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Well, when push came to shove, I didnt want to devote my life to helping the rich get richer or crunching numbers to see what views were most popular for the vice president to adopt. My doctor parents had drummed into me that education was the key to every door, the one thing they couldnt take away from my ancestors during pogroms and persecutions. I couldnt help feeling guilty dismay when I thought of the millions of kids whod never even tasted the great teachingnot to mention the supportive familyId enjoyed for my entire life. Weird as he might have thought it, I had decided to teach in an inner-city school. Five weeks later, I found myself steering my parents old Volvo off R Street and into a one-block cul-de-sac. There it was: Emery Elementary School, a 1950s-ugly building tucked behind a dead-end streetan apt metaphor, I thought, for the lives of many of the children in this almost all-black neighborhood a mile north of the United States Capitol in Washington. I had seen signs of inner-city blight all over the neighborhood, from the grown men who skulked in the afternoon streets to the bulletproof glass that sealed off the cashier at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. This was the other half of Washington, the part of the city I had missed during my grade-school field trips to the Smithsonian and my two summers as a Capitol Hill intern. I parked the car and bounded into the main office to say hi to Mr. Bledsoe, the interim principal who had hired me a few weeks before. As he showed me around the clean but bare halls, my head filled with visions of my students happily painting imaginative murals under my artistic direction. I peered through windows into classrooms, where students were bent over their desks, quietly filling out worksheets. I smiled to myself as I imagined the creative lessons I would give to these children, who had never had a dynamic young teacher to get them excited about scholarship the way I knew I could.
The one thing you need to do above all else is to have your children under control. But as I learned to my great cost, that was easier said than done. I was supposed to pick up that skill over the summer from Teach for America TFA, an organization, affiliated with AmeriCorps, that places young people with no ed-school background, and usually just out of college, in disadvantaged school districts suffering from teacher shortages. Applicants request placement in one of over a dozen rural and urban school districts around the country that contract with TFA, and I got my first choice, in the city I hoped to live in for the rest of my life. Teach for America conducts an intensive five-week training program for its inductees during the summer before they start teaching. It was there that I quickly figured out that enthusiasm and creativity alone wouldnt suffice in an inner-city classroom. I was part of a tag team of four recruits teaching a summer-school class of low-income fourth-graders. Even in one- to two-hour blocks of teaching, I quickly realized that my best-planned, most imaginative lessons fell apart if I didnt have control of my students. In the seminars we attended when we werent teaching, I learned the basics of lesson planning and teaching theory. I also internalized the TFA philosophy of high expectations, the idea that if you set a rigorous academic course, all students will rise to meet the challenge. But the training program skimped on actual teaching and classroom-management techniques, instead overwhelming us with sensitivity training. My group spent hours on an activity where everyone stood in a line and then took steps forward or backward based on whether we were the oppressor or the oppressed in the categories of race, income, and religion. The program had a college bull session, rather than professional, atmosphere. And it had a college-style party line: I heard of two or three trainees being threatened with expulsion for expressing in their discussion groups politically incorrect views about inner-city povertyfor example, that families and culture, not economics, may be the root cause of the achievement gap. Nothing in the program simulated what I soon learned to be the life of a teacher. Though I didnt know it, I was completely ill equipped when I stepped into my own fifth-grade classroom at Emery Elementary in September 2000. The year before I taught, a popular veteran principal had been dismissed without explanation. Bledsoe finished out the rest of the year on an interim basis, hired me and four other Teach for America teachers, and then turned over the reins to a woman named V. Savoy had been an assistant principal at the Districts infamous Anacostia High School, in Washingtons equivalent of the South Bronx. Before the start of school, she met with her four first-year TFA teachers to assure us that we would be well supported, and that if we needed anything we should just ask. Most of my veteran colleagues, 90 percent of them black, also seemed helpful, though a few showed flickers of disdain for us eager, young white teachers. By the time school opened, I was thrilled to start molding the brains of my children.
I could see clearly enough that the vast majority of my fifth-graders genuinely wanted to learnbut all it took to subvert the whole enterprise were a few cutups. On a typical day, DeAngelo a pseudonym, as are the other childrens names in this and the next paragraph would throw a wad of paper in the middle of a lesson. Whether I disciplined him or ignored him, his actions would cause Kanisha to scream like an air-raid siren. In response, Lamond would get up, walk across the room, and try to slap Kanisha. Within one minute, the whole class was lost in a sea of noise and fists. I felt profoundly sorry for the majority of my students, whose education was being hijacked. The daughter of Senegalese immigrants, she would tolerantly roll her eyes as Darnetta cut up for the ninth time in one hour, patiently waiting for the day when my class would settle down. When he needed help with a division problem, I tried to give him as much attention as I could, before three students wandering around the room inevitably distracted me. Twenty more students educations were sabotaged, each kid with specific needs that I couldnt attend to, because I was too busy putting out fires. Though I poured my heart into inventive lessons and activities throughout the entire year, they almost always fell apart in the face of my students disrespect and indifference. To gain control, I tried imposing the kinds of consequences that the classroom-management handbooks recommend. I tried to take away their recess, but depriving them of their one sanctioned time to blow off steam just increased their penchant to use my classroom as a playground. When I called parents, they were often mistrustful and tended to question or even disbelieve outright what I told them about their children.
One parent who was also a teachers aide threatened to kick my white ass in front of my class and received no punishment from the principal, beyond being told to stay out of my classroom. The failure of the principal, parents, and teachers to react more decisively to racist disrespect emboldened students to behave worse. Such poisonous bigotry directed at a black teacher at a mostly white school would of course have created a federal case. Still, other colleagues, friendly and supportive, helped me with my discipline problems. They let me send unruly students to their classrooms for brief periods of time to cool off, allowing me to teach the rest of my class effectively. But when I turned to my school administration for similar help, I was much less fortunate. I had read that successful schools have chief executives who immerse themselves in the everyday operations of the institution, set clear expectations for the student body, recognize and support energetic and creative teachers, and foster constructive relationships with parents. Successful principals usually are mavericks, too, who skirt stupid bureaucracy to do what is best for the children. To start with, from all that I could see, she seemed mostly to stay in her office, instead of mi...
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