Relentless Pursuit

Former Newsweek correspondent Donna Foote's "Relentless Pursuit, a Year in the Trenches with Teach For America", follows four Teach For America recruits during their exhaustive first year of their two-year service in South Los Angeles' Locke High School. Without any embellishment, 'Relentless Pursuit' provides an insight into the everyday realities of a teacher in the Teach for America program. For an excerpt, click here (NPR). Publisher Alfred Knopf provides the following description:

"A revealing look inside a national phenomenon, Teach For America, which, since its founding in 1990, has pursued one of the most daring — and controversial — strategies for closing the educational achievement gap between the richest and poorest students in the country.

"The story is set in South Los Angeles at Locke High School, an institution founded in 1967 in the spirit of renewal that followed the devastating Watts riots but that, four decades on, has made frustratingly little progress in lifting the fortunes of the area’s mostly black and Latino children.

Into this place, which resembles a prison as much as a school, are dropped a group of 'recruits' from Teach For America, the fast-growing organization devoted to undoing generations of disadvantage through a fiercely regimented selection and deployment of America’s best and brightest. Nearly 20,000 top college graduates apply for 2,000 slots. Then, with only a summer of training, the lucky ones are sent to face the most desperate of classroom environments.

"Giving us a year in the life of Locke through the absorbing experiences of four TFA corps members — Rachelle, Phillip, Hrag and Taylor — Donna Foote recounts the progress of their idealistic but unorthodox mission and shares its results, by turns exhausting, exhilarating, maddening, and unforgettable.

"Without romanticizing the successes or minimizing the failures, 'Relentless Pursuit' relates, through the experiences of these four new teachers, the strengths, the foibles, and the peculiarities of an operation to accomplish what no government program has yet managed — to overcome one of the most basic and vexing of social inequities, a problem we can no longer afford to ignore."