Donna Foote

Donna Foote is the author of Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America.

From a Q & A about the book at her publisher's website:

Q: You follow the first year teaching experiences of four new TFA Corps Members (CMs). How did you pick those particular teachers?

A: First, I picked the school. I chose Locke High School because I knew it was home to the largest cluster of TFA teachers in Los Angeles, and it also happened to be one of the school sites for TFA’s five week “Boot Camp”—which meant I would be able to follow a group of recruits there from training through teaching.

Aside from wanting all the corps members (CMs) to be working at the same school, I was looking for a group of teachers who would be representative of the TFA corps as a whole. There were some 15 TFA recruits hired to teach at Locke High School for the 2005-06 school year. Among that cohort, I was looking for ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographic diversity. I also wanted both male and female candidates, and I wanted them to be teaching in different content areas. What I did not, and could not know, was how each would fare as the year unfolded. In that respect, Taylor, Hrag, Rachelle, and Phillip were random picks.

Q: Where did your initial interest in TFA come from and how were you introduced to Locke?

A: I was working at Newsweek in 1990 when TFA first began. I remember reading a few pieces about this young Princeton grad called Wendy Kopp who was trying to change the world by starting a teacher corps. I was intrigued. I clipped the stories and eventually filed them away. Though I kept an eye on TFAover the years (and two of my nieces ended up joining TFA) I never found a strong enough peg to hang a story on. That changed in 2005, when I read a press release that reported that 17,000 people had applied to TFA, and among them were 12 percent of the graduating class at Yale. The Yale statistic struck me as extraordinary. I wanted to know more. Why would so many grads from elite schools like Yale, with presumably many better paying offers, give up two years of their upwardly mobile lives to
teach in low performing schools across the country?

At around the same time, a good friend who was new to teaching got a job at Locke High School. Her war stories were gripping; she invited me to come to her classroom to help out and see for myself. My visit was a revelation. Most of the kids in her 9th grade English class couldn’t read. And it wasn’t just that they were stumbling over words. They literally could not read. The day I observed, her students were sounding out words like C-A-T! When she mentioned that TFA held its summer training institute at Locke, everything suddenly clicked. I decided I would tell the story of how we educate our poorest students through the eyes and experiences of our most privileged.

Read the entire Q & A.

Related: "Teach for America Grows Up: What TFA can teach the NCLB [No Child Left Behind] era" by Sara Mosle in Slate.

--Marshal Zeringue