CHAPTER 7

The students lounging on beanbag chairs in Tilden’s Peace Room on an icy day in mid-February each had a story to tell about how a change of scenery, coupled with the right supports from teachers, could alter the course of one’s academic career. They were the Tilden freshmen who had ended first semester on-track, despite having eighth-grade academic records that put them at high risk for course failure. Mr. Swinney, the principal, had wanted to get them into a room together to discuss how they had beaten the odds, information that he hoped to use to continue to refine the school’s approach to freshmen. He asked Mr. Walker, the Peace Room facilitator, and Kelvin Chung, Tilden’s counselor, to facilitate the discussion. He hoped the freshmen would be more honest without a classroom teacher, who might be seen to be judging what they were saying, in the room. On the appointed day, though, one of the daily crises that seemed to chew up Mr. Walker’s time kept him from the meeting. Ms. Holmes agreed to pinch hit.

Though the room itself was spacious, the group’s post-lunch exuberance made it feel like a crowded postgame locker room. It also smelled like one. “Someone stink,” one of the freshmen loudly observed. A loud chorus of denials followed.

“It smells like straight poo,” confirmed Marcus, one of the ten students in attendance. He was wearing his signature diamond studs in both ears, baggy khakis, and a black T-shirt that said “BAM,” which stood for Becoming a Man, the name of the mentoring program he participated in. Despite conflicts with Mr. Persaud, his math teacher, and other teachers, he had ended the semester without any failures. When Roderick was doing her study, before the Freshman OnTrack movement, the odds of someone like Marcus ending his first semester on-track were virtually nil. Sierra had also finished the semester on-track, though she was not in attendance this day. David, who had failed all of his courses first semester, had been invited to a separate meeting Swinney had organized to help off-track students get back on-track.

“People!” Ms. Holmes yelled above the commotion. “People!” she tried again. When the chatter eased slightly, she began her spiel. “If you read your invitation to this group, you would have seen that, um …” Holmes searched for the right words to tactfully convey the purpose of the meeting. As usual, she settled for the direct approach. “We are going to be open and transparent with you. All of you came into this high school with a big red flag on you.”

“’Cause we’re slow,” came a voice from the back of the room.

“No. No, not because you were slow. Because you were at risk,” Holmes clarified.

“Because we bad,” yelled another.

“No, not because you were bad, because you were at risk,” Holmes repeated. “They said that you were at risk of failing ninth grade—”

“Who said?”

Holmes persisted, “—probably due to either one or a combination of three things: One, your attendance in junior high. B, your grades. Or you had multiple behavior issues during your eighth-grade year. But—”

The teens resumed talking at full volume. Nobody relished a rundown on how they had struggled in the past.

“SHUSH!” Holmes said, fixing the room with a stare. “But despite coming to high school with this big red flag over your head, all of you finished the first semester on-track, which means you passed all of your core classes. Which means you’re doing really well, and—”

Holmes did a quick scan of the room, and then said, “One, two, three, four, five, Marcus, six. Six of you are actually taking honors classes right now. So for people who, quote unquote, ‘were supposed to fail,’ you’re doing really well.” This turned a few heads.

“Who told you that?” demanded one girl.

“Who told us that?” Holmes asked rhetorically. “We looked at the dataset.” She continued, “The quote unquote ‘statistics’ told us that, but you guys defied those statistics. So what we want to know [is] what made you more successful as a high school student than you were in junior high, and what can we do to support other ninth graders to make them more successful, and what can we do to continue to support you.”

Side conversations ceased. It was a pleasant change of pace to be interviewed about their successes rather than lectured on their failures. Jakiyah, a self-possessed, often sharp-tongued student, volunteered to go first. “I didn’t like eighth grade,” she said.

“Why didn’t you like it?” Holmes probed.

“It’s just in a very dangerous neighborhood. The students was very irritating. I couldn’t learn because they were always talking and distracting me.” Holmes raised an eyebrow. Jakiyah had earned a reputation at Tilden for both talking and distracting.

“I didn’t like eighth grade either,” said Javion, who was seated next to Jakiyah. “I went to Dulles. I was fighting with everyone. My grades were low.”

“Okay, so you had issues with people who were getting in fights,” Mr. Chung clarified.

“I have anger management problems,” Javion admitted.

“And how is Tilden better for you?” Mr. Chung asked.

“Here I’m cool with everybody,” Javion said simply. “Ain’t nobody make me mad here.”

Holmes looked inquiringly at Javion. “Are you in an anger management program here?” she asked. “Because I find it very surprising that you said you had anger problems. Because you’re really pleasant. Like, I’ve never seen you mad.”

“I just don’t show it,” Javion explained.

“I’m not mad either!” Jakiyah interjected.

“I’m just saying,” Holmes enunciated, fixing Jakiyah with a look, “that he said he has an anger problem, and I’ve never seen that side of him. He’s always really pleasant in the hall. I see him speaking to everyone, so maybe there’s something about Tilden—”

“Me too! I’m pleasant!” Jakiyah interrupted again.

“Okay! I’m not saying you’re not!” Holmes said with exasperation. Jakiyah and Holmes had a complicated relationship. Holmes knew Jakiyah was smart and charismatic. For better or for worse, she held a lot of sway over her peers. Holmes often told Jakiyah she could “use her powers for good or evil.” Sometimes Jakiyah called friends who were skipping school and ordered them to get themselves to class. Sometimes they actually listened. But she could also be disruptive in class and occasionally cruel to classmates who demonstrated any sort of weakness. Holmes believed it was a ploy to deflect attention from her own problems and insecurities. Jakiyah fought frequently with her mother, whom she had accused of abuse, and often ran away from home to stay with friends. Still, she had done well this semester, playing on Tilden athletic teams and ending the semester on-track with an A, two B’s and a C. She also had near-perfect attendance. She had many dreams about the future and wanted to attend college out of state, maybe in California.

“I always wanted to be a police officer,” she said during an interview later that year. “I like helping, I like to help.” Some of the recent shootings of unarmed black men had soured her on that career, though. “I don’t like the police no more. They ain’t ever there on time, but that used to be my dream job, but I would like to be a nurse or a teacher. I’d like to teach younger children. I like kids.”

Incongruously, Jakiyah was part of a group of girls who routinely talked about dropping out of school to work as strippers. Details the girls had rattled off about pay and working conditions were alarmingly specific, enough so to convince Holmes that they were seriously weighing the option. Holmes spent a lot of time talking with Jakiyah, hoping to tilt the scales away from the pole and toward the classroom. Jakiyah appreciated it. “Without Ms. Holmes, I’d probably drop out,” she said. “Ms. Holmes is the kind of teacher who wants to help you.”

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. About eighth grade,” interjected Makayla, a chatty and exuberant teen. Makayla had ended first semester on-track—barely. For much of the semester she had had F’s in math and biology. “Stop interrupting me!” she remonstrated. “Okay, so about eighth grade. There was lots of girl drama. A lot of drama. Drama every day. We got suspended. We had to go to counseling. There were fights every day. We never got to be in class or getting work done. Then my math teacher transferred out to go work at a college, and we got a new teacher and we had to do different stuff for her and then she failed me. That’s why I had to go to summer school because she failed me.”

Often, when Tilden students talked about failure, they talked about “being failed” in the passive voice, as if they had played no part in the transaction. It was more than a rhetorical tic. Many students believed grades were awarded haphazardly and unfairly, and in many cases they were right. These grading practices, in turn, caused students to stop trying, convinced that their efforts wouldn’t pay off.

Holmes tried hard to make the connection between effort and grades. She constantly corrected students when they claimed that a teacher had “given them” an F, though privately she agreed that Tilden did need to implement a more uniform and fair grading system that emphasized mastery of specific skills over compliance and effort. Today, however, Holmes focused on Makayla’s reference to the “drama” she had experienced in eighth grade.

“So, do any of you use the Peace Room this year to avoid drama?” Holmes asked.

“No,” Makayla explained, “because he don’t keep it, uh … con-ah … ? con-fa … ? Uh, what’s the word?”

“Confidential?” Holmes supplied.

“Yeah, he snitch.”

Holmes explained that Mr. Walker had an obligation to report instances of abuse or threats against other students.

“Okay, so how is Tilden better for you?” Chung asked, trying to refocus the conversation.

“It’s kinder. Not as much girl drama, more mature. Tilden kids in here don’t like to fight. They are quiet and friendly and stuff—”

“That’s a lie,” opined one of the males in the group, drawing laughs.

“There aren’t really a lot of fights in here,” Makayla insisted. “They’re just arguments. People don’t really fight, they talk. They just go to the Peace Room.”

“You talk a lot,” Marcus observed.

“Thank you! I know!” Makayla chirped.

Makayla had hit upon one of the key determinants of whether students stay in school: their sense of belonging. Research has found a clear link between students’ feelings of belonging (the quality of their relationships with peers and teachers) and their willingness to work hard in school. “Our kids are so relational,” Holmes observed. Many Tilden students picked and chose where to exert effort based on whether or not they liked the teacher of the class.

Nicole, a talented student who earned top grades first semester despite occasionally missing full days of school to care for her younger brother when everyone else in the family had to work, offered her take on the difference between eighth grade and Tilden.

“In eighth grade, there was a lot of drama that involved girls,” she explained. “I focused more on that and started missing school. I didn’t want to be a part of it. My grades started going down.”

Nicole had attended one of the district’s top-rated K–8 schools. It had a fine-arts and performing-arts magnet program and a gifted program that drew students from outside of its boundaries. Many of the Tilden students who attended the school said that the work had been harder there than in high school.

“They would teach us high-school-level-type stuff, and I was out of school so I wouldn’t be able to catch up,” Nicole explained. “I knew I would have to go to summer school so I stopped trying.”

“And now?” Chung inquired.

“The teachers are nicer. I stay out of drama. The teachers are more supportive,” she said.

Chung asked Nicole what teachers could do to better support the students who had failed a course or two first semester. Her answer revealed the critical role that teacher-student relationships play in students’ efforts.

“Some teachers, they’ll teach you something and right away assume everyone in class knows how to do it. They don’t really teach you how to do it fully where all the kids understand it. There are some kids who do really understand it, but there are some who don’t.”

“So, teachers should check in with students,” Chung summarized. “Things that are basic to a teacher might not be basic to students.”

Makayla interjected, “The teacher should already know if kids aren’t caught up. They should know ’cause they are the teacher. They know the level students read at.” Students’ determinations of whether or not a teacher was supportive often hinged on whether or not they noticed when they were struggling and offered the proper help.

“If they see children are failing, they should ask, ‘Is something going on?’” Nicole added. When she had missed school to take care of her little brother, she had taken note of which teachers had inquired after her and which had not. Holmes was one of the teachers who had asked. She had proudly produced a photo of her baby brother to explain the situation. Holmes had been suitably admiring of the baby’s cuteness, Nicole had noted approvingly.

“So, teachers should research if something is going on with a student?” Chung asked the group.

“Not research,” Marcus snapped. “Just ask.”

As more students offered up their turnaround stories, it became clear that the primary obstacles that had tripped them up in eighth grade were absenteeism, behavioral issues, and interpersonal conflicts. Not one student cited an inability to do the work as the primary reason for their previous failure. Now that they were attending school regularly and doing the work consistently, they were passing. Some, like Nicole, who had earned all A’s first semester, were truly thriving. The students’ self-reports were consistent with the Freshman OnTrack research showing that attendance and studying—not test scores or background factors—were the strongest predictors of both ninth-grade course failure and grades, which in turn were the strongest predictors of graduation.

It was also clear that one of the main reasons their academic behavior had improved was that Tilden’s teachers were providing more individualized support for social and academic issues than most of the students had received in eighth grade. This was a dramatic departure from what Roderick had found in the mid-1990s, or what Allensworth had found in the mid-2000s. Back then, students overwhelmingly reported receiving less support in ninth grade than they had in eighth grade. But Freshman OnTrack efforts seemed to be reversing that trend in district schools generally and in Tilden in particular.

Daniela, a diminutive student who rarely caused any trouble in class, was one of the students who had made a particularly dramatic turnaround in high school, and she credited it to the increase in support she had received at Tilden. “When I was in Libby, I got caught with a weapon,” Daniela admitted.

“She got caught with knives!” Marcus supplied.

Daniela giggled.

“You all are telling me things I just did not know,” Holmes said, shaking her head. Often when students talked about their struggles and misdeeds in elementary school, Holmes expressed surprise. In some cases, she was genuinely surprised. In others, she was not particularly surprised but managed to fake it. She wanted to send a clear message that whatever failures or struggles they had experienced in elementary school, those events no longer defined them.

“So, anyway, I didn’t do good in math. I didn’t pay attention in math,” Daniela said.

“Math is my favorite subject,” Marcus interrupted.

“So how is Tilden different from Libby?” Chung asked.

“I think Tilden is much better. There are more people here to help you, understand you, help you know the things you don’t know.”

“So, Tilden is more caring, more supportive of you,” Chung clarified.

Daniela nodded.

Elementary school teachers may have counseled their students to avoid Tilden, but Tilden’s students and teachers alike recognized that their low-rated (according to the district’s metrics) school offered a kind of personalization that was rare in American high schools. Ironically, Tilden’s past failures had contributed to this strength. Because so many students opted out of this neighborhood high school, Tilden’s freshman class numbered just seventy-two students during the 2015–16 school year, making it easy for teachers to know every student in the building.

“Everyone here has someone,” observed Jenny, the City Year team leader. “Every kid has a connection with someone. It’s easy at the end of the year to break it up and say who is connected to whom because everyone is connected to someone.”

Holmes, who sometimes wished her colleagues would do even more to support Tilden students, nevertheless agreed with Jenny’s assessment. “One thing that Tilden does really well is help kids who struggled in junior high, who are at risk,” she observed one day at a Freshman OnTrack meeting. “We do a phenomenal job at that. We had a kid who transferred to Phillips a while back. He came back, and I asked why he had returned. He said, ‘Because you guys loved me and they didn’t.’ All the teachers at this school do care, and they want you to be successful.”

Tilden’s teachers and staff worked to ensure that success by offering an array of supports for freshmen that would have been unheard of at Tilden or at most other district schools just a decade prior. Each Tilden student was assigned a mentor who regularly reviewed the student’s grades and attendance and helped set goals for the future. Freshmen also attended intervention sessions twice a week. Th se were essentially advisory periods (the type that Vallas had tried to institute district-wide without much success) during which students reviewed their homework and worked on academic skills and interpersonal relationships. Every Tuesday at intervention, students received a “BAG” report—an update on their behavior, attendance, and grades. The reports consistently reinforced the importance of these measures while ensuring that no student was caught unaware of his or her academic standing at the end of the semester.

The constellation of supports for freshmen also included the monthly Freshman Success Team meetings, during which teachers discussed students like Sierra, who had required a good deal of extra attention (and some nontraditional support in the form of lipstick bribes) in order for her to finish first semester (just barely) on-track. She had avoided an F in Persaud’s math class by the skin of her teeth. In the old days, before the district’s push around Freshman OnTrack, students like Sierra who were struggling in math would have been shuffled into some one-size-fits-all program, likely tutoring of some sort. The success team meetings helped teachers realize that academic struggles could have an array of causes. Some students struggling in math might require tutoring, but many others, like Sierra, needed more help with motivation, self-esteem, and relationships, which was what she received.

Over the course of the first semester, Walker met with Sierra and her friends in the Peace Room. City Year staff bribed her with candy and lipstick and other small rewards so that she would stay after school and work with them. Persaud conferenced with Sierra’s grandmother, imploring her to get her granddaughter to school on time. He also gave Sierra loads of chances to make up missed work. Sierra ended the semester with a D. It wasn’t exactly an academic triumph, but she did manage to avoid failure and finish the semester on-track, which meant her odds of graduating increased more than threefold.

It took an array of staff and nonprofit organizations to address all the specific needs of Tilden’s students. One thing that stood out about most of these programs was that they were not strictly—or even primarily—focused on teaching content or building academic skills. Rather, they were focused on ensuring that students exhibited the type of academic behavior that was likely to make them successful in school. Those behaviors included attending class regularly, completing homework and classroom assignments, asking for help when needed, working respectfully with peers and teachers, and persisting at tasks even when they were complex or taxing.

Ms. Dominguez monitored attendance and called home whenever a student was absent. A Knock at Midnight, a truancy intervention program, tracked students down when Dominguez couldn’t reach them. “They could find a kid under a rock,” Dominguez observed. Mr. Walker from Umoja and others worked to defuse conflicts between students, and between students and teachers, and to build students’ social and emotional skills. City Year corps members offered tutoring to any Tilden freshman who needed it but, as important, they worked to create a sense of community, greeting students by name every morning as they filed into school and hosting regular events and celebrations for freshmen. When Tilden freshmen weren’t in class, they could often be found in the City Year room, chatting with mentors like Jess Enriquez and Anthony Bryant, who had grown up in Chicago.

All of these efforts were consistent with the growing national focus on so-called non-cognitive factors. Researchers define non-cognitive factors as “the sets of behaviors, skills, attitudes, and strategies that are crucial to academic performance” but are not necessarily captured by aptitude tests: perseverance, study skills, conscientiousness, and social acumen, to name a few. Students’ grades are generally a reflection of both their academic skills and their ability to employ these non-cognitive factors.

Part of the impetus for the growing focus on non-cognitive skills is the substantial body of research that shows that grades—far more than test scores—best predict how well students will fare later in life. Allensworth and Easton demonstrated that students’ freshman-year course performance matters more for high school graduation than test scores do. Other researchers have found that grades also matter much more than test scores do for college-going, college graduation, and other life outcomes. Though the public often views standardized tests as a fairer, unbiased way to measure students’ skills, grades clearly capture something important that test scores miss: both students’ academic ability and their non-cognitive skills.

One focus of efforts to improve students’ non-cognitive skills—both in Chicago and nationally—has been on improving students’ academic perseverance, the ability to keep working at tasks over a long period of time. One of the most oft-cited psychological studies justifying these efforts is by psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman, who found that self-discipline was actually more important for predicting academic performance than IQ. They argue that a failure to exercise self-discipline is “a major reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential.” When Sierra refused to do her math work because it was hard for her, when David cut school, when Marcus got kicked out of class, all were struggling with self-discipline in one form or another.

It can be easy to misinterpret the literature on non-cognitive factors and equate a lack of academic perseverance with laziness or some other individual character flaw. However, as Roderick has often observed, “No kid is gritty and perseverant enough to thrive in the crappy high schools some Chicago kids were forced to attend.” In fact, the evidence is clear that many of the behaviors and attitudes that students display are not simply intrinsic to them but are highly influenced by the schools and classrooms they attend. That is, there are features of certain classrooms and schools that make it much more likely that students will attend class regularly, complete assignments to the best of their ability, and persist when the going gets tough—in short, do all of the things it takes to earn top grades.

One way that educators can influence how hard students try is by influencing their academic mindsets, or the beliefs they hold about themselves as learners. Stanford University professor Carol Dweck was one of the first researchers to recognize the role mindsets could play in academic success. She found that students’ mindsets about intelligence play a leading role in whether or not they persist in the face of difficulty. Students who believe that intelligence is a finite quantity that they either have or don’t have (“fixed mindset”) tend to withdraw in the face of challenge because they worry they might appear dumb or incompetent if they fail. Students who believe that the brain is like a muscle that can be strengthened with learning and effort (“growth mindset”) tend to seek out challenges because they see them as an opportunity to improve.

Dweck and her colleagues have focused in particular on one-off interventions that can promote positive mindsets, but classroom and school contexts—grading policies, trust between teachers and students, teacher support for student work, teacher expectations, to name a few—also play a significant role in determining students’ academic mindsets, which in turn help determine whether or not students work hard and display strong academic behaviors.

Indeed, Roderick and her UChicago Consortium colleagues identified mindsets as a key piece in understanding why students who do well freshman year might continue to do well throughout high school. In a comprehensive review of the literature on noncognitive factors, they found:

Positive academic mindsets motivate students to persist at school-work (i.e., they give rise to academic perseverance), which manifests itself through better academic behaviors, which lead to improved performance. There is also a reciprocal relationship among mindsets, perseverance, behaviors, and performance. Strong academic performance “validates” positive mindsets, increases perseverance, and reinforces strong academic behaviors.

This reciprocal relationship between academic mindsets and academic success is likely to be one reason that such a strong relationship exists between freshman year failure and dropout and, conversely, freshman year success and graduation. Indeed, the Consortium identified four specific mindsets that were tied to students’ academic performance.

1.  I belong in this academic community.

2.  My ability and competence grow with my effort.

3.  I can succeed at this.

4.  This work has value for me.

To summarize, students are far more likely to persevere academically when they believe they are a part of a community of learners; when they believe hard work, rather than innate ability, is the secret to success; when they believe they are capable of learning the material presented to them and doing the work assigned to them; and when they believe the work is worthwhile, either because it is inherently interesting or because it will be useful for some later goal.

The students who were gathered in the Peace Room to discuss their first semester turnarounds were clearly displaying some of these positive academic mindsets. One recurring theme was that the students felt they belonged at Tilden, more so than they had in elementary school. “In eighth grade, I was the new kid,” said one teen who had spent much of the period chatting with another teen who shared a beanbag with him. “So, I didn’t know nobody, and I didn’t get along with nobody. When I came to Tilden, it was like, City Year and teachers and other kids, they were like, cool.”

Many explicitly discussed how they were succeeding this year because they were thinking differently—about themselves and school. Taylor, who had attended a charter elementary school, was one of those who talked about how he had changed his mindsets when he got to high school, though he didn’t use the term “mindset.”

“In elementary school I was always getting in trouble and trouble,” he said. “But I’m more mature than I was back then. When I came to Tilden, I realized I could do better, and that’s what I did,” he explained succinctly. When he came to Tilden, he came to believe he could be successful, which made it more likely that he would be successful, or able to muster the academic mindset “I can succeed at this.” There is clear evidence linking students’ self-efficacy (the belief that they can succeed) with effort. Simply put, people (teens and adults alike) try to do things they think they are good at and avoid things they think they are not good at, particularly if they have a fixed mindset. And like other mindsets, self-efficacy can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. When students think they will fail, they resist trying, which leads to failure, which reinforces the original belief about their competency.

This is why Holmes was so very determined that Sierra pass math first semester. It wasn’t just about ensuring that she did not experience failure in that one class; rather, it was about disrupting her negative mindset around math. “I had to have it out with Persaud over her math grade,” Holmes noted. “It wasn’t even about her lack of skill or work. It was her attitude. I was like, ‘Fine, but if you’re going to grade on attitude, make it just a small percentage of her grade.’”

Holmes acknowledged that Sierra was occasionally prone to displays of poor attitude, particularly in math. But she believed that the attitude was really just a shield she put up—the dis-identification that Claude Steele writes about. She believed Sierra didn’t try hard in math because she expected to fail at it. Holmes had noticed that she freaked out whenever she got below an A on any English project that had involved any amount of effort on her part. She seemed to think it confirmed what she secretly suspected, which was that she was dumb.

Persaud had a harsher interpretation of her behavior, believing Sierra expected to have everything handed to her. He said he passed her in the end because “she did step up her game.” Though he was willing to work with any student who was willing to put in the effort, Persaud also resented the implication that the onus was on him to ensure that students received a passing grade.

“Th whole system has changed. You’re stigmatized if you fail a kid. It’s a teacher’s fault, which makes no sense,” he lamented. “The pressure comes down on you for failing kids. But at the end of the day, what’s the purpose of it? If you pass an algebra class, you are expected to be able to do X, Y, and Z.”

Holmes agreed that demonstrating basic skills should be a requisite of passing classes. But she also believed that helping students develop the belief that they belonged to an academic community and were capable of success was even more important. She didn’t believe failing a kid could possibly serve that purpose. Holmes hoped this small success in math might inoculate Sierra against future failure by changing her mindset. She hoped that seeing her effort at the end of the semester pay off would be enough to engender that shift. Truthfully, though, she feared it wouldn’t be.

Marcus, sitting at the far end of the peace circle, was the last to share his experiences with the group. As usual, his classmates listened when he spoke.

“In elementary school I was fighting my teachers. I used to bring weapons to school. I used to get put out of class every day. I used to bring weed to school. I got kicked out of Libby—”

His peers hooted at his matter-of-fact itemization of past transgressions.

“Then when I transferred to Graham, I didn’t really know nobody. That’s when I had trouble, really, with the students. I didn’t know nobody so I got into it a lot. Since I came here, I had to slow down. I be getting older. I started thinking that it ain’t worth it to keep on getting kicked out, keep on having to transfer, move, so I said, ‘Forget it, I’m just going to do right.’” He paused. “Like, I know I’m smart. I used to be a straight-A student—”

“I remember that,” Daniela confirmed.

Mr. Chung summarized, “So, you’re saying you matured, you got older, you made a personal decision to act right. Thank you.”

Chung’s pithy summary of Marcus’s trajectory over the year was a vast oversimplification of the daily war the teen was fighting with his own demons—and that Tilden teachers and staff were fighting on his behalf. The battle was best illustrated by the emoji Marcus often posted on his Facebook page: a devilish, leering face with horns. He posted the horned emoji whenever he was up to—or considering being up to—no good. Often it was accompanied by a pistol emoji (representing his gang) or a fluttering leaf emoji (representing weed), as in: “If ion squeeze that trigger where im from they’ll end up Killing me,” followed by emojis including the devil face and pistol. Sometimes he followed those posts with regretful laments about how lonely or misunderstood he felt. “Can somebody be proud of me? Like, fuck I’m trying, I’m trying so hard.”

Indeed, his teachers confirmed, he was trying admirably to be the best version of himself and to reconnect with the boy he had been before—as he put it—“I really jumped off the porch.” In the first few weeks after his run-in with Persaud, Marcus could hardly stand to be in math class, despite the fact that math was his favorite subject.

Marcus began coming to the Peace Room to visit Mr. Walker whenever he felt like his anger was going to get him into trouble. That in and of itself was a breakthrough. Prior to his work with Mr. Walker, Marcus hadn’t really recognized the extent to which his emotions were controlling his life. “I mean, I knew that angry feeling was there. I just didn’t pay it no mind,” Marcus said. “[Mr. Walker] pointed it out to me. He was like, ‘Marcus, from my point of view, you get angry too quick. The littlest thing will enrage you.’” Marcus started thinking maybe he was right. He recalled that before he worked with Mr. Walker, he had seen signs of disrespect everywhere. Even something as simple as a person calling to him without using his name could set him off.

Walker began to fill a hole in Marcus’s life. There were plenty of black male teachers at Tilden, but Walker was different. He wasn’t a classroom teacher, so he didn’t need to worry about maintaining classroom order or authority. He never got in power struggles with kids, and he never tried to exert any authority over Marcus. He simply listened to what he had to say without judgment. “I ain’t got no father figure in my life,” Marcus explained, “so before Mr. Walker, I ain’t really got no guides. Now I do.”

But Walker did more than just listen. He also introduced Marcus to a variety of techniques he could use to keep himself on a more even keel. Every time Marcus lost his temper, Walker would ask him to recall how he felt just before the blowup, hoping he would start to recognize the physical signals by himself before he blew his lid.

Marcus had never spent so much time reflecting on his feelings or differentiating among them. “I really didn’t show no emotion but anger,” Marcus said. Mr. Walker helped him realize that there was a whole rainbow of emotions—sadness, fear, frustration, anxiety, jealousy—that he had experienced as one single, throbbing hue. He learned what calmed him down (bright colors, deep breathing techniques, music) and what didn’t (dark colors, counting backward from ten—“Not enough numbers,” Marcus observed).

Whenever he entered the Peace Room, Walker would ask him to rate his anger level, which usually was at a 10. They would talk a little bit, trying to get at the root cause of the blowup. Often Marcus ended up talking about his complicated relationship with his mom. After a few minutes, Walker would check in again. “How are you feeling now?” Marcus would generally report that he had cooled to a 5 or 6. When he got down to 3, he would go back to math class. There were times first semester when Marcus would come to the Peace Room every thirty minutes, for five minutes at a time.

Occasionally, when he was having a particularly bad day, he started the day in the Peace Room rather than risk a blowup in math class. He’d feel the old familiar pit in his stomach, the tension in his neck, the dull ache of his nails digging into his palm, and he would know how the day was likely to end up if he didn’t get help first. “I’d know he’d just say something to me, and then I would just pop off, and then he would put me out, and I’d probably have to go to the dean’s office,” Marcus recalled. “So I’d just say, ‘Can I sit in here, Mr. Walker?’ And he’d say sure. And we’d have a conversation and he’d eventually try to get me to go back in there.”

Walker thought Marcus’s growing ability to recognize his anger ahead of time and do something to preempt it was a remarkable breakthrough. Some Tilden teachers disagreed, concerned that Walker was “coddling” Marcus. Emanuel Smith, Tilden’s dean in charge of discipline, was one of those who worried about Marcus’s dependence on Mr. Walker. He believed that some of Walker’s tactics—and some aspects of Freshman OnTrack in general—wouldn’t translate well beyond the walls of Tilden.

It wasn’t that Smith wasn’t dedicated to serving his students or to Freshman OnTrack. Letters from grateful students he had mentored lined his office wall. “Thank you for putting up with my ignorance,” one student wrote. “You are like a father to me,” wrote another. And there was this heartbreaking note from one ninth grader: “I would like to give thanks to you Dean Smith for pushing me to succeed and go someplace in life but to be honest with you I think I am going to drop out because I don’t think I am going to pass freshman year. But thanks for being their [sic].”

But Smith’s approach differed from Walker’s. He was a proponent of “tough love” and wondered whether Walker’s approach would adequately prepare students for “the real world.” He said of Marcus: “He’s one of those where restorative practices and peace circles have become a crutch. Has there been progress? Okay, yes, but at the same time, every time something happens, you can’t go to the peace circle to talk about it. Children are most effective when they can handle things on their own, without an adult needed to guide them. In the real world, there’s not going to be a conversation every time you get into trouble.”

Debates about Freshman OnTrack often came down to precisely this argument. What, exactly, was expected of people in “the real world,” and what tactics were most likely to prepare students to face that eventuality? Not every school working on Freshman OnTrack offered peace circles or restorative practices, but most schools with strong on-track rates offered students multiple chances—whether it was to make up a grade, learn a new skill, or redo an assignment. Smith had been the Freshman OnTrack coordinator at Wells, a school on the Near North Side, before he came to Tilden. He loved that job and was good at it. He managed to spur a whopping 17.4 percentage-point increase in Wells’s on-track rate between the school years that ended in 2008 and 2009. But Smith’s work at Wells focused more on extra tutoring and careful monitoring of students, rather than on peace circles and restorative justice techniques. It was a reminder that FOT looked different at every school, and that FOT was often less about a specific intervention than about the process of monitoring and discussing what was in the best interest of students.

Indeed, Walker and Smith often engaged in lively debates about Marcus and other “frequent fliers” in the dean’s office. During one Freshman Success Team meeting toward the end of first semester, Smith expressed concern about the number of chances Tilden’s staff were providing to students. Holmes, Walker, and Sarah Howard, the Network for College Success coach, had spent part of the meeting pushing Swinney to reconsider how the school graded makeup work.

Howard asked the group, “Can we focus recovery on, Do they know what they need to know from that class? Rather than on, Did they do all the assignments, and did they show me due respect by coming back with everything I asked?”

Smith responded skeptically. “The only issue I have with that is, when you do that, you set the kids up for failure, in a sense,” he said. “You allow them to think it’s okay to play around and then take an exit exam. It just sends out the wrong message.”

“This requires a much longer conversation,” Howard replied. “But I think we can do both without punishing them for being fourteen.”

Walker nodded his agreement. “Some kids missed huge chunks because of crazy circumstances. It might make sense to have more opportunities for makeup when things are just really jacked up like that.”

Howard observed that sometimes “the real world” wasn’t as unforgiving as people made it out to be. “If you counted the number of papers that I turned in late in college you would be stunned,” Howard said. “I think there is a false narrative out there that you have to hold them hard, that you have to put the ‘dead’ in deadline.”

Smith and Walker continued the debate after the meeting wrapped up. Smith said he thought there was altogether too much coddling taking place at the school, and that students, particularly the boys, were starting to take advantage of it. He cited Anthony, a habitual truant, as one of the chief offenders. Walker disagreed with the term “coddling” and pushed back on his characterization of Anthony.

“We can’t expect kids to change overnight,” Walker argued, using the same even tone he used to talk with students. “Shit. Anthony? He’s a lot of work, he’s more work than ninety percent of kids in this building. I don’t see it as coddling. Everybody has different styles. Anthony, man, if he shows up to school and stays in school the entire day, that’s a reason to celebrate.”

Smith broke in. “That’s just a reasonable expectation.”

“It’s a reasonable expectation for someone who has a place to sleep,” Walker rejoined.

“See, see, this is what gets me,” Smith replied excitedly, gathering speed as he warmed to the topic. “I was adopted. Not only was I adopted, I’ve had to sleep in a house with no lights. I took showers in winter in freezing cold. We had candlelight dinners because my mom was embarrassed and didn’t want to tell us the lights were out. We had rats. We had roaches. I’ve slept on pallets. So don’t come to me with this bullshit ass story about, you know, life is so hard. I get it. I get it. I understand, and that’s why I share these things with you to let you know, ‘Hey, this is not the end, but in order to get where I’m at or surpass where I’m at, You. Have. To. Stop.’”

He plowed ahead, barely coming up for air. “I’ve had my fair share of struggles, but I made up in my mind that I didn’t want my kids to see what I saw. And in spite of all the crazy stuff that was going on—being adopted, losing my grandmother, being tossed around. A lot of stuff happened. I just made up in my mind like, no matter how bad it is, if you have someone trying to help you, you can get through.”

Walker, who had been listening intently to Smith, interjected. “Yeah, those are some moments, man,” he said sincerely. “I think your story has so much value, and kids can draw from that. And I also know humans are complex. We are all very different. And I wish, I wish, they fucking had like half of the resilience you had when you were their age, but everyone is just a little bit different.”

Marcus’s performance toward the end of first semester lent credence to Walker’s approach. “Mr. Walker, he really got through to me,” Marcus said gratefully. “I’ve started being able to control my anger. I’ve started learning how to hold things in, but also learning that if I hold things in too long, I’m just going to pop off.” Other teachers noticed the improvement. Marcus recalled the day Persaud complimented him on his turnaround. “He was like, ‘Mr. Clark, I really see you’ve been improving and I thank you for that.’ So, we cool now.”

As he learned to control his anger, his academic performance began to improve in all his classes. Over the course of first semester, he became increasingly engaged in class discussions. More and more, Holmes noted, he participated in class rather than spending the entire period with his head on his desk. One day in December, Holmes’s class was reading the classic Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. One section of the book talked about how Wiesel and his family were marched out from their home, in front of their neighbors, to be deported to the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz.

Some of the boys in Holmes’s class started posturing. “Man, they weak,” one declared. “I’d break out of line,” claimed another. Marcus, who hadn’t appeared to be listening to the discussion at all, swiveled in his seat and fixed them both with a withering stare. “No,” he said emphatically, “you need to think about the situation they were in. They didn’t have guns. They were outnumbered. They would have died more quickly by going ahead right then. You have to plan. You have to strategize. They weren’t being weak. They were being smart.”

Holmes and Vincent Gray, her team teacher, exchanged a brief grin. Marcus was sharp, no doubt about it.

“Y’all dumb as hell,” Marcus concluded, and then resumed staring off into space.

Two steps forward, one step back.

Holmes began making a point of giving Marcus opportunities to shine. He enjoyed reading aloud in class and at some point had designated himself the official arbiter of who would read which passages in her class. “He wanted to dictate who could read, so I let him,” Holmes said. If it was a longer part and someone couldn’t read that well, he would explain, not unkindly, that he might do better with a different part. “He’d be like, ‘You stutter, but here’s a good part for you.’ He was actually really diplomatic,” she said.

As the second semester began, there was another reason teachers had hope for Marcus. He had started dating a girl they all very much approved of. She was smart and funny and kind and she didn’t put up with any of his “ignorance,” as she called it.

The student who had not managed to pull off a first-semester turnaround was David. Despite a Hail Mary attempt during the last few weeks of school to complete missing assignments, he had ended up failing multiple courses. Toward the end of first semester, he had approached both Holmes and Persaud and asked them for makeup work, which they had provided. He had worked furiously to complete missing assignments—going to the City Year room or to Ms. Holmes’s classroom during lunch for the last month of the semester. In the end, though, it wasn’t enough. Though he was proficient in all of the math concepts—he had learned most of them already in elementary school Algebra—he couldn’t make up a semester’s worth of work in two weeks.

Still, unlike Sierra, he never attributed his struggles to a lack of ability. He knew he could do the work, and his teachers constantly conveyed that message too. “He knew. We reiterated what he knew, that the only reason he was failing was because he was never here,” said Ms. Lyana, one of the City Year corps members who worked closely with David.

Though his last-minute sprint came up short, it had imbued David with a certain level of confidence. He saw his class averages rise precipitously as he turned in missing assignment after missing assignment. And as he did the work, he received lots of positive feedback from teachers. He was particularly grateful to Ms. Holmes, who failed him but had also spent a lot of time with him making up work and encouraging him to get back on-track the next semester. “She is pretty an amazing teacher,” David said. “She’s the one who helped me return to school, focus on my work, improve on what I did. She basically put it to me how I needed to do it for the second semester, and that’s what I’m doing,” he said, during an interview a month into second semester.

David also had another revelation during that period—namely, that listening in class was actually more interesting than staring into space, which was how he had previously occupied himself in class. “Classes are an hour and thirty minutes. It can be pretty boring. But if I’m on task, then I don’t have to worry about just sitting there and waiting until the bell for the next class, because you’re doing something. You can focus on something else,” he explained with sincere enthusiasm.

David also had some new motivation to pull his grades up, though it wasn’t the type of motivation he liked to talk about. Over Christmas break, he had been arrested for driving in a stolen vehicle. He claimed he was just joyriding and didn’t know it was stolen. The juvenile court judge had agreed to drop the charges if he could bring in a strong report card the next semester. Persaud had also offered to write him a letter of support if he earned good grades second semester.

The arrest had set off some changes in his home life. After he was arrested, his father insisted David come live with him, his girlfriend, and their baby son on the Southwest Side. His father, who had recently bought a house, was a steadying influence. He made sure David was awake every morning before he left for his construction job. His father’s girlfriend dropped him off at school every morning and picked him up every afternoon. In the evenings they played soccer together in the park. The opportunities to ditch had diminished considerably.

“He’s kind of a strict parent,” David explained, “and it’s kind of good for me. It’s starting to help me out to do better.” David admitted that he actually liked being held accountable by his dad. Truth be told, his behavior last semester had come to frustrate even him. “Like, every day I would think to myself, ‘I’ll just leave today and do better tomorrow,’ but then I would do the same stuff over and over and over. It just became a habit.” It was a relief to no longer have to rely on his own still-developing self-control. “It’s more better how my behavior changed living over here from over there, because over there I had lots of opportunities.” By opportunities, he meant opportunities to get in trouble. “That’s why I felt like it was okay, because if I left school I wouldn’t get in trouble with my mom like I do with my dad, so I had more opportunities. He’s more strict. If he found out I ditched he’d probably just yell at me or give me a big lecture of what I have to do better.”

His goal for second semester was to earn all A’s and B’s and have the grades to transfer to Curie Metropolitan High School, which was closer to his dad’s house. “In five years I’ll be really happy knowing that I tried my best in school starting this semester,” he said. “I want to say, ‘Yeah, I started coming, I made a big turnaround.’ I just want to say that I got good grades and everything.”