Relentless Pursuit (46 page)

The school opened on September 5, and Phillip was assigned to teach geometry, algebra, and CAHSEE prep. The new principal became his mentor. Phillip was working twelve-hour days and thinking about buying a condo. He had never been happier in his life.

         

After school was out, Taylor did exactly what Samir had told her to do: she forgot all about TFA and relaxed. She and Hrag headed off to Catalina, where they camped and caught fish for their meals. Then Taylor met up with a friend in Budapest, and they traveled for a month throughout Europe—two girls, a tent, and a car. She came home via New Jersey, where she met Hrag and his family. Then it was back to Santa Barbara and a family vacation in Laguna Beach after that.

Taylor completed her two years with TFA as Locke's lead tenth-grade English teacher. Until just a few days before the 2006–2007 school year was to begin, the English department thought it was going to be using Read 180, a teacher-proof remedial literacy program for its incoming ninth-graders. Then word was received that the program was not district approved. That presented a huge problem: the school had scheduled double blocks for Read 180. Teaching a fifty-minute class without a curriculum was tough enough; teaching for two hours would be virtually impossible for the newly hired. Taylor jumped in and helped to create a plan of instruction. The joke at Locke was that Read 180 was really Read 360. Nothing had changed.

Taylor and Hrag remained inseparable that year. Sometimes she thought they shared a brain. But she knew they had to be careful not to feed off each other's anxieties and frustrations; they didn't want to compound the negativity. Because the truth was, Taylor loved teaching. And though she did not agree with everything it did, at the bottom of her heart she loved TFA, too.

In September 2006, Taylor held a barbecue to welcome the new TFA recruits; her self-appointed job was to make sure they enjoyed themselves and didn't quit. She really liked mentoring the new kids, and she joked that if she stayed a third year she'd end up department chair. She and Hrag also became the point persons for the new School of Math and Science. At Locke, just being a second-year teacher gave you credibility.

Taylor was ambivalent about what to do after Teach For America. She knew she wanted to teach; she just didn't know if she wanted to teach at Locke. Some days she thought:
Oh my God, I could really make a difference here if I stayed.
Then she'd see a kid running down the hall with a bloody face, and it would be:
Coming to Locke is like entering the gates of hell—abandon hope all ye who enter here.
So she sent out a bunch of résumés and was surprised to find how much cachet was attached to the words “Teach For America.” She was offered five different teaching jobs. She also applied for a position as a TFA program director. She didn't get it, but TFA did hire her to be a corps member advisor for the 2007 summer institute, a much-improved product over the institute of '05.

In her second year of teaching, Taylor made significant gains once again. And this time she was recognized for them. Taylor was one of three regional finalists for TFA's prestigious Sue Lehmann Award for Excellence in Teaching. She felt humbled by the honor.

In September 2007, she became the ninth-grade English teacher at Ánimo Watts II Charter High School, one of two new Green Dot incubator schools to open near Locke that year. Vanessa Morris was principal. The school was a revelation; it worked. When Taylor visited Locke, just a few blocks away, people told her how lucky she was. One of the school security guards there confided that even he was scared.

Samir Bolar left TFA in the summer of 2007 after completing two years as a program director. Every one of his 2007 colleagues left as well; the PD position had never been a pipeline to advancement within TFA. Samir had struggled with the highly structured, step-by-step Co-Investigation model during his first year. In his second year, TFA blew it up; the formal cycle of self-reflective problem solving was too focused on process, and PDs were getting lost executing the steps. In January 2007, TFA zeroed back in on the basics it believes a teacher needs to be successful—a vision, a standards-based plan, and quality assessments—and introduced the concept of backward planning as the way to execute them. The incoming CMs had already been primed for the new approach at institute, where more emphasis had been placed on long-term planning, assessments, and tracking. So the formal rounds of classroom observations and the robotic searches for the single key issue impeding student achievement were quietly shelved, giving way to more organic conversations. PDs were basically instructed to do whatever it took to help CMs get the job done.

The new approach played to Samir's strengths. TFA had already asked each region to contribute models of excellence in the three foundational priorities—a vision, a plan, and assessments—for the National Student Achievement Tool Kits. But Samir wanted to do more. So he took it upon himself to beef up the instructional resources available to the Los Angeles corps, and he got CMs, including Hrag and Phillip, to be leaders in the effort. The result was an online, standards-based road map of long-term planning in each secondary subject.

Samir was accepted into the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley. He felt he needed to expand his skills set if he wanted to be successful at founding his own educational nonprofit down the road. Only a few months into the program, Samir was already on the Oakland Small Schools Foundation board of directors as a fellow. There was no doubt in his mind. He was in education for the long haul.

         

Chad Soleo and his team of teachers left Locke in June 2006 and opened the Ánimo Pat Brown Charter High School that August on the site of a failed charter school, across the freeway from the USC campus. Josh Hartford was the vice principal; the five other Locke teachers joined three new hires to make an inaugural team of ten. There were 141 students in the first class of ninth-graders: 94.5 percent were Latino; 8 students were black. That year, the kids at Pat Brown scored 46 percent proficient and advanced in Algebra I, exceeding their goal by 21 percentage points. By contrast, none of Locke's ninth-graders scored advanced in Algebra I and only 2 percent were proficient; 87 percent scored below, or far below, basic. In English, 40 percent of the students at Pat Brown were either proficient or advanced, compared to 11 percent at Locke. In Chad's opinion, accounting for the difference wasn't rocket science. Pat Brown was small, paid attention to the students' needs, and employed quality staff.

The battle for Locke played out throughout Chad's first year as principal. There were moments when he wondered what would have happened had he stayed; about what role he might have had in the inevitable reconstruction of Locke. Green Dot's Barr sought Chad's input, and made the triumphant announcement of Locke's conversion to a charter from Ánimo Pat Brown's cafeteria. But as tempting as it might have been to go back and have a hand in getting Locke right, Chad wasn't going anywhere. He had made a commitment. There was no way he could walk away before his small school was successfully established.

In the fall of 2007, Ánimo Pat Brown added a new class of 142 ninth-graders and moved to a temporary space in Los Angeles's West Adams district to accommodate the school's burgeoning student body of 288. The Pat Brown team was excited and proud of their kids' results on the CSTs. But Chad was coming to the realization that, as essential as it was, quality teaching was not going to solve the problems in urban education on its own. Even at a school like his—a school in a good system, with plenty of support, and with caring teachers who worked relentlessly—it was tough to move students who were so far behind and so burdened by all the beyond-the-classroom issues that come with growing up in poverty. Working at Ánimo Pat Brown made him wonder how he ever survived at Locke.

         

Dr. Frank Wells did a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus-like conversion in 2007 and joined forces with Green Dot to facilitate the reconstitution of Locke High School into a charter school. His change of heart came after a face-to-face meeting with Green Dot's Steve Barr that spring. Before, Wells had been dismissive of Green Dot's success. He had believed that the charter schools got the cream of the crop: they did well because the students who attended them had parents concerned enough with education to go to the trouble to enroll them. Though Green Dot tried to blunt the charge by canvassing inner-city neighborhoods with information about school choice and the charter school option, it was true—it
did
take parent initiative to fill out an application and make sure a child's name was in the lottery for a spot in a Green Dot school. Too many kids at Locke lacked that advantage.

Wells was surprised to find that he and Barr agreed on so much. By the time of their meeting, Wells's relationship with his district bosses had soured. He had spoken out against the district during a visit to Los Angeles by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. And at around the same time, the district notified him that his contract would not be renewed.

He changed sides. Wells allowed—in fact, encouraged—his teachers to collect and sign a petition seeking to convert Locke to a charter school. On May 8, the day that forty-one out of the seventy-three tenured teachers at Locke signed the petition (more than the 51 percent required by law to trigger a conversion), Wells was escorted off the Locke campus and relieved of his duties. The next day, students and teachers alike protested his removal. While he weighed whether or not to take legal action to regain his job and lost wages, he became a consultant to the parent union started by Green Dot. It took nearly three years of fighting the union (and three boxes full of documentation), but in June, just weeks after being removed himself, Wells was notified that one of the twenty-two teachers he had tried so hard to terminate had finally gotten the boot.

In the fall of 2007, Wells was gratified to see that the LAUSD school board had finally approved the conversion of Locke to a Green Dot charter, and he hoped to play an active part in the process. But he was still feeling numb in the wake of his dismissal. The forty-three-year-old administrator was a principal without a school.

         

When school started in September 2006, safety and security continued to be a priority at Locke. In October, a big wall was erected along the eastern perimeter of the school, the site of at least two homicides in less than two years. Things were relatively calm on campus, but outside a political firestorm was brewing. When the district rejected Steve Barr's offer to partner up at Locke, the school became the object of a nasty yearlong custody battle. After the staff approved the Green Dot plan to take over Locke, the union and the district struck back, successfully lobbying some teachers to rescind their votes and then declaring the petition invalid. As the fate of the school was debated in L.A.'s corridors of power, chaos returned to Locke's hallways. But during the summer, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $7.8 million to fund the transformation of Locke into ten small Green Dot charter schools, and Superintendent David Brewer, who had initially resisted Green Dot's advances, got religion. By September it was a done deal. A newly installed school board voted to approve the new Locke charters.

Amid the squabbling, and against all odds, Locke's scores went up—though not on the scale necessary to meet all state or federal benchmarks. Despite the academic gains, Locke's small schools had become even less functional—just “window dressing,” in the words of Frank Wells—and the district considered collapsing them and reverting back to a big-school model. Still, because Locke met the criterion of at least ten points of schoolwide API growth over a two-year period, the school exited SAIT at year's end.

TFA's class of 2005 completed its two-year commitment in June 2007. Every one of the corps members at Locke, with the exception of Dan Ehrenfeld, chose to remain in education. Four of them—Rachelle, Mackey, Heather Fieldsteel, and Erica Rodriguez—decided to teach at Locke for a third year.

When they returned in September 2007, they found a school on the brink of anarchy. Because of reduced enrollment, there was only one lunch period—policed by five fewer security guards. Once a Crips-only school, Locke now enrolled a good number of Bloods. The two rival gangs battled constantly. The entire school was tagged, and packs of kids roamed the halls at will throughout the day. By early October, there had already been a full-on riot, a bomb threat, and an assault on an assistant principal. In announcing the teachers' decision to give Locke to Green Dot, Barr promised to do what had never been done before: turn a large failing urban school around. He had his work cut out for him.

         

By 2007, the year Wendy Kopp turned forty, she had graced the cover of
Fortune,
been named one of America's top twenty-five leaders by
U.S. News & World Report,
and, in what she jokes was the scariest moment of her life, appeared on
The Colbert Report.
(The media attention frightens her; she is mindful of the laws of gravity.)
BusinessWeek
ranked Teach For America tenth among undergrads' top twenty-five most-wanted employers. The Princeton Review recognized it as one of the country's top launching pads for college graduates seeking entry-level jobs. And on some of the country's top campuses, such as UCLA, Smith College, and Vanderbilt University, TFA was the number one post-grad employer.