In the South Bronx, Grant Stegner ’08 is Teaching for America.

BY | DANIEL LACHANCE

In the movie version of Grant Stegner’s life, his first year as a South Bronx middle-school teacher would involve climactic moments of triumph: students stumbling into an epiphany during a free-form discussion of “Rip Van Winkle,” a group of kids so enthralled with Shakespeare that they stay after school to keep acting out scenes, a moment of teary-eyed understanding as a student who began the year withdrawn opens up in a class discussion.

But this isn’t Hollywood. So the moments in which Stegner feels as if he may have a handle on teaching are far less dramatic. Success is in those all-too-brief periods of silence that hover over his eighth graders as he walks down the rows of his classroom during a silent reading period. It’s in the give and take of the Saturday coaching sessions he’s done with a handful of sixth graders, preparing them for the state-administered English Language Assessment (ELA) test. It’s on the Excel spreadsheet that shows how his students’ ELA practice test scores are improving.

And that suits the mild-mannered Stegner just fine. He’s a calm, understated guy who speaks in the low, hesitant rumble of a pragmatist rather than in the lofty platitudes of an idealist. Stegner is one of six Macalester students from the class of 2008 who stepped off the graduation stage last year and into Teach for America (TFA), the nonprofit program that each spring takes college seniors with no formal training, gives them a crash course on teaching, and places them in some of the nation’s most challenging classrooms.

The program was founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, who conceived of it as a way of closing the achievement gap between poor minority students and their wealthy white counterparts. Those chosen for TFA’s teaching corps commit to two years of service in a needy urban or rural school. Thirty Macalester graduates have participated in the program in the past three years. With 3,700 teachers selected from an applicant pool of 24,718, the program is harder to get into than many Ivy League schools.

Stegner is passionate about TFA’s work, but doesn’t consider himself a starry-eyed missionary. “I didn’t do this out of some ‘change the world’ idealism. I don’t think that’s effective,” he says. “You’re not really thinking about the nuts and bolts of planning if you’re always thinking about changing the world. I mean, you need to break that down a little bit,” he laughs.

Indeed, in the four months since he began teaching at Luisa Dessus Cruz Middle School 302, in the South Bronx, Stegner has learned that part of being a great first-year teacher is realizing that there is no such thing as a truly great first-year teacher.

In some ways, it’s an easy lesson to learn. He spends half his day co-teaching his eighth grade classes with another first-year TFA teacher, Grant Walker, a Vanderbilt University graduate. Their classroom, reached by hiking up four long sets of stairs in a stairwell encased by chain-link fencing, feels like a refuge. With its worn hardwood floors, gray chalkboard, and fire engine–red lockers, the room is less 1970s linoleum-and-cement anonymity and more 1950s everyone-knows-your-name security. It’s here that Stegner and Walker have provided support and a constant reality check for one another, watching and sharing in each other’s successes and failures, reminding each other when things go haywire that tomorrow is a new day.

Still, their room is not impervious to the pressure they feel to catch up their students to grade-level work. MS 302 has been moving in the right direction, Stegner says, since Principal Angel Rodriguez took over six years ago. Before Rodriguez arrived, students came and went as they pleased. Rodriguez, a short man with a pencil mustache who exudes no-nonsense competence, overhauled the school, replacing 45 teachers and instituting a host of new policies aimed at restoring discipline. But while order has been restored, the challenges that remain are daunting. The school serves 871 students (79 percent Latino, 19 percent black, 1 percent white, 1 percent Asian), most of whom qualify for free lunch. The school is two subway stops from Hunts Point, an area that embodies the specter of the post-industrial ghetto: stripped, abandoned cars, high levels of drug dealing, rampant prostitution, and way too much violent crime.

In 2006, MS 302 was placed on New York State’s list of “schools under registration review” because of its dismal standardized test scores. If listed schools don’t improve, they’re shut down or reorganized. Stegner’s students’ performance on the state’s ELA exam will count for a lot, both for his school and for his students, whose scores play a role in determining whether they’ll be admitted into their top choice high school.

Stegner worries at times that the test has become the end-all and be-all of urban schooling. “There’s so much emphasis on testing that it’s kind of self-defeating” in the larger system, he says. In New York, the highest performing students go to the same public high schools, those schools then become magnets for the city’s most experienced teachers, and the already underperforming high schools are filled with the most challenging kids, the most junior teachers, and the relentless mandate to raise scores. It’s a rich-get-richer cycle.

Still, Stegner is no fierce critic of standardized testing. He sees it as a necessary measure of whether schools are succeeding at educating kids. And he rejects the notion that one “teaches to the test”; if the test measures skills, which most seem to agree it does, then teaching to the test just means teaching, period. Deficits indicated by students’ scores, he says, are noticeable in non-test-taking contexts, a fact that is sometimes overlooked by critics.

When I visit their classroom in January, Stegner and Walker are having their students take a practice exam. Standing under a sign that says, “100 percent of our class will follow directions the first time, 100 percent of the way, 100 percent of the time,” Stegner tells the students, “We were really impressed with how far you’ve come on the writing portion of your practice test last week. We think we have half the test taken care of. Today, we’re going to look at the reading portion. I know this class can do this. I know you have it in the bag.”

As the students begin to work, Stegner circulates through the room with a clipboard, checking boxes next to students’ names. “Not engaged” is one option; “Not using multiple choice strategies” is another. He periodically squats down next to a student, urging him or her to come in for extra practice. As he points out something to a student, the cuff on his shirt-sleeve pulls back to reveal a bracelet similar to those yellow plastic LiveStrong ones. This one is a subtle gray, though, and reads “English: Teach Strong”—a gift to new English-teaching corps members from their TFA advisers. Walker wears one, too.

I ask Juan, a short, stocky boy who sits toward the back of the class, about Stegner and Walker. “Are they nice?” “Too nice,” he says. “Sometimes they are pushovers.” But then, perhaps seeing an opportunity to get word back to his teachers through a published article, he says with a smile, “But they work us too hard. They have to be easier on us kids.”

Like many of Stegner’s students, Juan’s life outside school is complicated. His stepfather was arrested for drug dealing a month ago. He showed up in homeroom one morning and told Stegner, “They ran my Dad down in the backyard. He’s completely innocent.” Other students have been homeless for all or part of the semester. Still others have been present for fewer than half the classes. On the day I visited, only 12 students were in class, fewer than half the number enrolled. Stegner is sympathetic to the complexity of these kids’ lives, a complexity unknown to him while growing up in the affluent Minneapolis suburb of Edina. “When I was in eighth grade, I had myself less figured out than my students do. They’ve matured fast—they’ve had to. They’ve had to be independent outside their homes, to be self-sufficient. And sometimes when they get to school they don’t want to do that anymore. They want to have someone notice them.” He thinks of Juan. “You know, other adults were coming by the house later that day to see how the family was doing. And he had to be a man. But he’s an eighth grader.”

Later, Stegner and Walker discuss the challenges of navigating the turmoil that sometimes afflicts their students’ lives outside the classroom. It’s hard to know, for instance, how to respond when something like a parent’s arrest happens. Do you give that student leeway and ignore the missed homework or poor behavior? Or do you hold him accountable, figuring that school is the most stable thing in his life, and the best thing you can do is to continue that stability? One person’s sensitivity, it seems, is another’s “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Then, of course, there’s the problem that any middle-school teacher has to deal with: managing kids who are not quite children and not quite adolescents. Stegner cringes as he recounts an early effort at imposing discipline in his class. Under the mantra “we’re all in this together,” Stegner and Walker had taken to dismissing their classes by rows, and only when every member of the class was seated and silent—a process that had sometimes resulted in explosive confrontations when one student detained the rest.

Last October, Nelli, a student going through a tough phase, refused to sit at her desk and wait for dismissal. True to their word, Stegner and Walker held the students. Five minutes went by. Then ten. Nelli still refused to sit. The tension grew outside the classroom as well, as kids whose lockers were located in the room crowded outside the door, blocked by Walker from entering. “They started banging at the door trying to get in. We weren’t letting them in,” Stegner recalls. Then from the hallway he heard a kid—normally a cooperative student—yell, “Open the *&!# door, you dick!’”

“That’s not who they are,” Stegner recalls thinking at the time. Here he was, trying to create the order needed for his students to learn, and the result was that he had kids he’d never had trouble with calling him names. The two new teachers gave up at that point, their effort at providing an orderly atmosphere crushed by the sound of students clomping angrily out of the room.

But assessing a situation, knowing when a disciplinary strategy is going to backfire—that’s the kind of knowledge you don’t have your first year of teaching. Indeed, the program’s two-year commitment has made it the target of criticism in some circles. Some see TFA as part of a trend in public education that sees quick fixes, rather than long-term financial investments, as the solution to schools unable to attract and retain master teachers. Just as these teachers start to become skilled, their commitment is up and a new crop of inexperienced teachers replaces them. Though many TFA teachers stay on beyond two years (Stegner works with 5- and 15-year teachers who started with TFA), the most hardened cynics see the program as a two-year resume builder, a tour through poverty done to gain social capital on the way to law school.

Stegner himself was taken aback by how some of his TFA training leaders seemed to assume—wrongly, in his case—that he and his cohorts were not planning to become career teachers. “A whole piece was missing for me. There was no vision of the career teacher, you know, ‘be a professional.’” That’s what he was looking for. If all goes well, he plans to continue teaching in New York indefinitely.

But when it comes to the nitty-gritty, TFA has been exceptionally helpful. The program equips its teachers with tools that enable them to prepare students to succeed on standardized tests. Stegner was given computer software and training that he uses to measure and monitor his students’ progress. Students’ responses on practice tests are entered into Excel workbooks and then aggregated so that Stegner can tell what kinds of questions the students, both individually and as a whole, are struggling with. It’s that less-than-glamorous Excel file, ironically, that has helped Stegner experience the small victories that give him hope for succeeding at a teaching career. The quantitative data may seem impersonal, but it has actually allowed him to tell kids where they need help and how he can help them. And that, to him, is a much smarter and humbler approach to teaching than vague platitudes or gimmicky tricks.

He mentions a student who has improved immensely by faithfully working on his writing skills deficits over the lunch hour—deficits Stenger identified in a first acuity test. “I put myself in his shoes: he probably never before had somebody who took the time to say, ‘OK, this kid didn’t do as well as he could have on this, and I’m going to ask him to stay and work on it.’ It’s not the sympathetic, condescending, ‘Oh, you didn’t well on this; do you want to talk about it?’ thing. It’s recognizing how to improve something specific. They realize that their academic problems are specific, and that you took the time to pinpoint that.”

And that observation, more than anything, is what Stegner is taking away from this year. It’s not sentimentality these students need from him, but competence. They don’t need a superhero, just a dedicated professional who cares about getting them from point A to point B. Slowly but surely, he thinks, they—and he—are getting there.

Daniel LaChance is an American studies graduate student and freelance writer living in Minneapolis.

PHOTOGRAPH BY | michael crouser