BY THE END of his second year at Bastian, Levin was convinced of the wisdom of his moving to Garcia and trying to make something happen with the KIPP plan. Bastian was undergoing severe adjustments. Joyce Andrews, the principal who had hired him, transferred to another school just as the spring term began. There had been a rape in the schoolyard, a group of fifth-grade boys assaulting a girl after class. That was too much for the area superintendent. He wanted someone he considered tough, and chose a new principal, a man this time.
About the same time, the Bastian faculty met to select their teacher of the year. Ball appeared to have most of the votes, but there was grumbling. Some people asked in whispers why she always had to be the one. Ball was disgusted by what she considered unprofessional comments. She decided to put a stop to it.
“You know what?” she said, standing up and looking around the room. “I don’t even want to represent you. You complain too much. It’s not like I was appointed by the principal. I was voted on by the faculty.” She paused for breath. “Tell you what. Take my name out of it. I don’t want to represent you. Give my votes to Levin or just vote over and leave me out!”
“Are you sure?” said the woman collecting the votes.
“Take it out. Take it out. You all have a good day,” she said, and walked out of the room.
In the hubbub, with teachers arguing among themselves and Ball’s friends running after her to try to dissuade her, the issue was up in the air. Her recommendation of Levin offended some teachers. They were not at all sure such a novice deserved the accolade. Some appeared to be openly hostile to him. One of them had called him “nothing but a white Ball.” Earlier that year, he found someone had slashed his tires in the locked faculty parking lot.
But Levin also had admirers, who shared Ball’s affection for the young man. They voted again. David Levin, at the end of his second year as a public school teacher, was declared Bastian Elementary School’s 1994 Teacher of the Year.
The new principal appeared to have no problem with that. Like other principals, he was focused on preparation for the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills tests, and Levin’s kids were learning their stuff. The TAAS way of evaluating schools would be one of the models for the federal No Child Left Behind Act, signed by President George W. Bush, a former Texas governor, in 2002.
The rule in 1994 was that if fewer than 75 percent of students in each ethnic group passed the TAAS test in any school, that school would be rated unsatisfactory. That posed a problem for the new principal because he had relatively few Anglo and Hispanic students, and there was little margin for error if all of them did not pass. There were only ten Hispanic and one Anglo student in the Bastian fourth grade. All of them were in Levin’s class. Levin was told at least eight of the Hispanic students, plus the Anglo student, had to pass or there would be trouble.
Levin later recalled being told by school administrators and special-needs staffers that the best way to avoid an unsatisfactory rating was to exempt those eleven students from taking the test. This could be done if their teacher or their parents signed a statement saying that their language skills were not adequate to take the test or that they had learning disabilities that would make it unfair to judge their progress by that exam. Levin was told to fill out and sign the exemption forms. Other teachers were doing the same. Many of them did not like the state tests. They thought it was wrong to put such pressure on children, particularly if they came from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Levin refused to sign. He was deeply disenchanted with the learning standards at the regular middle schools. He wanted his students to qualify for one of the magnet middle schools, which he hoped would challenge them in the same way he had been challenging them. Some of the magnet middle schools started in fifth grade. If his fourth graders took the TAAS exams and received good scores, they had a chance to move to a magnet right away. He and Feinberg were, after all, starting a special fifth-grade program to qualify students for the magnet middle schools. He would be betraying the KIPP idea before the program even started if he did not do everything he could to prepare his fourth graders for the TAAS tests and make sure they passed.
The Bastian administrators’ doubts about the children’s chances were well founded. They had been among the lowest-scoring students in the school the previous year. That was why they had been given to the Levin, Harriett Ball’s prize pupil. As third graders, only one of Levin’s Hispanic students had passed the reading section of the TAAS test, and only two had passed the math section.
Still, Levin thought they were doing well in his class and could pass the TAAS tests if given a chance. His first year at Bastian, 70 percent of his students had passed. Those children had started the year with Ball, of course, but this year he thought he could win the race on this own. At the very least, he wanted a chance to try. He was far more interested in raising their level of achievement than he was in guaranteeing Bastian would avoid an unsatisfactory rating on the TAAS. He was not going to give in to the popular but dispiriting notion that low-income children could not make much progress.
Giving up on Levin, the officials asked the parents of the Hispanic students in his class to sign the form exempting their children. They refused. They explained that that nice Mr. Levin, who was so polite to stop by and keep them in touch with their children’s progress, had told them not to sign. Mr. Levin said their children could pass the tests. They knew Mr. Levin. He always told the truth.
Levin would be proved right. All but one of the students passed the math section of the test. All but two passed the reading. The school did not suffer in the TAAS ratings, and Levin’s students could apply to the magnet middle schools. But that news came several weeks later. For the moment, the principal appeared to be furious at him. The principal knew Levin would be transferring to Garcia for the next school year. There was no need to take any action to get rid of him. But he decided to send the young teacher an unmistakable signal of his feelings.
The principal, accompanied by a couple of other school officials, personally delivered the letter to Levin in his classroom a week before the end of the school year. He asked Levin to read it, sign it, keep the copy that had been included, and hand back the original. Class was in session. The fourth graders, intrigued by the high-level delegation that was visiting their teacher, were watching. Levin tried to maintain a neutral expression as he read the letter.
It said his services would not be required at Bastian the next school year. He was fired. It gave no reason. (The official word came down later: insubordination.) He signed the original as he was told, and handed it back to the principal, who left. For a day or two, Levin worried that he would not be able to work with Feinberg at Garcia, that he had been fired from the Houston Independent School District in its entirety. His teachers’ union representative explained that that was not the case. The dismissal applied only to Bastian. The union wanted to mount a protest. It would make a provocative headline: TEACHER OF THE YEAR FIRED. Levin said no. He did not want anything to get in the way of what he and Feinberg planned to do with KIPP.
On the day he was dismissed, shortly after the principal left, Levin crumpled the copy of the dismissal notice into a tight ball and hit his wastepaper basket cleanly, a nicely arched shot. On the last day of school, when he got into his car to drive home, he noticed that his rearview mirror had fallen off. It was not vandalism, just a rusted screw. Like many athletes, he believed in unseen forces in sport, and in life. Ball had told him many stories about divine intervention. He chose to be like Ball and interpret the fallen rearview mirror as a sign. God was telling him to move to Garcia, and KIPP, and not look back.
It was such a good omen that he did not fix the rearview mirror for several months. He used the side mirrors to make sure nobody was coming up behind him too fast. He kept moving.