Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  Samir was in charge of putting the first two fairs together at the same time that he was wrapping up the last rounds of Co-Investigation for all fifty of his CMs. The L.A. office was understaffed, and he was strapped. It was important that TFA get as many corps members placed as early as possible. The previous year’s placements had not gone smoothly; about a third of the corps had left institute not knowing where they would be teaching. This year the goal was to place 80 percent of the CMs before the end of summer training. Samir and the L.A. staffers assigned to placement had done a few mock run-throughs. As busy as he was, Samir wanted to hit the target.

  At the front of the interviewing room was TFA’s workstation, with the names and the status of the prospective hirees color-coded on a computer: red for hired, orange for holding, and yellow for being interviewed. CMs were called into the cavernous room and directed to one of the tables where personnel from the interviewing school were seated. If the interview went well, the CM was hired on the spot. The school and TFA then signed an agreement; TFA would not send the teacher on any more interviews, and the school would not fill the position with another candidate. If the CM was not hired (which was unusual), he returned to the holding pen to hope for a better outcome from the next interview.

  TFA offered Locke several candidates to interview. Chad, Morris, and Hrag sat at the Locke table, pencils poised over their notepads. Before the interviews began, they had agreed that a bull’s-eye drawn at the corner of the page would signal an acceptance. A negative sign would mean a rejection. Hrag came prepared with questions. And they were tough. He wanted to know how the CMs coped with stress, how they would handle themselves in a confrontation, if they had even been in a situation remotely as challenging as teaching in an urban classroom. And even as he was asking the questions, he knew they were kind of unfair; the kids hadn’t even been to institute. But he persisted. He really wanted to get a handle on how they would react when their backs were against the wall. Of course, Locke desperately needed teachers, and both Chad and Morris were huge fans of TFA. So they had their bull’s-eyes down almost immediately, while Hrag would still be holding out, hammering the prospect with questions. Chad and Morris treated Hrag with the utmost respect. They just sat there, waiting for his bull’s-eye. Finally, he would relent, figuring if those two were convinced, who was he to give a thumbs-down. All three candidates were hired. It kind of bothered Hrag. He didn’t think any of them was ideal. Then it dawned on him. Whoever steps up and seems semicompetent will get the job. Why am I here? He decided his services were no longer needed.

  Driving home, he thought about what it was like when he had interviewed. Back then, he had this cocky attitude. He figured if they didn’t like him, he probably wouldn’t like them, so he wouldn’t want to work for them anyway. Hrag was one of the first people called that day, and when he was hired, everyone congratulated him. He was like: Of course I got it. Why would I not? Looking back now, if he had been the person interviewing him, he probably would have thought: Okay. This kid has no idea what he’s getting into. I’m glad he’s psyched now. Because that was sort of the way he was thinking about the kids he had just questioned. One of the candidates was this really sweet girl, completely oblivious. When she was hired and everyone was giving her high fives, Hrag was smiling, thinking to himself, You think you just got this great big “first” by being hired, but not really. They were gonna take you anyway.

  Hrag didn’t believe anyone could really predict who was going to be a successful teacher. He thought of the guy across the hall from him at Locke. He was really nice, reserved, almost timid, someone you would think the kids would eat alive. But no. They loved him. Then there would be these hard-asses who you would expect would shut the kids down, and the opposite happened. It was weird what they responded to. But he thought he had finally figured it out. He had spent the whole year trying to hide who he was from his students. But if you really wanted to succeed with them, you had to be genuine. You had to be you.

  For Chad, the guilt would not go away. But he had a contract with LAUSD that he intended to fulfill, and that meant he still had to work with Wells, who was obviously feeling betrayed. It was tough, and it was only going to get worse as June progressed and the year came to a close. He didn’t know how he was going to make it through the senior prom. He didn’t even want to think about graduation.

  There was plenty to do. Locke had been identified as one of ten schools eligible for a one-million-dollar federal grant to help implement small learning communities. The district needed a sixty-page school-impact report—immediately. With just weeks of school left, Chad was put in charge of it. Ideally, he would not be writing a report of that magnitude on his own. But that’s pretty much what it had turned into. The coordinators of most of the small schools showed no interest in helping out, and he didn’t want to take teachers out of the classroom. So Vanessa Morris, Josh Hartford, and a few others helped him before and after school. And he worked flat out every day from seven in the morning until eight-thirty at night. In the meantime, he had lots of stuff to do for Green Dot. His new small school was supposed to open on August 25, and they still didn’t have a site. But Green Dot would have to wait. Chad couldn’t let Locke miss out on a million dollars. Even though there was a good possibility that the money would be squandered, he had to do the work.

  Alone in his office, he stewed: Why am I putting myself through this, driving myself crazy to get this in on time, when it’s for them, for their own small schools? Why don’t they step up? Because they know I’ll sit here till eight-thirty every night writing the damn grant, and if I need help, I’ll call on the people I have relationships with. Well, good luck to whoever gets this job next year, because the people who do all the work at Locke are leaving; the people doing the work to hold the school together outside school instruction are going to be gone. Locke is headed for a big crash.

  It would have been nice to have Wells’s support. When Chad told him the report was much more work than he had anticipated and would require a substantial amount of time, Wells just told him to go ahead. But Chad didn’t hear Wells saying: “Go ahead. I’m the principal, and it’s a million-dollar grant, and I’m gonna help you on this.” It was nothing like that. Wells had announced the grant at two or three meetings and said that “we” were pursuing it. That was really galling to Chad because: (a) “we” weren’t pursuing it, Chad was; and (b) the grant was by no means guaranteed.

  Chad was resigned to doing his own thing, and it was apparent that Wells was resigned to moving on without him. As part of the SAIT intervention, Wells had a principal coach who had asked the VPs to fill out a survey on his performance. There was no way Chad was going to fill it out. It wasn’t his job to help make Wells a better principal. It was Wells’s job to make Chad a better VP, to mentor him. If Wells wanted to have an exit interview with him on his way out the door, fine. Chad had lots to say. But he wasn’t going to fill out some anonymous survey.

  For a while it looked as if he might be having that exit chat sooner than he thought. Though Chad did the work of a VP in charge of small schools, he had never been given the job. Knowing that Locke was still owed the position, and knowing how important the grant was, Chad asked Wells if he could get someone in that spot for the last weeks of the year. It would tie the person in to the grant and allow Chad to help with the transition.

  Wells said no, he didn’t think so. Then he laid a bomb in Chad’s lap. He suggested that Chad look into getting an early release from the district.

  “I know it’s only human nature to look forward to the next thing you’re going to do, and you’re probably starting to check out,” said Wells. “Find out if Green Dot will pick up your salary.”

  Chad was flabbergasted. He didn’t know what to make of what he had just heard. If someone else had spoken those words to Chad, he would assume that the person was saying in the nicest possible way: “Get the hell out of my school, and I’ll arrange it for you.” But with Wells, he wasn’t so s
ure. There was no other AP on campus available to write the grant. Wells would have to be crazy to show Chad the door in the middle of the process.

  Chad left the meeting and went straight to Green Dot. “Look,” he said. “I can’t read him. He could be an empty barrel making noise, or he could be talking to the district and arranging a transfer because he can’t fire me under the administrators’ contract. I think what he’s saying is ‘This is the beginning of the end; I’m gonna make your life hell.’” Green Dot was cool. If Chad wanted to quit, they would pick up his salary. If he wanted to see it through to the end, that was okay, too. He had nothing to worry about. Green Dot would support whatever he wanted to do.

  That night was the prom. Chad felt terrible, but as an administrator he was required to be there. It was held at the Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles in one of the lower-level ballrooms. The senior prom at Locke was always over-the-top. Chad would never forget his first one: it seemed that all the kids came dressed in purple coats, with canes and hats with feathers. And Ms. Talley, one of the longtime teachers, was there checking out the girls’ gowns. When she spotted the ones who had arrived with slits in their dresses up to their hips, she said: “Nope. We’re sewing that shut. Come with me.” Then she took them upstairs, sat down at a sewing machine, and had them wait while she made them decent.

  The 2006 prom was tame by comparison. Kids still pulled up in Hummer limos, and there was the occasional purple fur coat with silver gloves (and one kid in a pink tux and hat to match), but most of the boys wore white tuxedos or tasteful suits. The girls were in gorgeous, one-of-a-kind ball gowns, many designed and sewn by family or local seamstresses. Some couples came color-coordinated, with the boy’s shirt matching the girl’s dress. They looked beautiful. And maybe it was the clothes, or the occasion, but there seemed to be a measure of gravitas about them, a sense that they had stepped up, that they had a place in the world. Seven or eight hotel security men circulated throughout the ballroom, and two of Locke’s own campus policemen were there, too, but they had nothing to do except watch as the strobe lights pulsed and the kids danced in time to the incessant rhythms of reggaeton, rap, and hip-hop.

  Even a little dustup over the naming of the royal court didn’t spoil the fun. There had been a short campaign on campus before the kids cast their ballots for king, queen, and attendants. The problem was, when the results were counted, the winners were all Hispanic.

  “We are a diverse school, and that has to be represented in the court,” Wells told the staffers overseeing the counting. One of the senior advisors objected: “They don’t see themselves as black and brown. It’s the senior class. They voted, and you should honor their vote and let this happen.”

  Wells stood firm. He decided that there would be two princes, and one of them would be black—the kid who had come in a close second. When the court was announced, the only ones to complain were the two runners-up for Prom Queen. They wanted queen to be a shared title, too.

  It had been a very difficult day, and Chad was in a funk all night. When he arrived, it was as if he and Wells had never had that awful conversation earlier in the day. Wells was asking Chad’s advice—almost deferring to him: What do you think about this? And how about that? Chad was thinking, Dude. How about if I just go home, since you told me today to leave. He stayed as long as he could stand it. At eleven-fifteen he said the hell with it and left.

  On his way out, he passed the bar where all the TFAers and other staff were hanging out. They were having a great time. About thirty-five of them had met for dinner downtown before heading over to the Biltmore en masse. They were dressed up, too: the first-years didn’t look much older than the students. When the music got too loud and the female teachers tired of being asked to dance, they had moved the party to the bar. It was another one of those moments when Taylor and Hrag and Rachelle and Phillip were all reminded that there were some things that were common across zip codes and cultures. The senior prom was one of them.

  The prom happened to coincide with USC’s graduation. While Taylor was up at the bar, she bumped into some Greeks she had known from the year before. They looked like they had just walked out of a J. Crew ad—gorgeous, wealthy white kids. When they asked Taylor why she was at the Biltmore, she told them she was a teacher and that she was chaperoning the Locke prom. They were drunk, and they didn’t get it; they couldn’t understand what Taylor was doing with these black kids dressed up like Lil’ Bow Wow. If Taylor needed any reminding of how happy she was to be teaching at Locke, she got it then. Under no circumstances would I want to be back at USC. These people are so ignorant. My life is so different now—and so much better. This is the richest experience anyone could have right out of college. I am so fortunate.

  The days flew by. Once the prom was over, the seniors thought they were finished. But Taylor kept working them. They couldn’t read. She couldn’t let them out in the world like that; it felt wrong. She didn’t let up on her ninth-graders, either. They had started reading Romeo and Juliet in April. For Taylor, everything she had been trying to do all year came together then. And there they were, kids who were reading like fifth-graders in September dissecting and interpreting Shakespeare! It was unreal. Her kids from Watts were doing what ninth-graders all over the nation were doing—and doing it well.

  She knew from the very first day of Romeo and Juliet that the kids were going to get it. She started by having them make a T-chart of all the words in the prologue that had to do with love and hate. “You already know all about foreshadowing and connotations,” she told them. “So you know how to analyze a Shakespeare play! Notice, we have positive-connotation words and negative connotations. The point is, we think Romeo and Juliet is all about love—but there is hate in there as well.” Taylor pointed out that the first word Shakespeare used in the play was “two,” and they talked about pairs—how it took two people to love and two people to fight. Who started the fight between the two families? she asked. And could anyone else think of examples where old people start wars their kids have to fight?

  Vishon, a really smart African American boy, raised his hand. “The Bloods and the Crips,” he said. “The older folks, they put it in their heads to go out there and kill other people that haven’t done anything to you. You go shoot them. If it’s a park picnic and they see a Blood, they gonna start fighting.”

  They made the connection. And they were hooked. Over the weeks that followed, Taylor read aloud from the play, stopping after every few sentences to check for understanding with text-related questions. She had the kids act out passages. She played scenes from the Leonardo DiCaprio movie. They wrote essays. She even had them create CDs with songs that best described their favorite character in the tragedy. Everything she did from mid-April until the very last day of school was centered around reading and understanding that play. She knew they had internalized the material when they played a game of Jeopardy! in preparation for the final. Her kids could identify lines, characters, scenes, themes, symbols, irony, and foreshadowing. They had a blast—they cheered and jeered, arguing over which teams knew more. Romeo and Juliet was their favorite thing they had done all year. They knew it, understood it, loved it.

  Before the year was out, Taylor called each student to her desk to review reading comprehension scores over the year. Vishon was the second student up. He had started the year reading at 5.7 and ended at 8.7. “Awesome!” she said. “Your overall growth is three years. What could help you improve even more?”

  “Just keep reading,” he said. Did he have books at home? He was welcome to take some from the class library. “Congratulations, Vishon. You met our class goals. I am very proud of you.”

  Not everything she said to every person amounted to a big wet kiss. She told others they could do better: they needed to buckle down, and she would help them.

  Throughout June, she deconstructed her classroom bit by bit. By the last day, the walls were bare. And as the classroom grew increasingly more forlorn, she did, too, in a f
unny way. Part of her couldn’t wait for the year to be over; she and and Hrag were going to go camping on Catalina, and then she was meeting a friend in Europe. But the other part of her was worried that she’d miss the drama too much. One day she saw a young woman her age walking a bike up a hill. The sun was shining, and she looked so carefree, and Taylor thought, That’s where I want to be—I want to be on that bike. But then she’d be having a good time somewhere and one of her kids’ faces would pop into her head, and her mind would get the best of her and she’d start worrying: My God, I wonder what Marisa is doing. Even the whole notion of teaching was confounding: I don’t know if I’m good enough and I don’t know if I want to stay to get better.

  On the last day of class, after the kids had taken their final, she handed each student a glass. Then she passed out Oreos and apple juice. “Listen up, ladies and gentelmen!” she exclaimed. “The reason I gave you glasses is because when somebody does something admirable or congratulatory, you give them a toast. So raise your glasses, please, in a toast to accomplishment!” She reminded them of the two class goals they had set in September: to get 80 percent or higher on tests and quizzes, and to raise reading levels by one and half to two grades. “As a class we met our big goals. So raise your glasses!”

  The kids hoisted their cups, and Taylor went around the room until she had clinked every last one.

  Hrag gave the final test on the second-to-last day of class so that he and the kids could grade their papers together on the last day, before the party. He was in a great mood. The end was approaching.

  The day before, he had been pushed to the limit. He’d been in a fender bender—a result of stress, he figured—and after he picked up the car from the auto-body shop, he had gone for a run. The running was something that he had finally fit into his schedule. He had started the school year overweight and out of shape. His sister had been nagging him about it, so he and Taylor got on a program: no more red meat, yogurt for lunch instead of a sandwich, exercise. It was working. He had lost fifteen pounds. But somewhere on his run his house key had fallen from the drawstring of his shorts. He spent the rest of the day trying to recover. Taylor took his scheduled appointment with Samir, and he ran around in circles trying to right his life.