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 enlarge | Author: Donna Foote
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.88
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 47718
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 6.7 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307265714
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.100979494
EAN: 9780307265715
ASIN: 0307265714
Publication Date: April 15, 2008
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Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: R20080823231638H
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| Customer Reviews:
 All Teachers Left Behind June 14, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
I happen to love the language employed by the media when talking about education. War metaphors are most popular and eye-catching. "At the front," and "in the trenches" capture one's attention. One thinks of sweet little Princeton grads in gas masks, armed with bayonets being charged by thousands of black kids screaming "whitey." No wonder so many Teach for America alumni write books; they are like war veterans. Some are too traumatized to ever speak of their ordeal again, while others are turned into overnight Hemingways. I was down there in Watts, too, having the time of my life, but I didn't see the same things these TFA kids saw. What I remember is the counselor who drove a white Rolls Royce to school, and walked around campus in her Sunday best. Or the coordinator of school funds who drove a gold Mercedes onto campus, parked daily in front of his office, and dared the school police to give him a ticket. I remember watching the kids take a single bite out of their hot dogs, hamburgers, pizzas or burritos and then throw the leftovers over their shoulders on to the cafeteria floor. Staff spent an hour scooping up the garbage using snow shovels every day after "nutrition" and lunch. And how could I forget Dr. Princess, the computer coordinator, who spent everyday locked in her office surfing the net. Kids would walk around campus throwing their unopened orange juice cartons against the classroom walls and screamed wildly when the juice splattered and rained over their classmates. I'd tell the kids to open to page 112 in their "The American Experience" textbook, only to watch in horror as they tore the pages out, made paper wads, and told me they didn't have page 112, so could we watch a movie? Houses sell for $400,000 down in Watts. There were kids with parents in dubious lines of work, but then again no more dubious than those of our substitute teachers. I never met a kid who didn't have $20 to blow on the latest movie at the Magic Johnson Theatre. They were poor, all right, but not in the sense that they lacked money. What is difficult in Watts as is true of many working class neighborhoods in Southern California is that there is no model for work that is glamorous enough to compete with Hollywood. Gambling is cool, buying lotto tickets makes sense, but not work. When the black counselor attempted to revive the long-abandoned horticulture department by asking kids to clean out the greenhouses, the head of the English department charged him with trying to revive slavery. There is no honor in labor; work is seen as a sign or weakness. Basketball playing is seen as worthy, rapping, drug-dealing: they're manly. But study is simply out of the question. You can paint signs on the school house saying, "All Children Can Learn" all you want, but somebody has to tell the kids to do their homework.
 Foote Puts Paternalistic foot in mouth May 27, 2008
6 out of 20 found this review helpful
On the book sleeve, the publishers promise that Relentless Pursuit does not "romanticize" tbe successes or failures of these four TFA teachers, but, unfortunately it does. Even worse, the writer's obsession with how dangerous Watts and Locke high school is (it seems like her caveats are on every page) grates on the sensibilities of this reader and clouds the best part of her writing, the research and history of the school and Teach For America. As a former administrator at Locke intimately familiar with Phillip, Hroag, Taylor and the school, I'm appalled at how the writer paints the students as so horrible, savage,ignorant, and deprived that a mere compliment doled out by their teacher would be the first in their "very deprived" lives. Or, how they obsess over the beautiful white skin of their teachers or their personal lives. Her white paternalism and superficial understanding of Locke, Principal Wells, and the rest of the teaching staff would have one believe that the fault only lies with the larger district and that Wells is a savior battling the big, bad district who oppresses a committed black man. Truth be told, Wells was despised by most of his staff and teachers--TFA included-- for his tyrannical behavior, his inability to tell any short-skirt wearing TFAer or any female on campus for that matter "NO." His dysfunctional obsession of giving his friends everything (think sports teams and female teachers who flirt with him)bankrupted the student body fund, sucked out all the SAIT money for instruction and misdirected Federal monies and all of the local district cash for his personal hero worshipping indulgences. His Saul-like transformation came because he was given his walking papers in March, long before the May 3 temper tantrum. Even worse, the next year he asked gang bangers to come on campus and start fights (which they gladly did) so he, in his dilusional thinking, would be begged by the district to "save" Locke again! Sick! Also disgusting is the one-sided commercial feel for TFA that Foote writes about. Her "balanced" criticism of the organization is quick generalizations with no depth to the destruction the organization has on schools like Locke. Read the book? Naw, just watch Stand and Deliver or Lean on Me and save yourself some time. This story is a rerun of many of the other blown-out, glorified stories of inner-city school successes brought to you by John Wayne mavericks.
 Fantastic and un-baised book May 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Fantastic and un-biased look into Teach for America as an organization, both from the employer and employee perspectives. Revealing discussion of the achievement gap between America's rich and poor communities, even today.
Highly recommended for all Teach for America Corps Members May 6, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
As a second-year Teach for America corps members, this book is the perfect answer to an experience that can not truly be understood by anyone outside the TFA community. After years of trying to explain the experience to family and friends (and failing, time and time again), I was amazed after only one chapter how right on Donna Foote got it. It was like someone was right there with me starting at Institute and then heading into the classroom in the fall. For any corps member who needs validation their feelings of failure and defeat, needs a reminder as to why they signed up for this in the first place, or just needs a sense of who else is going through what they're going through, this book is for you. HIGHLY recommended!
The Myth of the Hero Teacher April 29, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The 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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