Relentless Pursuit
A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America
by Donna Foote
Knopf, 352 pp., $24.95
"You are quite evidently deranged."
That is what the founder of Teach for America (TFA), Wendy Kopp, was told when she first asked her Princeton adviser for permission to use her senior thesis to develop an idea for a national teaching corps that would put America's brightest college graduates in classrooms teaching America's lowest-performing students. Fortunately, Wendy Kopp is as stubborn as she is smart, and she not only wrote her thesis but, since her 1989 graduation, has worked tirelessly to turn her idea into reality.
Today, Teach for America has over 5,000 active "corps members" who are teaching 440,000 students in hundreds of America's toughest public schools. And TFA has become one of the most selective and sought-after post-graduation programs: Twelve percent of Yale's class of 2005 applied to become TFA teachers; only a handful were selected.
Perhaps most important, many of TFA's 20,000 alumni are now at the forefront of the burgeoning education reform movement. TFA alums are fueling what the Washington Post calls the "TFA insurgency" by starting successful charter schools, such as the growing KIPP Academy network, and assuming leadership positions in school systems across the country, including the District of Columbia, where Michelle Rhee, a TFA alum, was appointed chancellor last year.
In Relentless Pursuit, Donna Foote follows a group of TFA corps members for the entire 2005-06 school year as they take on the difficult assignment of teaching at the 3,100-student Locke High School in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. Opened in 1967, two years after the Watts riots, Locke High School was supposed to lead the community's revival; but after some early success, the school soon began to mirror the dysfunction of the community that surrounds it. Only 24 percent of the ninth graders who entered Locke in 2001 graduated in 2005, and only 3 percent completed the course requirements for admission to California's public university system.
Relentless Pursuit is filled with both the depressing and inspiring stories that one might expect. Most disturbing is the senseless gang violence. It is estimated that a dozen Locke students or Locke dropouts died violent deaths during the school year. But there are also moments of great triumph, such as when the girls' soccer team (coached by a TFA teacher) wins the division title. Especially uplifting is the story of a TFA English teacher, Taylor Rifkin, whose students not only increase their reading scores by an average of three grade levels in one year but also come to love Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
What makes this volume noteworthy is the fact that Foote looks at both Locke and TFA with the jaundiced eye of a veteran journalist. She does not glorify the TFA teachers: They are all initially overwhelmed by the challenge of teaching at Locke, and one quits just weeks into the first semester. Nor does she condescend to treat Locke students as helpless victims of a racist society, as Jonathan Kozol does in his numerous books. In fact, Foote is often quite tough on the Locke students and frequently questions why they don't seize the educational opportunities being offered to them and escape the cycle of poverty in Watts.
The last few chapters are especially fascinating for policy enthusiasts as they offer a hopeful look at the changes taking place in public education. TFA teachers at Locke launched a special "academy" within the larger school that was showing promising results. An important component of the academy was an extra period that allowed teachers to spend time with students in subjects where they needed extra help. The TFA teachers persuaded Locke's principal to call a teachers' meeting to discuss making the extra period a schoolwide reform.
When the TFA teachers made impassioned pleas to their colleagues regarding the need for more class time, the teachers' union rep coldly retorted: "If you guys want to work 20 percent more, and not get paid 20 percent more, then vote for seven periods." The teachers voted down the proposal to extend the school day by a 72-to-36 vote. (Interestingly, Locke students supported the idea of a longer school day.)
