Heart-shaped, tattered doilies hang from a thin ribbon between brick and adobe tenements. Laundry shrugs, frozen, on the lines. It’s about 5 degrees outside as I drive through the Denver projects, and park next to the blonde brick school nestled between Invesco Field and the poorest neighborhood in Denver.
Fairview Elementary teems with kids and smells of cafeteria food. “Hi! Hi! Hi!” Little braids and mohawks call to me from the lunch line. This is a school where all but two of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. This is where only 12 percent of the fourth-graders scored proficient on the writing portion of their CSAPs in 2008. This is where Teach for America corps member Garrett Girouard teaches second grade.
The phrase “Work Hard. Get Smart” hangs above the chalkboard at the front of his classroom. After the kids have all made it in from the bathroom with washed hands and zipped pants, Mr. G clicks a CD player on the crowded shelf. Soothing music flows over us and his kids start their “melt.” It happens twice a day, right after chaotic restroom excursions — a little meditation session to calm them down.
I’m here to see if a new, idealistic teacher can handle the heat in one of the worst neighborhoods in Denver.
“I see crossed legs, I hear deep breathing. I see some perfect melts,” Mr. G notes quietly. Girouard’s calmness works its way over this room of fidgety children. One student is revving the edge of his desk like a motorcycle, but eventually, even he gives in to the afternoon’s exercise in tranquility.
If you’re a Teach for America corps member you know Mr. G’s phrase — “work hard, get smart” — well. Not just because it gets programmed into you along with a barrage of buzzwords that are all part and parcel of the TFA toolkit (“big goals,” “objective mastery,” “backwards planning”), but because when you’re in TFA, you live by that phrase. Work hard. Get smart. That’s what you do if you’re a recent college grad who could have gotten a corporate job, but instead, you’re teaching in the nation’s lowest-performing schools.
To be a Teach for America corps member means, like Girouard, you probably don’t have any teaching experience besides a summer’s worth of TFA teaching boot camp before you’re thrown into your own classroom — a microcosm of an impoverished American community. Currently, 7,300 Teach for America corps members serve 35 regions around the nation.
Girouard didn’t always want to teach. With a double major in criminal justice and history from Penn State, he was on the path to law school. He took an office job with TFA in New York, but every day at 4, he listened to the stories of teachers coming in from their schools. “I realized I wasn’t having the impact in the office that I wanted to have.”
He applied to TFA, an organization that accepts only 15 percent of its 35,000 applicants from some of the best universities in the country. He started teaching here last fall.
“I know a lot of lawyers who hate what they do and a lot of teachers who love what they do,” he says. “Now I’m interested in continuing in education, maybe even administration. It took me about five minutes in this classroom to realize I care more about my kids than I do about anything else.”
The feeling seems mutual. “One major struggle I’ve had is managing how much the students need my attention,” he admits. A few weeks ago, a group of students gathered around him yelling, “He’s my dad! No, he’s my dad!”
The principal of Fairview Elementary, Norma Giron, says most of the students at the school don’t have dads. According to the Piton Foundation’s 2007 study, 67 percent of Sun Valley’s newborns were carried home by single mothers, as opposed to 33 percent in Denver proper.
“Mr. Girouard teaches a tough class at a tough school,” Giron admits. “Most of our kids don’t know what it doesn’t look like to be abused or hungry or non-educated. I’m wary of hiring teachers without experience and, honestly, I don’t like to do it. But he’s the first Teach for America teacher we’ve had here, and he’s proven that he’s not here to do what’s necessary, but what’s necessary and beyond.”
She’s talking about his data systems, his visits to students’ homes, his ability to set ambitious milestones along the way — all part of his dedication, but also part of the lexicon of being taught and watched by the TFA powers-that-be.
“Mr. Girouard is an exception,” Giron adds. “He has the instinct and intuition to be a good teacher. But he has tremendous support and resources from Teach for America. He comes with their tools.”
TFA makes resources available to corps members online, in person, and through the education courses they take toward a master’s degree one evening a week.
The kids file out of the room holding “a hug and a bubble,” that is, their arms are wrapped tight around themselves (so as not to touch anything) and their cheeks are puffed out (so as not to be screaming). It’s one of many strategies Girouard learned at the TFA Summer Institute. Those methods, resistance bands tied under chairs so kids can pump their legs without standing, rigorous lesson plans, and the unwavering conviction that all students are entitled to an excellent education are what get 92 percent of the TFA corps members through their two years of teaching.
When Girouard gave his second- grade students a first-grade end-of- year math test, all but two failed it. But now, with 100 days of school down, Mr. G’s second-graders scored a class average of 85 percent on their most recent grade-level unit math test. They are 1 percent away from their goal of having an 80 percent year-long class average. His reading goal: 1.5 years of growth even though they came to him on an average Developmental Reading Assessment level of 12, when the expected DRA level is 18 by the time a student reaches second grade.
Girouard’s story isn’t the exception. A 2004 independent study by Mathematica Policy Research found that students of Teach For America corps members make 10 percent more progress in a year in math than what’s typically expected.
Of course, there are searing criticisms: Young teachers bring zeal, but also arrogance to schools where veteran teachers have worked for years. Teachers only begin to hit their stride after two years, and TFA doesn’t seek out college students who plan to teach for life.
But can new teachers today be expected to teach for life? When Girouard started at Fairview, he arrived at 6 every morning and stayed until 7 at night. Then he went home and did more planning, researched management skills, and woke up to do it all over again. He probably puts in 80 hours a week.
Looking at his complicated data and rhetoric systems, his positive behavior charts, his individualized education plans, I wonder if the best start to a crippled education system is to get smart people who work hard, even if it’s only for two years at a time?
Do the critics know that two- thirds of TFA corps members remain in education in some way after their two-year commitment, and half of those are still classroom teachers?
In fact, inexperience has helped Girouard set goals other teachers wouldn’t dare introduce in a system accustomed to failure.
When I ask Aaliyah — who sits balancing on an inflated exercise pad to use up some of her pent-up energy — what she thinks of Mr. G, she says he is her best teacher. We are at the headphone station, where she can choose a CD and listen for a while. She pushes pause to think about Mr. G, who is reading in the corner with two of her peers.
I don’t think she knows this is his first year. I don’t think she knows that a good teacher, according to some standards, is supposed to have worked for 20 years in education. “I like him because he’s making me a better reader,” she says.
Aaliyah probably doesn’t know that 56 percent of the population over the age of 25 in Sun Valley did not finish 12th grade. She doesn’t know that she might change the statistic.
Megan Nix (megannix.com) of Denver can be reached at thenixionary@gmail.com.
