Radical by Michelle Rhee Read Free Book Online Page A

in a second-grade classroom in Los Angeles,” I said. “I was pretty effective with the students and thought they responded well to me, so I think second grade is probably better.”
    â€œFine,” she said, looking wholly unimpressed and uninterested in my rationale. “Second it is.”
    The truth was, of course, I was worried and figured second graders were a lot smaller and younger than fifth graders, so I stood a better chance.
    Harlem Park was a huge school and had four second-grade classes. They assigned students to different classes according to their academics and behavior, a practice called tracking. It was a rite of passage that the new teachers were assigned to the students on the lowest track. Therefore, I was assigned second grade, track four: the students with both the lowest achievement and the highest discipline problems. They had been together since kindergarten. And there were thirty-six of them in the class.
    The classroom was worse than dingy. The windows were protected on the outside by black steel grates. The windows were so dirty and yellowed that light barely came through. But at first things went relatively well. I had my kids sitting in nine clusters of four desks each to foster cooperative learning, a popular strategy at the time. Over the course of the first few weeks I came up with fun and engaging lessons, and the children seemed to respond well.
    There was only one problem. All classrooms at Harlem Park were assigned a teacher’s aide. Mine was a gruff woman who clearly had seen her fair share of young teachers pass through. Too intimidated to give her any direction, I pretty much let her do her own thing. Or maybe I should say, she just did her own thing. She’d come and go as she pleased, sit in the back of the room, cut out letters, or do other things she felt were appropriate.
    The other thing she did was yell at the kids. I remember teaching a lesson where I read the book Caps for Sale . As I read the book and chanted the refrain, “Caps! Caps for sale . . . fifty cents a caaaaaap!” the kids started to join me, singing at the top of their lungs. The aide thought the children were being much too loud.
    â€œStop that silliness!” she screamed at the children.
    I was shocked and chagrined at the same time, but mostly I was a new teacher who didn’t know how to react. I thought it was great that the children were so engaged. Why squelch a student? That could ruin their enthusiasm for learning! Call me clueless. But I didn’t have to worry about my aide for long.
    Kurt Schmoke—a dynamic, young African American leader—was starting his second term as Baltimore mayor. He devoted himself to reforming his city’s dismal public schools. The summer before I started teaching, Schmoke contracted with Education Alternatives, a consulting company, to take over some of the city’s worst-performing schools. Harlem Park was among them. The company fired the aides from these schools because they didn’t have college degrees. My new aide was an older white guy, very tall, dumpy, tousled hair, brushy mustache, square-framed glasses, and generally unkempt. He looked like he was at least seventy. He did not belong at Harlem Park, in the ghetto, trying to connect with second graders. Not only did he not make my life easier; he made it harder. He became a target for the kids. They threw stuff at him. They made fun of him. I lost absolute control of the class when my first aide left. While I’d initially thought she was a problem, I quickly came to realize that she was the only reason my classroom was under control.
    My once-angelic students, who I worried might have their enthusiasm crushed by a harsh word, were all of a sudden spewing harsh words of their own. “Punk-ass bitch!” they’d call out to one another, as they threw pencils and books at one another. Or worse, “Screw you, Chinese bitch!” they would yell