They are dealing with the issue of retaining their manhood and surviving at the same time—in the absence of parents. They are targets if they are not in a gang. And if they are in a gang, they are either a victim or a victimizer. The foundation or the organization that has the leverage to interrupt the course of destruction is education. Other institutions have done a piss-poor job—resulting in high incarceration rates, high death rates, and other things destructive to that particular population.”

         

Phillip Gedeon managed to avoid the path of self-destruction taken by so many other young black men. He owed his good fortune to his mother, Eunice Cole. Eunice was born in rural South Carolina and worked the cotton fields as a child. There were eight children in her family. When her older brother left home for Massachusetts, she followed him. It was there that she met the man who would become Phillip's father; he had come to the States from Saint Lucia, where he had played professional soccer. He was married when they met, though he had been separated from his wife for quite some time. The relationship with Eunice was intense—and short. Things were pretty much over by the time she gave birth. Eunice named the baby Phillip and gave him the middle name James, after her father, who died before he could see his new grandson. She called her first and only child PJ, short for Phillip James.

The life she built for PJ was as sheltered as any single working mother could provide. Until he was twelve, Eunice worked the second shift at the Smith & Wesson gun factory. She would drop PJ off at school, get things done around the house, then leave at two in the afternoon for the three-to-midnight shift. Eunice wanted it that way. She wanted to be home in the morning to get PJ off to school, and she wanted to be available for school conferences and activities during the day. After school, Phillip stayed with his aunt and two boy cousins who lived nearby. His aunt fed him dinner; if she wasn't free, Phillip ate with his landlord. He was not allowed to play outside. Eunice was afraid that she might lose him to the streets.

Phillip didn't have friends, and looking back, he realized he didn't have much of a childhood, either. He spent his days indoors—with his mother or another adult—where he created his own little world peopled with stuffed animals sitting at imaginary desks in a make-believe schoolhouse. He did the work of each of his “students,” hung the results on the living room walls, and filled out their report cards. His mother bought him a chalkboard, and his approving teachers gave him old textbooks.

The first playdate of his life didn't occur until he was in middle school; his mother dropped him off at a skating rink and then picked him up at the precise time the playdate was over. Though Phillip got his driver's license, the keys to the car did not come along with it. He had to wait. When he was finally given the car, he used it only to go to work—he had no friends he wanted to hang out with. By the time he was actually able to form real friendships, he wasn't sure he wanted them.
They weigh me down. I don't have time for this.

He learned early on that his father was not someone he could rely upon. His father wasn't a real presence in his life, but Phillip felt lucky to know him. Most of the other kids at school didn't have dads at all. When Phillip started playing soccer as a boy, his mother, who loved the game, mentioned that his father had played professionally. His father ended up giving Phillip the occasional pointer. But the son wasn't the aggressive soccer player his father had been. In fact, that's what Phillip liked about the game: soccer was more about strategy and teamwork than male aggression.

When he did see his father, Phillip recognized much of himself in him. It wasn't just that they shared first and last names; they had the same complexion, the same hair, and, in some sense, the same personality. His father was so blunt that he often offended people. Over the years, more than one person had told Phillip that he was a bit harsh in his dealings with people. Phillip didn't see it that way. When asked his opinion, he gave it. Sometimes the truth hurt.