34.
Dave and Frank

THE FRIENDSHIP OF Dave Levin and Frank Corcoran often brought comment. They were so different. When they first roomed together in Houston, the quiet Corcoran thought Levin took an interest in him only to get a break from the boisterous Feinberg. But Corcoran had good instincts about children. He was the next-to-youngest of the seven children of a lawyer and a homemaker in Newport, Rhode Island. Nearly everybody liked the slender, blond, sweet-tempered teacher. When Levin and Corcoran started working together in New York, school system officials would often call Levin an obstinate troublemaker. Those were the same words being used to describe Feinberg back in Houston. They would ask why Levin couldn’t be more like Corcoran. “Oh yeah,” Levin said wearily. “Everyone loves Frank.”

There were priests and nuns in Corcoran’s family. For a while he thought he would accept holy orders himself. That was one reason he went to the University of Notre Dame. He embraced many of that campus’s cherished traditions. He was a talented musician, rising to first trombone in the Notre Dame marching band his freshman year. He was also an inquisitive student, looking for the deeper meaning of man’s place in the universe.

That thoughtful side led him to drop the idea of the priesthood. He saw much need for change in the world. Anger over social injustice gripped his soul. But the church did not seem to be the best place to channel his desire for political and social change. In his junior year he spent a semester abroad in Israel, when the Intifada was at its worst, and learned about the lives of young Palestinians. He persuaded his aunt Anne Corcoran, a nun, to let him work with her for several weeks at her small hospital in Zimbabwe.

By the time he returned to South Bend for his senior year, his mind was racing. He quit the band and added a concentration in peace studies to his history major. He did a research paper on the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, or ROTC. He concluded it had too much influence over the lives of students at Notre Dame.

One night, as a protest, he climbed to the top of the new $6 million ROTC building, still under construction, and wrote “ A W,” with the R inscribed in reverse, in nine-foot-high letters with white paint on the steeply slanting roof. He hoped people would see he had written a mirror image of the word war, as a sign that the university’s priorities were askew. But when he got home, he realized he had accidentally left his keys at the scene of the crime. He would, he was sure, be quickly identified. He saw no point in trying to avoid punishment. He turned himself in. He was suspended for the rest of the year. He would not be able to graduate with his class and had to pay a three-thousand-dollar fine for malicious vandalism and destruction of school property.

His parents were surprised but forgiving. His siblings teased him. “Oh, Frank,” one said, “you’re no longer the best kid.” He worked two jobs for the rest of the year to pay his fine and prove to his parents that he was not a complete loss. He returned to Notre Dame the next year and graduated, adding some depth to his college life by sharing living quarters with a paroled murderer in a program that, as expected, taught him much about the real world.

He signed up for Teach For America in 1991. Adriana Verdin at Garcia made him one of her first recruits. The next year she added Feinberg to her Teach For America collection. Before Corcoran could quite figure out what was happening, he was heading to New York with Feinberg’s friend Levin. They rented a yellow Ryder truck, filled it with their furniture and books, and drove it to the Thirty-third Street apartment Betty Levin had found for them. It was twelve hundred dollars a month, twice what they had been paying in Houston. Corcoran considered the higher cost of living part of his New York adventure.

For him the big city was full of surprises, many of them unpleasant. By his count, about 40 percent of the South Bronx families they visited were indifferent or hostile. He and Levin got the impression that the people who had promised them a start in the South Bronx had not believed they would go through with it. They were two nice-looking kids in their twenties. They couldn’t really be serious.

At each sticking point, Corcoran heard Levin repeat his mantra to whoever was standing in their way: “We think we have earned this. We have shown what we can do. We have a track record. We have earned the right to this chance.” Corcoran let Levin do the talking, but he thought to himself, We haven’t really earned anything, at least in the minds of these people. The P.S. 156 principal, Maxine O’Connor, told them, “How can I guarantee that you guys are actually going to come in here and pull this off and not just abandon the kids in the middle of the year?” At least she was honest, Corcoran thought.

Corcoran didn’t think he was a great teacher. He could connect with children, but he was not a disciplinarian. He didn’t have the toughness he admired in Levin and Feinberg. They were hustling phenoms who had found a way to bring student achievement to new heights. He was nothing like them.

He was amazed that so many of the South Bronx students actually called his and Levin’s apartment each night with homework questions. That was what they were required to do, he knew, but school rules usually didn’t mean much in that neighborhood. They could have acted like the kids often did in his former classes, ignoring everything he said. Why were so many of them, after a nine-and-a-half-hour day at school, in what some New York KIPP critics were calling the Kids In Prison Program, willing to dial the telephone for more discussion of schoolwork when all their friends and family were sitting around watching television?

Spending every day teaching with Levin, he got a clearer idea of how KIPP might actually make progress, if they could keep it together. Corcoran thought their hard work as teachers motivated their students. Inner-city children were surprised to see outsiders putting in so much time and energy on their behalf. Few of the teachers they had had in regular public schools had done that. Never before had any teachers given them their home phone numbers and insisted they call if they had questions.

In the South Bronx, Levin tried to re-create the conditions of KIPP’s successful first year in Houston. One Sunday in Central Park, Levin taught Corcoran all of Harriett Ball’s songs and chants. He could have written them down and told his new partner to memorize them, but he thought Corcoran should learn them just as he had, by listening. The Frisbee players and young lovers in Strawberry Fields saw two young men lounging in the grass and singing to each other, partly to the tune of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” in what sounded like gibberish: “Six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four, thirty, thirty-six, and the spider said: Forty-two, forty-eight, fifty-four, sixty, forty-two, forty-eight, fifty-four, sixty, sixty-six, seventy-two—how do you do?” The two teachers shook hands. “Sixty-six, seventy-two—how do you do?” They shook hands again.

“Okay,” Levin said. “Let’s do it again, but snappier.”

Levin and Feinberg had taught as a team in one jammed classroom at Garcia, so the first year, Levin removed the dividing screen between his and Corcoran’s classroom at P.S. 156 and taught the same way. Corcoran became increasingly convinced that Levin was the best teacher he had ever seen. Corcoran’s roommate often seemed laconic in private. He practiced a form of urban cool that was characteristic of young people who had grown up in Manhattan. In the classroom, he kept some of that reserve. He was not as frenetic or effusive as Feinberg. But he was relentless, constantly pushing students to go further and do better.

Levin sought feedback from every child in the room. He had a dozen ways to explain difficult concepts, never quitting until he was sure each student got it. No child was permitted to sit through a lesson without having to answer some questions. “I am missing one person, I am missing one person,” Levin would say, as he moved around the classroom. That meant someone was not paying attention. Instead of going to that one child for a stern lecture, he submitted the problem to the class as a group, as a team. He would give that child a chance to correct herself. Often when he said he was missing one person, he was actually seeing many more ignoring him. He claimed to see just one so that the slackers would not be tempted to think of themselves as a large and brave group of rebels. Many students came to hope that the inattentive one would come around soon so they could keep moving and see what else Mr. Levin had in mind.

At night, when the two teachers were back in their apartment, Levin explained to Corcoran the importance of details, things Corcoran had never considered despite the fact that he had started teaching a year before Levin had. There was the thinking-skills class, for instance. They began school each day with a few problems Corcoran xeroxed at the copy shop near their apartment just before he went to bed. The quick start set the pace for the whole day. Unlike many regular public school students, Kippsters were given no time for distracting chats about what they had seen on TV the night before. Learning started the minute students entered the school cafeteria to get their free breakfast at 7:30 a.m. They were handed the thinking-skills questions at the same time they got their milk, cereal, and juice.

Levin told Corcoran he should always look for responses from the students. Dominating the lesson was bad. He should not be speaking for two minutes and let students speak for only one minute. It should be a conversation. Students should be responding regularly to the teacher, and the teacher to them. Fifth graders, Levin told Corcoran, could not sit quietly and absorb a lesson for too long at one time. They had to be kept talking and moving and doing things as a group. That way, Corcoran would not only keep them interested but monitor how much they had learned.

To Levin, the best team teaching was like playing basketball. It ought to be back and forth. The teachers should regularly interrupt each other. They should keep the lesson lively and lure the students into giving them the same attention they would give two of their friends who were arguing. But they had to keep it light. No class would ever learn anything from a death struggle like Levin’s five-hour one-on-one hoops marathon with Feinberg.

A well-paced and engaging class could only occur in an orderly classroom, Levin said. On that issue, Corcoran felt inadequate. Levin was strict, jumping on the first small sign of inattention or impoliteness. Corcoran had never been that tough or that quick in his classes. He was convinced this was a major reason why he had not been as effective a teacher as Levin and Feinberg.

He tried to improve. He experimented with thinking of discipline as an acting assignment. He loved the theater. He would become well known at KIPP New York for, among other things, writing and directing the annual Winter Show. In his mind, it wasn’t kindly Frank Corcoran who backed a child into a corner, stuck his nose in the boy’s face, and asked him if he thought he was such a genius to snicker at a classmate’s wrong answer. It was not Frank Corcoran. It was a part he was playing, Fearsome Frank. The thought helped him improve his classroom management—Corcoran would eventually win the same prestigious teaching award that had once gone to Esquith—but he did not think he ever achieved Levin’s air of assurance.

Levin and Corcoran agreed, as Levin and Feinberg had, that it was absolutely unacceptable for one student to make fun of or laugh at another student. This was one of Ball’s firmest rules. Levin reminded Corcoran repeatedly that he had to get close to the child to make the point clear. He did not have to yell, but he had to be understood: “Oh, so you’re that much better than him that you can laugh at him? You’re that much better? Let’s see you do it. Here’s another math problem. Let’s see you do it now.” The idea, Levin said, was not so much to shame the miscreant, although that was important, but to signal the rest of the class that certain behavior would not be tolerated. As teachers, they tried to draw the lines that could not be crossed. They wanted to build a structure that made learning possible. Their message was that school should be a place where students could feel safe from bullies and wise guys and acts of childish cruelty. For children who already felt the shame and discomfort of poverty, this was key. They strived to make KIPP an island of peace where children could speak their minds and tend to their business without having to defend themselves. It would make them more willing to come to school early and stay late.

Often the problem in the classroom was not defiance but apathy. Some children would not participate. They required an entirely different approach: warm, regular encouragement. Corcoran was better at this. He loved praising the shy and the meek, people like him, and getting them to try to do a little bit more. The message was delivered softly, with little embarrassment to the child: “Look, get up. You’re going to sit up here. You are going to participate. Sit up. Come on. Sit up. We’re all tired, but we’re all doing this.”

Levin thought even melodrama sometimes had a place, although he would later admit that some of his performances went too far. One day during his second year in New York, a boy tossed something—it looked like a wadded piece of paper—at another child. It was not the first time that day that Levin had seen the boy throwing things. He was a bully, living proof that Levin and Corcoran’s efforts to discourage such behavior had not been entirely successful. Levin was at the boy’s desk in a second and escorted him to the front of the class.

“So you like throwing stuff?” he said. He told the boy to sit on a chair, facing the class. He found the classroom wastebasket and placed it in front of the chair. “The rest of you,” he said to the class, “you all have wastepaper you need to get rid of. Well, just this once, you can throw it right here, into this basket.” The students were delighted. They fired their wadded papers at the wastebasket. As Levin expected, some hit the boy. It didn’t hurt him physically, but it shamed him in a way more powerful than Levin had expected. After that, he did not throw any more paper in class. But Levin realized that the lesson had gone too far, and never tried that approach again.

One warm day in spring when the students were unusually lethargic, Levin had another idea. The following day, both he and Corcoran walked into the classroom in full winter garb—coats, hats, scarves, and gloves. They kept them on the whole day, even though it was ninety degrees outside. “You’re hot?” they told students. “Well, we’re hotter. But we’re not going to stop teaching. And so we expect you to keep learning.”

They savored the flexibility of their long school day. Their students wrote in their journals every day. They read books each afternoon. During those classes, they sat with their books open, just as Feinberg’s students were doing in Houston. They took turns reading aloud. Levin or Corcoran stopped them frequently for questions or comments.

At 3:30 p.m. each day, Corcoran would take the entire class down to the school gym for a snack and their daily dose of dodgeball, the routine Levin and Feinberg had established in Houston. Levin used those forty-five minutes to catch up on administrative work.

Years later, Levin would marvel at the depth of the relationship he and Corcoran developed. Dave and Frank were together nearly every minute of the day. Feinberg, and now Corcoran, had become his brothers. It seemed to all three of them that the depth of friendship and mutual respect was essential to their schools’ success. When more KIPP schools began to be born, they urged new school leaders to find teachers with whom they could forge such personal relations and be a family.

For Levin, as for Feinberg, one of the most difficult chores, if his school was to survive, was to find a place to move after the second year. His building principal had no more room for him. If he was going to add a seventh grade, he needed to go elsewhere. He and Feinberg talked about this on the telephone nearly every night, each encouraging the other to break out of the bureaucratic death grip. But it was slow going. When Feinberg secured bigger quarters at Wesleyan, in the aftermath of staking out Paige’s car, Levin was even more discouraged. Rod Paige knew Mike Feinberg. Rudy Crew, the chancellor of schools in New York City, had no idea who Dave Levin was. Any attempt to stalk that man would lead to Levin’s immediate arrest. He was still without a home for his school the next year.