Last month, I was fortunate to sit down with a dozen Princeton students who were considering joining Teach for America. Twenty-one years ago, almost to the day, I had anxiously opened up the thick envelope in my Princeton mailbox informing me that I had been accepted as a TFA corps member. But until I sat down with the Princeton students, I forgot how big–and just how nerve-wracking—those first steps from college can feel.
I did my best to level with the recruits. I told them that teaching was the hardest job I ever had. But I also told them that my TFA experience had left me with an optimism and enthusiasm that overwhelmed those cautionary notes. My time teaching through Teach For America had ultimately meant more to me, and put me in a position to do more immediate good, than any job I could have imagined coming out of college. And I said that my experience had informed every move of my career in a 20-year run as a high school principal, deputy chancellor of the New York City public schools, and now as director of the Walton Family Foundation's education program.
On some days, I try to forget my first day as a sixth grade teacher at Community School 66 in the South Bronx. When I walked into my fourth-floor classroom, I gasped at the plaster hanging precariously from the ceiling. The chalkboard at the front of the classroom was splintered down the middle.
To be sure, CS 66 faced tough challenges: all of my students came from one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. But tragically, CS 66 seemed to have surrendered to the notion that its students were not supposed to achieve much. No adult appeared to be accountable for improving student performance; the school would have three principals in three years. My fellow teachers, many with the best intentions, had no shared vision of how the school would get better.
No number of data points or education school seminars could have proven so starkly that my school was giving each of my kids the equivalent of a life sentence. This is not about clichés: My students' ZIP code and the color of their skin really were determining their achievement in school and beyond.
Unexpectedly, one of my most difficult students stepped in to help save me and his fellow students. A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, Ivan stopped by after school with a chess set to ask if I would play a game with him. Ivan came back the next day and the next—and he brought a few friends with him. In a matter of weeks, 30 boys were spending two hours a day after school, five days week, playing chess.
Thanks to young Ivan's initiative, I began to learn the craft of teaching. Our improvised Chess Club made all the difference. Hunched over their chess boards, my students learned discipline and problem-solving. I got to know my students—and they learned they could trust me. We started traveling to chess tournaments—and even won a few. It turned out that, all along, my students had hungered to be challenged.
My students simply refused to give in to the cynicism of adults about their limitations. And that lesson has guided me for the last 21 years.
Fortuitously, one of the Princeton TFA recruits I met with grew up across the street from the Bronx Lab School, where I became the founding principal a few years after completing TFA. He had grown up in an impoverished neighborhood with some of the city's worst schools. Yet he made it all the way to Princeton and Nassau Hall—and now was ready to get back home to help the next generation of students follow in his footsteps.
I didn't need to tell him about the soft bigotry of low expectations. He could tell me of the teachers who cared about him and recognized his potential to excel. He knew firsthand that education can be a powerful tool for racial justice and narrowing achievement gaps.
Yes, TFA is not for everyone. But for the social entrepreneurs, who see hope where others see despair, it can be the opportunity of a lifetime. It was for me.
This article originally appeared at TeachforAmerica.org. Photo by James Estrin/The New York Times/Redux.
