The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  But there have been good times, too. After I hadn’t seen her for almost a year, we caught up over lunch in her junior year, slurping noodles at a ramen joint on Broadway. I was afraid she might be close to dropping out. Instead, she laid the news on me: “I got a 3.3 GPA for the semester and I wanted to thank you for all your encouragement. I hope you like this.” She handed me a box, and inside was a carefully folded navy blue sweater, which turned blurry as my eyes welled up. I was elated. Afterward, to celebrate her accomplishment, we sat side by side getting pedicures and gossiping about the bad old days and the mean girls of Union Street.

  No matter how you cut it, the academic results of Union Street, a reform-minded school that endeavored to prepare students for college, were poor. Of the roughly ninety freshmen I taught in 2006, I am in touch with more than half. Of those, only three students I know of graduated from a four-year college in a four-year period.

  In fairness to the former Bloomberg administration, which championed the small schools movement, Union Street’s results are well below average. Overall, this change to the system is standing the test of time. In 2014, a major multiyear study of twenty-one thousand NYC students in small schools showed a nearly 10 percent higher graduation rate than in large schools. The results are particularly striking for young black men who graduated from New York’s small schools: They enrolled in college at a rate of just over 43 percent; that may sound horrific, but it beats the big high schools by more than 10 percent.

  A year after the Union Street graduation, I found myself again in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. Another full-capacity crowd had gathered for the Project Advance gala honoring another Wall Street titan. As always, I moved through the crowd thanking the donors, but tonight it was hard not to be struck by another group of people in the room: the accomplished alumni of the program whom I saw at every turn. I had a happy reunion with Sharon, the young woman who inspired my decision to teach at that same event in the same room years before. I remembered her words from 2004 vividly: “Take the plunge, Ed. Go and teach.” After Choate, she excelled at Harvard and then Columbia Law School. She earned two prestigious clerkships and is now a lawyer at one of the most prestigious white-shoe firms in New York. She is one of Project Advance’s 263 lawyers. Next, I spotted Jaime, an eye surgeon, one of the program’s one hundred doctors, who’d recently been appointed to the Yale Medical School faculty. I had observed him in surgery the month before, when he restored the sight of a thirteen-year-old girl with a rare condition. Nearby stood Nate, a recent Brown graduate who postponed his dream of getting a PhD in paleontology to open a charter school in East New York, Brooklyn, one of the lowest academically performing districts in the country. An alum who is a special assistant to President Obama for Legislative Affairs was there, as well as the program’s first White House Fellow.

  After a last-minute pep talk before the dinner, I sent Julia, a high school senior, to the podium. She had been chosen to share her journey with the crowd. Brilliant, modest, and polished, Julia was the oldest of four daughters raised in the Bronx by a strict, single Dominican mother. She opened with a confession: Knowing how overprotective her mother was, five years before, she forged her mother’s signature to apply to Project Advance and then again on her application to boarding school in Massachusetts. Julia excelled at boarding school and, among a slew of other honors and awards, was voted the top freshman girl by the faculty. As if the crowd weren’t enthralled enough, she ended with this:

  “This spring, I called my mother to give her some amazing news. ‘Mami, me aceptaron en Harvard!!’ I yelled as soon as she picked up the phone. There was an awkward pause. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘don’t stay up too late tonight, adios,’ and she hung up the phone. Wasn’t she happy for me? Proud of me? Then it hit me. My mother had never heard of Harvard.”

  Then 150 more seniors, each headed to an impressive college, joined Julia onstage. The crowd leaped to its feet and applauded for a solid five minutes.

  This event has always been the highlight of my year and yet, without warning, I felt a pang of sadness. Even years after my failed foray at teaching, so much of me wished that this were the Union Street graduation I was witnessing. That I was watching my former students cross the stage on their way to great colleges and bright futures.

  While this isn’t the story I was hoping to tell, despite it all, I have made my peace and remain defiantly hopeful. I realize that all steps forward, whether halting and small or bounding and grand, are valuable. I am as proud of Nee-cole as I am of Julia. Encouragement, good role models, and the occasional break can open a whole new world for a kid. And conversely, with a few wrong turns and without the right opportunities and support, any kid can end up robbed of a promising future.

  Any role I have played in a young person’s life—no matter how direct or indirect—during my decade at Project Advance or, yes, even during my dismal year at Union Street, is a worthy one. As I walked out of the ballroom and into the cacophony of Lexington Avenue, it hit me: I’d be a fool not to celebrate where I am and what I have tried to do.

  Epilogue

  A Message to Charles

  IT WAS JANUARY 2013, six months after the benefit at the Waldorf, on the kind of dark winter evening when 5:30 p.m. feels like the dead of night. Snow flurries plinked lightly against the windows of a downtown loft space where a Project Advance trustee was holding a reception for our undergraduates interested in careers in education.

  Representatives from all the big teaching recruitment programs and charter schools were in the room eagerly trying to attract Project Advance’s college seniors. For them, this was a mother lode: Instead of the usual surfeit of well-intentioned, upper-middle-class white kids eager to help the urban poor, here was a roomful of brilliant, pedigreed students of color who looked like and had lived like the kids they would teach.

  I was engaged in an awkward conversation with one of them: Charles Lee, a supersweet super nerd I’d known since he entered the program in fifth grade. A self-described “über-mutt,” he was a mix of Caribbean black and Hakka Chinese by way of Jamaica with some Bronx Puerto Rican thrown in for good measure.

  “It’s really important for me to give back, and there’s no question that teaching is the best way to do it.” Small-boned and earnest, Charles looked up from a plate piled high with waxy, precut cubes of yellow and white cheese, which he was devouring as only a college kid could. He gulped down another piece and continued. “Being part of Project Advance, attending private school, and having all these advantages opened my eyes to just how unfair the whole educational system really is. I want to make a difference.”

  I nodded. His words were eerily familiar. It was practically the same “into the fray of teaching” spiel that I’d given everyone several years earlier.

  “So, Mr. Boland, tell me about your experience. I know they loved you! Lots of lightbulbs going off over everybody’s heads, I bet.” During graduate school, I’d served as a teaching assistant in Charles’s history class during the academic boot camp that all Project Advance kids must undergo for fourteen months before private school. Now he was five months away from graduating from Brown with honors in economics. The investment banks were falling all over themselves to snatch this kid up, but his first priority was to do something altruistic. A charter school network representative had just spent the last half hour giving him the hard sell, and he seemed close to signing on the dotted line for a two-year stint in an underserved Brooklyn school.

  I strained a fake smile. “Well, sure…there were lightbulbs going off…now and again.”

  He looked a little puzzled.

  “Did you feel well supported by your school?”

  “Yeah, to an extent. There were some things in place.”

  “Well, all the programs and schools that I’m considering have a lot of special supports for new teachers.”

  “I am sure they do.” I latched my teeth onto the lip of a plastic wine tumbler and thought back to the “spec
ial support” meetings at Union Street that were promised for new teachers. We ended up having a total of two: the first one two days before the start of school and the second after about a week of classes. At the first meeting, I remember the powerful words of a new middle school math teacher, Althea, a bougie, twenty-two-year-old, oft-proclaimed Christian, right out of Howard University. She spoke about the special responsibility she felt to give back to poor communities of color before she went off to graduate school. We were all so moved by her words. Only ten days later, at the second meeting, she was bawling her eyes out, pounding on a desk, and howling about her students: “They are ANIMALS!” We sat in stunned silence. Next to her was the new Spanish teacher, Alvin, who was right out of Tufts. He lasted a month before he threw in the towel. Some support.

  “Did you feel like you were making a difference?” Charles asked.

  “Look, Charles, I’ll level with you. It was a tough year. I had a hard time with classroom management,” I said, churning inside with ambivalence. I had returned to a world where I was confident and successful, and I didn’t like being dragged back to the clusterfuck of Union Street.

  “You only stayed…a year?” His smile disappeared and his shoulders dropped a little.

  “But it’ll be different for you,” I sputtered. “You’re tougher than I am.” It was a stretch: Charles weighed 120 pounds soaking wet; his voice was slight and reedy. At least there was six feet of me to abuse. I feared they would eat him alive.

  “I don’t consider myself very tough,” he said.

  “Well, you’ll get tough!” I said, just a little too loud. I was trying to be honest but encouraging; I was being neither.

  “As much as I want to teach, I also think investment banking would be interesting, and I could really help out my parents financially. So what do you think, Mr. Boland, should I try teaching?”

  I pretended not to hear his question, waved to someone, and started to the other side of the room. “Good luck with your decision. I really should say hi to a few other people.”

  In the following weeks, I returned repeatedly to my conversation with Charles. Ashamed of my evasion, I thought long and hard about his question. I started writing him an e-mail but was never satisfied with its message. I saved draft after draft, each one growing longer and more ambitious. Finally, late one night, months after seeing him, after two whiskeys and a shot of espresso, I hit Send on my e-mail message with the subject line, “Ramblings from a One-Year Flameout.” Below is a modified and fortified version of what I sent him:

  Dear Charles,

  Great to see you at the education reception in January. I’m afraid I owe you an apology. That evening you asked me if you should try teaching. In the moment, I lacked the courage and clarity to offer you an honest answer, but since then I have given your question a great deal of thought. Like most educational exchanges, I learned more in putting this “lesson” together than you will in reading it. I suppose that’s the first secret of the business: Teachers are always taught far more by their students than the reverse.

  Before I launch in, let me say a word about why I feel qualified to answer at all. Where do I—a product of nearly total parochial education, professionally steeped in elite educational institutions, and with only one disastrous year of public school teaching under my belt—get off giving you advice? Well, to be blunt, most of the wisdom of the experts I read in graduate school (from the left, right, and center politically, and from those who shuffle between all three camps) and advice I heard from my school administrators was not helpful. I am by no stretch an expert, but I can offer you what I wished I’d heard as I was making my decision to teach and what I’ve gleaned from two decades of working in different educational settings. So from my admittedly limited vantage point, here is my answer:

  My answer is: “Yesbut,” and the “but” is pretty big because it is likely going to be brutally hard on you emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Do it! Go and teach your heart out. Teach those little monsters till it hurts—and it will. In the hopes of making it sting a little less, here, in no particular order, is my advice for a first-year teacher in a tough school:

  Scrutinize Your Prospective Schools

  In retrospect, if I had done more homework, I would have taken a job I was offered at a gem of a small high school in Brooklyn that serves the same type of students as Union Street, but with a more cohesive and disciplined approach and far better results.

  Like me, you’ll encounter a bustling marketplace of reform ideas, each sounding more promising than the last. It’s easy for a novice to be duped by a sales pitch or get the wrong impression in a quick afternoon visit to a school, so be on the lookout for any warning signs. Ask hard questions to find out if those ideas are making a difference. If you do your homework, you will go in with your eyes wide open and hopefully find a school with a philosophy that matches your personality and passions.

  First, look at the hard data. There is more public information about school performance available today than ever before, but it is often hard to locate and interpret. Do the legwork to gather information from a variety of sources—official and unofficial. Read every website, survey, and evaluation you can find. Don’t just look at standardized test scores, but delve into class size, school safety surveys, student and teacher attendance, number of suspensions, percent of English Language learners and Special Ed students, staff turnover percentage, graduation rates, and college/career readiness measures. While there are no magic numbers that will ensure success, look at how schools with similar student bodies compare.

  Second, gather your own impressions while visiting: What is the caliber and type of work being asked of the students? What kinds of questions are the kids asking? Has their curiosity been piqued or are they just following orders? Do teachers appear to share an educational philosophy? How do the teachers and the administration interact? Don’t just ask the administrators; if possible, find opportunities to question current and past teachers, parents, students and alumni, grad school professors and classmates.

  Third, seek out a principal who is both visionary and practical, someone who can quote the curriculum gurus and get the cell phone out of a kid’s hand in three seconds flat. (Think half Steve Jobs, half Captain Queeg.) My school and administration were driven by progressive ideas and dedicated to reform, but without discipline the kids ran amok and little was accomplished. Other schools are run with military discipline and precision, but lack educational vision and warmth.

  Is Everyone on the Same Page with Classroom Management?

  During a nasty battle over gum chewing with a student one day, she complained to me, “Half of you teachers will let me chew and half of you won’t. Why don’t you just make up your minds?” She was right. Students shouldn’t have to learn a different set of rules and consequences for each of their seven teachers. It confuses them and violates their sense of what is right. Look for evidence of behavioral norms and expectations across classrooms. Is there a philosophy that permeates the school? Teachers should be largely using the same language and following the same procedures to manage their classrooms for everything from small infractions to the most serious suspensions. That consistency tells students there is a right way to act.

  But, as important, whatever that classroom management philosophy is, make sure that you are comfortable following it. If you are not willing to enforce utterly straight lines in the hallway all day long, don’t choose a school where that is part of the culture. If being a “no excuses” badass is required, make sure you are a bit of a badass; otherwise, students will smell the insincerity a mile away. They know “frontin’” when they see it. If the setting is more progressive and long, reflective psychosocial conversations with students about their behavior are the norm, make sure you have the mettle for that as well.

  Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion is the kind of teacher’s bible I wish had existed when I taught. Its power is in its specificity to describe and rationalize teaching and
behavioral techniques. (He even tells teachers there is a right way to stand still!) In retrospect and at the risk of oversimplifying, I realize being consistent, calm, clear, and positive with my off-task students would have been far more effective than my default: loud, fast, angry, and grasping for a different system of discipline every month.

  Two final words of advice about classroom management that I heard too late from great teachers: Resist the urge to resent and withdraw from the kids who fight you the hardest; they are the ones who need you the most. Tell yourself your most nightmarish student is your favorite and act like it. And second, don’t be afraid to admit publicly to kids when you have made a mistake. You’ll gain credibility and respect, and they’ll respond in kind.

  Plan Every Minute, Plan Every Detail

  The nuns who taught me in grammar school had it right: “An idle mind is the devil’s playground.” If students sense there is a highly structured classroom culture in place, they will focus more and act out less. I paid the price for failing to create classroom systems and procedures from the beginning. Figure out exactly when and how a student can sharpen a pencil, request to use the bathroom, and answer a question. Do seating charts. Post signs clarifying the rules. Create a system of rewards and consequences for good and bad behavior. But here’s the even harder part: Once the system is in place, consistent enforcement is key. All of us respond to consistency, but children especially so. Make it clear to students that full engagement is required from the minute they walk over your threshold to the second they pack up. Overprepare your lessons to make sure there is no downtime. Go the extra mile to make your lesson plans more engaging; even the most tedious topics can be enhanced with a little creative flair.