Relentless Pursuit (26 page)

The kids shouted: “No!”

Phillip corrected them. “Your hands should be the same size,” he said. “So they are congruent. We are going to take this idea and relate it to shapes.” He told them to start doing their work sheets. He wanted them to match triangles by finding corresponding angles and sides.

A few minutes later Dr. Wells came in and sat down in the back of the room next to Phillip's desk. He watched as Phillip modeled what he wanted the kids to do on the classroom's overhead projector. As they worked, Phillip moved to the whiteboard in the front of the classroom, where he began to review the problems. He finished up the lesson by reiterating the concept and reciting the principles that they had discovered by manipulating the protractors and triangles. Moments before the class ended, Dr. Wells left the room. On Phillip's desk was a yellow sheet of paper that was folded in two. Dr. Wells had written “Mr. Gedeon” on the outside; there was a smiley face below.

The entire time that Wells was in his classroom Phillip was thinking:
Why is he here? What is he doing? What is he writing down?
Phillip figured the principal had been in his room more than ten times since the year began, three to five times in the first week alone. He felt uncomfortable. And this third-period class was one of his wildest, not the class you necessarily wanted your boss to observe. It was the one period of the day when people would be perfectly justified in criticizing Phillip's classroom management. It was heavily African American male, and Phillip ran a slightly looser ship than usual. Though profane language was forbidden in room 301, there were a couple of black students who habitually swore in class. They would immediately self-correct with “My bad, my bad,” and they never used the words maliciously. At first Phillip addressed the issue every time he heard a curse word. But after a while, he let it go. He saw the other side of the two offenders—he saw the sweetness in Andrew and the intelligence in Lemarr. If he couldn't get past the bad language, he realized he would miss so much in them—and they were capable of doing such great things!

Phillip didn't read the yellow note. He never read classroom observations right away. He preferred to wait until he had some distance and time to reflect on his own performance before reading someone else's take on it. Phillip was unhappy with the way the lesson had unfolded.

That afternoon he was about ten minutes late for the faculty meeting. He dreaded going to them. At best, they were boring, a waste of time. At worst, they degenerated into ugly shouting matches. Phillip would never forget the first faculty meeting of the year. When the union rep challenged Dr. Wells and became disruptive, he threw her out of Hobbs Hall. That set the tone for the year. So Phillip was in no hurry to get to the first meeting after Christmas break. When he slipped into his seat, Wells was talking about some teacher he had seen that day. He was reminding the staff to have the day's agenda posted on the board and objectives identified for all the students to see. Phillip always did that, so he tuned it all out. Later, when they broke into smaller department meetings, Wells came by, put his hand on Phillip's shoulder, and asked the group, “Have you seen Mr. Gedeon teach? You need to. He gives administrators like me hope. I saw a master teacher at work. I was utterly amazed.” Then to Phillip he said: “Keep up the good work!”

When Dr. Wells left, the teasing began. It was embarrassing. Phillip felt awkward around Wells. The guy was always smiling at him. And Phillip didn't want to let him down. The next day, another teacher stopped him to tell him what Wells had said in the beginning of the faculty meeting, before Phillip arrived. Wells didn't name Phillip then, but it wasn't hard to figure out which math teacher he was talking about. Wells explained that he had intended to stay for a only a few minutes, before seeing the science class next door, but he became so engaged in the math lesson that he stayed. “He did not say that!” returned Phillip.

“I'm telling you, he did,” the other teacher insisted. “He was speaking about you!”

At first he was blown away by the praise. Then it began to bother him. He knew that when one teacher gets singled out for praise, the others get resentful. It had happened to other teachers at Locke. When you have shown results, people don't like you—either because they can't do as well or because they can, and do, and are not similarly recognized. Phillip didn't need to be praised in front of a crowd. He already had a reputation for speaking his mind—and for not being a team player. It would have been much better if Wells had taken him aside and said those things privately.

But what really got to him that week was the realization that, at Locke, he really was considered one of the best teachers. That was crazy!
If I'm one of the best, what does that say about everyone else?
He knew his kids were learning and achieving. But he was a first-year teacher; he had so much more to learn. He was only doing what should be the norm for every teacher: setting high expectations, holding his kids accountable, and working his butt off. There was nothing amazing about it. It should have been standard operating procedure.

That was one of the problems. There were no standard operating procedures at Locke. There were no systems at all. The school wasn't set up for success.

Classes needed to be smaller and longer. Kids needed to be tracked. The students failing all their classes needed to be doing double of everything: English two times a day, math two times a day. If a kid couldn't write a history paper or read a textbook, why give him history? First teach him how to read. When he was up to level, then he could double up on science or history.

Someone had to stand up and say no to the status quo. The number of kids just falling through the cracks was breaking his heart. By the end of that first week back, Phillip was drained. He walked around his classroom in a daze. When he finally did get it together to go home, he had a bite to eat and went to bed. It was eight-thirty.

Why am I here? What can I do? How do I give both myself and my students hope?

         

Once she finished work on her IEPs, Rachelle did just what she promised herself she would do over the Christmas break: nothing. She relaxed, saw a few friends, chilled. But she found herself thinking about her kids. She wasn't stressing over how she was going to teach them mitosis. She was wondering what they were doing for Christmas, and worrying, too:
I hope they have family around. I hope they're happy.

They were thinking about her, too, because a few of them phoned. One boy, Mario, a lovely Hispanic kid, called and said, “Hi, Miss.” When Rachelle asked who was speaking, he insisted that she guess. Rachelle got it wrong; she thought it was a girl on the other end of the line. “Is everything okay?” she asked.

“I'm gonna ride my bike,” he replied. “I just wanted to say hi.”

It made her feel good.
That's what I've got going for me. I'm not good at special ed or teaching. In fact, I'm pretty bad. But I think most of them know I care.

But she knew that wasn't enough. She had to make changes in her classroom. She had spent the first few months on the scientific method. She was bored with the material; she could only imagine how the kids felt. She was going to pick up the pace. At first she didn't know how much the kids could do, and she didn't want to stress them out. Now she knew they were perfectly capable of achieving. There was so much to learn in biology that was cool—Samir had made that point the last time he was in. He said that her kids were learning. And he had some suggestions that he thought could help them even more.

She was going to get better organized, too. She had recently connected with a second-year TFAer named Jill Greitzer, who taught special ed algebra to many of the same students Rachelle taught. Rachelle went to see Miss G teach and was really impressed with how she ran her classroom. She decided to adopt many of the techniques she saw.

Miss G was into setting small goals. She had a daily activity log in which students rated their performance in class. Then she compared their assessments with her own, added up the totals, and gave the kids daily grades. That way they could see what happened when they didn't come to school and what happened when they worked hard.

Rachelle was going to get stricter, too, even though it was against her nature. Like Miss G, she was going to have the kids sign contracts. And there would be new rules. She wasn't going to open the door to kids who were late for class. Under the new behavior plan, kids would be given classroom jobs; there would be rewards. Twenty tickets got you a lunch with Rachelle. The big prize was dinner. Other people coming into her room might think:
What the hell is going on here? It looks like a circus.
But she was going to hang on to the small gains and remember that these boys were just kids.

She vowed to work harder herself. Truth be told, she felt like she'd been slacking off.

She ditched her plan to teach literacy. She didn't know how to do it. And it didn't appear that anyone else did, either. Locke's UCLA literacy coach for science devoted two entire professional development days to “read-alouds,” a strategy to aid comprehension. It was maddening. Rachelle got the concept immediately; she didn't need to waste two days reviewing it. Besides, her kids were not just “below level.” She had kids who didn't even make phonemic connections, who didn't know the sounds certain letters made. She could spend three days just teaching the word “cat.”

Her four-to-nine evening credentialing classes at Cal State, Dominguez Hills, twice a week weren't any more helpful. For the most part, they were a waste of time. She couldn't understand how anyone could major in education. It seemed that if she had really paid attention, she would have learned everything she needed to know at the five-week summer institute. In fact, even that could have been condensed!

What was particularly upsetting was that as useless as she thought the credentialing program was, she felt like she was falling behind. Her dad suggested that it was probably because she was exhausted. And that was true: she knew from experience that tired kids had trouble focusing. It was no different for adult students.

At one point, early on, it looked like she was going to get kicked out of the credentialing program over some bureacratic snafu.
Sweet! That frees up my nights!
But her mother put on her attorney's hat and informed her that without being in a credentialing program, she could get fired for teaching under false pretenses. State law required that every teacher of record be credentialed or working toward a credential. “You don't want to get fired, do you?” her mother asked.

“Yes, yes, I do want to get fired!” she replied. “I really do!”

She really didn't. She liked her job. And she loved the kids. She wanted to expand their horizons, to give them experiences beyond Watts. But even that proved difficult. She had signed up to take a handpicked group of students to see a play in Pasadena. It was disappointing. Only one kid showed up. And when she arranged through some friends with Hollywood connections to have Kenyon play basketball with Snoop Dogg, he was a no-show.

Then, one day, she got a call from someone she had met at the Palm Springs science conference that she and Hrag had attended a few months before. Rachelle had signed her name to every flyer she found at the conference—she was looking for freebies for her kids. One of the things she apparently signed up for was a field trip. When the phone rang, the voice on the other end wanted to know if Rachelle was serious about taking her kids to an outdoor learning camp. The shortest, cheapest program his company offered was a three-day academic camping trip to Catalina, the biggest of the Channel Islands, located just off the coast of southern California. The cost was $190 per child, and the instruction was pitched to a fifth-grade level. There was an opening at the end of May.

It sounded perfect. Most of her kids had never been on a boat—or even to the beach, though it was only a twenty-minute ride from school. Most had never been
anywhere
beyond Watts. Rachelle's mind began to race.
How cool would that be? But is it feasible? Is it even worth doing? Where will the money come from?

She began to plan. Maybe she would get online and apply to donorschoose.org for a grant. Or maybe the school would pay. Or maybe not; there would almost certainly be liability issues. But Rachelle would argue that the kids who were allowed to go would be carefully chosen. She was not going to take anyone who could potentially embarrass her or the school. She'd start the ball rolling and set good citizenship as one of the prerequisites for being included.

She knew she could take only a limited number of students. And as far as she was concerned, they were all going to be from the special ed department. No offense to Vanessa Morris, the science department chair, but her general ed kids were not welcome. The last science field trip had been to the aquarium in Long Beach. Hrag's kids had all gotten to go. Special ed kids had not. They were not on the radar at Locke. Rachelle's students were second-class citizens in a lot of other ways—they didn't need to be put down at school, too. So, no, this would be a special trip for special ed. She'd ask Jill Greitzer if she wanted to come along. Between the two of them, they would decide who'd be on the boat.

There was, of course, the little matter of running it by Dr. Wells. His first reaction was positive. He said the field trip would be a great use of Title I money, the federal funds granted to schools whose children live below the poverty line. Rachelle nearly jumped for joy. She intended to surprise the kids once all the details were worked out. But she couldn't help herself—she was so excited that she told them. They were going to Catalina!

CHAPTER NINE

The Corps

Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., like clockwork, Samir Bolar and the other Los Angeles program directors met in the conference room in TFA's Los Angeles regional headquarters downtown. The TFA offices were on the ninth floor of a twelve-story building. The first thing Samir saw when he stepped off the elevator and into the office was a banner printed with Teach For America's core values. The vision statement “One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” was written along the bottom.

The L.A. suite also posted the Teach For America Los Angeles time line, a snapshot of TFA's history there over the past fifteen years, and a not-too-subtle reminder to staff and visitors alike that Teach For America is an organization that keeps score.

Los Angeles was one of the six original charter sites in 1990, when TFA fielded its first class of five hundred corps members; it also hosted the first summer training institute, a tumultuous affair, as disorganized and chaotic as it was inspirational, according to founder Wendy Kopp. That inaugural year, close to 100 recruits were assigned to Los Angeles. Over the remaining years of the decade, the size of the L.A. corps waxed and waned with the organization's fortunes. In 2002, Los Angeles had 500 alumni. By 2005, when Hrag, Taylor, Phillip, and Rachelle entered the corps, TFA had more than doubled the incoming Los Angeles teachers to 223, making a total of 276 CMs teaching more than 22,000 students in 82 schools in the Los Angeles area. Most of the TFAers were employed by LAUSD. But in a district with more than 35,000 teachers, their numbers were tiny.

And the achievement gap in L.A.—and in virtually every other region in which TFA operated—persisted. “I think if you look at the overall statistics, you will not see a significant narrowing of the gap,” conceded Kopp as the organization began its second five-year growth push. “That's one of the reasons we don't feel satisfied. That fuels our sense of urgency.”

Los Angeles was exactly the kind of city TFA was built to serve. In few regions in the country was the gap more pernicious than in the City of Angels, home to the second-largest school district in the country. In the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the kids in LAUSD's low-income areas were three grade levels behind their wealthier peers, and seven times less likely to graduate from college. The district's dropout rates were among the highest in the state, test scores among the lowest. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger characterized the way LAUSD was run as “horrible.” An independent audit of the troubled district in 2007 concurred; the 115-page report described a pervasive and shocking lack of accountability throughout the district on all levels.

But Los Angeles had deep pockets. Of the $2.6 million raised from funding sources in the Los Angeles region in 2005, 31 percent came from individual contributors to TFA's Sponsor a Teacher program. Perennials on Hollywood's A-list—Casey Wasserman, Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, Paul Newman, Jerry and Linda Bruckheimer, and Sherry Lansing—were among them.

Much had changed since Los Angeles had hosted the first four summer institutes. Wendy Kopp traveled to the West Coast often then, mining for gold. In those days, Teach For America's financial health was precarious; too often it lurched from paycheck to paycheck, forcing Kopp to spend much of her time raising money. She used the same tactics at TFA that she had employed at the struggling business magazine she headed as an undergrad at Princeton: she went right to the top. In her book,
One Day, All Children,
she recounts sneaking into one of Mike Milken's lectures at the UCLA business school. Afterward she introduced herself. Milken was pleased to meet her and offered to fly her back to the East Coast on his private jet the next day. They spent the three-and-a-half-hour transcontinental journey in earnest debate. Nearing touchdown, she asked the infamous financier and philanthropist for a million dollars. The money would make the difference between life and death for Teach For America, she told him. Milken seemed inclined to write the check but in the end didn't pony up. Others did—against all odds.

“She goes to where her fear is,” explains Greg Good, an alum who was TFA's Los Angeles executive director in the mid-1990s. Good remembers traveling around L.A. in his Honda Accord hatchback hitting up the city's top guns for cash, his long dark hair flowing, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, with Kopp, dressed in business attire, riding shotgun. By then the early seed money from the foundations had dried up. TFA was forced to turn to private funders, corporations, and the government to survive. Kopp became a traveling saleswoman. She bunked in Good's Venice pad and arose each morning at five for her daily run. Then she spent the rest of the day and night shaking money out of trees. She excelled at it, but, as Good recalls, she wasn't necessarily comfortable with it. Inevitably, he says, just before walking into a high-level meeting, Kopp would turn to him and confide: “I am scared to death.” And then she would walk through the door, deliver a compelling pitch, and, cool as a cucumber, conclude with “I'd love to see you come in at a million dollars.” The first time she did it, Good nearly fell out of his chair. She was like a laser beam, plowing right through her fear, drawn to the challenge. She didn't always succeed, but she never let TFA fail.

It came perilously close. In 1994, Kopp recalls in her book, there was open rebellion at TFA's summer institute when she invited questions from the corps at a meeting midway through the training. Angry recruits stood on chairs, shouting out their complaints. Among the many: Kopp herself had never taught. Kopp suffered, observes Good, from the pedestal syndrome. Because she was so engaged in the business of just keeping TFA alive, she wasn't present at every on-the-ground team meeting. The result was that she was seen by some as remote, removed from the trenches, a kind of figurehead—revered but not loved. Because her head was so far above the parapet, she made an easy target when the going got rough.

In the early days, it got rough a lot. Kopp maintained her cool throughout the institute ordeal, now remembered as “the night of a thousand suggestions,” but there were more assaults ahead. It was just weeks later that Linda Darling-Hammond published her scorching analysis of TFA, “Who Will Speak for the Chidren? How TFA Hurts Urban Schools and Students,” in
Phi Delta Kappan.

“It is clear from the evidence,” wrote Darling-Hammond, “that TFA is bad policy and bad education. It is bad for the recruits because they are ill-prepared…. It is bad for the schools in which they teach, because the recruits often create staffing disruptions and drains on school resources…. It is bad for the children because they are often poorly taught…. Finally, TFA is bad for teaching. By clinging to faulty assumptions about what teachers need to know and by producing so many teaching failures, it undermines the profession's efforts to raise standards and create accountability.”

The blistering critique from such a big name in the field of education caused some of the organization's major supporters to balk and cast a pall over the efficacy of the mission that would last for years to come. When the fiscal year drew to a close at the end of September, TFA had a $1.2 million deficit.

It was make-or-break time. Kopp and her top money man, Richard Barth, who later became her husband, cut two million dollars from the budget, resulting in the termination of the sixty program directors. TEACH!, a TFA initiative set up to help school districts recruit and develop teaching talent, was shuttered. Another TFA start-up called the Learning Project, a summer school program headed by TFA's very first hire, Daniel Oscar, had already left the TFA stable to become an independent nonprofit. Having finished pruning, Kopp launched a three-year plan to transform TFA into a “stable, thriving institution.”

The years of struggle had taken a toll on morale and tainted the mission's culture. Kopp moved to define the organization's core operating principles. Over time, the foundation of how TFA works was articulated in five core values: relentless pursuit of results; sense of possibility; disciplined thought; respect and humility; and integrity.

Kopp knew that in order to succeed, TFA needed better management—and it had to start at the top. She herself had to become a much more effective manager of a much improved product. But she was a young twenty-something who was learning on the job. And she didn't have the stereotypic personality of a dynamic leader. There was no flash, no flourish to Wendy Kopp. No memorable anecdotes, either—except those that underscored a clarity of focus and an unshakable confidence that caused her to work harder and longer than anyone else around her. Kopp, a runner of marathons, could go the distance. Oscar recalls one particularly exhausting night in the early days when everyone was crashing, and Kopp sent them all home at 1 a.m. to get some much needed rest. She stayed on, alone in an empty New York high-rise, endlessly making copies at the point when others on the team didn't have the strength to push the start button.

“She can't be described as charismatic,” notes Dr. Bressler, her Princeton thesis advisor. “She's not eloquent, and she doesn't have the attributes associated with extraordinary leadership. What she does have is a kind of calm conviction that the thing is possible, and she conveys that. She's almost amused at a recitation of obstacles.”

She was new to managing, but she embodied the key TFA operating principle of “constant learning.” An autodidact on business management, she read voraciously and picked the brains of every smart person she encountered. Like the organization she led, she was obsessed with getting better. (Ironically, she consulted with Linda Darling-Hammond in the very beginning, when TFA was not much more than a senior thesis.) Nick Glover, a vice chairman for Whittle Communications, advised Kopp on how to structure the organization and management team in the very early nineties. By the end of the decade, TFA had developed formal working relationships with a number of consulting firms, including the Monitor Group, which assisted in the development of the 2005 and 2010 growth plans, and McKinsey & Company, which helped with selection and recruitment. Several of the outside consultants eventually took jobs with TFA—including Matt Kramer, from McKinsey, who was named president in 2007.

According to members of her top management team, Kopp was strongly influenced by the writing of Jim Collins, author of the bestselling books on business management
Built to Last
and
Good to Great.
In
Good to Great and the Social Sectors,
Collins describes a great organization as one that “delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long time.” He also notes the hallmarks of great leaders: they are ambitious for their institution—not themselves—and possess a paradoxical blend of personal humility and intense professional will. The goals TFA announced when launching the 2010 five-year plan read like Collins's definition of a great institution. As for his take on the distinguishing characteristics of great leaders, Kopp has them in spades say those close to her—and she looks for those qualities in the people she hires.

That doesn't mean she—or the organization she heads—is “nice” in the conventional sense of the word. “‘Nice' is not part of the self-concept,” observes Matt Kramer. “Civility and humility are there, but that's not the same thing as nice. Nice is saying it matters more how people
feel
than how they
perform,
and whether they deliver results. Nice is: ‘Here's what we're working on, we didn't get to where we're going, but that's okay.'

“That's not the way it is at TFA. At TFA, if something doesn't happen, it's terrible, we think about what we did wrong, and we really dive in and change things because we hate when we don't deliver results. And if somebody says, ‘That hurts my feelings,' well, the thinking would be:
It's not about you, it's about delivering results. You don't let your personal emotions get in the way of results.
High-performing organizations are not
nice
places to work, but they are very
challenging
places to work, and because of that, they attract people who like challenges. The question is always: What's good the for kids?”

Richard Riordan, mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001 and California secretary for education under Arnold Schwarzenegger, was on the TFA advisory committee early on, and he agrees. He and Kopp were fellow Princeton alums; the idea for Teach For America struck him as perfect. Riordan compares Kopp to Mother Teresa, who—he is quick to point out—may have been one of the most giving persons on earth but not necessarily the nicest.

“Wendy wasn't some sweet bouncing young girl that God sent down from a star,” he recalls. “She was a tough doer who really believed in what she was doing. To be a champion, sometimes you have to be pretty tough, and that describes Wendy.”

According to Jerry Hauser, an alum who taught in Compton, California, in the inaugural corps and who returned to TFA in 1999, after law school and a stint at McKinsey, to preside over the first five-year growth plan, Kopp is a caring person who remembers birthdays and takes a real interest in others' lives. But that's not what sets her apart as a leader. What makes her unique is her “relentless pursuit of results,” he says. “She sets goals nobody thinks can ever happen, and she runs into obstacles, and she persists. The relentless pursuit of results, that's the phrase that best captures Wendy.”

Hauser recalls a particularly tense board meeting at the end of the first year of the expansion plan that was “classic Wendy.” It was the week after the 9/11 attacks, and things seemed pretty bleak. It didn't look like there was going to be a lot of funding money around; the stock market had tanked by 25 percent. The board appeared ready to rethink the expansion. Then Kopp spoke. She said if ever there was a time to keep growing and going, it was then. It was critical that TFA do it for the country. She argued that the original plan was sound; TFA should stick to it. Some members of the board were skeptical and warned that they would keep a close eye on progress; if they didn't like what they were seeing, they would ask TFA to change course. That never became an issue. The expansion unfolded pretty much as planned.