Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  There was another huge problem with the significant gains measure. It was the source of tremendous stress for hard-charging CMs. Those who didn’t make the grade felt like failures and believed that TFA didn’t value their efforts.

  Phillip belonged in that camp. At the end of the year, his kids had made solid gains, showing 75 percent mastery of the content standards for geometry. On paper, that made Phillip one of the second-tier TFA teachers in terms of student achievement. In reality, he was one of the best in the corps. In his year-end survey, Phillip had noted that TFA did not offer up enough models of exemplary secondary teachers. Samir believed Phillip would make a great model for excellent teaching at the secondary level. He almost willed his students to succeed, and he kept adjusting his style of teaching to meet their needs. Midyear, he slowed the pace, to ensure his kids were mastering the objectives. He focused on the standards, hitting them over and over again, and scores went up. In the weeks leading up to finals, he picked up the pace and the rigor, calling his instruction geometry boot camp. On his final, he deliberately hit each core standard he had covered (fourteen out of twenty) so that the test was exactly representative of the material he had taught. His kids scored an average of 81 percent on that exam. Unlike most teachers at Locke, Phillip based his grading strictly on the results of his weekly assessments—nothing else. Had TFA allowed him to calculate his gains based on the final alone, he would have been in the significant gains bucket.

  Phillip was stunned to hear that Samir thought so highly of him. “What?” he said. “I don’t think I’d be a model. According to TFA, you have to dazzle.”

  It was Samir’s turn to be stunned. Phillip didn’t realize that TFA valued everything he was doing. Samir showed him the TFA rubric. “At what point did I say you needed to be more energetic or put on more fascinating lessons?” he asked. Samir finally understood why Phillip had not appeared to be invested in their meetings, why it didn’t seem like they were making much progress: Phillip always felt he had to defend what he was doing! He didn’t realize that our values weren’t in conflict with his. He never saw that our goals were very similar.

  At the end of the year, Rachelle felt like she had failed TFA, if that was possible. She was supposed to do the round-three observation before spring break. By mid-May she still hadn’t connected with Samir. She figured she was probably the black sheep of the corps. But she didn’t care. If she was late getting in her data or sending in her reflective guides—or never got around to it at all—it was because she was busy with more immediate concerns, like teaching kids. She knew she hadn’t taken advantage of TFA the way she could have. She found the once-a-month Saturday meetings helpful, and she thought the teacher instruction at institute was a lot better than what she got in the graduate program at Dominguez Hills. But TFA had had no impact on her day-to-day life as a teacher. And she was pretty sure she had had no impact on TFA, either—she was definitely not closing the achievement gap. Her kids couldn’t read any better at the end of the year than when they started. If she did anything, maybe it was to get some kids to come to school who otherwise wouldn’t have come. Maybe.

  Ironically, Rachelle’s kids—for all their behavioral and learning problems—demonstrated 80 percent mastery on the tests she gave. Samir was proud of her. She had had the toughest kids to handle, and she had no grounding in biology or special ed. Rachelle had struggled to establish authority in the classroom, and then to teach biology to kids who couldn’t read. But she reached out to Miss G for help on classroom management and to Hrag for help on biology. She got around the literacy issue the same way he did—she planned lots of hands-on activities—and in the end her kids internalized some key biological concepts. The highlight of her year had been the trip to Catalina. Rachelle may not have made significant gains in the strictest sense, but Samir had no doubt that she had had significant impact on the lives of her special ed students. That, to Samir, was good enough.

  Hrag turned the corner with Samir in February. That was usually the time that new teachers began to feel comfortable, the phase called rejuvenation. It happened after the round-three observation. After resenting Samir’s demands on his time all year, Hrag came to see him as someone he could trust and learn from. Together, they pored over Hrag’s assessments and then figured out how to give his students multiple ways to demonstrate standards. Once Samir showed Hrag how helpful the data could be, he was hooked. When they broke out the tests and quizzes, Hrag was excited to see that his students were performing even better than he had thought. He really was blowing their minds.

  Hrag’s final number was 80 percent mastery. He wasn’t sure how indicative that was of anything. Locke students weren’t good test takers. Often, when he’d give an assessment, they wouldn’t be able to understand the questions and would just give up. That’s what happened when they took the PSATs in October for practice. His students weren’t even halfway through when they realized they didn’t know much of what they were being asked. One kid said he felt like jumping off a bridge, but most of them didn’t seem to care; at that point they were reduced to doodling on the answer sheets. Hrag knew he was going to lose control of the class if he didn’t do something. He didn’t give any answers away, but still, he thought that what he did was probably wrong. He went around trying to show them that it wasn’t totally hopeless, that if they looked they could find hints to the answers right there in the sentences.

  The PSATs made him think about how he was presenting the material, and he began to change the language in his assessments to reflect the questions on the standardized tests. During classroom quizzes, if he saw that the kids were stumped by a question, he found that if he sat there and pointed out the key words and told them to connect the concepts—if he walked them through how to think critically—they could answer the questions correctly. Was that success?

  Like that of many other Locke teachers, Hrag’s approach to grades was weighted heavily toward class work: If the kid does everything you ask of him, how do you fail him? At Locke, for the most part, students passed if they showed up—and showed interest. How else to explain the fact that it was possible to graduate without really knowing how to read? The problem was, if you didn’t do it that way, everyone—with the exception of the three brilliant kids in every class who worked hard and aced the tests—would fail. No one would ever get out of Locke.

  Like Taylor, Hrag saw the flaw in the TFA system. A lot of what he had taught wasn’t even tied to a standard. It was fun, and it was good to know, but it didn’t necessarily correspond to what the state expected the kids to master. He was glad to have achieved significant gains. But he knew that the TFA metric would never pass scientific muster. TFA needed to be able to gauge its effectiveness more accurately. It was doing great things, but it could be doing even better. Hrag began to think hard about how.

  He didn’t know it, but the national team was doing the same thing. Though outside researchers in New York had looked at TFA’s significant-gains data and confirmed that the organization was accurately identifying its most effective teachers, TFA recognized that its internal system had serious limitations. It needed a unified, standardized way to measure corps member impact on student achievement. It took some preliminary steps to improve the system right away. When the class of 2005 returned in September, a much higher standard was placed on teacher-created assessments, and CMs were required to show data for every student’s performance on every state standard. The result was a significant drop in the number of CMs achieving significant gains.

  A longer-term solution was in the works. TFA determined that it would refine goal setting by linking classroom goals to performance on state tests rather than to 80 percent mastery of standards. It also intended to start measuring student growth, as well as performance. To further enable continuous improvement, TFA decided to pilot a standardized growth assessment developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association the following year. If the pilot proved successful, TFA would be able to make precise comparisons
of student learning across grades, subjects, states, and schools—even those in more affluent communities—in a way that came closer to meeting objective academic standards of rigor.

  By turning to an external benchmark to measure gains and ensure more accurate comparability, TFA was headed in Taylor’s direction. She made Samir smile. Here was a teacher who had proved him wrong. He’d been skeptical of her results in January because he had never seen that type of increase before. Other good teachers had used the same test, with much different results. So he had reserved judgment on Taylor’s apparent significant gains.

  Taylor gave her kids a pep talk before they took the Gates-MacGinitie reading diagnostic for the third and last time. By then it was mid-June, and the walls of her classroom had been stripped bare. Gone was the racetrack with her classes’ competing scores. The college pennants were down, and so was the poster of the year’s big goals. The trash can was filled with the detritus of a year’s worth of instruction. Two seniors were cleaning her desk.

  “Today’s really important,” she said. Her kids were drop-a-pin quiet. “Here’s why. This is the very last time you will take this test. You have taken it two times already. You have made tremendous growth. You have jumped almost two grades. Remember, that’s our goal in this class. From wherever it was. If you were at the fifth-grade level, where do you want to be? Seventh! Are there gonna be people who jump more than that? There are. Will there be people who don’t make their goal? Sure. So here’s the situation. There are thirty-five questions—all level-one questions. They are right there in the text. Find the answer. This is your last chance to prove to yourself and to me that you can meet our big goals. When I met you, I never believed that we would or could be reading Shakespeare. Did you think we could read Romeo and Juliet? One of the most complicated texts? Well, you guys tackled it. You didn’t just tackle it, you did it really well. So now is your chance to prove you really can read at two grade levels above. I believe you can do it. You need to believe you can, too.”

  Taylor was not religious, but as the kids worked, she prayed.

  The answer came a week or so later when Taylor learned that her kids had made on average 2.9 years of growth.

  When she met with Samir for the last time, she was really nervous. Hrag had just lost his keys, had had to borrow her car to find Mackey at LMU, and was forced to cancel his appointment with Samir. Taylor took it instead. Her kids had scored an average of 73 percent in the class assessments. But they had gained three years in literacy. Which score mattered to TFA? Samir started with a patented generic speech, a “you did it, congratulations, now take time off to reflect and rest” kind of lecture. Taylor thought: Okay. No problem. I won’t work and just relax.

  Then Samir looked at her and said: “Your data. It was really good. I’d be lying if I said it’s something I see every day. This is really good, really good.”

  It took everything in her power not to cry. She had worked so hard, and she had pushed her kids to work so hard, because she knew she could get them to achieve. She had had them take the standardized reading comprehension test on top of her class assessments because she knew it would yield objective, more reliable results. She didn’t want there to be any doubt at all about their scores. Once they had taken the test for the third time, she was satisfied. There was no way anyone could say there wasn’t real growth there.

  Of course, she had considered Samir’s theory—the idea that maybe they had scored so high because they had tested in really low—but she didn’t believe it. She always thought that her students’ gains were for real. The kids explained what had happened. One student, Yemane, who had started at a sixth-grade reading level and ended up at twelfth, said: “I started listening. I had never listened before.” A lot of kids just said that no one had ever taught them how to read; once they understood the strategies Taylor showed them, it all made sense. Some admitted that they knew how to read, but Taylor had made them practice, and they got better at it. She didn’t know what their experiences had been in middle school—maybe they had had permanent subs for three years. But it was clear to Taylor that if you taught them, they would learn.

  Taylor gave a lot of the credit to Samir. Every time he came into her room for an hour, he would immediately see what was wrong and give her a smart suggestion for how to fix it. In the beginning, he told her she didn’t have a unit plan, that she needed to know where she was going. The next time, it was big goals. She had to set goals, and get the kids invested by creating a class competition. Then the problem was matching their reading comprehension skills to their performance on tests. These were all things she had been told at institute, but everything was happening so fast then, she’d just missed it.

  Before the meeting ended, Samir and Taylor talked about the year to come. She had already come up with her big goal for September. Now she wanted to figure out how to match their performances on the Gates-MacGinitie test with the state standardized tests. Those were the tests that really counted, and that’s where her kids were running into trouble. It was unfair. Taylor believed the CSTs were testing white norms. But she wasn’t going to make excuses for her kids. Her goal was to help them kick butt.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The End

  Hrag really liked teaching. One day, toward the end of the year, he had one of those “moments.” It happened while he was doing a PowerPoint on sickle-cell trait and paused for a moment. When he looked around, he realized that every single kid in the classroom was looking right back at him. Wow! They’re listening! The idea was so ridiculous to Hrag that he burst out laughing. And he couldn’t stop. He tried, but they were all still watching him, and that made him laugh even harder. It got to the point where he couldn’t breathe. The kids didn’t know what to make of it. And the more they stared, the more he laughed. Finally, he composed himself. But it took him a while, because the thought that he was teaching and they were listening was such a mind blow: How are they listening to ME?

  Lots of people listened to him. They had to. He didn’t hold back when he had concerns. Whenever the counseling office dumped more students into his room—and they were doing it up until the end of May—he went right downstairs and did something about it. Same thing with the increasing number of lockdowns and block scheduling in the spring. If administrators knew ahead of time that there would be double periods—as they must have known before the well-telegraphed May Day walkout by Hispanics—then they had an obligation to warn the staff so they could be prepared. Then there was the Chad thing with Green Dot. Dr. Wells thought Hrag was a grouch. Hrag considered himself one of the lone voices of reason.

  He wasn’t shy about calling out Teach For America’s shortcomings, either. Hrag argued that new corps members needed to be armed with standards-based lesson plans when they entered the classroom; it was hard enough learning how to teach without having to spend time figuring out what to teach.

  Until then, TFA had subscribed to the Chinese proverb “Give a man a fish, you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.” Handing over lesson plans to recruits like so many pieces of fish ran counter to the organization’s culture. Planning lessons was something every teacher had to learn in order to succeed. The subject was covered during institute; recruits were expected to execute in the fall. But Samir agreed with Hrag and began to work on developing standards-based curricula and assessments for teachers in the L.A. region. He credited Hrag as inspiration for the initiative.

  By the end of the 2005 school year, Samir predicted that Hrag would be taking a leadership role in the new School of Math and Science. In fact, Hrag had already stepped up. He and Taylor had worked on the original proposal for the school and helped write the application for its first grant. Hrag enjoyed running some of the early meetings, and he helped shape both the policies and the vision.

  After he got over being angry about Soleo’s defection—and the fact that he was taking three dynamite science teachers with him—Hrag decided he wanted s
ome control over how the next year would go. So he asked Morris and Chad if he could accompany them to the Teach For America hiring fair. The science department alone was looking for as many as ten new teachers for the next year. Hrag told them he could offer good insight into the mind of the TFA teacher and help identify the ones best suited for survival at Locke.

  The placement fair was held at Bethune Middle School, the same school TFA used to stage its monthly teacher-development workshops. Sometimes the Saturday-morning sessions, which were organized by content area, were helpful. Often they were seen as yet another drain on the new teachers’ time. The English teachers at Locke were lucky. Chad Soleo led a professional development session just for them. He was obviously a gifted teacher, and he completely understood the problems they faced. Chad helped Taylor and the others write their assessments so that they mirrored the format of the state’s standardized tests, and then reviewed them for rigor. But the quality of the other sessions varied. Phillip was frustrated because the math sessions were not divided by grade—middle school teachers and high school teachers were lumped in together, and their needs were much different. For him, one of the best things about the mandatory classes was that it gave him a chance to catch up with friends he had made during institute.

  The setup for the first of the TFA hiring fairs looked pretty much like the one Hrag remembered. When he arrived, there were about thirty CMs seated outside at picnic tables, waiting to be called into the auditorium for their school interviews. They were the first bunch of candidates, and they were on top of it. They had applied early, had taken the CSETs early, and were gung ho on Teach For America. (They also happened to live locally.) TFA didn’t want to complicate the hiring process by giving schools too many choices, so it kept the fair small to ensure a better placement rate. And it offered up only one or two math or science teachers at a time, knowing they’d be scooped up the moment they were on the block. Placement was a finely tuned process. Principals came with their needs, and TFA played Let’s Make a Match.