by Donna Foote
The breaking point came during a phone conversation with Emily, when she said: “You don’t laugh anymore, Dave. I can’t make you laugh. You don’t seem like yourself.” And the truth was, he didn’t feel like himself. He was an optimistic person with a joy and passion for life. But he could no longer see the beauty in things that used to make him happy. He got to thinking: What if I don’t do this—even for a year? What if I ended this sooner?
He raised the question with Emily. They both agreed to pray on it. Soon afterward, he flew home to see her. Emily said he needed to make up his mind. He wrestled with a decision that he knew would affect him for the rest of his life. It wasn’t in his personality to quit. If he hadn’t been in the relationship with Emily, leaving wouldn’t have even been a consideration. But he was in the relationship, and Emily was the woman he adored, and with whom he intended to spend the rest of his life. This relationship was more important than the job. He asked himself what made sense: What had he been called to do and led to by God, a God who had been faithful to him in every decision he had ever made before? Buehrle decided he would teach until Christmas and quit. At last he felt at peace.
TFA had been the most difficult thing he had ever done, and the decision to quit was the toughest he had ever made. He looked around at the TFA teachers at Locke—at Chad Soleo and Josh Hartford and others in SE—and knew they were doing amazing things. And he loved his kids. The students in his math lab had created a rap song based on Dave’s classroom mantras. First they’d start tapping out a beat, then they started rhyming refrains like: “Please sign the tardy log…Stop!…I don’t appreciate!” It made him laugh. And it didn’t make leaving any easier. His relationship with TFA was more complicated. It was love-hate. That’s why he decided to write out and hand in his resignation letter before he told Chad and TFA. He was not going to be talked out of quitting. The letter would help him stick to his guns.
He had confided in a few of his closest TFA friends almost as soon as he made his decision. The news took them by surprise, but no one blamed him. Most thought that in similar circumstances they would have done the same.
Heather Fieldsteel was sad to see Dave go, but her overriding emotion was jealousy. She, more than anyone else, could identify with him. She, too, had gotten a terrible workload: four preps. That was after she went to Wells and begged to have the fifth prep, a math lab, taken away. He agreed, but it hadn’t helped much. She was still underwater, and the thought of quitting was tempting. But now that Dave was going, her options had narrowed. If she left, too, she’d be letting down so many people—not the least of whom were her kids. Dave’s students were now going to be stuck with a permament sub for the rest of the year. She couldn’t do that to her kids. She didn’t think she could live with the guilt.
When Buehrle approached Chad during the last week of November and asked for a meeting, Chad didn’t think much about it. In fact, he was busy and tried to put Buehrle off. But Buehrle persisted, eventually following Chad to the parking lot, where he handed him a letter.
“Is this something we can have a quick conversation about?” Chad asked impatiently. He was rushing to an off-site meeting. Dave suggested Chad start by reading his letter. So Chad opened it right there, in the parking lot. The first word his eyes landed on was “resignation.” Oh shit! He skipped the part about the reason, saw “December 16,” and thought: Terrible date. Then he was flooded with regret. He hadn’t adjusted Buehrle’s schedule when he knew he was struggling. Whenever he saw Dave, he seemed to be in total control, and Chad had thought, Well, we’re overwhelming him, and he’s doing okay. Chad was determined to do something for Dave. He just hadn’t gotten to it.
I read him wrong. I didn’t see this coming. Damn it, we’ve lost Buehrle! How resolute is he? I’ll do whatever we need to do to solve his issues.
It was a Wednesday and Chad would be off campus until Friday. He told Dave that he would accept the letter but would not act on it. He warned him that quitting was more complicated than he might think. Dave should consider talking to Loyola Marymount, where he was enrolled in the master’s program, and Chad urged him to call Samir at TFA as soon as possible. While he was talking, his mind was racing. Maybe TFA can convince him—or guilt-trip him—into staying, at least until the end of the semester. And when he hears he might owe LMU ten thousand dollars in tuition, he might change his mind.
Dave must have called Samir right away, because that evening Chad got a phone call from Felicia Cuesta, TFA’s managing director of program in Los Angeles. TFA hadn’t seen it coming, either, she said. Clearly, the schedule was difficult, and Dave had mentioned that to Samir. But when Samir visited room 209, he had liked what he had seen.
In his resignation letter, Dave didn’t dwell on his grueling schedule. He talked about how the stress of the job was preventing him from seeing the beauty in life and how difficult it was to maintain a relationship with his fiancée from three thousand miles away. No job was more important than that relationship.
Aha! So, it’s the fiancée, thought Chad, which somehow made the news more bearable. He and Felicia worked out a strategy. The short-term goal was to get Buehrle to agree to stay past the Christmas break, at least through the end of January, when the first semester would end. The longer goal was to get him to finish the year—and then, they hoped, two. Chad would immediately relieve Buehrle of at least one of his preps, even if he had to take it over himself. If that worked, and he agreed to finish the semester, Felicia would dangle the possibility of a transfer to a location closer to home, so he could honor his two-year commitment. Chad and Buehrle met a few days later. Dave didn’t bite. He was leaving Locke on December 16.
It wasn’t Chad’s place to talk about broken promises; he would leave that to the TFA folks. In truth, Chad felt partially responsible because he had saddled Buehrle with that ungodly schedule in the first place. But, on the other hand, he thought: What the hell! You signed up. This is a real commitment and you should hang in there. You have a responsibility to your kids, if not to TFA.
Samir Bolar knew full well that some CMs never made it out of the disillusionment phase. All fall he had been dealing with one recruit at another school who had e-mailed him: “I hate my job, I hate my job, I hate my job! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t quit!” Samir swung into action. He arranged to have her co-teach with a successful teacher at her school who had many of the same kids but achieved much different results. He also had the struggling teacher observe three other first-year teachers at another L.A. high school—three first-year teachers who were also stretched but who had managed to put a visible management system into place in their classrooms. It was touch-and-go with this CM, but Samir would do everything in his power to help turn things around for her—because the stakes were so high. The loss of a Teach For America recruit was devastating—to the students, to the teachers, to the credibility of the organization, and possibly even to the recruit, who would no doubt carry that burden of defeat for a lifetime. It didn’t help the recruit’s program director much, either.
When Samir got the phone call from Buehrle, he was in the middle of the first of two selection rounds for TFA. Every PD was required to participate in the crucial selection process; it was hard work, but Samir relished the idea of helping to choose some of the teachers he would be supporting the following year. Besides, as a PD, he had a special appreciation for the traits and competencies needed to survive and flourish as a Teach For America recruit. It was an interesting juxtaposition: to have Dave call and say “I’m leaving” at the same time that he was asking potential candidates the final question, “Are there any circumstances under which you would quit before finishing your two-year commitment?”
Dave had not been on Samir’s watch list. Samir knew Dave had a fiancée, but it wasn’t like he was closed off or a shut-in. Samir had seen him at the TFA events—the introduction picnic and the one-hundred day party at a club in Hollywood. He knew that he lived with a few other guys from TFA, and from
what he could see, he was getting out and creating a life for himself beyond the classroom. When Samir and Dave met at the end of round one—the first of the four classroom observations—Dave had seemed happy.
Dave did have a lot of preps, and he seemed a bit overwhelmed with the long-term planning procedures. After round two, Samir wasn’t sure Dave yet had the kids’ full attention, and he didn’t know if Dave even expected it. Sometimes Dave just taught right through all the chatter. But he was a very creative teacher, and Samir had no doubt that he would make significant gains. Dave had mentioned that he was overworked—but, Samir thought, so were they all! Still, he realized that this disaster might have been avoided if the problem had been addressed sooner. I feel like we weren’t looking out for his interests.
What bothered Samir the most was that he didn’t really have a chance to address the problem; Dave made his decision before saying a word to him—or to Chad. Samir’s hunch was that Dave had been complaining to friends and family and had been urged by them to pack it in and go on home. When did it happen—when he didn’t believe we wanted the best for him?
Samir asked to see him. They met at Starbucks, where Samir offered Dave everything he could to get him to stay—including a position in Chicago by June. Dave insisted that he believed in the TFA mission. But he said he didn’t feel fulfilled, and his relationship with his fiancée was falling apart. Samir countered that any meaningful job would be demanding and would take a toll on his personal life. The key to satisfaction is in finding the balance between the personal and professional. Maybe it wasn’t teaching that was the problem; maybe it was Dave’s inability to balance the job and his love life.
Samir appealed to Dave’s sense of duty. “You feel committed to the movement,” he argued. “You feel the injustices being suffered, and you understood when you signed up that there was a degree of sacrifice required.”
The two sat for hours, and when Samir had nothing left to say, Dave announced: “Samir, I’m finished.”
After Dave called, Samir had immediately pulled up his application and file. The essay he had submitted in response to the prompt: “Describe a time when you confronted a serious obstacle” was entitled “The Opposite of Loneliness Is Deep Fulfillment.” In it Dave described his experience as an intern for a film company in Hong Kong, where despite a profound sense of loneliness, he had found real meaning. Samir thought it strange: Dave’s circumstances at Locke were not that different from those he described in his essay. The persistence he had demonstrated in Hong Kong led TFA to believe he was an ideal candidate. What happened?
Samir wouldn’t be the only TFAer combing through Buehrle’s application. The national selection team would be on the job, too. They would take Buerhle’s application—and all the data that had been collected on him to date—and add it to the information already compiled on other early leavers, looking for trends. They would also carefully review his file to see what clues should have red-flagged his lack of commitment. Though he cited the fiancée factor, other conditions may have come into play. They would search for answers in his history of involvement at college, and they would no doubt reexamine his essay. His TFA selector had given him a spike in perseverance. Now New York would look closely at its own methods. Perhaps selection had taken Buehrle too much at his word. How could TFA have read this better?
The regional team strategized, too. It was decided that all the PDs would initiate weekly e-mail check-ins with their CMs. Teachers deemed to be in danger of quitting would be targeted for extra attention. At the same time, the regional office would put out the word to any other wavering CMs that quitting was not an option. Each job had an impact on the mission as a whole. It was important that CMs didn’t get the idea that TFA was something they could walk away from.
After reviewing Dave’s file, Samir contacted his TFA roommates. He wanted their insights into why Dave was leaving, and how, or if, he might be persuaded to stay. He also wanted to gauge whether they were wobbly, too. After talking to them, Samir was confident that Dan Ehrenfeld, another English teacher at Locke, was solid. But he discovered that Dave’s other roommate, Grant, was also thinking about leaving.
Samir felt terrible. TFA’s national retention rate over two years was 88 percent. Los Angeles’s was higher. There was a lot of pressure from headquarters to raise the national retention rate; there was a lot of pressure from downtown Los Angeles to maintain its impressive record. By mid-December, something like seven CMs from the L.A. region had quit. Dave was the second TFAer to leave Locke alone—earlier Allison Momot, another first-year English teacher, had resigned for medical reasons. Now people were warning him to watch out for Fieldsteel as well.
The rumor was that she might not return after the Christmas break. Samir had not explicitly asked her if she was thinking of leaving the corps, but he did ask her how she was doing, whether she was feeling supported, how he could help her. If he had learned anything from Dave’s situation, it was how important constant communication was. He would never again assume that because he hadn’t heard from a CM, everything was okay. With fifty CMs to feed and water, he had been too busy to do a weekly check-in. That was going to change. How am I to know what’s going on in their minds? I don’t even know if they trust me to be somebody they can confide in.
In his gut, he didn’t think Fieldsteel would leave. She was so good, and he didn’t think she’d be putting in the effort she was if she wasn’t getting some satisfaction, some sense that she was having an impact. But, then again, he had never suspected Dave would bail. He had to be careful. With Buehrle and Momot gone, it was two down, and who knew how many more to go!
Neither Chad nor TFA could change Buehrle’s mind. Buehrle told the SE folks he was packing it in, and the word spread like wildfire. Some of his students cried. When the other first-years heard, they were very supportive. Most of the other teachers at Locke were not as sanguine. They saw him as leaving his kids high and dry, and screwing his colleagues to boot. The anti-TFA lobby at Locke took Buehrle’s desertion as further evidence of the dangers of hiring TFA teachers. Typical. They come and they go. They are not committed to this community. They end up doing more harm than good.
But nothing surprised Chad more than Dr. Wells’s response, when Chad said, “I’ve got some bad news. I got the resignation of Buehrle effective December sixteenth.”
Wells didn’t skip a beat, recalls Chad. “That’s an opportunity,” said Wells. “Because I’ve observed Buehrle and he’s pathetic. This is a chance to get someone else.”
Chad was speechless. He was expecting an administrator-to-administrator conversation about how they had made mistakes in not supporting the kid. Not this! Because (a) Buehrle is not pathetic, and (b) Where in the world does he think we can get someone good in there to take his place? We already have two permanent subs working in the English department!
Then he wondered: Could he have Buehrle mixed up with another teacher?
CHAPTER SEVEN
What the Hell Am I Doing?
Taylor was one of the first in the corps to know that Dave Buehrle was planning his Great Escape. She and Dan, Dave’s roommate, hung out together. The three of them had gone to dinner one night toward the end of October, and Dave had told them then that he was quitting. Taylor admired Dave. The administration loved him, and he was regarded as one of the better TFA recruits at Locke. He got there early and stayed late. He was still working flat out for Locke, even when he knew he was going to resign! Taylor thought his kids were lucky to have had him, if only for a semester. But boy, his leaving was going to cause a lot of trouble. No one would want to blame it on Chad Soleo, but you had to think that if Chad hadn’t given the poor guy four preps, he might not be leaving, and his kids might not be looking at half a year with a long-term sub—or worse, one of the crummy tenured teachers Locke couldn’t get rid of.
Taylor worried about how the news would be received. There was a real stigma attached to quitting. It wasn’t so much about not having the ri
ght stuff, though there was some of that. No, it was more about the kids. They got to you. It was as if they were your own children, so leaving them became unimaginable. How do you quit when these kids are depending on you? When they worry when you’re out a day, scared that you won’t come back? Taylor could never do it. But she wasn’t about to second-guess Dave.
Dave believed they were all chasing something they could never catch. TFA, he said, trumpeted the success of teachers making “significant gains,” and because the CMs are all psycho, and because they have always been told they can do anything they set their minds to, they chase this impossible goal, running themselves ragged to change the world. But on what distant planet? The reality, he said, is you can’t force kids to make significant gains. There are so many other factors involved, and what are significant gains, anyway? And what is supposed to happen to your own life while you’re tilting at windmills? Are you just supposed to put it on hold? Dave and his fiancée couldn’t do it; they were miserable. “The TFA lifestyle is not sustainable,” he concluded.
He’s right, Taylor thought, the lifestyle isn’t sustainable. She felt good about what she was doing, but she was overwhelmed. With the expectations of Locke, TFA, LMU, and even the UCLA literacy coaches at school, there was no time in her day for a social life. Sometimes, she wished she worked just for LAUSD and not for TFA, because LAUSD didn’t make so many demands on a teacher. It was hard to bad-mouth TFA when the organization had given her such a wonderful opportunity. But she’d never been worked so hard—or been so emotionally drained. Like all the other CMs, Taylor was used to being good at whatever she tried. Now she thought: I suck. I am a first-year teacher who doesn’t know how to teach. I don’t know how to be good at this.
