Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  The night before the first day of school, she went to a barbecue at her brother’s beach house. Evan had done well in the tech boom. He seemed to have it all going on—the wife, the dog, and a big bunch of friends all making big bunches of money. Her brother Ryan was there, and he tried to talk her out of going through with TFA, arguing that she couldn’t handle the stress. She was the youngest of four; the whole family saw her as the immature baby sister.

  But she was not backing out. Before she went to bed that night, she checked her stuff three times. She had already been to Kinko’s, where she’d made hundreds of copies of handouts. When she arrived at Locke at 6 a.m. after a sleepless night, it was still dark. She stopped at the main office and discovered a few other insomniacs roaming the halls, then made the long walk back to the bungalows and her own classroom. When she got to A22, she concentrated on breathing. In and out, in and out. She put her desk where she wanted it and waited.

  Though Taylor was expecting to teach ninth-grade English to the kids who streamed though the door, she spent that first period helping students with their schedules. All the ninth-graders with last names beginning with “Ro” through “Ru” had been sent to her room. They came in, sat down, and were stone-cold silent. They just sat there and stared. They looked as scared as she was.

  Teach For America began basically as a garage start-up; as it grew and matured, it took on many of the characteristics of a successful, results-driven corporation. As TFA rounded the corner into financial and programmatic health in 2000, it embarked on an ambitious growth plan. In order to support the expansion, TFA reorganized its management structure. The vice presidents of the various arms of the organization—from program to development—reported to a new chief operating officer, Jerry Hauser, a 1990 alum who returned to TFA after Yale Law School and a stint at McKinsey. Hauser took over daily operations from Kopp. TFA set organizational goals, tracked progress, and continuously analyzed virtually every aspect of the enterprise in order to reach those goals.

  Today, data analysis drives the organization’s relentless pursuit of results. Meticulous records of all facets of the program and organization are stored and analyzed. The data collection begins in the recruiting process, when all campus interactions—e-mails, coffees, info sessions, canvassing—are fed into a sales-force software called Sales Logix. The collection runs through selection, training, and on-the-job performance. With a new emphasis on maintaining and enriching alumni records and relations, it basically never ends.

  The analysis of the data it collects helps TFA track its own performance, make predictions during the selection process, and increase teacher effectiveness. It also allows TFA to identify good candidates for other jobs within the organization once CMs have completed their time in the classroom. Though in recent years TFA has increasingly gone outside the organization to fill positions in its top team (only 35 percent of its senior operating team are alums), 60 percent of its eight-hundred-member staff come from its own rank and file. TFA is so good at spotting talent that hot companies like Google and JPMorgan have chosen not to compete with it for new hires; in 2006 they both inked recruitment partnership deals with the organization. So, when looking to hire staffers to support the mission, TFA looks first to its own.

  That’s how Samir Bolar came to be one of six TFA program directors assigned to the Los Angeles region in 2005. The role of PD was to be part mentor, part nanny, part boss to the corps member—the human face of the TFA juggernaut. PDs were expected to ensure that CMs got the job done—that they set high student goals that resulted in significant student achievement. Each PD was assigned to monitor up to fifty CMs through four rounds of classroom observations and subsequent follow-up meetings over the course of the school year. Among Samir’s charges were the twenty-two Teach For America CMs working at Locke High School in 2005.

  Samir was a star TFA alum from the 2002 corps. He had joined TFA fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin with a double major in chemical engineering and English (he picked chemical engineering because it was the most challenging major he could find). At the end of his two years at Willowbrook Middle School in Compton, an incorporated inner-city community in South Los Angeles, his students earned the highest scores for eighth-grade algebra in the district. What’s more, on the strength of their performance, the school’s overall growth target actually quadrupled. Though TFA had set goals for significant gains, it had no systematic means of measurement in place during the 2002–2003 school year. But Samir did. He created a student tracking system on an Excel spreadsheet, adopted the TFA goal of 80 percent mastery for his kids, and charted their progress from day one. By any measure, Samir Bolar met the bar for excellence in teaching.

  Willowbrook begged him to stay on, but, like many in TFA, he had bigger plans. At first he wanted to be a school principal, but a summer internship at the educational arm of the L.A.-based Broad Foundation opened his eyes to the breadth and depth of the growing educational reform movement. By summer’s end, his new ambition was to open a series of technology-based charter schools. In order to do so, he thought he needed more critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. So he took a job in the private sector, working with Fortune 500 companies on IT issues.

  His stint on the outside was short and unfulfilling. When TFA approached him about becoming a PD in mid-2005, he felt honored. It had never occurred to him that he might be PD material—he wasn’t even sure how great a teacher he was, compared with other CMs. That kind of information was never shared; TFA considered humility to be one of its core values. It was leery of creating a superstar system.

  Samir calculated that becoming a PD would be an ideal opportunity to hone the skills he would need to lead a cluster of schools. Not only would he learn the inner workings of a big school district like LAUSD, he would gain experience as a manager as he helped select and then support fifty new TFA teachers. He would get to see what good—and bad—teaching looked like; what made a school function; what contributed to a school’s failure. He accepted Teach For America’s job offer and rejoined the fold in July 2005.

  Samir was sent to Houston for one week of training. There he learned how to score teachers on the newly codified TAL rubric and was introduced to Co-Investigation, a new teacher-development program that was a direct result of TFA’s push to improve teacher effectiveness. A reflective problem-solving approach, Co-Investigation was the result of an exhaustive eighteen-month internal study that drew from the work of various adult-learning theorists, including David Kolb and Robert Kegan. TFA introduced the self-help model because it knew that PD intervention alone would not suffice to move CMs through the continuous cycle of learning and improvement necessary to make significant gains in the classroom. The teachers had to learn how to help themselves. Though the idea of reflective practitioner work was not foreign to the world of teacher education, TFA’s model was outcome-based, and heavily reliant on the use of data to assess progress.

  Co-Investigation represented a paradigm shift in TFA’s care and support of its teachers. Until then, when PDs met with TFA recruits, it had been an anecdotally driven discussion: the PD asked how things were going, the CM reported on areas of struggle, and the PD came up with a grab bag of tips and resources. The PD inevitably brought something valuable to the table, but it wasn’t always the most purposeful in terms of the ultimate objective.

  Under the Co-Investigation model, freewheeling PD-CM chats gave way to highly structured and tightly focused meetings centered on reaching the goal of significant student gains. Before each meeting, the CM was required to submit student assessment scores and to fill out a reflective guide gauging how well the CM was addressing the four TAL habits of an excellent teacher. After a classroom observation, the PD and CM met to identify the “key” teacher problem that was inhibiting student achievement. Then, together, they looked for potential causes, possible solutions, and future measures of success.

  Like every other program on the TFA continuum, Co-Investigation was a w
ork-in-progress. Throughout the 2005–2006 school year, the organization continued to refine and flesh out the new support model. In February 2006, it called all the PDs together once again and introduced Co-Investigation 2.0, a more nuanced version of the original. The second iteration probed more deeply into the cause of the key problem, determining whether it was due to knowledge, resources, or mind-set.

  Applying the Co-Investigation model would be no easy task. Samir was responsible for supporting fifty corps members who were teaching every one of the secondary core subjects—across six school sites. During the waning days of the summer, he pored over curricula and state standards, trying to bone up in the subjects he was least familiar with. He studied the Teach For America summer institute curriculum, too, combing it for teaching strategies on everything from literacy to lesson planning. Among his flock were a gaggle of special ed teachers, many of them clustered at Locke. TFA had provided him with no particular insight into problems specific to special ed teachers. He didn’t have a clue how best to support them.

  As he headed to Locke for his first school visits, he was nervous. His experience as a teacher was limited to two years in a very small middle school. Locke was the biggest and the baddest of the schools he was assigned to; the idea of dealing with almost two dozen teachers there was overwhelming. Samir knew he looked young. He was young. Every time he arrived at a school and asked for a teacher’s room assignment, he would be mistaken for a wet-behind-the-ears sub—-not a professional TFA manager. It didn’t get any better once he found the right classroom. At Locke, every classroom was locked from the inside. Should I knock? Or should I wait until the end of the period? I don’t want to intrude. How should I handle this? Inevitably, Samir would knock. But rarely did he feel welcome as he flipped open his laptop and began to tap out a minute-by-minute account of a new TFA teacher at work.

  He didn’t feel very competent in Co-Investigation—in fact, he didn’t even think it was the right way to support struggling new teachers. He knew from his own experience; after only a few weeks or even months in the classroom, a new teacher had neither the time nor the inclination to navel gaze about “key” problems. A new teacher didn’t need a so-called thought partner. A new teacher needed a Mr. Fix-it.

  His first few visits to Locke didn’t exactly allay his concerns. Many of the second-year TFAers were openly hostile. Some of the first-years were, too. They felt like lab rats. They resented the intrusions, particularly in the beginning, when they were at their weakest as teachers. Samir’s first meeting with Hrag was particularly uncomfortable. Hrag came right out with his qualms.

  “So what is this relationship all about?” he demanded. “Are you here to tell me what I’m doing wrong?” Hrag’s low-key, straightforward tone of voice intimidated Samir. He doubted very much if Hrag was disposed to take his advice.

  Phillip didn’t appear to need it. He was impressing just about everyone who walked into his classroom—and he had plenty of visitors, starting with the principal himself. Kids were in their seats, participating, even turning in homework. Unlike most of the corps members, Phillip had already assessed his kids by his first formal meeting with Samir. When asked what he would like Samir to look for, Phillip responded: “I feel like people look at my management and not necessarily at my teaching. I want you to tell me what you see.” What could Samir say? He saw a very thorough, by-the-book teacher whose high expectations were having an unexpected effect on the kids. They appeared to be actively engaged in learning geometry.

  Phillip was the exception. All the other CMs Samir visited were struggling. And it seemed that whenever he gave a suggestion, they rejected it as untenable—based on the expected reactions of their worst students. Samir urged them not to fall into that trap. “Don’t model your class after your worst student,” he argued. “Think of the middle-of-the-road student you could motivate. Sure, you will have some students who say FU—but that doesn’t mean there are no rules. Maybe that student won’t react the way we want, but let’s talk about everyone else.”

  The new Co-Investigation model was intended to examine one key problem. Samir was seeing a multitude of key problems, ranging from bad classroom management to lousy lesson plans. He couldn’t help himself: he wanted to help solve them all. So instead of zeroing in on one area of concern as he had been trained, he ended up addressing three or four issues at a time. By the end of an observation, his notes would be covered with critical comments. Samir was thrilled to be of so much help. But most CMs didn’t share his enthusiasm. They resented it.

  Samir was too swamped to bother reviewing the application files before his CM meetings. But he did look at all the information input from institute. Most times, when he saw a questionable review, it had to do with race. TFA always held a series of discussions centered on diversity over the course of institute. The idea was to get the issue of race out on the table and have people talk and think about it in ways they had not before. For many recruits, it was a scary discussion, and inevitably some made questionable statements. The idea that they might be perceived in certain ways based on the color of their skin was unnerving; the notion that race could have an adverse impact on teacher effectiveness seemed ridiculous. The discussions were often heated, the language aggressive. Some CMs of color suggested that white teachers were not equipped to teach minority students. Bullshit, came the angry response.

  Taylor’s file threw up a red flag. Sure enough, diversity had been an issue for her during institute. When another recruit questioned the motives of the white CMs for joining TFA, she bristled. Yes, everyone knows that TFA can burnish a résumé, but that’s not why whites are signing up in record numbers. Why can’t people be taken at face value? Samir knew something about that question himself. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had been singled out for a particularly disturbing brand of bias. His family had immigrated to the United States from India when he was a child. Assuming he was a Muslim, his students called him Mr. Osama.

  It was the note about Taylor’s run-in with her CMA at institute that gave Samir pause. There had obviously been a lot of friction. In the file, the CMA suggested that Taylor had acted unprofessionally. Taylor, she alleged, had verbally attacked her. Samir steeled himself for their meeting. In his head he was expecting a lot of resistance. Oh, I’m gonna have to watch out. She’s going to challenge everything I say.

  For Taylor, the reality of day-to-day life in the classroom was actually much more bearable than the anticipation had been. Teaching felt natural to her. She wasn’t faking it. She actually believed that she was providing her ninth-graders with a good education.

  She had been careful from the very first day of school to create a safe environment for learning in her classroom. Over the summer she recoiled when she heard kids taunting one another: “Fuck you, you’re stupid,” or “Shut up, you dumb-ass nigga.” She knew that kind of classroom culture made kids not want to come to school. If she was going to get them out of Locke, she first had to make sure they were in Locke. I can’t have an environment where kids are allowed to be mean to each other, or I’m screwed. So when Taylor heard one kid tell another to shut up, she corrected her and asked the girl to rephrase what she had said. “May you stop talking so much, please,” came the do-over in a heavy Spanish accent. That was better; in Taylor’s classroom, at least, kids were going to feel free to express themselves, safe to make mistakes.

  But a white, middle-class college graduate’s idea of “safe” didn’t necessarily correspond to a Locke ninth-grader’s understanding of the word. Over the summer, when a fellow corps member gave her students the safe classroom speech, the kids laughed. “Look behind you, Miss,” commanded one student. “How can you say this is a safe place?” The teacher turned around. There was a bullet hole in the window.

  Later in the summer, CMs learned—only after the threat had passed—how potentially dangerous teaching at Locke could be. One morning, a student had come to school with a sawed-off shotgun hidden in a guitar case. Another s
tudent informed the front office, and a mad scramble was on to locate the gunman (gunchild?) before he could do any damage. When security found him, he was sitting quietly in class with the instrument case by his side.

  Taylor had realized early on that at Locke anything could happen. Clearly, the only thing she would have any control over would be her own classroom. She worked hard to establish her authority—setting rules and getting to know her students. Her first test had come on the first day of summer school, during institute, when a cell phone rang in the middle of class. “There are no cell phones allowed in class,” she said to the owner. “I need to take your phone.” The student was big, much bigger than Taylor, and he was wearing a house arrest ankle bracelet. “No,” he replied. Taylor stood there with her hand out, waiting. And hoping. Finally, the boy gave up the phone. And Taylor thought, Maybe I have a chance of not dying here…

  Days into the school year, she had her kids fill out a survey about their goals. Almost everyone listed college. But there was a disconnect. Too many said “Nothing” when asked what they loved about English, and “Everything” when asked what they hated about it. Most couldn’t name a favorite book. How are these kids going to get to college if they don’t read? It’s one thing to have a dream; they need a plan to realize it.

  She waited until the end of the first week to introduce an ice-breaking activity she had picked up at institute. She asked the kids to list four things about themselves, one of which was untrue. Then the class had to guess which item was fiction. When things got a little noisy, Taylor simply said, “Excuse me,” and there was absolute silence.

  “Why are we doing this?” she asked. Hands shot up.

  Then: “We’re functioning as a what in here?”

  “A team!” came the response.

  “Are we competing against one another?” she demanded.