Relentless Pursuit (29 page)

Growing its funding base was a key goal in the 2000 five-year plan. TFA wanted to be fully diversified so that it would never again be dependent upon a single revenue stream for its growth—or survival. It approached the development challenge the same way it did every other part of the mission—by setting ambitious targets and doggedly pursuing them.

Kevin Huffman, a 1992 corps member in Houston along with KIPP founders Levin and Feinberg, took on the task of heading development just a few months after speaking on a panel during the tenth anniversary alumni summit in New York. At the time, he had a well-paying job at a prestigious law firm, but being around the old TFA gang again precipitated a full-blown crisis of conscience. Huffman decided he had to get back into the nonprofit world. When Kopp got wind of that, she invited him to rejoin TFA. On his thirtieth birthday, in August 2000, he left his lucrative job with Hogan & Hartson and returned to the TFA fold.

Huffman had no experience in fund-raising, but he saw right away that there were changes in structure and culture that could significantly increase revenues. TFA's regional sites clearly represented a largely untapped source of diversified funding that the organization moved aggressively to exploit. The multiregional setup allowed TFA to figure out the best development practices, quickly share them with other sites, and then execute them. Goals were set, and a rigorous central tracking system built around a high level of skepticism was put in place. Regions were required to do a monthly check-in with the national office to categorize the likelihood that pledges would actually be delivered. The check-ins resulted in brutally honest assessments—both on the reliability of pledges and the proficiency of the fund-raising.

Restructuring the fund-raising effort was easy. The cultural piece was a bit tougher. The focus within the organization had always been on the program—how to build it, improve it, expand it. Fund-raising was seen as a necessary evil, a dirty task that needed to be undertaken in order to do the things that really mattered. Under the five-year plan, fund-raising came to be seen as part and parcel of the mission, an endeavor of elemental importance.

TFA enlisted new funders to be on the ground floor of the expansion at their regional sites. And it began to appreciate the importance of synergy between the private and public sectors. It started to invest more in building personal relationships—especially in Washington, D.C., home to policy makers and federal dollars. It didn't hurt that the new president, like Kopp, was a Texan. During his campaign, George W. Bush had flown Kopp cross-country on his plane to discuss Teach For America. When he took office in 2001, he named Ron Paige, superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, secretary of education. Paige had had a long and happy history with TFA in Houston, and he viewed it as a catalytic force in public education.

“We were still a relatively small nonprofit,” recalls Huffman. “We were national in scale but probably not that well known, and all of a sudden we had people in D.C. who thought we were great.”

As TFA was figuring out how to engage the power brokers in Washington, it was equally mindful of Wall Street. In 2002 its first national corporate sponsorship fell into its lap when Wachovia Corporation approached TFA to partner up. National corporate partnerships with Lehman Brothers and Amgen followed. In 2002, TFA's annual New York City benefit dinner raised $860,000. Five years later, it raised more than $4 million.

TFA also tapped John Q. Public through Sponsor a Teacher, and continued to seek funding through foundations. The Broad Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and New Profit, Inc. were among a dozen or so philanthropies that joined the Pisces Foundation in underwriting the 2000–2005 expansion. By the end of the 2005 fiscal year, operating revenue had grown from $10 million in 2000 to $40 million. Amazon.com named Teach For America one of the country's ten most innovative nonprofits, and the organization received Charity Navigator's highest rating for sound fiscal management.

         

As the national team worked feverishly to improve the program, the regions worked equally hard executing. Samir and the other program directors were at school sites every day of the week except for Tuesdays. The second day of every workweek was spent in the downtown office, where all the PDs met with managing director of program Felicia Cuesta to assess their work as thought partners to recruits, to share best practices, and to plan ahead for the other programmatic roles they were assigned.

Samir always approached Tuesdays with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, a day at the office was a welcome respite from the stress of a day on the road meeting with harried CMs. He looked forward to seeing his colleagues. Brian Johnson, the Los Angeles region's executive director, Felicia Cuesta, and all six of the PDs in Los Angeles were TFA alums. That in itself was binding—they had all earned their stripes in the trenches, all gained yardage on the battlefield. And like him, they were new to the job—each having been hired after undergoing a typically rigorous TFA selection process. Samir loved them—and trusted them. He considered them his own wise thought partners as he strived to improve his performance as a PD.

But checking in with the regional office could be stressful, too. The PDs shared data on their CMs' performance, which of course was a reflection of their own effectiveness on the job. And there were always new tasks being assigned, new deadlines to meet, new heights to reach.

The meeting on Valentine's Day 2006 started with what the agenda called a “community builder,” an icebreaker to get the ten people seated around the conference table warmed up for a full morning of work. Cuesta started off a quick round of personal trivia questions—penciled in for fifteen minutes. To lots of laughter, the group was reminded that when Samir was in elementary school he did not know how to skip, that Felicia toilet-papered houses during slumber parties in junior high, that when Liz was a deejay her stage name was Thunder Bunny, that Ramona craved olives and had a dog named Chile, and that Samir's band was called Stereochemistry.

At nine-fifteen, the team got to work with “personal and professional alignment reflections”—TFA-speak for an update on what everyone was doing. The personal stuff came first: Frank was taking his first day off and leaving at one; Ramona was registering for the San Diego marathon; Liz had gone one day without coffee.

Then came the work updates. Ruth Ann reported on the status of the “excellent school visits” she had been coordinating: CMs, as part of the professional development opportunities offered by TFA, were invited to observe teachers at an “excellent” L.A. school—such as the renowned Harvard-Westlake and the Marlborough School, the all-girls academy that Taylor had visited earlier in the year. The meeting moved quickly over the rest of the calendar and office updates. The team was told of the ongoing push for early placement of the incoming class of CMs, an arduous, months-long process of schmoozing and horse trading. Brian Johnson, a 1999 corps member and Princeton alum, had started the conversation with the area school districts back in October, just after the 2005 school year began.

As TFA's top man in Los Angeles, Johnson had connections. Marlene Canter, president of the LAUSD board, was a TFA fan who had actually donated her annual salary to the cause. (TFA presented her with its Lifetime Leadership Award in July 2006 for her “Commitment to Educational Excellence and Equity.”) Five LAUSD school board members had TFA alums working for them; two other TFAers were on the superintendent's staff. Still, negotiating the placement of future CMs required exquisite finesse. Johnson was in constant contact with superintendents, school board members, and human resource officers for the various school districts in the greater Los Angeles area, gingerly balancing supply against demand.

L.A. Unified was by far TFA's largest customer in the Los Angeles area; 200 of the district's 2,347 new teachers in the 2005 school year were TFA recruits, accounting for 8.5 percent of new hires. It cost TFA $12,500 a year to select and train each recruit. The district picked up $3,000 of that. With improvements to the program, the costs kept rising. In 2007 the tab was $14,000 per recruit. By 2010, TFA expected it to cost $20,000 to select and train a corps member.

Johnson had to sell each potential employer on the benefits of hiring a TFA recruit. The problem was, TFA was offering schools the promise of student achievement; what the districts were looking for were “highly qualified” teachers, as mandated by No Child Left Behind. State and federal laws required districts to show proof of progress; the percentage of credentialed teachers was an easy metric to cite. In LAUSD's lowest-performing high schools, where there was an acute shortage of teachers, Johnson had no trouble selling his teachers-to-be. Most principals were happy with warm bodies; a TFAer, though noncredentialed, was almost always preferred to the alternative—a longtime sub. (A 2005 Kane, Parsons & Associates survey found that 84 percent of Los Angeles principals with TFA teachers on staff reported that they would hire another one; 93 percent regarded TFA teachers as more effective than other beginning teachers.) But in elementary schools, where there was no shortage of credentialed teachers, getting a slot for a TFAer often was problematic. When it came down to a choice between a credentialed teacher who could bolster the district's stats and a noncredentialed TFAer, it was no contest—the credentialed teacher tended to get the job.

But TFA refused to entirely cede the elementary school terrain. The need was there: achievement levels among Los Angeles's younger students was alarmingly low, and TFA believed its teachers could perform higher than the average LAUSD hire. TFA insisted that if the mission truly was to close the achievement gap, then it had a moral imperative to be in the lower grades, where it had the potential to have maximum impact. So, TFA and LAUSD worked out a deal. Though LAUSD would still take K–6 teachers from TFA, the numbers would be relatively low, and the teachers could be placed only in schools that already had TFA on staff. What's more, most of the placements would be assigned to sixth grade.

Secondary and middle schools were a different matter. LAUSD was happy to hire TFA teachers for the upper grades for reasons other than the chronic shortage of people willing to work in tough, gritty, urban schools. One of the biggest advantages to hiring TFA recruits was that they tended to pass the test that helped satisfy the NCLB requirement that every child have a “highly qualified teacher,” at impressively higher rates than other new candidates. Though the state of California trailed other states in student achievement, it was generally considered to have one of the most rigorous sets of standards. The CSET, the test to demonstrate subject-matter competency, was tough.

“Nobody but the TFA teachers can pass the CSET exams,” explains Anthony Thymes, coordinator of new teachers for Locke in 2006. “If TFA weren't here, we would have to hire thirty-five teachers on emergency credentials, and that would make the state come in.” There was another advantage to hiring TFAers. They were goal-oriented high achievers, so they tended to work hard and sometimes more purposefully than some of their older colleagues. TFA encouraged CMs to zero in on improving student achievement in their classrooms—a goal that was within their locus of control. Worrying about school dysfunction or other environmental factors that were beyond their power to fix was seen as an unnecessary distraction. So, in the beginning at least, TFAers tended not to complain publicly about overcrowded classrooms or too many preps. And they took on additional work that more experienced teachers, protected by the union, resisted. Often, the more successful they were, the more responsibilities they were given.

Not every school district in Los Angeles laid out the welcome mat. The reforming Long Beach School District, which had declining enrollment, had made so much progress that it no longer needed TFA hires. Compton, though needy, had proven to be a difficult customer. It was one of the original school districts to hire TFAers, but TFA had withdrawn from the troubled district after a dustup over an unwritten agreement to place recruits there went awry. Now TFA wanted back in; Compton was exactly the kind of district that needed TFA the most. Samir, who had taught there so successfully only a few years before, was lobbying school board members hard for a contract. The district was on the fence. Compton, like LAUSD, was desperately seeking math and science teachers. But it didn't need any elementary school teachers. TFA had math and science teachers, but it also needed to find spots for its elementary school assignments. So TFA offered to send ten math and science teachers to Compton if the district signed a contract with TFA to hire ten elementary teachers as well. But TFA was running into a lot of political and union opposition. The same old objection was being made:
they leave after two years.
Samir considered himself living proof that the argument was specious. After all, he may have left the classroom, but he was still advocating for his students in Compton. He was in a position to bring ten “highly qualified” math and science teachers to Compton. How could anyone argue that TFA bails on its students?

With all the difficulties presented by the big public school districts, TFA was working the charter angle aggressively. It already had CMs working at KIPP L.A. Prep and the Watts Learning Center. Another KIPP charter had recently opened up, and the Green Dot charter schools—many staffed by TFA alums—were popping up all over Los Angeles.

The school-placement update was only one of many items on the agenda. Earlier in the month, the PDs had attended an organization-wide meeting in Las Vegas at which Co-Investigation 2.0 was introduced. The L.A. region PDs had been surveyed on their Co-Investigation needs. It was clear they had no problem analyzing CM data, but they were struggling with the solution and follow-up phases of C-I 2.0.