Getting Their Chance to Try Out Teaching : Education: Innovative program recruits teachers for nation’s most-beleaguered schools.

Greg Goodworth put medical school on the back burner in 1990 and instead committed two years of his life to teaching in an East Los Angeles high school.

While there, he saw instructors forced to buy their own classroom supplies--staples like chalk, paper and markers--after the Los Angeles Board of Education cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the school district budget. He met and listened to veteran teachers who were bitter at a system they said placed all the ills of public education on their backs.

Yet, despite such trying conditions, Goodworth has decided to remain in the profession.

“I love the kids,” he said simply. “With everything that’s so wrong with teaching, I think there’s very few jobs where you can get such gratification from what you do.”

Goodworth is an inaugural member of Teach for America, a program founded in 1989 by Princeton University graduate Wendy Kopp to recruit college graduates to teach in the nation’s most-beleaguered rural and urban schools.

Last week, the program’s first class, which started in 1990, held a reunion at Cal State Northridge and welcomed more than 1,000 newer recruits who have committed themselves to carrying out the program’s premise that every child in America can learn and deserves the opportunity to do so.

Of the original group, 170 recruits were assigned to the Los Angeles Unified School District and completed their two-year commitment. Goodworth is one of 117 in the district who have chosen to stay in the field.

Teach for America’s initial class had 489 members, with 60% deciding to continue in teaching.

“We think these young folks coming in are really the future for our young people,” said Donnalyn Jaque-Anton, the district’s director of professional development. “They’re in teaching because they want to be. They see it as a creative, thought-provoking, innovative profession, which it is.”

Others in Teach for America’s original class have decided to go back to graduate school, try other jobs or work on the program’s staff, where they will devise ways to reform education and attract talented young people to the teaching profession.

But whether they have decided to leave or stay, many agree that during the past two years they have learned at least as much as they taught.

Goodworth realized, for example, how difficult teaching can be. “I thought it was one of the easiest jobs around,” the 23-year-old Pittsburgh native said. “You never know how hard it is until you get into the game.”

By the end of his two years teaching science at Roosevelt High School, Goodworth had suffered through one of the worst fiscal crises the Los Angeles district has ever faced. He endured increases in class size--”(Try) to manage 40 students by yourself when you’ve never been in that kind of situation before”--and a spending freeze on class supplies.

Like many instructors, he used his own money at least twice a week to stock his classroom with everything from yarn to glue to pencils. And if he didn’t occasionally put paper on his shopping list, his students would have been forced to share assignments in class, unable to take a copy home.

Goodworth and other faculty members are bracing for yet another round of massive reductions in the wake of $400 million in spending cuts imposed for the 1992-93 school year.

“It makes you feel helpless,” he said of the reductions. “There’s nothing you can do, (and) next year is going to be unbearable.”

Despite the hardships, Goodworth said he will be back at Roosevelt next year. “There are definitely times you come home and you feel fed up with everything,” he said, “but the next day’s a new day and it only seems to get better.”

Emilio Gonzales is less optimistic. A teacher at Vermont Avenue Elementary School, Gonzales plans to return to the school. But, he said firmly, “this will be my last year.”

It’s not that he didn’t gain something valuable from the experience. Gonzales said he has met many dedicated teachers and in particular is glad to see the district make multicultural education a priority.

But there are other problems. His school, too, has suffered from the district’s fiscal difficulties. And he has felt the budget cuts in his own paycheck.

“I’m leaving the profession because, as rewarding as it is, you’re not valued,” said Gonzales, a Los Angeles native and a graduate of Columbia University. “I don’t understand how they expect professional people to come (into the field) if they’re not going to pay them a professional salary.”

In 1990, the annual salary for Teach for America recruits working in the Los Angeles district was about $29,500, though budget problems later forced them to take the same 3% pay cut as all other district employees.

Gonzales said he understands that money should not be the driving reason behind teaching. He entered the Teach for America corps because of a high school English teacher who went out of his way to help him do well in life.

“He forced me to apply to good schools and spent a lot of personal time with me,” Gonzales said of the instructor, who died last year. “I came from a low-income, single-parent home. It wasn’t until high school I got turned on to learning.

“I’m not saying money is the reason to get into education,” Gonzales said. “But I’m being realistic. A gifted, talented teacher is going to look elsewhere” if the pay is inadequate.

Many corps members said their classroom experiences gave them insights into themselves. Furman Brown, for example, became aware of his own prejudices, and how to cast them away.

“I always thought of myself as a liberal person,” said Brown, who studied education in graduate school at UC Berkeley and taught at Normandie Avenue Elementary School in South Los Angeles, where the students are predominantly Latino and black. But “I learned I, too, had a lot of racial biases. That was valuable.”

He discovered that stereotypes about poor, minority families not caring about their children were untrue. He saw firsthand that parents of all ethnic groups and socioeconomic backgrounds were interested in the education of their children.

Brown also observed how much the Los Angeles school district needs bilingual instructors willing to teach in poorer sections of the city. The first day of school he found himself thrust into a bilingual fifth-grade class even though he does not speak Spanish. His aide was not fluent in either English or Spanish.

So Brown found it difficult to communicate with many of his students and their parents. If he was having a discipline problem with an African-American child, “I wouldn’t hesitate to go to their home and work with the parents,” he said. “But if it was a Latino child, it was difficult. I felt there was a huge barrier between us because of language.”

Ultimately, he got by. “You wound up depending on the kids,” Brown said. He had the children sit in groups instead of rows and assist one another with assignments as well as in translating lessons. And he did meet with some of the Latino parents, although because of the language gap the conferences sometimes took a long time to arrange.

Brown says he remains dedicated to teaching. But he will not immediately return to the classroom.

“I busted my butt the last two years, and yet my children will still score in the bottom 10th or 20th percentile (on standardized tests),” Brown said. “I’m working too hard for that. My school is full of teachers that care, but they are also teachers who are tired.”

Instead he will work in the professional development arm of Teach for America, looking at ways to reorganize the country’s schools.

“I want to be involved in that part,” Brown said, “so when I go back to the classroom I’ll have every possibility (of) reaching those children.”