Excerpts from the Year Zero Substack by Andrew X. Evans
...we were cautioned on several occasions by TFA higher-ups not to stress the negatives when sharing our experiences from the classroom. But I really don’t buy that anymore. Yes, the layers of hierarchy, responsibility and power that surround the horror matter, but the horror itself matters more. We must talk about the horror.
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On stage, Kopp (Wendy Kopp, TFA's founder) explained how TFA had begun as the topic of her senior thesis in grad school. She wore a dark gray pantsuit and an earpiece microphone. She talked about the “achievement gap,” the immense disparities in academic performance between affluent, largely white children and the rest of the population—disparities that remain largely the same today. She explained how studies had shown that the single most important driver of learning was not school funding or neighborhood income but teacher quality.
The common critique is that people only apply to TFA to advance their careers or to play savior. The latter was closer to the truth in my case. At some point in college, I had adopted the plight of inner-city Black America as the keystone of my moral concern. I shared this aspect of myself whenever possible, shoe-horning references to James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time or incarceration stats into casual conservations and off-topic classroom discussions.
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Our training was a five-week bootcamp in Philadelphia. We stayed in the dorms at Temple University and attended training sessions held on campus and at local schools.
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Nothing matters if you can’t control your students.
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We were given a stack of booklets to read before Philadelphia. One included a lesson plan that used concepts from research into intelligence to disabuse students of the damaging idea that “smartness” is a fixed trait. People aren’t born smart; intelligence comes from practice. At the end of the lesson, the teacher leads the students in a chant.
“Work Hard!,” the teacher shouts.
“Get Smart!” the students shout back.
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I doubt we said those words more than once. Still, they stayed up above the classroom door, gradually wilting and fading, until I found them on the floor when I came back from Christmas break. By then, my classroom walls were an obituary page to behavioral management strategies.
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A flashbulb memory from my second year, for instance, depicts how, on the way to pick up my students from lunch, I came across a large fifth grader named Dante holding a small third grader against the wall by his collar and bouncing the boy’s tiny head against the concrete with his fists.
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Early in the fall of my first year, a rumor began getting around that TFA’s 2008 Baltimore class had broken records for the most people quitting in the first month.
TFA’s main strategy to dissuade people from leaving the program was to stress the deep harm this would do to your students. The urgency underlying this messaging was justified. Most of my children were staring down a lifetime of functional illiteracy, poverty wages, and a likelihood of incarceration or early death, particularly the boys. But once I was in the classroom, from that first day in fact, the idea that my students were better off for my presence evaporated.
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But even more than these horrors, the realization that many, if not most, of my students were illiterate and would likely always remain so, underlined my sense of futility. The achievement gap is a relative measurement, pertaining to comparisons between groups. Illiteracy is absolute and personal. If you can’t read, what does it matter who can? If some new age of social utopia dawned tomorrow, you’d still be working at its gas station.
As children get older, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop reading skills and so with each year the urgency of imparting that crucial skill grows. If children are not reading at or near grade level by the fourth grade, it’s a genuine emergency, one that necessitates the highest level of instruction and the highest level of classroom management to make that instruction possible. ... The urgency was lost on the students, of course. They couldn’t see their life prospects evaporating in front of them.
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Only 6 students were reading at grade level. Second grade-level was the average.
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In an attempt to avoid stigma, the buckets were labeled with the first letter of their color, rather than the numerical grade. The G level books in the green buckets were for first-grade readers, for example. But the students caught on quickly. When you ask an 11-year-old to read Hop-on-Pop, it doesn’t matter so much that it came from the Yellow and not the Purple bin. They get the picture.
Brandon, a B-level reader (kindergarten), sat next to Anthony, the lone W-level reader (6th grade) in the class. At some point, Brandon began surreptitiously borrowing Anthony’s W-level books to read, or rather to fake read during quiet reading time. He’d follow along with his finger, fake muttering the words he didn’t know under his breath and shooting glances over at me to make sure I wasn’t on to him. The first few times I caught on to this, I had gently re-directed him towards the B-level books. But then he began hiding the chapter books inside larger children’s books so that it looked like he was reading them.
When I caught him doing this one day and tried to correct him, he stood up and threw the children’s book across the room.
“I ain’t reading this baby shit no more,” he yelled. The class erupted in laughter.
This earned a call to his mother, a stout, boisterous woman who often volunteered at the school. Unlike Shawn, Brandon feared a phone call home. The last time I’d called his mother, she’d told me that I had her permission to slap him if he acted up, a privilege I never exercised. This time she had simply asked when quiet reading time was.
During quiet reading time the next day, Brandon was chatting with another student, a chapter book on his desk open to some randomly chosen page, when his mother appeared in the doorway wearing a baby blue velour track suit.
“Come here,” she said, beckoning to him.
He stayed where he was, turning to me pleadingly.
“Come here,” she said, more forcefully. When he didn’t come, she walked over to his desk and pulled him out of his seat by the collar. She stood him up and slapped him neatly across the face, not nearly as hard as she could have, but hard enough to make the tears flow. Then she dragged him by the collar into the hallway, where she screamed at him loud enough for the neighboring classrooms to hear, and slapped him a few more times.
The real tragedy is not that a mother would come to a school and beat her child in front of his classmates. Brandon’s mother worked in the schools. She knew what happened to boys from that neighborhood who didn’t learn to read. If there was any chance that slapping him could scare him into making progress, you’d have to admit that there was a logic to it. The real tragedy, as well as the real reason I never called her again, was that it probably didn’t make a difference what she did.
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One of the more common questions I get about being in TFA is whether I wonder about what’s become of my students. The answer is I try not to.