Why New Orleans? March 5, 2009
Posted by Matt Brown in Stories and observations.Tags: Columbus, Growing up, New Orleans, Stories, Teach For America, Teaching
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Today I emailed my boss with my new work schedule for spring quarter. I do this every 10 weeks or so, and it typically isn’t a very big deal. This email was very different, because at the end, it said May 22nd (aprox) will be my last day at the office. As you know, I have accepted a teaching position with Teach For America, and will be moving to New Orleans shortly after graduation. I’ll give you more details as the date gets closer.
Shortly, Outlook cheeringly announced that my boss had responded to me. She told me how happy she was for me, and how much the office would miss me. She then helpfully pointed out that I did not, in fact, study education in college. My professional background is in government service and writing. I don’t know anybody in the whole state of Louisiana, and never mentioned wanting to continue my studies there. So why then, she wondered, am I picking up my life and moving to New Orleans to teach elementary school?
This is a perfectly reasonable question, and one that deserves a better answer than the three sentence burst I typed out when I first got my acceptance letter. Before I can begin to answer that question though, let me tell you a story.
I’m not much of a crier. In the past 5 years or so, I think I’ve only cried three times. Once when my father passed away, once on my LDS Mission (I came pretty close in the 2007 ALCS though. No, I don’t want to talk about it. JD Drew can go to Hell, and CC Sabathia has man boobs).
I don’t think I’ve really talked about the other time I cried. It was early in my freshman year at American University. I was sitting at my desk, watching TV when CNN cut away to a new breaking news story. A hurricane unlike any in recent memory had just hit New Orleans. Whole neighborhoods were being washed off the face of the earth. I remembered reading about Hurricane Andrew (I was too young to actually remember it), and the destruction I was seeing on TV made those pictures I saw in National Geographic look like puddles after a rainstorm. The devastation was truly shocking…but it didn’t really hit me right then. I felt the appropriate amount of Liberal College Student Guilt, and then went on with my life.
But the story didn’t go away. After the storm stopped, all hell broke loose. The Superdome, once a symbol of American Commercial Greatness, was now a cesspool of filth. People were looting, families were trapped in toxic, washed out homes, and the impotence of the Federal Government was naked and on display to all the world. This was more than just a storm. The old band-aid covering many of our country’s social ills washed away too.
It finally hit me a few days after the initial hurricane. I was sitting all alone in the TDR, American’s dining hall, with my bagel, juice, and Washington Post. I read article after article detailing the suffering and chaos of the city….how the 9th Ward, home of some of the poorest inhabitants, had almost been wiped off the map. How local, state and federal aide agencies had failed in nearly every way. How developers were openly debating not to rebuild the city at all. It crushed me. I looked around to make sure nobody could see me, and let some teardrops fall all over my Post, turning Eugene Robinson’s picture into a big, pulpy mess.
Why did that impact me so strongly? I had never been to New Orleans, (I actually still haven’t been to New Orleans) but I felt a strong emotional connection to the city. I was a jazz and blues musician, and New Orleans is the capital of jazz. Not only that, but from what I had read, New Orleans valued and protected the Weird and the Unique. They sometimes played trombones at funerals! For a guy growing up in a Mormon household in blasé Columbus, New Orleans seemed to represent everything I wanted as a 19 year old. It became an almost rallying cry with some of my musician friends. One of these days man…we’re going to find us some fedoras, grab some gumbo, and head down to Naw’lins for a while. It just felt like my kind of town.
Now, it was under several feet of water, and starting to rot. It may have never been the place I had idealized in my head, but now I could see that with my own eyes. It wasn’t going to be the same again.
When I was filling out where I wanted to work for Teach For America, I tried to take a pretty analytical approach. My sister,her husband and newborn nephew now live near San Jose California, and I wanted in-state CA residence for possible grab school, so I selected the Bay Area. I used to live in Washington DC and loved it, so I put down DC. My mother lives in Madison, so I put down nearby Chicago, etc etc. With one exception, I based my preferences on things like proximity to family/loved ones, whether that state had a public university I wanted to attend, how familiar I was with the city, etc.
That exception was New Orleans. Teach For America apparently has a great need for teachers in the Greater New Orleans area, and that region was mentioned specifically in a lot of the literature they sent me. Every time I read it, I couldn’t help but think back to how I felt sitting in that cafeteria, reading. If I really believed in the ideals of TFA, and the capacity for good teachers to change people’s situations for the better, then I felt like I needed to put my money were my mouth was. Nobody needed help more than Naw’lins. I circled that bubble too.
I am very aware of what the challenges of that decision will be. I was lucky to attend a very good public school, and I understand that where I am going will be different in virtually every way. I understand, perhaps even a little bit better than some of my TFA peers, the limitations of my own abilities, and the sting of disappointment. This will unquestionably be the hardest thing I have ever done. It keeps me up at night sometimes.
And I know that those challenges extend far beyond what happens in my classroom. I know two people in New Orleans right now, and both are with TFA. My family members will literarily be in every opposite corner of the country. My Girlfriend’s friends have helpfully pointed out that my girlfriend does *not* live in New Orleans (approx. 912.07 miles, or a 16 hour drive away actually. Not that I checked or anything). I guess that’s what Skype and airplanes are for.
The challenges and hardships are daunting already, but that doesn’t make the goal unreachable, or a foolish endeavor. Teaching now gives me the chance to perform a critical service to children who badly need help, and in a city that I’ve wanted to love for years. I’ll be right in the heart of the biggest social science laboratories in history. I’ll be doing real, meaningful work that fits into my ideals and worldview at 22. How many other people get a chance to say that? It’s an adventure. It’s a blessing.
I didn’t write all of this back to my boss, but it’s why I’m going.
I am seeking a dialogue with current and past Teach for America teachers. I have taught for 14 years in inner-city Houston. When I started teaching, I saw myself as a reformer, as some of Teach for America teachers do. I had some pretty serious success with AP students, and some serious frustration with our regular students. So my experience, to be honest, has been mixed. I want a dialogue about the political behaviors of the Teach For America elite.
In our city, a former TFA official, now a school board member, has led the charge for beginning to fire teachers based on student test scores. She also opposed allowing teachers to select a single major union representative. After a little research I found this appeared to be a pattern with TFA’’s leaders. There seems to be a close relationship between conservatives and the TFA elite.
This goes back to its origins, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp’s original efforts to create Teach For America. A few years before, Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything it could to avoid and minimize responsibility after the event.
A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved by their financial assistance. The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools with corporate schools. Two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, then joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was vital to Bush, since as Governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican. I then read the popular magazine articles about Michelle Rhee’s firing of teachers and closing of schools, and then her admission she had gone to far too fast.
I think you do great work. Ironically, my former mentor works for Ms. Rhee. He saved me in my first year as a teacher in Houston. He was a terrific teacher. I respect and honor your work, as I do my own.
But your leaders seem to attack the public sector and blame teachers for student failure in order to curry favor with rich conservatives. To be up front, I grew up in a low-income housing project in Mississippi and eventually became a good student, and I am a social democrat. I believe school reform must include better schools, but also health care, stable employment, long-term unemployment benefits, a revitalized union movement, a higher minimum wage, freedom for alternative lifestyles, and affirmative action. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their kids than economically or emotionally unstable families. Better schools are part of this, but only one part of it. Your leaders seem to have gotten in bed with people who believe the market solves all issues—and that makes the money flow faster. Yet your hard work gives them credibility with the media.
Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor Peoples March—even if they alienated powerful people. I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.