Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America (Vintage) Review

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Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America (Vintage) ReviewThe Hero Teacher Story is an important American myth, known through such movies as "To Sir With Love", "Stand and Deliver", "The Hobarth Shakespearians" and "The Ron Howard Story". Like all good myths, they are used by different people to prop up different ideologies; often it is used to support a claim that poorly performing schools are not caused by a lack of money, just by a lack of expectations. Thus we should not be tempted fix the problems by "throwing money at the school districts which will just waste it like they have wasted all we have given them in the past".
A more reasonable interpretation may be that an excellent teacher with strong motivation can sometimes (often?) achieve what seems like miraculous results in a surprisingly short time with an almost superhuman work effort under even the worst of circumstances. But absent a systemic change, these results will probably only last for as long as the hero keeps up the superhuman effort. After he or she gives up, and leaves the field to "ordinary" successors, the disaster returns to the status quo ante. Thus, American urban schools have often turned into permanent disaster areas.
Thus, the must can promote both hope and hopelessness:
- on one hand, there is hope for a solution *IF* we can attract more of the very best teachers to address the problem
- on the other hand, this seems unlikely. The people that make extraordinary teachers tend to be all-around competent, intelligent, hardworking people with charismatic leadership abilities. Why would these people, who would be an asset to *any* organization, and who are often well recognized and given many well-paying job offers right out of college *EVER* take an underpaid job in what looks like a war-zone and work themselves half to death in a place that gives them no respect, where their supervisors give them no help (often directly sabotaging them) with a high risk of failure and give up their guaranteed career opportunities to go on this death march?
There are pockets of excellence dispersed throughout the often dismal American "system" of public education, but we should not be surprised that they occur far more often in the comfortable suburban neighborhoods than in the inner city or on the Indian reservations.
There the problem sat until Wendy Kopp's senior year at Princeton University, where she wrote a thesis proposing a radical experiment:
Bribe a few hundred of the most promising university graduates to take on this challenge and give them all the support you can. Amazingly, she got funding to try this experiment, now called Teach For America (TFA). It has been operating for 17 years, and the new book "Relentless Pursuit" is the story of 4 of its teachers, assigned to Locke High School in Watts, Los Angeles from 2005 to 2007.
The Atlantic Magazine has written about TFA from time to time, and my daughter Katherine wants to apply when she graduates.
I heard about the book on NPR's Fresh Air, and ordered it the next day. When it arrived from Amazon I could not put it down. One of the young teachers in the book, Taylor Rifkin, is from Santa Barbara (where I live), and as I read about her challenges and triumphs, I kept seeing my own daughter, and I wanted to know how the story ends.
Applying to Teach For America has become very popular among seniors at some of America's elite colleges. In its first year, TFA placed only 500 teachers. In 2007, the organization received applications from "11 percent of the senior classes at Amherst and Spelman; 10 percent of those at University of Chicago and Duke; and more than eight percent of the graduating seniors at Notre Dame, Princeton and Wellesley." Close to 18,000 individuals applied for an incoming corps of 2,900.
So how *does* the story end? Given that these kids are thrown into battle at schools that have a very hard time finding *anyone* to hire, and where most of the teachers they do hire often defect to better schools at the first opportunity, it is testament to an extremely effective selection policy that almost all of them serve out their two year commitment, and about a third of them stay for a third year at the same school. Despite their lack of experience - or maybe *because* they do not know that the job they are doing is basically impossible - they do very well; almost as well as the average teacher. And those TFA'ers that stay with teaching
have gone on to become leaders in education reform in such movements as KIPP and Green Dot.Next on my reading list is another book about TFA called "Lessons to Learn".
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