Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  The end of the year was always a stressful time for Frank Wells. But 2006 took the cake. It seemed that he hadn’t stopped fighting with the district—or the union—since the second day of his contract, when he kicked all the druggies and gangbangers out of Locke. Admittedly, he had bypassed a slew of things the district required under the auspices of due process. But Wells was working under his own auspices—the auspices of an emergency situation—and in the interest of his kids. He was still dealing with that issue on May 10, when a kid came onto campus and pointed a gun. It was right after school, and there were probably a hundred kids out on the quad. They scattered when they saw what was going down. Some of them ended up in Rachelle’s classroom. Eyewitnesses identified the gunman as a Locke student, and Wells immediately expelled him. The next thing he knew, the kid had convinced the district that it was a case of mistaken identity. The mother kicked up a fuss, and Wells was ordered to reinstate the boy.

  Wells was sick to death of dealing with higher-ups in the district. During the first week of June he wrote a letter of resignation. He believed that with all the bureaucracy he had to fight and the history of neglect at Locke, the school was doomed to fail. Of course he never sent the letter. He would have been a hypocrite if he joined the rest of the people who were abandoning Locke. He had to stay and fight. If I don’t, who will?

  Locke’s graduation was at least something he could be proud of. There were a record number of students graduating this year. And Locke students had been accepted at the big UCs, and even a few Ivies. The stands on the athletic fields, for once, were filled. And a mighty roar rose up when the graduates filed in, mortarboards on, their light blue gowns swishing as they marched single file to their seats on the field beneath a big white canopy. Blue, white, and yellow balloons bobbed in the air. Barely audible strains of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” wafted across the field. The sound system was broken.

  Phillip sat with the members of his small school. For the six who were leaving, this was the last Locke graduation they would attend as staff. It was sad. They still felt guilty. It would have been one thing if, after all the effort they had put into the school over the previous five years, Locke was in a better place. But it felt like the school would be in a worse place come September. And it wasn’t just them thinking it in some kind of self-aggrandizing fantasy; it was everyone else, other teachers at Locke, saying it.

  The class of 2006 were freshmen when the towering Mr. Osterhaus had first started teaching four years before. Wells had already conducted an exit interview with him. Andy had been frank; he didn’t hold back about the formidable problems he saw at the school. The principal was gracious and told him he could always come back.

  “Leaving Locke is like going to a planet with a yellow sun,” observed another Green Dot defector who sat with Mr. O and watched the ceremony. “Superman was just another guy on his planet. When he got to earth, he was a superhero.”

  Mr. O explained what his colleague meant. “The idea is, if you think you are a good teacher, and you are brought to a school that functions—that has a yellow sun—you become great.” He and the others leaving with him were being given a chance to “rock” as teachers. The painful truth was, having observed other functioning schools, Mr. O thought he was actually a terrible teacher. At Locke, even the so-so teachers were considered great.

  Wells kicked off the ceremony with a few words of congratulations. He told the graduates of 2006 that only two years before, fewer than 140 seniors had graduated from Locke. Now more than 300 students had been accepted to universities all across the country. That was news to the teachers in the stands. There were a handful of students going to four-year colleges—Roberto, the leader of the Hispanic walkout, who was headed for UC Riverside, was one of them. But the majority of graduates were only eligible to attend one of California’s community colleges, something anyone over the age of eighteen in California had the right to do.

  Before the ceremony, each graduate had been asked to write down the name of the college he or she would be attending in the fall.

  “Can I write Harvard?” asked one kid.

  “You can,” said Chad. “I’m not sure anyone would believe you, though.”

  As they stood to accept their diplomas, each graduate’s college destination was announced. There was no way to know that most of the kids would be attending those schools only in their dreams.

  But Phillip knew, and he was horrified: What is this mockery?

  There was no featured guest speaker at the graduation. Scott Braxton, the director of school services who reported to the local District 7 superintendent—who in turn was one of eight who reported to the newly named superintendent of schools, David Brewer—represented the district at the ceremony. He said a few words, then passed the mike to the salutatorian, the valedictorian, and the president of the class. The Saints’ choir sang “Stand Up for Love” by Destiny’s Child, and the graduates received their diplomas. Then the tassels were moved, the hats were in the air, and the class of 2006 was officially graduated.

  Chad Soleo was out on the field seated with Braxton throughout the ceremony. He was mortified. Braxton kept asking him who was in charge of staging the graduation. Why didn’t the microphones work? Had there been a rehearsal? Chad just shrugged and said he didn’t know. The fact was, the administration had never sat down and had a meeting to discuss the graduation. Instead, at the last minute, every available body was put on an assembly line in the community room, furiously stapling programs together just minutes before the ceremony was about to begin. As for the sound system, the official word was that someone had stolen the extension cord. Chad’s reaction was, Baloney.

  Though there was the little problem of the sound system, Chad didn’t think things had actually gone that badly. Graduation wasn’t a major failure. The kids all knew what they were doing, and the procession was fine. The music was well rehearsed, and actually quite good—if only it could have been heard. From his seat in the front row with the other administrators, Chad could see the face of each candidate. He knew most of them. He was so proud of them, and he wanted to savor their success. Instead, he had Braxton sitting beside him carping. What he wanted to say was: We’re up on the stage. There’s nothing we can do. Can you just let me enjoy the last couple of times I’m gonna see these kids? Maybe Braxton could read Chad’s mind. After a while, he gave it up.

  Chad felt really low. This was not the way he had envisioned leaving Locke. He had wanted to say good-bye to the kids, get into classrooms, and say good-bye to teachers, too. Instead, he had been working until the last minute. Once the grant application was complete, the master schedule for the following year had been thrown at him. Clearly, Wells had not wanted Chad to leave after all. It wasn’t until the day before school ended that Chad got around to packing up his office. He was a wreck. Locke had been his life. His identity. His home. His family. It was too much. He couldn’t keep it together, and he started crying. Just then, one of his former students walked in and found him.

  “You’re leaving, too?” she said in disbelief. And then she broke down and cried along with him.

  “A Tribute to Locke Staff, an End of the Year Awards Dinner/Delight/ Dance Night,” was held the evening of the last day of school at a banquet hall in an airport hotel just a twenty-minute ride from Locke. Hrag didn’t attend. That day his car had been hit in the school parking lot as he was leaving, by a student, who accused him of being a racist because he insisted on going through insurance to repair the damage instead of following the kid to his uncle’s repair shop deep in the heart of Watts. The student hit the exact spot that Hrag had just had repaired. Taylor advised Hrag to get out of town. That afternoon he headed to Vegas.

  Close to a hundred staff members showed up at the dinner/delight/ dance. Though he was the host, Dr. Wells was delayed—when he arrived home, he had collapsed into a deep sleep. Chad was there. Taylor, Phillip, and most of the other TFAers attended. And so did Rachelle and Stephen. A lot o
f alcohol was consumed. It was time to forget. And there was a lot to celebrate.

  Epilogue

  Every year the L.A. region has a culminating event in which the “graduating” second-year teachers are celebrated. The class of 2005 was invited to join the big farewell for their departing colleagues. Executive director Brian Johnson, who presided over the event, exhorted the eighty-two members of the class of 2004 to be proud of what they had done. They had changed lives, he said—their students’, one another’s, and their own. He issued a rousing call to action, reminding them that they were the fifteenth L.A. corps and that they had begun their commitment on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

  “Today, in this country, opportunity is determined by the neighborhood in which you grow up,” he said. “You are the successors to the civil rights leaders of the past. You, along with the eight hundred L.A. alumni and the ten thousand alumni nationwide, will change the course of history. Because of what you do, a child born in East L.A. will have the same opportunity to succeed as a child born in Beverly Hills. Let’s change this town so the quality of our children’s education does not depend on zip codes! This is a room of people who can do it, and I am proud to know you!”

  Next up was Greg Good, one of the Los Angeles region’s first executive directors, a man who liked nothing better than to be “preachin’ about teachin,’” a 1992 alum who “begged his way into TFA out of Brown” to teach a class of five-year-olds in Inglewood, California. There were thirty-five of them, he told his audience, and on their first day of school they sat staring in “shock and awe at the big hairy Texan man standing in front of them, who was staring back at them in equal shock and awe.” Since his days of ferrying Wendy Kopp around Los Angeles with a TFA cup in hand, Good had gone on to become an actor, a writer, a UCLA law student, and a lifelong advocate for education reform. It all started with Teach For America. And he wanted to share with the folks gathered there the three pillars of his TFA experience.

  The first was the “gift”—the gift of teaching, said Good. The inequities that existed in Los Angeles were downright criminal and merited attention every day. But that said, there were glorious treats for TFAers. Like when a kid you taught in kindergarten called to say he had finished his finals at UCLA. Treats like that were “real nuggets of experience that stick in your heart and head and fuel me to this very day,” he said.

  The second pillar was the “power.” Good explained how scared he was when he began teaching and how he lived with a daily feeling of angst—an angst born of the fear that his kids weren’t going as fast as they should, and the realization that he was responsible every day to keep them on that journey. That fear and anxiety required him to dive deep into himself. He knew he owed his kids everything he could muster. “I don’t mean just working my hardest,” he explained. “They needed my A game. And when I faced that, what emerged was the best me in my life. I wasn’t the best teacher, probably not even that good, but my kids did achieve, and they deserve credit for that. And as a benefit of being part of their journey, I found the very best Greg Good I ever encountered. I found the Greg Good I wanted to be—as a leader, as a man, as a son, as a brother—challenging the inequities out there and engaging my world. When you tackle the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your life, you may emerge with a level of personal power that extends past the fear and angst that led to it.”

  The third pillar was the “responsibility.” For Teach For America, student achievement was the bottom line, he said. Students had to achieve, and corps members had to figure out a way to empower them to do that. But the mission didn’t end there; it couldn’t. The level of inequity was obscene, the level of stratification grotesque and morally reprehensible. The members of the class of 2004 were part of a corps, an ever-expanding network of warriors. “You are a group of pit bulls—you lock your teeth into whatever you take on and you do not let go until you achieve,” said Good. “There is a community to that, and it will feed you. The realities are stark and the stakes are high. In this city, in this state, in this country, we devour low-income kids on a daily basis. This city, this state, this nation is crying for leaders to speak the truth, who will engage aggressively from their experience about the possibility and challenge of low-income kids, who will go full-tilt boogie. I congratulate you all again on this wonderful first step and the colossal task you are only now beginning to address. The movement is contingent upon you humbly and aggressively engaging the issue.”

  Every TFAer in the class of 2005 got to experience the gift, the power, and the responsibility.

  When school started again in September 2006, Hrag was more or less heading up the biology department. For the first months of the school year, he led the professional development workshops for science teachers, too. He became a master to a student teacher from UCLA’s teacher education program. Over the course of the year, in consultation with other members of the biology team, he rewrote Locke’s biology curriculum to align with the tough California standards and the timing of the state’s assessments, and he devised his own simple system for student tracking.

  Hrag felt strongly that incoming CMs needed to be provided with workable lesson plans and linked assessments—tied to state standards—if they were to be successful. So he wrote to Brian Johnson, and created a PowerPoint detailing how to effectively collect and share curricula for each subject area across the Los Angeles corps. He also urged TFA to have a heart—CMs’ successes needed to be recognized, and so, too, did their travails. Hrag suggested that TFA set up support groups, celebratory gatherings, and stress workshops. He noted that TFA also had to do a better job of tracking alumni—and tapping their talents in support of the mission.

  Much of what Hrag suggested regarding curriculum ended up being incorporated into major changes to the Regional Student Achievement Tool Kits (RSATs), the suite of resources each new teacher in Los Angeles received before starting in the classroom in 2007. In addition to a new and improved national tool kit, the L.A. corps was given electronic curriculum binders that broke California state standards down into teaching objectives, with unit plans and assessments pegged to the school-year calendar. New CMs were still being taught how to fish; the difference was, now they were being served some, too.

  Working at Locke continued to be a challenge. Things were fine in Hrag’s classroom, but conditions schoolwide seemed to take a turn for the worse. Hrag now totally understood why Chad and the others left; every time he tried to do something, he ran into a brick wall. It didn’t help that Green Dot and the school district became locked in battle over the school’s fate. A bid from Green Dot in late fall 2006 to partner with LAUSD in the running of Locke was rejected. The yearlong tug-of-war that ensued was a distraction for students and staff alike, and it sapped the energy and enthusiasm of even the most ardent Locke reformers.

  Hrag earned a master’s degree in education in the spring of 2006, and his parents flew out for the ceremony. He graduated with a 4.0 average and left LMU with a newfound appreciation for its program, which had been specially tailored to accommodate the time constraints and pressures felt by TFA recruits and was uncommonly forgiving of their shortened attention spans.

  He spent a lot of time worrying about what to do after Teach For America. TFA’s Los Angeles office sent CMs a regular bulletin filling them in on area events, providing them with corps documents, posting job opportunities, and giving shout-outs. The region offered career services to outgoing CMs, too—ranging from free prep classes for the GREs and the LSATs, courtesy of Kaplan, to introductions to alumni in various professions through casual meetings and conference calls. TFA’s Office of Career and Civic Opportunities also sent out career specific “news-blasts,” complete with job listings and tips on how to navigate the hiring process. An entire section of the TFA website was dedicated to “After the Corps.”

  Hrag read it all. He thought about consulting, and even applied to TFA to be an assistant to an executive director. But it was at a TFA
-sponsored career fair that he found what he was looking for. Building Excellent Schools, a national nonprofit that trains aspiring school leaders to start their own urban charter school, had a table there, and the program instantly appealed to Hrag. He had made up his mind that he didn’t want to work for anyone else—he wanted to be able to blame himself for whatever he couldn’t do. And he wanted to make a bigger impact. Building Excellent Schools was highly selective and very intense—like Teach For America on steroids. Hrag applied and was accepted, a rare feat for a teacher just out of the corps.

  Hrag spent a chunk of the summer traveling in Europe with friends. He began his fellowship in Boston in August 2007; he hoped to open his charter school in Los Angeles in 2009.

  Rachelle returned to Locke in 2006 and continued to teach special ed biology in her aquamarine classroom. Things went much more smoothly. She added lots of new projects to the curriculum; her kids even got to dissect a fetal pig. She saved her lesson plans, matching them to the school calendar, so that no other new special ed biology teacher would ever have to start from scratch. She sought out training in the latest techniques for teaching reading and applied the strategies she learned to her classroom, devoting one day a week exclusively to literacy. Rachelle won a mayor’s award for excellence in teaching and civic duty for services in the community. She received her certification in mild to moderate special ed K–12 from Cal State, Dominguez Hills, and was awarded her master’s in special ed in December 2007.