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in all of LAUSD. That gave Locke a statewide rank of 1 out of a possible 10—even among schools with similar demographic profiles. Results on the CAT/6, the norm-referenced tests that compare California students to their peers nationwide, were equally dismal. Only 11 percent of Locke’s ninth-graders scored at the 50 percent level (the national average) on reading and math. Thirty-one percent of the freshman class was expected to graduate—a number just slightly lower than their parents’ own graduation rates.
    Wells submitted his application, and in the time it took him to drive home, the district was on the phone trying to set up an interview. Other candidates may have seen in Locke hopeless dysfunction. Frank Wells saw opportunity.
    When Wells was named principal, Teach For America had already been a presence at Locke for a decade. But the number of recruits in any given year had never exceeded five, and in all, fewer than two dozen TFA alums had taught at Locke. That began to change when Dr. Rousseau signed a contract with TFA allowing recruits to train at Locke’s summer school. At first Rousseau, now a professor of education at USC, was dubious. She was a product and proponent of teacher-ed programs. But the district was desperate for math and science teachers, and Rousseau reckoned a TFA recruit had to be better than a sub or what she called a “dying-on-the-vine” teacher. It worked out. TFA sent Locke quality teachers, and the dynamic at the school began to change. “TFA was a real asset for us,” she recalls.
    Under Wells, Locke became a TFA factory, home to the largest cluster of corps members in the Los Angeles region. In 2004, his first year, TFA sent nine corps members to Locke. The next year, when Phillip, Rachelle, Hrag, and Taylor joined the staff, they were among thirteen new Locke TFAers, bringing the total of first-or second-year recruits teaching at Locke to nearly two dozen. Five more staffers, including the new assistant principal Chad Soleo and the brilliant physics teacher Josh Hartford, who headed the School of Social Empowerment, one of six small learning communities at Locke, were star TFA alums.
    â€œThe TFA teachers come here with a missionary zeal,” said Wells, explaining why he hired so many. “It must be a requirement of the program.”
    Good grades and a history of achievement were, too. The program was highly competitive. A record seventeen thousand people applied for two thousand spots in the 2005 corps. Among them were 12 percent of the senior class at Yale, 11 percent of the graduating classes of Dartmouth and Amherst College, and 8 percent from Princeton and Harvard. Founder Wendy Kopp once said that she wanted Teach For America to have the same cachet as a Rhodes Scholarship. In 2005 it did: Teach For America was
the
postgraduate program of choice for the elite of America’s top universities.
    Ultimately, only 12 percent of all applicants gained admission to TFA in 2005; two thirds of the Ivy Leaguers who applied didn’t make the cut. The average GPA of those who did was 3.5, SAT scores averaged 1310, and 95 percent held leadership positions on their campuses or in their communities. Getting accepted at Teach For America was a big deal.
    The selection process had actually changed little since 1990, when Wendy Kopp and her start-up team accepted 500 of the 2,500 college seniors who applied to join Teach For America’s inaugural class. The first applicants submitted an essay application, underwent a tough personal interview, and had to present a five-minute lesson plan. In the interview, selectors probed for proof of the candidate’s persistence, commitment, and intellectual heft. Kopp recalls in her book
One Day, All Children
that one of the questions posed to applicants was “(1) What is wind? Don’t describe it, just tell me what it is. (2) Phenomenologists draw an analogy between religion and the wind, claiming