Relentless Pursuit (14 page)

The local fire department was just two blocks away and arrived within a minute or so. Deliesh was rushed to the hospital, where she died after eight days on life support.

The hunt for her assailant began immediately. A cop at the crime scene heard someone say, “It was Snoopy.” The officer called over to the Locke police station and asked if anyone knew a kid by that name. Snoopy was the moniker for a gangbanger named Dejuan Hines. An index card with all of Hines's information was crammed into the overstuffed, well-thumbed file box kept at the campus police station. He was arrested later that night. “I actually got along with the guy; he was respectful,” recalls Salazar. “He wasn't one of the real knuckleheads. I'd deal with this kid, two, three times a week. He was one of those guys, if you tell him something, he'd say all right, and call you sir. What I think happened was he was shooting at a passing car or something.”

On March 8, 2006, a few weeks shy of the one-year anniversary of the Deliesh Allen shooting, Dejuan Hines was convicted of second-degree murder and attempted murder. He was sentenced to eighty-two years to life in prison. He was eighteen years old when he killed Deliesh. He was a high school dropout.

         

Deliesh's death only underscored what Chad already knew. It was after Angel's funeral that he understood that he wasn't going to be in and out of Locke in two years. He hadn't finished what he had come to do. He was a get-it-done-and-be-done-with-it type of guy. Too late, he realized that that was a terrible personality to have in a low-performing high school. Because you never felt like the job was done. You always felt like a failure. And because you couldn't stand that feeling, you ended up trying even harder, working even more. Chad knew why he was at Locke, and he knew that Angel's death was something he would have to remember if he was going to continue to be effective there.
Remember how you feel, remember the kids, remember Angel.

He probably couldn't have left Locke even if he wanted to. It felt like home. He couldn't leave the kids, and he couldn't leave the band of teachers he had come to love. They were all young, mostly white, mainly single, many of them TFAers. They called one another by their last names, but they were closer than family. They worked together and drank beers together at Sharkeez, a dumpy surfer bar on the edge of Manhattan Beach. Some even lived together.

So, he re-upped. But more and more, the satisfaction he felt at his students' achievements was replaced by a nagging sense of frustration with school bureaucracy and the slow pace of change. In two and a half years of teaching he had already been through two principals; the third was waiting in the wings. Student attendance and test scores remained appallingly low, school crime unacceptably high. The school was too big, the district too political. Chad Soleo worked as hard as was humanly possible, but at Locke, nothing stuck. Not the teaching, not the teachers, not the administrators, not even the kids.

He began to think about expanding his reach. As a teacher he knew the problems; as an administrator maybe he could fix them. He visited successful charter schools, and he pored over the literature on education reform. At around that time, the school was ordered by the district to reorganize into small learning communities—a consequence of failing to make academic progress under No Child Left Behind. Dr. Rousseau addressed the Locke faculty. “Dream!” she said. “Think about what a good school should be.” Staff proposals for six small academies were due in weeks. Chad drew up an outline for a plan and asked his friends and colleagues to help him flesh it out. In September, the School of Social Empowerment (SE) was up and running. The next year, recognizing Chad's success in leading his small school, Wells asked him if he had thought about becoming a school administrator. Chad had reservations about Wells. Safety and security had improved under his leadership, but he thought Wells lacked the kind of instructional vision required at a school like Locke. He put aside his misgivings, though. Wells was making him an offer he couldn't refuse.

“Yes,” he replied. “I have thought about administration, and yes, I would like to join your staff.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Locked In

It's like a prison. Even the teachers are locked in. No wonder the kids act this way.
Phillip was in a bad mood as the police officer slid the gate open just wide enough for him to exit the football field, then promptly locked it shut again. He was sick of all the gates and the locks. What good did they do, anyway? Weapons still made their way onto campus, property still managed to go missing, kids still ditched classes. He was tired of being locked in, locked down, locked out.

He should have felt great. It was homecoming weekend, the sun was shining on this first Saturday in November, and the Locke Saints were winning the game against rival Fremont High. Behind him, the cheerleaders were chanting: LET'S GO, LOCKE SAINTS, LET'S GO! LET'S GO LOCKE SAINTS, LET'S GO! The stands weren't full, but the three hundred or so people who had paid the seven-dollar admission fee and submitted to a scan by a wand-waving cop were having fun. Whole families were there. Little girls waved pom-poms in time with the cheerleaders; blue and yellow balloons fastened to the fence bobbed in the breeze. Frank Wells, a former football player himself, stood on the sidelines, shoulder-to-shoulder with the players, his arms akimbo in his Locke bomber jacket. The fans were mostly African American. Sports at Locke tended to divide strictly along racial lines. Blacks played football; Hispanics played soccer.

Because of security issues, it wasn't often that the blue-and-gold Saints team played at home. Homecoming was special. The daylong festivities began in the morning when the once famous Locke Saints Marching Band led the annual parade through the neighborhood and onto the campus. Kickoff was at 1 p.m. Then later, at seven, the homecoming dance would begin. Throughout the day, security was tight. Three uniformed school police officers manned the field's sliding entrance gate, unlocking and locking it after each arrival and departure.

Phillip was wearing jeans. More than a few heads turned in surprise at the sight of him out of professional attire, but he had already put in several hours of work in his third-floor classroom. He would probably log in several more before the dance that evening. He was exhausted. His allergies were acting up
(was it the L.A. air?),
and he hadn't had time to sort out his medical benefits and get a prescription refilled since he'd moved to the city. It felt like all he did was work. The only time he was able to relax was when he returned to the apartment he shared with three women—all first-year TFAers like himself. Their place was in Baldwin Hills, a black middle-class neighborhood only a short drive from Locke. It wasn't until they moved in that they realized that thirteen years before, the neighborhood had been ravaged in the Rodney King riots. Now their apartment building was filled with professionals—many of them teachers in L.A. Unified. The four roommates took turns cooking; over nightly meals they shared their war stories. They got along perfectly. Phillip's only complaint was that on occasion someone forgot and put his coffee mug in the dishwasher.

He felt burned out. But he wasn't the only one. Just walking down the halls each day, he could see people dragging. It was only November, and already a lot of the teachers were saying this would be their last year at Locke. Not Phillip. He had a plan from which he would not deviate. He would stay at Locke for four years, and during that time he would get his master's in administration from Loyola Marymount University. He didn't want to be a principal, but it made sense to get certified for administration. From there he would most probably move to another school, where he would work while earning his doctorate. Finally, he would get a Ph.D. He knew that eventually he would leave the classroom, and just the thought of that day's arrival made him sad. He loved teaching. Still, working at Locke was so taxing. People said the atmosphere on campus had changed for the better since Wells took over. But judging by the chaos he saw all around him, school and district policies had not.
The system is failing, and it's making me fail.

Classes were too big and the school too dysfunctional for one teacher to effect real change in student achievement. Ten-week grades were due, and Phillip still didn't know exactly how many students he had. In his seventh-period class, only half of the thirty-six students enrolled ever showed up. In his fourth-period class, there were forty-five names on his roster in a room that had only forty-one desks. Most of the time it wasn't a problem—there were always at least five students absent; some of them he had never even seen. But it was annoying. Each day, one particularly good-natured student would come in, sit at the front table, and wait to see which desk would be empty. Then, satisfied that the real owner was a no-show, the student would take a seat and get to work. Phillip could have requested more desks, but that would have sent the wrong message to the administration. That would be saying that he was okay with an oversized class, and he was not okay with that at all. The way to raise student achievement was to lower class size, not to pack the kids in like sardines and assume there'd always be enough room because attendance was so poor.

Other things bugged him, too. Like the fact that there was a deaf boy in Rachelle Snyder's class who had no aide to sign for him, and the fact that some kids assigned to honors English couldn't really read, and the fact that faculty meetings were like grade-school food fights, and the phones didn't work, and access to copy paper was based on politics—if you were one of the anointed, you got paper; if you were not, you had to beg, borrow, or steal. That's literally what he had had to do to get a computer for his classroom. He begged. The school didn't have enough working machines, so rather than wait or do without, Phillip logged on to www.donorschoose.org and published his sob story. The website was designed to match donors with needy causes in low-income school districts. Some rich philanthropist trolling the site saw Phillip's proposal and funded the purchase of a Sony VAIO laptop for him.

The heady days when he first arrived in Los Angeles seemed like a mirage. Teaching at a place like Locke was a grind, an uphill climb with no summit in sight. And the kids! They came to school with so much baggage, baggage that no first-year teacher could possibly help carry.

His most recent heartbreak was Darius. Darius had been absent from school for three or four weeks, and when he finally returned, Phillip asked him where he had been.

“You don't wanna know,” Darius replied.

“Yes, I do,” insisted Phillip. “Tell us the story.”

“I was at home,” he explained. “I got into this fight with this kid and he lost, so he came to my house several times with guns.”

“What else?” prompted Phillip.

“He's been threatening to kill me and my family, so my mom wouldn't let me go out. We got a TRO [temporary restraining order]. Then she thought I should go back to school.”

“How is this going to come to a closing, a resolution?” asked Phillip.

“One of us is gonna have to shoot the other,” came his simple reply. “Whoever shoots first solves the problem.”

Phillip was taken aback. “Is it worth it?”

Darius looked at him and said, “You got to do what you got to do.”

Everyone else in the class just sat there. There was no outrage, no shock, no embarrassment. It was business as usual. Phillip didn't know what to do with what he had just learned.
Who do I go to? He already has a TRO. Do I send work home? Who would pick it up? What should I do?

Phillip had much in common with his students; he, too, was raised in a low-income community by a single mother. But he had never lived in a neighborhood like this. He had never experienced the kind of pressure or fear that Darius knew. He could sympathize, he could imagine, but he could never feel what Darius was feeling. The only answer for Darius's situation, he decided, was to make the time that he had with him meaningful, to make the moments in Mr. Gedeon's class the best moments of Darius's day.

But that did not address the larger problem, and it certainly didn't allay his own fears about Darius's safety. Now, when Darius was not in class, Phillip couldn't help but wonder:
Is this the day? Is this the day I'm gonna get the notice he's either in jail or dead?

One day, way back in September, a note was left on his desk that read: “Hey Mr. G. I Love the way you teach our first period. You help me a lot in class. I really appreciate you helping me. Guess who? Thanks 5:30 p.m.” Phillip tacked the letter to the bulletin board next to his desk. He kept it there to read on days like this, when everything seemed so futile.

The first inkling that teaching at Locke was going to be tougher than he thought came when Phillip got the results of the first benchmark assessments, monthly tests that Dr. Wells required teachers to give to track achievement. Ninety-five percent of his students had failed. At the math department meeting afterward, Phillip realized that the other teachers had equally disappointing results; the kids had all bombed.

When Phillip handed out the scores to his students, they were surprised. He had given them the grades they deserved; they were used to getting the grades they needed.
Am I being too hard? Are the questions too difficult?
No, he decided. The questions had come directly from the work he had been presenting in class.
Then why are my students failing?

Phillip was not in the habit of blaming himself. He decided that the problem was homework. His kids didn't do it. That was going to change.

First he decided to cut the number of nightly homework problems from an overwhelming twenty to a more manageable handful. Then he decided that the kids themselves would correct the homework in class, instead of handing it in to him for marking. That way there would be immediate feedback—kids wouldn't have to wait weeks to get their work back, if Phillip even got around to grading it. They would see that there was a meaningful relationship between the nightly homework and the weekly test results. The pace of the class would change, too. The lessons would be slower, more deliberate. Finally, failure to do homework would have consequences: a dreaded Saturday-school detention.

Phillip came up with his plan after reading through the “free writes,” essays critiquing his class that he had solicited from his students. He found out that his emphasis on homework was the exception at Locke, not the rule. Most teachers didn't give it, or if they did, they didn't really expect to get it back. So it was tough; he was making a big deal about something that nobody else cared about. Phillip believed that Locke needed a schoolwide policy on homework. Without it, kids could not succeed. Limited resources were not the problem at Locke. The problem was that there was no culture of achievement.

It wasn't the kids' fault; it was the responsibility of parents and teachers to instill good work habits in their children. Phillip tried to put himself in his students' shoes:
If I were a student and no one forced me to do homework and I had a teacher giving it to me, and not grading it, why would I do it? I would think: “I have homework and there's a lot of it, so why do it?” Especially if I were a student who had been passing all the time.

Phillip got positive feedback at the school's open house in early October. Attendance schoolwide for the event was low. But a whopping twenty-two out of two hundred parents had dropped in on room 301. Phillip used the time to try to create some accountability from parents. The next day, he tried to do the same with his students. He spoke for five minutes and took no questions. The kids needed a reality check.

When he started to speak, the look on the faces before him was
I don't care.
But as he continued, he could see that his words were having an effect.

“Let's talk about reality,” he barked. “What do people think about Locke High School? The reality is the people on the outside—the school board members, the politicians, and the government officials—make decisions every day that affect you. But they don't care about all your trials and tribulations and who you really are. What they care about is what you show them. All they see is the test scores, the grades, the attitude. They don't see what we as teachers see on a daily basis. Talking to your parents made me realize that teachers are not the only ones in this struggle. The parents support us and want you to succeed. But you have to realize what people from outside the community think of you. They don't spend money on this school on a daily basis because you tell them on a daily basis that you are not worth it. Why spend money when you don't do the work? Why buy computers when you don't perform even at a basic level?

“You have to understand that every action has one of two consequences: you can either support their beliefs that you are unworthy and that you don't care so why should they, or you can show them that they are wrong. How? You be the students they think you cannot be. Study. Do your homework. Come to class and do as well as you can. You need to make a choice. Every time you do something, think of the consequences. Are you supporting or disproving their theories about who you are?

“The cards are stacked against you. But that doesn't give you an excuse not to play the game. That should give you the excuse, the motivation, to work twice as hard.”

There was silence. He had their absolute attention. Now the look on their faces said
You're right.

Seeing that, he launched into a lesson about biconditional and conditional statements.

         

While Phillip worried that all his kids were failing, one of Hrag's biggest problems was that too many of his students were passing. He didn't know how to grade. There was no schoolwide policy, so he just did what almost everyone else in the biology department did. The bottom line was, if you came to Mr. H's class and did the lab work, you passed. Hrag gave out homework maybe once a week—any more often, he figured, and they wouldn't do it. The tests he gave counted for only 15 percent of the final grade, though the kids didn't know that. Surprisingly, the results on the first couple of quizzes were outstanding—the average was 80 percent and the tests were
real
biology! Since then, though, the scores had dipped into the 60s. He wasn't sure what to make of the drop. He worried that the kids weren't conceptualizing the material he was presenting. But he had so little time to think about what he was teaching and how he was doing that he was hard-pressed to make any adjustments.