Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  Hispanics did, too. Zeus Cubias remembers that it wasn’t until he got to college that he realized he wasn’t a nigga. “Nigga” was used by black and Latino alike—as a term both of endearment and of derision, depending on the tone of voice and the context. Rachelle didn’t care how they used the word, or why. It had to go. She was sick of hearing it.

  So she gave her nigga speech. It was at the end of the second week of school. She hadn’t meant to talk about the cursing; she certainly hadn’t prepared her remarks. It all just poured out of her. It started, as so many things did, with Kenyon, a really smart kid with a really bad attitude. He was one of seven children born to a single mother. Though some had different fathers, each child had a name that started with a K. Kenyon was a strikingly beautiful child with a dark, flawless complexion—and he was big trouble.

  “Did you know Miss G’s a racist?” he asked, referring to another white special ed TFA teacher named Jill Greitzer. “Well, she is. She’s a racist, and you are, too.”

  “Really?” Rachelle said. At that point, Rachelle didn’t know who Miss G was, though later in the school year they would become fast friends. She tried to get the class back on track, but Kenyon kept winding her up. Racial slurs were flying through the air. So, before she knew it, she had launched into a lecture about the n word. She assumed they couldn’t possibly know the genesis of the word or they wouldn’t be using it with such abandon. She explained that “nigga” was another way of saying “nigger,” a word that was a pernicious racial slur.

  “Think the word over,” she told the boys. “Your people had to struggle. I think you can say the word to your friends. I don’t think we should be oversensitive. But you should know what you’re saying, and where the word comes from—because not everyone takes it the way in which you say it. So say whatever you want to your friends. But don’t say that word in this classroom, and here’s why: words can be hurtful. You don’t pick a Mexican kid and call him a wetback.” As she talked, she could sense this little life lesson wasn’t going as she’d hoped. The kids didn’t get it. And she felt out of it, too, as she rambled on and on. I can’t believe this is happening.

  “We call Jaime a wetback,” said one of the other black students, referring to one of their Mexican classmates. “He don’t care.”

  “Then show me some respect,” she responded. “Those are my rules. You don’t use that language in my class.”

  By this point, Rachelle was almost crying. The kids thought the whole thing was funny.

  The following week, Kenyon struck again. He walked into class, as usual, in his long black sweatshirt. The hood was pulled up over his head, concealing a do-rag. Do-rags violated the dress code, a code that was rarely enforced, though Rachelle had no way of knowing that so early in the school year. Rachelle told Kenyon to remove the do-rag and pointed to his assigned seat. Kenyon ignored the order, insisting that he had not been assigned a seat.

  “I’m not arguing with you,” replied Rachelle. “This is your seat. Move your butt. And take the do-rag off.”

  As Kenyon started negotiations, Rachelle started writing a referral, the form needed to send a kid to the office.

  “I’ll take it off. Will you not send me to the office?” he pleaded.

  “I’m not here to play games with you,” Rachelle replied, her voice rising. “I’m not negotiating with little boys!”

  “So why should I take it off?” shot back Kenyon. He started air punching her face.

  “Kenyon, come here with me. This is unacceptable. I’m calling security!” she threatened. To the others she said: “Get the book out and turn to the page I told you.”

  Kenyon removed his do-rag and stood in the doorway. She turned her attention back to the rest of the class and asked if they had done their homework. Only one person had. Eduardo, a Latino gangbanger, pulled his out, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into the wastebasket.

  Now Rachelle introduced the day’s lesson—about false advertising and the need to test products scientifically. By this time, Kenyon had slipped back into his seat.

  “Do you guys remember what we talked about yesterday?” she asked.

  Kenyon’s hand shot up. She ignored him. “I remember, I remember!” he cried. “But no. She won’t pick on a black boy. She’s racist.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Kenyon stood up to answer it. When Rachelle saw that it was another one of the troublemakers coming to class ten minutes late, she refused to allow him in. “Go away, Jesse,” she ordered. “Don’t touch my door!”

  “Why? What’d I do?” Jesse said. Now he and Kenyon started to mix it up in the hallway as the rest of the class watched.

  Rachelle turned to the other nine kids in the class and said: “You should not have to suffer. This is not your fault.”

  And Kenyon said to the class, “You’re racist, just like her.” To Rachelle, he said, “You! You shut up!” Then he reentered the room and threatened to throw the file cabinet out the window.

  Now Rachelle was really angry. “You are not allowed in my class now! Do not tell me to shut up! I am sick of this! Sick of this crap!” She took him into the hall. Usually, a security guard sat just feet from her door. Today the seat was empty. She needed help. She needed to get him out of the room and down to the dean’s office. There was no one in sight.

  Inside the classroom, two Latino boys were throwing gang signs. Others doodled. A few got up to stretch and began to roam around the room. By the time security arrived, the bell had rung. Class was over, and Rachelle had not taught more than a minute of biology.

  “What we did today was a complete waste of time,” she said as the students rose to leave. “I want you guys in my class. I don’t want you not to succeed. But I can’t even teach a class!”

  Fourth period was the last class of her day. It usually left her exhausted, often angry.

  I have to stay calm. I am so appalled. I’ve never seen people act this way. They are so rude. I don’t care where they come from. You don’t act that way! Why am I wasting my time? They don’t even listen to me. They make me want to quit!

  She didn’t know how to teach them—or even what to teach them. Should she show them first how to conform—how to be white—so people wouldn’t judge them and they could blend into society? Or should she accept the bad behavior as part of who they were?

  She wanted to tell them what she really thought: When you act like this, you are confirming all the stereotypes. When you use profanities or take something from my desk and say: “You don’t know, Miss Synder, this is the hood, this is how things go down, you got to get what you got to get,” I want to say: “Don’t act that way, don’t talk that way. You are really rude. You have bad social manners. You are really bad with eye contact.” Maybe it’s no big deal if you’re talking to your friends, but if you ever want to leave here…

  Maybe I don’t know how you grew up. But you don’t know how I grew up, either. Maybe it is white privilege. And it’s not fair, it’s not right. But it is true. People will judge you. I’m not saying the white way of interacting is superior, I’m saying it’s more professional. You get pigeonholed. And I want to shake you and say “Why don’t you wow people? Why don’t you show them who you are?”

  When Chad Soleo thought about race, and the school, and the community, and the plight of the young black males of Locke, he sometimes caught himself slipping into places he never thought he would go. But there were some things that just didn’t escape notice—like who the loudest, most obnoxious students running down the halls were. He didn’t want to say it was the black kids, but he saw what he saw. And it was at moments like those that he would find himself thinking things he philosophically and politically didn’t want to be thinking—and hoping there was another explanation. Some people would say those kids were crack babies. And they probably were.

  Because there was no doubt in his mind that a family could be out of Watts within one generation. If a poor family came and the parents worked their but
ts off to make sure their kids had a roof over their heads and a place to do homework, if they emphasized school and the need to go to college, there was every reason to believe they could and would get there. The opportunity was there. There were scholarships, and grants, a lot of money. If the student qualified, it was there. It was Chad’s hope that when those kids finished college, they would return to their communities as leaders; but it was his job to make sure that they didn’t have to return, that they had other options, and that as a result their children would, too. Leaving Watts was not an impossible dream.

  Chad wondered about the families who didn’t leave, who never made it out, who had been there for generations. Some of them were admirable community leaders who chose to stay and whose kids were going to college, and making money, not living in the projects in absolute poverty. They owned property in Watts. But those who stayed, mired in poverty? The renters? You had to believe that they were not doing what it takes to get their families out. They were not emphasizing the importance of education; they were letting their kids run amok. They didn’t have it easy, definitely not. But you had to ask: Why aren’t you valuing education? Why aren’t you seeing it as a ticket out for your kids? Because it is, it is the ticket out.

  He was not naïve. He knew there were circumstances that kept people from getting opportunities. But they didn’t always come to mind when dealing with a tough kid. Instead he found himself thinking: Why are you talking to me this way? Why won’t you listen? Then he would call the parent and everything would become clear. Ah. That’s why. You say you went to Locke, too? Okay. Now I understand. This kid doesn’t prioritize school because you don’t—and apparently didn’t. And he wouldn’t have wanted to go there, but there he was, and he couldn’t help but wonder what the kid would be like with different parents.

  For the most part, he thought it was healthy, these musings; mentally embarrassing but healthy. If I don’t question the perceptions, then how do I help create solutions? If I don’t explore the reasons, how do I come up with interventions to reengage black boys?

  He also knew there was a point—one he hoped never to reach—when a person could become too cynical. Chad was reminded of a conversation he had had with a teacher, a TFA alum, who was still working at Locke when he first arrived. She said, “I really do think we should build a wall around this community and let them shoot each other. And don’t let anybody in, and don’t let anybody out, and let the community take care of itself.” Chad would not dignify the statement with a comment. But he thought: I’m embarrassed to know you. You need to go. He knew that she couldn’t have started out that way because Teach For America doesn’t appeal to people like that. She made the comment during her fourth year at Locke. She left after that.

  Now he was in his fourth year at Locke, and he was a newly named assistant principal, in charge of the counseling office. Not only did he have to create a master schedule to accommodate some 3,100 students and 131 teachers, he also had to manage a dozen counseling office staffers. He was younger than just about every one of them. Some, if not all, resented his success, which even at Locke, where a second-year teacher could practically run a department, was meteoric.

  Chad had come to Locke in the fall of 2001 as a Teach For America recruit. He thought of his two-year commitment then as a useful detour on the way to law school. Teach For America could get him to Los Angeles, delay graduate school long enough for him to afford the tuition, and really challenge him—which he liked. But more important, it would put something really valuable on his résumé. It would open doors.

  The gibe that TFA really stood for Teach For Awhile wasn’t that far off the mark. In fact, there was an unspoken expectation that after completing their commitment, most corps members would move on to something else. TFA actually encouraged it. As valuable as two years in the classroom was to the mission, Kopp knew it would never be enough to close the achievement gap. Teach For America had to groom an army of leaders to take the fight beyond the classroom and into the corridors of power. So it forged partnerships with top graduate schools and prestigious private-sector firms that agreed to grant two-year deferrals for corps members. And the opportunities provided post-classroom became a key component in the marketing of TFA. A two-year stint in the classroom would give recruits a chance to do something valuable, with immediate impact, right out of school. And far from derailing the ambitious, it would actually help set them up, paving the way for their future careers.

  But by the end of his second year at Locke, Chad had forgotten about law school. He had become a teacher. He couldn’t have been more surprised. Teaching wasn’t a serious career move for a person with ambition. It didn’t pay enough money, and it didn’t command enough respect; Chad wanted both.

  The thing was, Chad had taken to teaching right from the start. He had actually enjoyed Teach For America’s intensive five-week training institute in Houston. A classic type A personality, Chad found himself up until 2 a.m. every night perfecting lesson plans. Others chafed under the workload. He thrived on it. He was psyched when he heard founder Wendy Kopp speak at the opening ceremony, and he was still psyched when he got a job at Locke. Chad realized that Locke was a low-performing school—those were TFA’s only clients. But he didn’t know it was arguably the lowest-performing high school in all of LAUSD. And if he had been told that Locke was a de facto gangland battleground, it hadn’t sunk in.

  Chad had arrived at a school in free-fall. Attendance was low, truancy high. His tenth-grade students lacked the most fundamental skills; a good percentage of them were reading at a third-grade level. Fights were an almost daily occurrence. Though he never felt personally threatened, he could feel the danger in the air. Everyone could. If you worked at Locke, you were always holding your breath, just waiting for the inevitable spark that would ignite a fire.

  The siege mentality drew many of the younger teachers together. Chad found a lifelong friend in Josh Hartford, the only other first-year TFA recruit assigned to Locke that year. The two of them reached out to the five other TFAers then on staff, and to some others, such as Vanessa Morris, the young UCLA alum who had become a nationally board-certified teacher—a feat unparalleled at the school. The veteran teachers may have resented the tight clique of young turks, but no one disputed their dedication, teaching skills, enthusiasm, and love for their students.

  Within two months of Chad’s arrival at Locke, the principal who had hired him was gone. Shortly after school began in September, Locke was the site of what the media called a bloody “mêlée.” Chad and Josh Hartford watched in amazement as LAPD officers descended upon the campus to restore order after black and brown students engaged in a particularly ferocious battle during lunch. Weeks later, the principal was transferred, and local superintendent Sylvia Rousseau moved in.

  June 2003 marked the end of Chad’s two-year TFA commitment. He had seen the achievement gap narrow in his English classes. He had experienced the thrill of taking on a reading intervention class and turning it into a book circle where the ten kids who actually showed up had advanced several grade levels by the semester’s end. Chad was a gifted teacher who had moved his students—academically and personally—and he reveled in their success.

  He also experienced failure—and a loss so profound that it threatened to plunge him into despair. The boy was a gangbanger, only fifteen years old. His name was Angel de Jesus Cervantes, and by October, when he was shot dead in an alley, he had started coming regularly to Chad’s class. The day after his death, students came to Chad’s room crying, wanting to know what had happened to Angel. Chad had no idea. He was having trouble wrapping his head around the fact that his fifteen-year-old student was really dead. So he went down to the counseling office and asked how to verify whether a student had actually been killed.

  “Well, what do you want to see? The dead body?” came the reply from a usually empathetic counselor. No, I want to know what it is I’m supposed to do with these students crying in the hallway!

&n
bsp; Chad took the kids to the library, where Angel’s girlfriend fell to the floor in hysterics. Chad had never seen anything so emotionally god-awful in his life. And he couldn’t think of a thing to say. In the end he mumbled something about how everything would be “all right.”

  But nothing about it was all right. Angel’s was the first funeral Chad had ever attended. All Angel’s homeys were there—dressed in Bloods’ red, arms crossed, gang signs flashing. Chad was incensed. This is all so wrong. He had started coming to my class. And now he’s dead.

  The kids seemed to get over the slaying more easily than Chad did. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. The school never made an announcement that Angel had been shot and killed. When another teacher heard of the death, his response shocked Chad: “Oh, he was a gangbanger anyway,” he said, as if that made his murder okay. Though Chad had been in South Los Angeles long enough to have a sense of the community and the gang violence that pervaded it, he hadn’t been prepared to feel the way he did when he watched that fifteen-year-old—a boy he had known and presumably touched—being put into the ground.

  Angel was the first student of many that Chad would lose in the next four years. Most, not surprisingly, were victims of gang violence; Los Angeles is the uncontested gang capital of the world. A 2006 gang study commissioned by the city council estimated that some 720 gangs call Los Angeles home. Despite 23 antigang programs that cost $82 million a year, gang violence in the city overall rose 14 percent in 2006. The increase in South Los Angeles—home to Locke High School—was 25 percent.