Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  On the one hand, a day at the office was a welcome respite from the stress of a day on the road meeting with harried CMs. He looked forward to seeing his colleagues. Brian Johnson, the Los Angeles region’s executive director, Felicia Cuesta, and all six of the PDs in Los Angeles were TFA alums. That in itself was binding—they had all earned their stripes in the trenches, all gained yardage on the battlefield. And like him, they were new to the job—each having been hired after undergoing a typically rigorous TFA selection process. Samir loved them—and trusted them. He considered them his own wise thought partners as he strived to improve his performance as a PD.

  But checking in with the regional office could be stressful, too. The PDs shared data on their CMs’ performance, which of course was a reflection of their own effectiveness on the job. And there were always new tasks being assigned, new deadlines to meet, new heights to reach.

  The meeting on Valentine’s Day 2006 started with what the agenda called a “community builder,” an icebreaker to get the ten people seated around the conference table warmed up for a full morning of work. Cuesta started off a quick round of personal trivia questions—penciled in for fifteen minutes. To lots of laughter, the group was reminded that when Samir was in elementary school he did not know how to skip, that Felicia toilet-papered houses during slumber parties in junior high, that when Liz was a deejay her stage name was Thunder Bunny, that Ramona craved olives and had a dog named Chile, and that Samir’s band was called Stereochemistry.

  At nine-fifteen, the team got to work with “personal and professional alignment reflections”—TFA-speak for an update on what everyone was doing. The personal stuff came first: Frank was taking his first day off and leaving at one; Ramona was registering for the San Diego marathon; Liz had gone one day without coffee.

  Then came the work updates. Ruth Ann reported on the status of the “excellent school visits” she had been coordinating: CMs, as part of the professional development opportunities offered by TFA, were invited to observe teachers at an “excellent” L.A. school—such as the renowned Harvard-Westlake and the Marlborough School, the all-girls academy that Taylor had visited earlier in the year. The meeting moved quickly over the rest of the calendar and office updates. The team was told of the ongoing push for early placement of the incoming class of CMs, an arduous, months-long process of schmoozing and horse trading. Brian Johnson, a 1999 corps member and Princeton alum, had started the conversation with the area school districts back in October, just after the 2005 school year began.

  As TFA’s top man in Los Angeles, Johnson had connections. Marlene Canter, president of the LAUSD board, was a TFA fan who had actually donated her annual salary to the cause. (TFA presented her with its Lifetime Leadership Award in July 2006 for her “Commitment to Educational Excellence and Equity.”) Five LAUSD school board members had TFA alums working for them; two other TFAers were on the superintendent’s staff. Still, negotiating the placement of future CMs required exquisite finesse. Johnson was in constant contact with superintendents, school board members, and human resource officers for the various school districts in the greater Los Angeles area, gingerly balancing supply against demand.

  L.A. Unified was by far TFA’s largest customer in the Los Angeles area; 200 of the district’s 2,347 new teachers in the 2005 school year were TFA recruits, accounting for 8.5 percent of new hires. It cost TFA $12,500 a year to select and train each recruit. The district picked up $3,000 of that. With improvements to the program, the costs kept rising. In 2007 the tab was $14,000 per recruit. By 2010, TFA expected it to cost $20,000 to select and train a corps member.

  Johnson had to sell each potential employer on the benefits of hiring a TFA recruit. The problem was, TFA was offering schools the promise of student achievement; what the districts were looking for were “highly qualified” teachers, as mandated by No Child Left Behind. State and federal laws required districts to show proof of progress; the percentage of credentialed teachers was an easy metric to cite. In LAUSD’s lowest-performing high schools, where there was an acute shortage of teachers, Johnson had no trouble selling his teachers-to-be. Most principals were happy with warm bodies; a TFAer, though noncredentialed, was almost always preferred to the alternative—a longtime sub. (A 2005 Kane, Parsons & Associates survey found that 84 percent of Los Angeles principals with TFA teachers on staff reported that they would hire another one; 93 percent regarded TFA teachers as more effective than other beginning teachers.) But in elementary schools, where there was no shortage of credentialed teachers, getting a slot for a TFAer often was problematic. When it came down to a choice between a credentialed teacher who could bolster the district’s stats and a noncredentialed TFAer, it was no contest—the credentialed teacher tended to get the job.

  But TFA refused to entirely cede the elementary school terrain. The need was there: achievement levels among Los Angeles’s younger students was alarmingly low, and TFA believed its teachers could perform higher than the average LAUSD hire. TFA insisted that if the mission truly was to close the achievement gap, then it had a moral imperative to be in the lower grades, where it had the potential to have maximum impact. So, TFA and LAUSD worked out a deal. Though LAUSD would still take K–6 teachers from TFA, the numbers would be relatively low, and the teachers could be placed only in schools that already had TFA on staff. What’s more, most of the placements would be assigned to sixth grade.

  Secondary and middle schools were a different matter. LAUSD was happy to hire TFA teachers for the upper grades for reasons other than the chronic shortage of people willing to work in tough, gritty, urban schools. One of the biggest advantages to hiring TFA recruits was that they tended to pass the test that helped satisfy the NCLB requirement that every child have a “highly qualified teacher,” at impressively higher rates than other new candidates. Though the state of California trailed other states in student achievement, it was generally considered to have one of the most rigorous sets of standards. The CSET, the test to demonstrate subject-matter competency, was tough.

  “Nobody but the TFA teachers can pass the CSET exams,” explains Anthony Thymes, coordinator of new teachers for Locke in 2006. “If TFA weren’t here, we would have to hire thirty-five teachers on emergency credentials, and that would make the state come in.” There was another advantage to hiring TFAers. They were goal-oriented high achievers, so they tended to work hard and sometimes more purposefully than some of their older colleagues. TFA encouraged CMs to zero in on improving student achievement in their classrooms—a goal that was within their locus of control. Worrying about school dysfunction or other environmental factors that were beyond their power to fix was seen as an unnecessary distraction. So, in the beginning at least, TFAers tended not to complain publicly about overcrowded classrooms or too many preps. And they took on additional work that more experienced teachers, protected by the union, resisted. Often, the more successful they were, the more responsibilities they were given.

  Not every school district in Los Angeles laid out the welcome mat. The reforming Long Beach School District, which had declining enrollment, had made so much progress that it no longer needed TFA hires. Compton, though needy, had proven to be a difficult customer. It was one of the original school districts to hire TFAers, but TFA had withdrawn from the troubled district after a dustup over an unwritten agreement to place recruits there went awry. Now TFA wanted back in; Compton was exactly the kind of district that needed TFA the most. Samir, who had taught there so successfully only a few years before, was lobbying school board members hard for a contract. The district was on the fence. Compton, like LAUSD, was desperately seeking math and science teachers. But it didn’t need any elementary school teachers. TFA had math and science teachers, but it also needed to find spots for its elementary school assignments. So TFA offered to send ten math and science teachers to Compton if the district signed a contract with TFA to hire ten elementary teachers as well. But TFA was running into a lot of political and union opposition. The same
old objection was being made: they leave after two years. Samir considered himself living proof that the argument was specious. After all, he may have left the classroom, but he was still advocating for his students in Compton. He was in a position to bring ten “highly qualified” math and science teachers to Compton. How could anyone argue that TFA bails on its students?

  With all the difficulties presented by the big public school districts, TFA was working the charter angle aggressively. It already had CMs working at KIPP L.A. Prep and the Watts Learning Center. Another KIPP charter had recently opened up, and the Green Dot charter schools—many staffed by TFA alums—were popping up all over Los Angeles.

  The school-placement update was only one of many items on the agenda. Earlier in the month, the PDs had attended an organization-wide meeting in Las Vegas at which Co-Investigation 2.0 was introduced. The L.A. region PDs had been surveyed on their Co-Investigation needs. It was clear they had no problem analyzing CM data, but they were struggling with the solution and follow-up phases of C-I 2.0.

  “The way I scored it,” Samir informed the group, “I need a wider range of solutions than I have now.” Samir also questioned the need to differentiate the causes—skill, knowledge, or mind-set—of a teacher’s problem. “I don’t feel it’s critical to differentiate between knowledge and skill because the solutions are similar—why debate whether it’s one or the other? And I still have to check mind-set…and I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. I understand what they mean, but the way it plays out in real time is never that concrete.”

  Others jumped in, and a spirited discussion followed. The upshot: Cuesta announced that she wanted to tighten up all parts of the Co-Investigation process—from narrowing down and identifying the key teacher problem, a gateway issue, to offering up possible solutions based on causes.

  Next up was a matriculation update and a look ahead to the midyear retreat, where the staff would “step back” and look at the big picture—review TFA’s core values and strategic plan, gear up for the end of the year, and prepare for the coming one in a smart, disciplined way.

  Then it was on to the dreaded stats: at midyear, 19.5 percent of CMs were achieving significant student gains, 24.5 percent away from the L.A. region’s year-end target of 44 percent. The key problems and causes were identified, next steps to a solution enumerated, and measures of success put in place.

  Cuesta then announced a new program she wanted to pilot in Los Angeles: Co-Investigating the Co-Investigations. She explained that her informal pop-ins to observe PDs at work would continue. But a much more formalized process—straight off the Co-Investigation rubric—would be put in place to assess PD proficiency. Cuesta would oversee the entire Co-Investigation cycle of each PD and a CM of his or her choice. The session would be videotaped, Cuesta would take notes, and then she and the PD would sit down and Co-Investigate the PD’s key problem, underlying causes, and possible solutions.

  As she explained the new plan, backs around the table stiffened slightly. Program director Amy Cox presumably spoke for the group when she asked for clarification. She explained that she was the type of PD who always invited Cuesta to her most challenging Co-Investigation sessions. “But it’s not going to be my cycle of evaluation, is it?”

  Cuesta’s response hung in the air: “When I say formal, I only mean structured.”

  She moved on. Next up was a note on the ongoing collection of 2003 alumni data, and TFA’s plans to enhance summer institute programming. The institute planning team was harvesting information and feedback from the regions. Early signs indicated that special emphasis would be placed on diagnostics and tracking sessions; institute diversity sessions were historically contentious, and designers were working on improving them, too.

  The morning concluded with PDs munching on Valentine’s Day cupcakes, bagels, and grapes as they discussed their nominees for the Sue Lehmann Award for Excellence in Teaching, a five-thousand-dollar prize given each year to an outstanding corps member. At exactly noon, the PDs filed out of the conference room and back onto the battlefield. There wasn’t a minute to waste.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Who Do You Screw?

  Who do you screw? It was a question Chad asked himself nearly every day. The other questions that he couldn’t get out of his head as he was making the tough calls were: Is this something I’d want for my kids? Would I be okay with this? The answer was almost always no.

  After Dave Buehrle left, Chad had to figure out what to do with five orphaned classes of twelfth-graders. Any way Chad looked at it, someone got screwed; the only thing to be determined was who and to what degree. The obvious and easy solution to the dilemma was to get a full-time sub to take over. But the English department already had two full-time subs. Chad didn’t want to take the risk of hiring another.

  So he decided to give Buerhle’s classes to an underperforming tenth-grade English teacher from one of the other small schools. Chad would disband that teacher’s classes and farm out his students. His reasoning was simple: the tenth-graders needed a good teacher more than the twelfth-graders did. After all, the tenth-graders were about to take the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), and if a good percentage of them failed, the entire school’s API and AYP scores would be affected.

  It was true that the transfer would cause widespread damage to Buehrle’s English honors and drama classes. But those kids had already passed the CAHSEE and were on track to graduate. Though it was not a factor in his decision, Chad knew, too, that there was an undeniable side benefit to sticking a crummy teacher in the highest-performing school. Now all the people who had accused him of favoring the School of Social Empowerment over the other learning communities would be silenced; no one in his right mind could interpret that particular chess move as beneficial to SE. So that was that. In the daily battle of who gets screwed at Locke, Buerhle’s kids lost. But they knew that the moment he told them he was quitting. Their reaction to the news had been “Why do all the good white teachers leave?”

  If they had posed the question to Chad, his unspoken response would have been “Because the school doesn’t work.” And though he took the position as VP because he thought he could change that, he had been sadly mistaken. He had no power. His job was only a balancing act—between evils. At least when he was a teacher, he had had some fantastic days; in fact, most days were fantastic. Now every time he walked through the door into his office he knew he was entering a no-win zone.

  It was maddening to have to make these administrative Hobbesian choices. Kids in suburban schools could live with a couple of duds for teachers, but not the kids at Locke, or any school that looked like Locke, or any school in which a TFA teacher worked. Locke kids arrived with fifth-grade reading levels. A good teacher could move them up one level. A fantastic teacher—a teacher making what TFA called significant gains—could boost them two grades in a year. At Locke, students couldn’t afford to have just one or two good teachers. They needed four fantastic ones. And they weren’t getting them.

  One reason was because schools like Locke were safe havens for lousy teachers. Dr. Wells reckoned that 35 percent of his teachers had no business being in a classroom. But the powerful teachers union, the UTLA, protected tenured teachers regardless of their classroom performance. There was a process in LAUSD to either get rid of bad teachers or make them better—but it required administrators to jump through hoops. Under the rules of the union contract, supervisors were bound to conduct and document repeated rounds of observations and evaluations carried out along a very specific time line, and to offer interventions and remediation through professional development where needed. Even when a convincing case had been built against a teacher, a missed deadline could derail the entire process. The teacher evaluations were divvied up among the administrators at Locke. Dr. Wells took the toughest cases himself. He tried mightily. He had about twenty-two teachers in his sights, but the union contract made tenured teachers just about bulletproof. Chad didn’t get it. Why are
we so concerned about protecting teachers and not kids?

  It was hard to fire a bad teacher, but it did occasionally happen. The terrible irony was that the alternative to a successful dismissal was often worse. Good teachers weren’t exactly lining up to teach at Locke, so often the only candidates sending in résumés were district castaways looking for a place to hole up. When Locke couldn’t find a permament teacher for a vacant position, it relied on substitute teachers to fill the spot. Noncredentialed substitute teachers in LAUSD needed only to have graduated from college with a 2.7 GPA and to have passed the CBEST, an exam considered easier than the high school exit exam. Some of the subs were okay; many were not. At Locke, if there were only fifteen subs working on any given day, things were looking good. Throughout the 2005–2006 school year, the school had three teacher vacancies and employed seven to ten long-term subs.

  Wells estimated that 40 percent of his staff were hardworking, committed educators. And for a long time, Chad had believed that if Locke could get a critical mass of them to stick around, real change could take place. But the dysfunction wore good teachers down and forced them out. With up to thirty teachers leaving every year, some of them TFAers, there was no way to build an enduring culture of achievement. Without that, Locke’s numbers might trend up ever so slightly, but for all intents and purposes, the school would continue to flatline.

  Locke was on every government education agency’s watch list, but the consequences for failing to make the mandated improvements were never clear. The most recent reform, the carving up of the school into small learning communities in 2004, was imposed in an effort to stave off more drastic government action. But the plan was never formally approved and funded by the district, nor was it fully embraced by all of Locke’s teachers. In the spring of 2005, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), a regional accrediting body for public and private schools, was due to conduct its annual Locke inspection. And a School Assistance and Intervention Team (SAIT), a county auditing group appointed by the state to oversee and support Locke, had recently started to pull together an action plan for school improvement. But the school had been subject to numerous audits and inspections, and countless action plans had been drawn up. It was difficult for Chad to see what anyone could really do to hold the school accountable.