Relentless Pursuit (18 page)

His first big confrontation came a few weeks later. He was standing, as he always did, in the area just outside the cafeteria, in the southeast corner of the quad, close to where the Hispanic activists on campus kicked, when a guy walked by with his girlfriend. Chad heard her say, pointing to another student some yards away, “Isn't that the kid you're looking for?” Chad decided to follow them. And sure enough, they turned the corner, and the boy jumped a Latino kid. Chad was the only supervisor in sight. Within seconds, he was in the middle of a nasty fistfight. He had found that generally, if he could duck in and push the kids away from each other, they wouldn't hit him. Not this time. Chad ended up on the ground, pinning one of the kids down while he held him in a headlock. The school police came quickly; the brawl was probably over within a minute. As the cops took the kids away, Chad got up and dusted himself off. He was fine—until he realized that his keys to the school were missing. The football players who had watched the fight said they saw the keys tumble from his pocket in the scuffle. Someone had grabbed them while Chad was down.

Chad offered a one-hundred-dollar reward for their return. There were no takers. So the school had to be rekeyed—at a cost of nine thousand dollars. Until they were changed, all the school locks were jammed with nails.

Being on the other side of the great divide between teachers and administrators was chastening for Chad. He used to think all administrators were stupid. How else to explain the problems at Locke? There were five or six well-paid people in the top administration positions, but the school was a mess. As head of the School of Social Empowerment, Chad sat in on a lot of supervisory meetings, and he was always shocked by some of the stuff the APs presented.
Are they blind, stupid? Can't they manage at all?
When he got the job, he knew he could be really effective. He thought:
Cool. I'm an intelligent person.
But as he sat in on the smaller meetings, with just the principal and his APs, Chad had an epiphany:
These are very intelligent men and women.
Mrs. Jauregui was in the doctorate program at USC. Dr. Wells had some valuable ideas and a good rapport with students. Another AP, whom Chad had regarded as the dumbest man on the planet, turned out to have some well-thought-out plans that unfortunately ended up being poorly executed.
No, the problem is time. There's not enough time to do everything the job requires.

Chad was swamped. He had spent the summer designing the master schedule but had yet to be paid as an administrator because he had never found the time to turn in the paperwork. Most of September was consumed in fine-tuning the schedule, getting guidance counselors into their offices, and organizing a filing system. He wanted to make the counseling office functional, efficient, and dependable. He had countless meetings to attend, and as an administrator he had to get into classrooms to evaluate the teaching. And, of course, there were always the 911s. He would have liked to give the new Teach For America recruits more support, but he didn't have the time or the energy.

He had also made a lifestyle change when he became an AP. Until then he had shared an apartment with Martha Mata, a fellow teacher at Locke. With the new job, Chad decided to live on his own. He also felt less comfortable bellying up to the bar with Locke teachers at Friday-night happy hours. He was still close to his teacher friends, but the relationships had changed. There was a distance between them now, because there were many work-related issues Chad could no longer talk about. He knew the Social Empowerment teachers trusted him to look after their interests at inner-circle supervisory meetings, but sometimes the interests of SE diverged from the needs of the school at large. Chad found himself doing a delicate balancing act. It wasn't easy. He felt pulled in opposite directions.

And there was no safety net. Chad couldn't depend on Wells. In fact, he felt like Wells was constantly undermining him. Chad was in charge of the incredibly complicated schedule of students, teachers, and room assignments. But a disturbing pattern had been established. Chad would make a difficult scheduling decision and run it by Wells, who would approve it. Then the teacher adversely affected would receive the news, run to Wells for relief, and the order would be reversed. Chad couldn't believe it:
I look like a moron, he looks like a savior, and I'm back to square one!

From Chad's vantage point, Wells was a man who just couldn't say no. Even to crummy teachers. One teacher, a poorly performing longtime sub, went to Wells insisting that the math prep assigned to her by Chad be taken off her schedule. Wells agreed and ordered Chad to make the change. When Chad dragged his feet, the teacher threatened to file a grievance because, she said, under No Child Left Behind, she wasn't qualified to teach math. Chad looked at her and laughed. He thought of a hundred things he could have said—in his opinion, she wasn't qualified to teach
anything
—but as a supervisor he had to watch his mouth. The way he saw it, if someone was unhappy—especially if that someone was a teacher who shouldn't be at the school anyway—then let her be unhappy and leave the school. But that wasn't Wells's way. Wells was a people pleaser.

Chad's relationship with Wells grew strained. He began to think of Wells as a spin doctor. He believed him—to a point. Things took a turn for the worse in early November when one of the local district directors stopped Chad on campus for a chat. He asked Chad if Wells had talked to him about his position. Wells had not.

“No?” asked the district official, seeming surprised. “Well, we're bringing in a candidate for your position, and we're pretty sure we're going to go with her. She'll be here next week, and I'd like you to take her around campus.”

Chad was stunned. He knew when Wells offered him the job that it was technically an interim position. Although Chad had an administrator's credential, he didn't have the additional certification needed to head the counseling office. In practical terms, it didn't matter. Chad referred the counseling issues directly to the counselors and the psychiatric social worker. The other stuff—the master schedule, the teacher observations, the supervision of the counselors, and all the odds and ends that Wells threw his way—Chad could and did do. And he did them well. Now he was being replaced!

He couldn't believe it.
You're kidding me! Not only am I being replaced, but you expect me to train my replacement? And Wells hasn't even run this by me?

But he simply said: “What are you going to have me do?”

The answer threw Chad for another loop. Locke was creating a new position that was supposed to ensure cultural literacy in all the English and English-language learners' classes. Like so many positions within LAUSD, the job description was vague. Chad wasn't even sure what cultural literacy was; he figured it had to do with making instruction meaningful to students who were learning English as a second language. That certainly was not Chad's area of expertise; he didn't even speak Spanish. But he said, “Thanks for the opportunity. I've learned a lot as head of counseling, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot in this new position.” There must have been some hesitancy in his voice, because the district director responded, “I'm pretty convinced you could run a school better than so many others. You'll do fine.” With that, he walked away.

Chad made a beeline for Wells's office, but he didn't get to see him. So he drove home, made three phone calls to try to line up a job, and then met a friend in Manhattan Beach. Over cocktails, he rehearsed what he would say to Wells.

He went in the next day still angry. “I shouldn't have had to hear this from someone else,” he told Wells. Chad conceded that he did not have the extra certification, but he argued that in his vision of how the job should be done, it wasn't necessary. He went on to enumerate his duties and accomplishments, and concluded with three words: “You owe me.”

“You're right,” Chad recalls Wells saying. “But I didn't tell you because I have no intention of hiring her. You have my word: you are in this office. No one will replace you. When she comes on campus, I will be there and she will not be hired.”

Wells said all the right things. And when Elena Enriquez-Salazar came on campus, Wells didn't hire her. The district did, over his objections. Two weeks later she was on staff. Chad was asked to draw up a list of her duties and was assured that he could keep whatever parts of the job he liked. A few days later, a county coordinator of the college-prep program AVID phoned and asked Chad if he'd be interested in a liaison position for the district's AVID programs the following September. She had heard through the grapevine that Chad had been screwed, and that he was pissed.

“Absolutely, put my name in,” replied Chad. “I don't know what will occur between now and next week, let alone next September.”

He certainly wasn't prepared for what happened next.

Chad knew that all the TFA first-years were struggling. The surprise would have been if they were
not
feeling overwhelmed by classroom challenges. But Chad also knew the tough kind of person TFA recruits. He was one of them! So, aside from a small beer party he had thrown for them before school began, and his input with the English department, Chad hadn't really kept up with the incoming TFA class of '05. He figured most were slogging through the tough survival and disillusionment phases
(Who wasn't? He certainly was as a new administrator),
but he counted on rejuvenation to come after the winter break. Chad knew Phillip Gedeon was doing relatively well because Wells had been singing his praises. Chad hadn't seen Taylor Rifkin teach, but Mrs. Jaurequi had, and loved her. He had heard nothing about Rachelle Snyder—maybe because there was no coordinator for special ed—but he assumed no news was good news on that front. No one had actually been into Hrag Hamalian's class to observe, but Hamalian had certainly made his presence known. Hrag had been bugging Chad to do something about his schedule, and Chad didn't appreciate his in-your-face-approach. Chad had recently reconstituted Hrag's second period to accommodate recent transfers from other schools. The newcomers kept on coming throughout the semester, making it impossible for Hrag to teach new material. Still, Hrag taught only one subject—biology—and he had a great mentor, Vanessa Morris. Chad thought the guy had it made, compared with some of the other new folks, like Dave Buehrle and Heather Fieldsteel.

Those two had four different classes to teach, referred to as “preps,” each requiring its own preparation time. Chad felt bad about them. He knew he had given them a bear of a schedule. But they were among the best of the new TFAers at Locke, and they had been assigned to SE, the most functional of the small schools. He figured if anyone could handle the stress, they could. Still, Josh Hartford, who had taken over as the SE coordinator, was worried that their workloads were too heavy. Chad knew he was right, but what could he do? He had too many bigger issues to address. Chad assumed that if they were really in trouble, they would speak up.

Both Dave and Heather had been speaking up—to fellow TFA teachers. By homecoming weekend in early November, Dave had decided to bolt. Heather was two steps behind him.

It was a tough call, but Dave made it, and he wasn't backing down. His fiancée, Emily, had also applied to Teach For America but had been rejected. She still lived in the Midwest, and he missed her badly. With the workload he was shouldering, they barely had time to even chat on the phone.

Dave had been one of the most promising of all the recruits. When he applied, he had a 3.58 GPA in film and a minor in English from Calvin College. He was a resident assistant, a community volunteer, and owner of his own small business: Buehrle Lawn Care Service. He was also a devout Christian. He had spent a semester studying at Oak Hill Theological College, a conservative evangelical seminary in England, and during a film internship in Hong Kong had volunteered at a Christian missionary base. After his daylong interview with TFA, there was no doubt about his suitability. With a 3 in two key traits—IMP (influencing and motivating) and PR (perseverance), he fit one of the TFA profiles for automatic admission. The TFA selector wrote at the bottom of his competency-scoring sheet: “Wow! Strong PR and IMP—Dave should be, based on evidence today, a strong CM!” During institute, Dave did not disappoint. He ended his five weeks of training with the highest objective average score of any of the CMs assigned to Locke.

Dave was drawn to the mission. He believed in working for social justice, in taking a stand and making a difference. He wanted to close the achievement gap, to overcome prejudice and racism, and he couldn't picture himself as a nine-to-fiver. He loved the idea of doing something short-term, high-impact, and unique, and then seeing what would happen.

He seemed to be a natural. Although he was thin and pale, almost frail-looking, with blond hair and blue eyes, he could be bold in front of a classroom of teenagers. And he was creative. During his very first week of teaching at summer institute, he introduced the formula for writing a persuasive essay with a confidence and flair few other CMs yet possessed.

He started the lesson with the statement “I'm not gonna lie to you.” The class sat up. He continued: “This will revolutionize your life.” They sat up a little taller. “If you have a notebook, get it out. You're gonna want to write this down.” Now he had their full attention. Every kid in the classroom flipped open a pad as Buehrle wrote the word
“oppositio”
on the board. “The principle behind
oppositio
is so crazy! If you're making an argument, you state the other side's position!” After explaining the rationale for the writing strategy, he continued: “You are now ready to learn the
knock out
sequence for writing a persuasive essay. If you know this, it will change your life!” Buehrle wrote down five steps, explaining and modeling each. In the coming weeks, he would bravely write and sing a rap song and invite the principal outside to the quad to see his kids perform.