by Donna Foote
For a while, the smell of the barbecue drew all the kids back to the picnic area, where they lined up for hot dogs and sodas at a dollar apiece. The teachers did the cooking and serving. The kids were very appreciative, and when they forgot to say “please” or “thank you,” Taylor reminded them. But Hrag remained wary. A strange dynamic was developing between the Hispanics and the blacks. In class, they got along just fine. But here at the beach, things seemed racialized. The kids had completely segregated themselves by race. At one point, Hrag looked over at Taylor and said, “I feel like something’s gonna happen, Taylor.”
There was plenty of time for things to go awry. They wouldn’t be heading back to Locke until nearly midnight, and the schedule was loose. After dinner, the kids would go to the fire rings for a bonfire. Then they would do a tour of the aquarium and watch a short film on the grunions. Finally, it would be back to the beach to watch the fish do their thing until eleven-thirty or so, when the buses would take them back to Locke. Hrag and Taylor were worried. This field trip had it all: water, fire, and darkness—the perfect ingredients for a disaster.
It was at the bonfire that Hrag sensed how quickly things could go wrong. By then, the Locke kids were firmly in their groups, blacks with blacks, Hispanics with Hispanics. And he could see that they were getting bored. There were plenty of marshmallows but no sticks to roast them with. A few kids found wooden planks, plopped marshmallows on top, and stuck them in the fire, but the rest had nothing to do. It was dark, and other schools had shown up, too. Gardena, another inner-city school, was there, and so were a bunch of white kids with beer. A few of his students came up to him, furious, saying some of their things had been stolen. When he noticed some kids wander off, up a big dune and around to the tide pools, out of sight, he followed. But no one else seemed concerned. Even if I worry my brains out, there’s nothing I can do. There are so many places to hide.
At the aquarium, things started to go south. The Locke kids had been divided into two groups. The students touring the darkened labyrinth of fish tanks were accused of using inappropriate language. Morris ordered them outside and delivered a stern lecture. Meanwhile, the group in the theater watching the film was put on notice, too. The documentary was very dated and had been shot in black and white. The kids talked throughout, their chatter laced with expletives. The manager went ballistic. He berated Hrag for not having better control over the kids.
“Look, I’m doing the best I can,” said Hrag; what he was really thinking was: Screw you and your grunions. When the movie was over, the kids broke loose and headed for the beach. Hrag was tired from worrying. He stood sentry by the tide pools and then surrendered. Letting down his guard, he sat down in the sand. It was pitch-dark.
The kids who stayed on the beach, waited, and saw the grunions put on their show were enthralled. But the majority of them had grown weary of waiting and wandered off by the time the fish finally did their gyrations in the sand. They had never really come to see the grunions, anyway; they had come to hang with their friends on the beach. When the buses arrived, everyone seemed ready to go.
Hrag stood in front of his bus, checking off names as the kids bounded up the steps. Then, suddenly, all hell broke lose. A chubby, 250-pound black kid named Jarell cut in front of Carlos, a short, stocky Mexican kid who was built like a man.
Hrag knew that Carlos had a short fuse. At the beginning of the semester, he had come into class, sat in the front row, and declared it his new seat. Hrag told Carlos to go back to his assigned seat and to speak to him respectfully. The kid stood up, flipped the desk over, and left. When he returned the next day, Hrag explained that if Carlos had wanted to move his seat, all he had to do was ask. That was it. Carlos smiled, took the front seat, and never gave Hrag an ounce of trouble again. But he kind of scared Hrag, he was so quiet.
When Jarell cut in front of Carlos, he didn’t say “Excuse me.” Carlos gave him a good shove. In a second, they were tearing each other apart. Hrag had been told never to jump into a fight, but he couldn’t not. It looked like they were going to kill each other. Hrag tried to put one of them in a hold, and he had the kid pinned with his back against the bus when he slipped. In the scuffle that followed, Hrag got hit a couple of times, hard, in the head. The whole thing was over in thirty to forty seconds; three or four African American boys had jumped in and pulled the boys apart. Gareen had seen it all from the bus, where she was trying to keep the others from jumping off and joining in the mêlée.
Hrag put the two boys on separate buses, and they caravaned back to Locke. It was 1 a.m. before the last student was picked up from school. Weary, Hrag and his sister headed for the faculty parking lot. Even before he reached the car, Hrag could see the shattered glass on the ground. Both his car and Jinsue’s had been broken into. The window on the driver’s side of Hrag’s Ford had been smashed, and more than a thousand dollars’ worth of CDs had been stolen. His heart sank. He loved that collection; he played his CDs as he drove to and from work, and they made the days easier. You put so much into this school, and then you get dicked around. This is too much. This school is too much.
The next day, Mackey took Hrag to a shop in East Los Angeles to get his window replaced. When Hrag returned to school on Monday, shards of glass still littered the parking lot, untouched from the Friday-night break-in. He wrote a letter to Chad Soleo and two deans of the ninth-grade academy, and within two hours both boys were suspended. (He did not report that he had been hit, because he knew that could get the boys expelled.)
Jarell didn’t go to school that day but later explained that he had friends who had been jumped by Mexicans, and he was leery of them.
Carlos showed up for class, even though it was May 1 and most Hispanic students had taken May Day off for another pro-immigration protest. He felt bad. He explained to Hrag that he had had no choice but to fight; he could not let someone disrespect him. Carlos gave Hrag his word that it wouldn’t happen again, and they shook on it. He was a very solemn street kid, the type of person who would never go back on his word, and Hrag felt satisfied that he had gotten through to him.
Hrag understood exactly how it had all gone down the night of the grunions. Carlos and Jarell were both good kids. It was late, and they were tired. Hrag himself had gotten into his fair share of fights when he was in middle school. But the difference was, with these kids, if they messed with the wrong person, they could get badly beaten. Or shot. Kids told him they got jumped all the time in school—in the hallways, in the bathrooms, in the stairwells. They didn’t come back to class bloodied or bruised—on the outside at least.
Once their suspensions were lifted, Hrag welcomed the boys back to class. They sat two desks away from each other for the rest of the year. No one would have known that they had ever crossed swords.
Phillip’s only field trip of the year was a lot less dramatic than Hrag’s or Rachelle’s. It was arranged for all the kids in SE’s guidance classes. At SE, guidance was modeled after AVID, a program that teaches the organizational and study skills necessary for college. Chad had headed the AVID program at Locke when it first started. And it was that program, more than anything else, that got him and the other activists connected and thinking about extending their reach, and challenging the status quo. SE actively promoted a college-going culture. To underscore that commitment, its small-school field trip was to nearby University of Southern California and the museum complex adjacent to the campus. The kids got to tour the campus, visit the science museum across the street, and view a movie in the museum’s IMAX theater.
SE took some notoriously difficult kids along, and they handled themselves with amazing grace. They kept the profane language in check, asked very intelligent questions, and were perfectly well-behaved in the science museum. It made Phillip think: We should set higher expectations for these kids. To say that because of their home environment they can’t rise to the bar is doing them an injustice. Time and again they have shown me they are capable of great things.
Later, when they were all about to sit down to lunch, Phillip left to walk a few students to a nearby McDonald’s. When he returned twenty minutes later, the group had finished eating. “What did you guys do? Eat it all?” he teased. One student, Lemarr, handed him a box with half a pizza. “Did you spit on it?” asked Phillip. No, he had not. Lemarr had asked another teacher what Mr. Gedeon would like to eat and drink, ordered it, and saved it for him. Phillip couldn’t believe it. “That is the nicest thing a student has ever done for me! Thank you!” he exclaimed.
“You know, I’m not as bad as you think I am,” said Lemarr sheepishly.
After that, Phillip and the kids talked about lots of things they could never have discussed during a math lesson, like what it was like to go to college, and how to choose a good one, and whether or not USC would be a good place for them. They wanted to know other stuff, too: why Phillip and most of the teachers were single, how old they were, and where they grew up.
It was a positive experience for everyone involved. It had been so good for his kids to see life outside of Watts. And it had been so good for Phillip to see them outside of Watts. He had never been happier. He felt like his kids were learning. If he had a problem at all, it was only how to become a better teacher. He loved to plan lessons, and he thought he was good at it. But he had to get better at instruction, at relaying the information in a way that his students could understand and retain.
After a week of satisfying work, he often treated himself to a drive to Long Beach. He had fallen in love with the waterfront during summer institute and had developed a little ritual there. Instead of taking his clothes to an expensive dry cleaner down the block from his apartment in Baldwin Hills, he would save up his laundry and then drive to a place in Long Beach that charged a dollar an item. He’d drop the clothes off, get a mango smoothie, and pick up a tuna grinder. Then he’d race back up the 405 freeway. He’d become more adventurous since living here. The speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, but he pushed it to eighty, and he liked to crank up the music. He loved Los Angeles.
It was funny. Two months before, just a few weeks into the second semester, he had endured the worst week of his life. The new term had started out well. The kids knew the routine and there was a rhythm to each period. Finally, his geometry classes were working the way you would expect a geometry class to—in a normal school.
But Locke was not normal. Phillip thought of it as a building pretending to be a school. It had bells and books and all the things a school was supposed to have, except for a true mission that put kids in the forefront and gave them the kind of education they deserved. Every day at Locke, Phillip saw tons of kids not in class, and tons of adults not doing anything about it. There were only small pockets at the school where learning was occurring. One of the pockets happened to be his.
Or so he thought, until the middle of February, when he found himself so angry and confused for three consecutive days that when he left school each afternoon, he told himself he would not return.
The bad luck, or his PMS, or whatever you wanted to call it, had started the week before, when he left Los Angeles for a TFA recruiting trip back to his alma mater, Connecticut College. He hated missing school, and he wasn’t looking forward to even a small dose of winter in New England, but he thought it was important to spread the word. He himself had seen the effect Teach For America can have on a school and its students. He wanted to tell potential candidates from Connecticut College about the mission.
It was really just a one-day event, but because of the time difference, it meant two days of traveling. His mother lived only an hour or so from campus, but he didn’t know if he would be able to squeeze in a visit. He’d arrive late on Saturday night, rest on Sunday, then work flat out from eight o’clock on Monday morning until seven that night, leaving around noon the next day. TFA had sent him samples of questions that might come up, along with answers he could give. But he didn’t feel he had to follow the samples to the letter; if he didn’t want to answer a question, he was told he could just say he didn’t feel comfortable responding.
He already knew the drill from his previous incarnation as a TFA campus campaign manager. Doing a one-day blitz of the campus as a corps member sounded a lot easier than all the work his first TFA job had entailed. He was on Christmas break when he got the initial e-mails from Teach For America. He had never heard of TFA and, not recognizing the name of the person who sent the message, decided to ignore it. The first deadline for applying for a job as a campus recruiter came and went. Then he got another e-mail, this one more personal. He didn’t give that one a second thought, either. During the Easter break the third e-mail arrived. This one almost sounded as if the sender knew him. It was lengthy, and mentioned the names of several other campus leaders. It urged Phillip to apply for a position as Connecticut College’s TFA campus manager. Phillip felt compelled to reply, and a phone conversation was arranged. The TFA staffer was persuasive. Within three weeks, Phillip had the job.
He was sent to Washington, D.C., for orientation, and that began the journey that took him to Los Angeles as a 2005 corps member. TFA was never anything he sought. It just kept coming at him, and TFA’s persistence finally won out.
Being campus manager was hard work. Phillip was part of a two-member recruiting team, but he ended up being the go-to guy. He did all the brownnosing with the professors and all the research on the students, and it was he who led all the application workshops. TFA had a computerized recruiting dashboard that basically tracked every task he had to do—from getting the academic and extracurricular goods on students to personalizing the invitations to TFA events and meetings. He was required to write a summary of every conversation he had with a prospective candidate and to follow up on each encounter. Once a week, he had to check in with his TFA boss, and was evaluated on whether or not he had reached the goals that had been set. The gig ran from September through June, and when the two application deadlines loomed, Phillip was putting in thirty hours a week. Things slowed down after that, but he was still expected to prepare a list of one hundred names for his successor to pursue the following year. TFA was especially interested in attracting math and science candidates, and minority students, so Phillip’s input was important.
He didn’t get a good sense that year of what it meant to be a TFA teacher, but he learned a lot about the organization. It was very structured. Impressively so. He loved that the TFA meetings were so efficient. Ambitious goals were set, and data drove the process. It was a good fit for Phillip. He was used to operating in exactly the same way. The year Phillip headed up recruitment, twelve candidates from Connecticut College applied to TFA, a bumper crop.
Recruiting had been a top TFA priority ever since 2000, when the organization embarked on its first major five-year plan. Now TFA had launched the 2010 plan to further ramp up both the number of recruits and the results they achieved. Extensive marketing research was under way to identify changes to the recruitment strategy that could yield a greater number of matriculants. TFA was specifically interested in expanding the number of applications from high-potential prospects (HPPs). In 2006, 10 percent of all prospects it rated HPP had applied; if TFA could attract just 5 percent more of such applicants, it would mean the addition of at least six hundred CMs to the movement.
Galileo, a boutique market research group from the San Francisco Bay Area that specializes in teasing out the considerations that go into complex, high-stakes decisions, conducted qualitative and quantitative research for TFA starting in December 2005. Using some New Age-y research techniques—such
as meditation and relaxation with candles and soft music—Galileo conducted focus groups to probe the deeper beliefs and feelings of applicants and nonapplicants, matriculants and decliners. Quantitative online surveys followed, and the results among the four groups were analyzed. Special attention was paid to the nonapplicants, who were further divided into those who had met with a recruitment director and those who had not. The data was cut by ethnicity, gender, degree subject, socioeconomic status, and school type. By June 2006, TFA had identified a number of themes related to how prospects made their decisions about whether or not to apply to TFA. Action plans were developed around each of them.
Galileo had found that applicants were motivated to apply primarily by a desire to “give back” and to have a positive impact on the lives of children—combined with the opportunity for challenge and personal growth. What held them back were concerns that they would sidetrack their careers. They also questioned both their own ability and that of the organization to be effective. Money mattered, too, especially to potential recruits who didn’t have a lot of it.
Those key insights reshaped the message TFA was telegraphing. Now four basic understandings would be embedded in all TFA communications, personal cultivation meetings, and website content: though the problem of educational inequality was enormous and grave, it was solvable; the TFA mission was working; each recruit had the potential to make a real difference; and the experience would enable corps members to develop leadership qualities that would lead to a lifetime of impact and meaning.
