Relentless Pursuit (40 page)

The matter was not settled that day; after more thought and discussion in the following months, it was decided not to add collective responsibility to the list of core values. The notion that corps members bore a responsibility to see that TFA reached its ultimate goal was implicit in the culture. Besides, there could be unintended consequences.

The 2005 corps had come into TFA at an important juncture in its history. TFA was in the final year of its ambitious and successful 2000 to 2005 growth plan, in which it saw applications increase fourfold to 17,000, the number of corps members triple to 3,600, communities served nearly double to 22, and operating revenue soar from $10 million to $40 million. In 2010, TFA would be twenty years old. It had to decide what would come next.

As an organization, TFA spent most of 2005 “imagining the possibilities,” says Kopp. What it came up with for its twentieth birthday was more of the same—only bigger and better. Its new 2010 plan was to more than double the number and maximize the impact of both its corps members and alumni. By then, TFA wanted to have 7,500 CMs reaching 700,000 students, and a robust pipeline of leaders filled with more than 22,000 alumni. Among the alumni, the goal was to cultivate and empower 600 school leaders and 100 elected officials. Finally, it vowed to become an enduring American institution. To do so, it would once again strengthen its organizational capacity, build its brand, and further diversify its funding base. TFA figured it could reach its ambitious goals by growing its budget to $108 million by 2010—up from its $40.1 million operating budget of 2005.

Every area of the organization geared up for the growth and worked obsessively to improve performance. The organizational structure was readjusted. Now the senior operating team would have six officers reporting to the newly established office of the president. Wendy Kopp would remain the CEO. TFA aggressively head-hunted for talent. One year into the new plan, the national staff had grown to more than six hundred employees, almost doubling in size. The push came with more than a few growing pains, and the L.A. corps felt the burn.

In 2005 the number of incoming L.A. corps—223—had more than doubled, requiring a beefier regional staff. Brian Johnson signed on as the new executive director of the L.A. region, and TFA hired six brand-new PDs to supervise the burgeoning crop of teachers. The rapid increase in corps numbers, coupled with TFA's efforts to widen its impact, contributed to tensions all around. The 2005 institute, which was just a summer shy of a great leap in clarity and sophistication, ended up being rife with dissension, a recognized “hot spot” within TFA. Things didn't improve much in the fall, when the TFA class of 2005 became the first to be subjected to Co-Investigation. The highly structured problem-solving process met with resistance on all sides, and was quietly downplayed the following year. Johnson was brilliant, but he wasn't into hand-holding. He had more pressing matters to attend to, like fund-raising, and finding school placements, and navigating Los Angeles's increasingly charged political shoals.

Stroking new teachers wasn't Samir's forte, either. So not all members of the class of 2005 were happy campers. The end of-the-year survey of Los Angeles CMs showed that 57.9 percent believed TFA's local support network helped make them more effective teachers, compared to the national average of 62.7 percent. And though 78.7 percent of Samir's CMs felt that being part of Teach For America inspired them to strive to achieve significant gains, just 63.8 percent reported that TFA created a welcoming environment, compared to the 75.5 percent national rate. Only 64.6 percent of the L.A. corps reported general satisfaction with Teach For America, compared to 78.5 percent of their predecessors in the class of 2004.

Given the level of dissatisfaction, it was imperative that the L.A. office find the right CMs to be its emissaries. Sometimes the jobs went to the teachers who seemed most eager to do the promo. Often, need dictated the choice. For example, if a funder wanted to see an eleventh-grade math teacher at one specific high school, the job went to the person who best fit the bill. Although Wendy Kopp had always eschewed the notion of charisma as an identifying feature of a leader and designed TFA to be the ultimate data-driven meritocracy, there was an undeniable buzz around certain CMs.

Samir had forwarded Phillip's, Rachelle's, Hrag's, and Taylor's names—among others—to recruitment as potential campus speakers. Rachelle declined and was never asked to do anything again. After Phillip's aborted recruitment trip, he fell off the speakers' circuit, too, though he did apply to be a faculty advisor for the 2006 institute and agreed to write the summer's geometry curriculum. Hrag was never asked to represent TFA at all; Mackey knew somebody in recruitment and got the nod to speak at Boston College instead. In the end, Taylor was the only one of the four who made appearances on TFA's behalf. And she did it again, and again, and again.

Taylor loved that TFA wanted to give an honest account of how hard the work was. After she had charmed her sponsor in December, Samir accepted her offer to chat up the undecided that spring.

In April, she was asked to attend a matriculation event at USC held in a banquet room at the Parkside Commons dorm. She had been invited the previous year, too—as a prospective CM. But at that point she didn't know if she wanted to attend, if she was ready to hear how hard TFA was going to be. So she had walked over, peeked in the window, and walked away. This time she had her doubts, too. She had received numerous e-mails and had sat in on a conference call before the event. She didn't read the twenty-page document with talking points that had been sent to her. She didn't want to spin the experience, and didn't like the idea that the whole event was so scripted, so well orchestrated. She was a professional; she knew how to handle herself. She wasn't going to blow it. But she was going to give it to them straight.

Only a handful of CMs had been invited, and they mingled with the candidates. The point was to determine candidate intentions; if someone had not accepted the offer, it was up to the CMs to find out what was holding that candidate back. Taylor fielded lots of questions—good questions. The undecided wanted to know if there was a written curriculum for new teachers, what the racial makeup of the schools was, what institute was like, what the kids were like. Taylor told them the kids were very raw, very literal, funny but real. If they didn't like what you were wearing, they'd tell you. If you came in with a new hairstyle, they noticed. She was always struck by how canny they were. Once, when she was on the phone, the kids could tell that her laugh was not sincere and scolded her: “You sound like a rich white person, Miss Rifkin!”

Taylor worked the room. If she saw that a person had already signed up, she moved on to someone who was on the fence. And with the ones who were wavering, she was very up-front. She pushed TFA. But she also told them if they had something else they really wanted to do, they should spare TFA the expense and the kids the pain.

After the chitchat, the L.A. recruitment director stood and gave a short speech. Then it was the CMs' turn. Each was supposed to give a thirty-second spiel—something inspiring, short and sweet. TFA liked to move things along. Though Taylor had been advised to jot down some notes, she decided not to. She would speak off the cuff. She had just started the end-of-the-year unit on
Romeo and Juliet
with her ninth-graders, and she spoke about how powerful it was to have the same kids who had come to her in September with fifth-grade reading levels explicating quotes from Shakespeare seven months later. She also reminded the candidates that their education at USC was a gift. It was time to give back.

She thought later that she must have looked so pathetic to them. She was practically begging them to do the right thing and sign up. She told them that as difficult and as painful as her experience had been, she felt really lucky to have been given such an opportuntity. And it was true. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, when she had just had one of those unforgettable teaching moments, she'd call Hrag up and say, “What would you rather be?” Hrag would deadpan: “A fireman?” And they would both chuckle because they knew the answer:
There was nothing else they would rather do. It was so empowering to take this on at twenty-two.

Before her speech was over, Taylor had to stop herself from choking up. When she looked out at the audience, all eyes were trained on her. They were smiling, and she was thinking:
Please, please, God, don't go work for some consulting firm. Do this!

After she sat down, the group was divided up, and Taylor took the questions specific to teaching high school. When the candidates left, the TFAers sat around a table and shared what they had picked up about the prospects' intentions. They studied all the information that had already been entered into the computer about each potential new teacher, then strategized about which ones needed further assurances and how best to approach them. There was one candidate who was leaning toward law school. Taylor thought that was a done deal; he was not worth pursuing. Same thing with the biz-school candidate—did they really want some schizo who couldn't decide between attending business school and teaching elementary school? What kind of a choice was that? But there was another weighing whether to accept an offer from the Peace Corps. Taylor had argued that she should do TFA first, while she was young and able. The Peace Corps could wait. Taylor thought she had gotten through to her. But someone needed to follow up.

That night, two undeclared candidates signed up to observe Taylor's classroom. One ultimately accepted the TFA offer. Taylor was pretty sure she had scared the other one right off the fence.

Before Taylor left that night, the recruitment director thanked her for her amazing speech and urged her to consider working for TFA after her commitment was up. But as she was about everything else in her life, she was ambivalent about TFA. She wasn't sure she wanted to know what went on behind the curtains. Besides, she still felt that no one could ever match TFA's expectations. It seemed that all the organization cared about was the data that indicated significant gains.

Taylor thought she had nailed them at the end of January, when her kids took the Gates-MacGinitie diagnostic for the second time. On their first try, in early fall, the average reading comprehension score came in at a fifth-grade level. After five months in Taylor's classroom, her students had, on average, jumped almost two grades. One kid's scores had risen by three. When she got the results, Taylor was beside herself with joy. And she couldn't wait to tell Samir. She couldn't sleep all weekend in anticipation.

“Isn't this exciting?” Taylor asked as she showed Samir the numbers. But he was poker-faced. He didn't trust the results. Samir theorized that after the long summer break, the kids were rusty at test taking, and their initial scores must have been reflecting that—not their true literacy levels. He figured the real gains in Taylor's classroom were more like a year's growth. The true test would come in June. Then they'd see if Taylor had achieved gains of the magnitude she was claiming.

Taylor was devastated. Mrs. Jauregui had practically screamed when she saw the scores, and the UCLA mentors were pumped, too. The kids, of course, were psyched. But all of that good stuff was lost to Taylor when she saw Samir's lukewarm reaction. She loved him, but this was too much. She
knew
her kids were learning. Just the other day she was walking to the bathroom thinking:
Okay. My kids have totally learned how to write an essay, a five-paragraph essay with sophisticated transitions—and their reading levels have jumped.
Now her line of thinking changed.
Did they accomplish something, or am I delusional?
She decided that, no, she wasn't delusional. She just had to stop seeking approval from TFA because she was never going to get it. She would just have to forge ahead.

The significant gains measurement was used only internally, but it was imperative that it be as reliable as possible. The data on CM significant gains had an impact on everything from selection, to training and development, to fund-raising. If TFA were to continue to attract support, the program had to be seen as effective; it had to significantly improve kids' achievement levels. TFA's selection model was based on the characteristics of former corps members who had been able to do just that. If the determination of significant gains was wrong—if the CMs with certain key competencies were not actually making significant gains—the selection process would be compromised.

But significant gains was an inherently flawed measurement, because it was based on assessments that were CM-created and self-reported. PDs checked for rigor on the tests on which the submitted scores were based. But sometimes it was a leap of faith. Many CMs questioned the validity of the numbers—and the value in judging corps member effectiveness that way.

Taylor thought it was a completely subjective metric. It was clear to her how important the numbers were to TFA, but when you got beneath them, when you really looked, it was also obvious that the numbers weren't solid. So many things came into play—including something as simple as the way a teacher asked a test question.

TFA had had a lot of trouble getting data from the English teachers. It was a subject in which mastery was hard to accurately assess; it was also a pain for teachers to collect and analyze the results. Even when Samir had the data, it wasn't comparable teacher to teacher or school to school. At Locke, each teacher made up her own curriculum, her own exam, and her own schedule. So Taylor might be testing her kids on persuasive essays when someone else was testing on theme and foreshadowing. Her tests might be hard, theirs easy. Her assessments might be hitting all the state standards, someone else's could be evaluating God knows what. She believed the numbers CMs sent in and TFA crunched were meaningless, unless they were all based on the same assessments scored in the same way. At the end of the second semester, Taylor's kids had averaged 73 percent on her assessments, dumping her into the solid-gains bucket. Good, but not good enough. Not the 80 percent mastery standard required to make significant gains.