Relentless Pursuit (30 page)

“The way I scored it,” Samir informed the group, “I need a wider range of solutions than I have now.” Samir also questioned the need to differentiate the causes—skill, knowledge, or mind-set—of a teacher's problem. “I don't feel it's critical to differentiate between knowledge and skill because the solutions are similar—why debate whether it's one or the other? And I still have to check mind-set…and I don't know if I'm comfortable with that. I understand what they mean, but the way it plays out in real time is never that concrete.”

Others jumped in, and a spirited discussion followed. The upshot: Cuesta announced that she wanted to tighten up all parts of the Co-Investigation process—from narrowing down and identifying the key teacher problem, a gateway issue, to offering up possible solutions based on causes.

Next up was a matriculation update and a look ahead to the midyear retreat, where the staff would “step back” and look at the big picture—review TFA's core values and strategic plan, gear up for the end of the year, and prepare for the coming one in a smart, disciplined way.

Then it was on to the dreaded stats: at midyear, 19.5 percent of CMs were achieving significant student gains, 24.5 percent away from the L.A. region's year-end target of 44 percent. The key problems and causes were identified, next steps to a solution enumerated, and measures of success put in place.

Cuesta then announced a new program she wanted to pilot in Los Angeles: Co-Investigating the Co-Investigations. She explained that her informal pop-ins to observe PDs at work would continue. But a much more formalized process—straight off the Co-Investigation rubric—would be put in place to assess PD proficiency. Cuesta would oversee the entire Co-Investigation cycle of each PD and a CM of his or her choice. The session would be videotaped, Cuesta would take notes, and then she and the PD would sit down and Co-Investigate the PD's key problem, underlying causes, and possible solutions.

As she explained the new plan, backs around the table stiffened slightly. Program director Amy Cox presumably spoke for the group when she asked for clarification. She explained that she was the type of PD who always invited Cuesta to her most challenging Co-Investigation sessions. “But it's not going to be my cycle of evaluation, is it?”

Cuesta's response hung in the air: “When I say formal, I only mean structured.”

She moved on. Next up was a note on the ongoing collection of 2003 alumni data, and TFA's plans to enhance summer institute programming. The institute planning team was harvesting information and feedback from the regions. Early signs indicated that special emphasis would be placed on diagnostics and tracking sessions; institute diversity sessions were historically contentious, and designers were working on improving them, too.

The morning concluded with PDs munching on Valentine's Day cupcakes, bagels, and grapes as they discussed their nominees for the Sue Lehmann Award for Excellence in Teaching, a five-thousand-dollar prize given each year to an outstanding corps member. At exactly noon, the PDs filed out of the conference room and back onto the battlefield. There wasn't a minute to waste.

CHAPTER TEN

Who Do You Screw?

Who do you screw?
It was a question Chad asked himself nearly every day. The other questions that he couldn't get out of his head as he was making the tough calls were:
Is this something I'd want for my kids? Would I be okay with this?
The answer was almost always
no.

After Dave Buehrle left, Chad had to figure out what to do with five orphaned classes of twelfth-graders. Any way Chad looked at it, someone got screwed; the only thing to be determined was who and to what degree. The obvious and easy solution to the dilemma was to get a full-time sub to take over. But the English department already had two full-time subs. Chad didn't want to take the risk of hiring another.

So he decided to give Buerhle's classes to an underperforming tenth-grade English teacher from one of the other small schools. Chad would disband that teacher's classes and farm out his students. His reasoning was simple: the tenth-graders needed a good teacher more than the twelfth-graders did. After all, the tenth-graders were about to take the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), and if a good percentage of them failed, the entire school's API and AYP scores would be affected.

It was true that the transfer would cause widespread damage to Buehrle's English honors and drama classes. But those kids had already passed the CAHSEE and were on track to graduate. Though it was not a factor in his decision, Chad knew, too, that there was an undeniable side benefit to sticking a crummy teacher in the highest-performing school. Now all the people who had accused him of favoring the School of Social Empowerment over the other learning communities would be silenced; no one in his right mind could interpret that particular chess move as beneficial to SE. So that was that. In the daily battle of who gets screwed at Locke, Buerhle's kids lost. But they knew that the moment he told them he was quitting. Their reaction to the news had been “Why do all the good white teachers leave?”

If they had posed the question to Chad, his unspoken response would have been “Because the school doesn't work.” And though he took the position as VP because he thought he could change that, he had been sadly mistaken. He had no power. His job was only a balancing act—between evils. At least when he was a teacher, he had had some fantastic days; in fact, most days were fantastic. Now every time he walked through the door into his office he knew he was entering a no-win zone.

It was maddening to have to make these administrative Hobbesian choices. Kids in suburban schools could live with a couple of duds for teachers, but not the kids at Locke, or any school that looked like Locke, or any school in which a TFA teacher worked. Locke kids arrived with fifth-grade reading levels. A good teacher could move them up one level. A fantastic teacher—a teacher making what TFA called significant gains—could boost them two grades in a year. At Locke, students couldn't afford to have just one or two good teachers. They needed four fantastic ones. And they weren't getting them.

One reason was because schools like Locke were safe havens for lousy teachers. Dr. Wells reckoned that 35 percent of his teachers had no business being in a classroom. But the powerful teachers union, the UTLA, protected tenured teachers regardless of their classroom performance. There was a process in LAUSD to either get rid of bad teachers or make them better—but it required administrators to jump through hoops. Under the rules of the union contract, supervisors were bound to conduct and document repeated rounds of observations and evaluations carried out along a very specific time line, and to offer interventions and remediation through professional development where needed. Even when a convincing case had been built against a teacher, a missed deadline could derail the entire process. The teacher evaluations were divvied up among the administrators at Locke. Dr. Wells took the toughest cases himself. He tried mightily. He had about twenty-two teachers in his sights, but the union contract made tenured teachers just about bulletproof. Chad didn't get it.
Why are we so concerned about protecting teachers and not kids?

It was hard to fire a bad teacher, but it did occasionally happen. The terrible irony was that the alternative to a successful dismissal was often worse. Good teachers weren't exactly lining up to teach at Locke, so often the only candidates sending in résumés were district castaways looking for a place to hole up. When Locke couldn't find a permament teacher for a vacant position, it relied on substitute teachers to fill the spot. Noncredentialed substitute teachers in LAUSD needed only to have graduated from college with a 2.7 GPA and to have passed the CBEST, an exam considered easier than the high school exit exam. Some of the subs were okay; many were not. At Locke, if there were only fifteen subs working on any given day, things were looking good. Throughout the 2005–2006 school year, the school had three teacher vacancies and employed seven to ten long-term subs.

Wells estimated that 40 percent of his staff were hardworking, committed educators. And for a long time, Chad had believed that if Locke could get a critical mass of them to stick around, real change could take place. But the dysfunction wore good teachers down and forced them out. With up to thirty teachers leaving every year, some of them TFAers, there was no way to build an enduring culture of achievement. Without that, Locke's numbers might trend up ever so slightly, but for all intents and purposes, the school would continue to flatline.

Locke was on every government education agency's watch list, but the consequences for failing to make the mandated improvements were never clear. The most recent reform, the carving up of the school into small learning communities in 2004, was imposed in an effort to stave off more drastic government action. But the plan was never formally approved and funded by the district, nor was it fully embraced by all of Locke's teachers. In the spring of 2005, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), a regional accrediting body for public and private schools, was due to conduct its annual Locke inspection. And a School Assistance and Intervention Team (SAIT), a county auditing group appointed by the state to oversee and support Locke, had recently started to pull together an action plan for school improvement. But the school had been subject to numerous audits and inspections, and countless action plans had been drawn up. It was difficult for Chad to see what anyone could really do to hold the school accountable.

The state could take over the school. But who are they going to send in? The governor? The school could go charter, but who's going to charter a dying public school in the inner city? Green Dot's Steve Barr? He had his chance and took a pass. The school could be reconstituted by firing all the teachers and hiring back only the good ones. But how do you do that? The ones worth their weight might tell you to go to hell, and then Locke would have even more open positions that couldn't be filled. The other big consequence—replacing the administrative staff—has already happened three times since
2001.
How is yanking the principal just as he is getting to know the school supposed to improve Locke?

Chad had a daydream. The answer to Locke's problems would come from the students themselves. Locke had 3,100 kids, 5 administrators, and a faculty of 131 or thereabouts; the people being controlled far outnumbered the controllers. The students could rise up and take charge. They could stage a sit-in, call the district, get the media to come, and demand change. If the kids decided they wanted something, they would get what they needed. It could happen.

But the chances were slim.

God knows Chad wanted change. He had tried to be a force for change, a leader. But he couldn't even keep his own job. How was he supposed to support teachers in theirs? After the new vice principal in charge of counseling arrived and took over Chad's office, Wells urged Chad to apply for a newly created position of small-schools coordinator, a job that paid ten thousand dollars more and was perfectly aligned with Chad's ambition. At first Chad was excited about the possibility, but as the weeks passed and nothing happened, he became depressed. Eventually he was advised that he was technically ineligible for the job because he did not have five years of teaching experience. Still, Wells held out the hope that he could find a way around the red tape that was tying up Chad's appointment. In the meantime, Chad became the AP for leftover jobs. He worked out of an empty third-floor room he converted into an office, and from there he found himself shagging all the curveballs that came his way.

Chad didn't feel empowered by Wells, and he in turn didn't feel he was empowering the teachers he supervised. There were no systems in place at Locke. Teachers hoarded supplies, and books that had been ordered and paid for were never distributed. There were no tutors for the two-year-old AVID college-prep program, and the school counselors didn't have functioning computers. There was a budget, estimated to be around twenty million dollars, but nobody ever saw it. Though the school was allocated funds for site improvement, money was wasted—or not spent—at every turn. The adults at Locke were failing the kids. Chad felt increasingly helpless.

And so it was that he began to think that he, too, would join the ranks of Locke's recently departed. He was wracked with guilt. Not the Great White Guilt. He didn't feel guilty because he had come from so much privilege and his kids from so much deprivation. He felt guilty because he had always had a strong faith that Locke would get better if enough of the right people stayed. He felt guilty about abandoning that hope, about walking away from the kids and his commitment to them. But as he evaluated the reasons he remained at Locke, it was more about the guilt he would feel if he left than the hope for the future if he stayed. And that was unhealthy.

Chad contacted Steve Barr, the education reformer who operated the Green Dot charter schools in Los Angeles. Though nothing had come of their meetings a few years before, their long discussions over chips and margaritas had put Chad—and Locke—on Barr's radar.

Barr was an impolitic politico with a knack for the sound bite and a love of the spotlight. He had come to his mission as school reformer rather late in life. The son of an Irish immigrant who abandoned the family when Barr was three, he was raised by his single mother, who waited tables to make ends meet. As a boy, he was a C-minus student in what was then an A-plus school system. But by the time Barr graduated from high school, California had embarked on its inexorable decline from the number one state in student achievement to the forty-eighth. Proposition 13, the taxpayer revolt of 1978, had put a cap on property rates—the death knell for fully funded public education in the state. Twenty years later, California's school system was in shambles, and Barr was in the middle of a midlife crisis.

A writer by trade, Barr had established his reformist credentials in 1990 when he cofounded Rock the Vote, the mostly online movement that encouraged young people to become politically active. Seven years on, he was looking for a new cause. How could he broaden the reach of Rock the Vote to engage Los Angeles's politically disenfranchised immigrant population? The answer, he thought, was in school reform. Education would connect Los Angeles's youth, many of them new to the country, to the political process—and ensure the financial and social success of the city he loved by making them into an educated workforce.

He resolved to create a prototype of the Great American High School. His effort would be called Green Dot, a reference to the number of wired schools in California at the time. (While researching a story for
George
magazine, Barr had found an online map on which green dots represented the state's wired schools, and discovered that there wasn't a single one in Los Angeles.) His new school would be built on six tenets that the noneducator had identified as key to high-performing schools: they would be small, safe, and autonomous, with high expectations and accountability for students and teachers, an extended school day, parent involvement, and a greater share of government dollars going directly to the sites. The first Green Dot school, Ánimo Leadership Charter High School, opened in 2000. Four more followed. They worked. Graduation rates at the Green Dots averaged 81 percent compared to 47 percent for LAUSD, and API scores on average were up more than one hundred points.

But Barr had never wanted to be an operator of a chain of successful charter schools. His long-term vision was to reform the whole district. The question was: How many green dots would it take to reach the tipping point for all of Los Angeles? By early 2005, he was ready to find out. He began to look for a large, existing high school that he could turn around by using the model that had proven successful in his small schools. He thought of Locke and Chad, and remembered their meetings.

“Chad was a very quiet kid,” Barr recalls. “When he walked into a room, you didn't think ‘John Kennedy.' But he's one of those guys who rallies people around him by outworking everyone around him. It's amazing how many people follow him, and he does it by example.” Given Chad's leadership skills and the school's obvious need, Barr seriously considered making a play for Locke—until another low performer, Jefferson High, erupted in a series of racial clashes. Barr figured that he had to pick the place that would generate the most heat. At that moment, Jefferson was already hot; Locke was not.

So, in a move that enraged the union and the school board, Barr proposed to take the struggling Jefferson High School off LAUSD's hands. Barr's hostile takeover bid, which he subsequently outlined in a white paper published in March 2006 entitled “School Transformation Plan,” called for the deconstruction of Jefferson into a cluster of six autonomous small schools. The four-year process would begin by “incubating” each new school off-site, starting with a ninth-grade class and adding an additional grade each year. Once the schools were at full capacity with four grades, five hundred students, and an established culture of achievement, they would reoccupy the original Jefferson High site and share common facilities. (Because the resulting retention rate would be so high, two entire schools would remain off-site.)