Sold on Kira Orange-Jones

And why Kira Orange-Jones is sold on helping the schools in New Orleans before the spotlight shifts.

by Mimi Read

It’s a balmy Thursday night in New Orleans, with rain dripping through a canopy of venerable oak trees. Inside a 19th century Garden District mansion with its front door propped open, 29-year-old Kira Orange-Jones, Ed.M.’06, hobnobs with some of the city’s most affluent residents. The new executive director of Teach For America’s New Orleans office, she describes for them the conditions inside the city’s public schools — schools that many of these people have never been inside.

Orange-Jones’ goal is straightforward. She wants them to take on more responsibility for the quality of public education in New Orleans.

Every person in the room, she says, can symbolically sponsor a teacher for a year by donating $5,000 to Teach For America — the Peace Corps-like nonprofit that recruits stellar college graduates to teach for two years in America’s hard-case urban and rural public schools. A trim, elegant woman with sparkling eyes and a soft Afro upswept in a stylish wrap, she’s wearing a nipped suit and heels. She’s eloquent and warm, focused and poised — and as heavily armed as a guerrilla with statistics and information. Eager to share the spotlight, she lets a witty, passionate first-year teacher regale everyone with tales of adversity and triumph in the classroom. The mood in the room swells until it feels like a thinking person’s revival tent — so much so that the party’s hostess and one of the guests both pledge to sponsor teachers on the spot. And one month later, representatives from the Booth-Bricker Fund who knew little about Teach for America until this soiree pledged $750,000 — the local foundation’s largest gift to date.

If Hurricane Katrina had any silver linings, one is that it pretty much blew away one of the worst public school systems in the nation, leaving behind a void so deep that smart, energetic reformers from all over have rushed in to fill it. These spirited educators who are suddenly calling New Orleans home regard the city as a perfect laboratory for new ideas and this moment as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to change history.

Written off as intractable prior to Katrina, the most desperate schools are being reinvented, and new ones are almost simultaneously dreamed up and launched. Nonprofit charter networks such as KIPP schools and for-profit companies like Edison Schools are part of the whirlwind. Philanthropists like Eli Broad, the Carnegie Corporation, and Bill and Melinda Gates have funneled in millions.

Teach For America, too, has seized the opportunity. The organization has been in New Orleans since 1990, but this year, it increased its corps of teachers from 57 to 126. By September 2008, it plans to ramp up to 360 teachers, and by 2009, to 500 teachers. It’s the most ambitious growth plan in Teach For America’s history. The teachers will be placed in the Recovery School District — a league of 33 underperforming schools given intensive care since the storm — as well as other regional schools.

By 2010, Teach For America hopes to place at least 20 school principals in the city. The nonprofit is also trying to grow the budget for its New Orleans operation from $2 million to $9 million by 2010.

“We see 20 principals as a tipping point — a number that will bring systemic change,” says Orange-Jones. This will make the culturally blessed but climatologically cursed city at the mouth of the Mississippi River the site of the organization’s largest initiative after New York City.

Prior to this job, Orange-Jones was Teach For America’s vice president of new site development, which taught her the fine points of parachuting into new communities and zeroing in fast on the powers-that-be. She is uniquely qualified to oversee the growth spurt of the New Orleans’ office, according to Jane Vance, an educational consultant who saw what she did for the ailing school system in Jacksonville, Fla., after just one visit.

“Jacksonville was not even on Teach For America’s radar screen,” says Vance, who lured Orange-Jones there in January 2007 to meet with community members about developing a program. “We set her up to meet with three groups of potential donors. Her passion was so genuine that it was infectious. Within five weeks of her visit, we raised $5 million.”

Major donor Dolores Barr Weaver, co-owner of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, put it this way: “First I was sold on Kira Orange-Jones, and then I was sold on Teach For America.”

As the New Orleans program director in charge of management, development, and expansion, Orange-Jones holds no small part of the city’s hope in her hands. The task in front of her is daunting: Prior to Katrina, only 22 percent of Orleans Parish public school students in the eighth grade scored at the basic proficiency or above level in English and only 29 percent did so in math. Katrina caused a billion dollars in damage to school facilities, and many of the kids who have returned to their previously failing schools are living with scant supervision in overburdened, improvised households with aunts, grandmothers, or each other. For a litany of reasons, their parents have not been able to return to the city.

Carl Bankston, a Tulane University sociologist who has written extensively on Louisiana schools, suggests that significant improvement isn’t even a possibility.

“I’m not sure there’s very much room to accomplish anything,” Bankston told The New York Times in October. “There was relatively little family control before. There’s even less so now.”

Orange-Jones says she has no choice but to succeed.

“We have to get this right,” she says. “There are thousands of kids getting up every morning depending on us for a future. It’s everyone’s responsibility. Certainly it’s mine.

“In the post-Katrina landscape, there’s really a just a small window of opportunity,” she continues. “I don’t think it will last forever because eventually the spotlight will shift. People will lose interest and move on to problems in other places. We have to work very, very hard — but we might be able to change what is possible. I believe that. That’s why I packed up my stuff and moved down here three months ago.”

Growing up, Orange-Jones had her own encounter with the entrenched inequities of education. After years of sailing through her neighborhood parochial school in the Bronx, she transferred to the high-powered Horace Mann School in Riverdale, N.Y., and hit a wall that would change her life forever. An exclusive private school that nevertheless prides itself on diversity, Horace Mann gathers smart high-achievers and drives them hard.

There, for the first time, she found herself pegged as a poor student. “It wasn’t until I entered this realm that I realized that when you’re behind, you can do everything right and stay behind,” she says. “I had gotten straight A’s from first grade to eighth grade, and still I was not prepared.”

Socially, the new school was just as potently alien. “Suddenly, I was surrounded by kids who had enormous privilege and access to culture. It was nothing for them to get on a plane to go skiing in Aspen, or take all their friends away for the weekend, or hire the MTV dancers for their birthday parties. My best friend had a cultural budget to make sure she had cultural experiences every year, and it was thousands of dollars.” Meanwhile, Linda Jones, the woman who had taken Orange-Jones in and raised her since infancy, took a second job to pay the few school expenses not covered by her scholarship.

The struggle continued for four years, but there were people who pulled Orange-Jones through. She credits them with giving her intimate knowledge of what she believes is the bottom line in education: first-rate, dedicated teachers who will give 100 percent of their hearts, souls, minds, and time to help a failing student — or a roomful of them. Human capital, she calls it now. It’s a tenet that happens to be the very foundation of Teach For America.

“Geraldine Woods, my ninth-grade teacher, was on the phone with my mother nightly,” she remembers. “It sounds clichéd the minute it comes out of my mouth, but she believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. When I applied to 15 colleges and the rejections came in one by one, she got on the phone with the admissions office at Hamilton College” — a small, liberal arts safety school in the Harvard- and Yale-fixated world of Horace Mann. “She was critical in getting me in.”

Orange-Jones was able to transfer to Wesleyan University the following year. She discovered a passion for film there. When she and her film buddies graduated, Orange-Jones watched them leave for Hollywood or New York for entry-level jobs working on splashy commercial movies, but she yearned to roll up her sleeves and work directly with people in ways that reflected her beliefs about education. She also felt she needed to get out in the world and find some subject matter worthy of putting on film.

That’s when Orange-Jones signed up to be a Teach For America corps member, a move that guaranteed her an emotionally, physically, and intellectually exhausting, low-paying teaching job at a failing school somewhere. It’s also a job that the organization has brilliantly managed to imbue with honor and high status. After a two-year hitch with Teach For America, alumni often go on to high-paying corporate jobs with McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or high-ranking administrative jobs in education. To the chagrin of her mother, the nonprofit sent her to Baton Rouge, La.

“We wrung our hands and prayed,” remembers Linda Jones. “Here she had grown up on the East Coast, where there was theater and culture. Baton Rouge just didn’t strike us as a city that was advanced for people of color. In fact, it seemed like the worst place an African American could go.”

It turned out to be a place where Orange-Jones would struggle hard again — this time, on behalf of others. At 21, she took an apartment north of Baton Rouge in rural Zachary, La., and surprised herself with her own adaptability to a pindropquiet Southern town. It worked perfectly for her.

“There was nothing to do there, no distractions, so teaching became my life,” she says. “Of all the things I’ve ever done, it is the thing I did best. I spent 20 hours preparing for the first hour of my first day of school. I ended up falling in love with my kids. It was a beautiful time: I taught, I came home, I lesson-planned, and on Sundays I went to church with their families. A lot of what drives me is the fact that I know education played such a critical role in my own life.”

She even fell in love with Baton Rouge. “Without question, I preferred living in Baton Rouge to New York City,” Orange-Jones says, voicing an opinion that reveals her open mind. “In Baton Rouge, a humility about education exists — we could discuss things openly and do something about them. In New York, no idea is a new idea, and everyone feels they have things figured out. There, I could really intercede. I could engage with the problem. And that’s what I want my life to be about.”

When her teaching stint was over, Orange-Jones stayed in Baton Rouge. She and a friend launched a nonprofit film production company called Right Quick Productions, raised about $300,000, and made a documentary titled Expecting Men. Still in post-production and unreleased, the film tells the tale of two boys and their progress at an unusual, rigorous Baton Rouge leadership academy for young African American males — a place where the kids wear coats and ties and show up early on Saturdays to chant.

As a contrast, Orange-Jones wove into her narrative the very different outcome of another young man she found on the street as she was scouting locations one day. Nathan Brown hadn’t had the opportunity to go to the leadership academy. He’d dropped out of high school and wound up in and out of jail. “I loved him,” says Orange-Jones. “He was a kindred spirit. When I’d run out of money, he’d call me from jail and leave pep talks on my answering machine: ‘Don’t worry, Kiwi! We’ll find a way!’”

In making the film, money problems were harrowing and persistent. Payrolls funded by friends and family at the eleventh hour taught Orange-Jones that if she wanted to be a working artist, she needed to brace her idealism with a dose of the pragmatic. In 2005, she was accepted to the Ed School’s School Leadership Program. She thought it would be a good place to hatch a business plan, learn from some of the best minds in her field, pick up a meaningful credential, and go on to business school so she could redouble her efforts at merging film with education. (The minute she graduated, she was recruited by Teach For America executives, who convinced her that she’d learn more there than in business school.)

But just before she left for Harvard, Katrina struck. When the levees broke, many New Orleanians washed up in Baton Rouge, 90 miles upriver. “I’d look out my windows and see families walking down the street holding shopping bags with everything they owned. Baton Rouge was impacted differently than New Orleans, but we were impacted. The shelters were overwhelmed. On the drive to Boston, there were miles and miles where you could hear helicopters flying overhead. I had all this conflict: Should I be leaving now?”

When she got to Harvard, her advisor, Professor Tom Hehir, convinced her that she’d driven in the right direction. “She was exactly the kind of student we look for — smart, focused, enthusiastic,” says Hehir, director of the School Leadership Program. “We don’t want people who want to come here and ruminate about education. We want people who believe things can change.”

Still, her insides twisted. “I’d gone from a situation with desperate human beings to one with people having coffee and discussing the etymology of word ‘refugee.’ Tom Hehir helped me sort through all that. And when I got involved in a film project highlighting the voices of kids who had been relocated, he urged me on.”

To Orange-Jones, becoming director of Teach For America’s New Orleans operation was a harmonic convergence of opportunities. It brought her back to her beloved Louisiana. And she’s in a position to help some of the least fortunate children of the storm change their lives through education.

Since she arrived in August, she has put in mostly 90-hour weeks. Her days begin at 6 a.m. at a freshly unlocked Starbucks, where she’s apt to bump into Teach For America teachers. Over iced coffee, she casually helps them solve thorny classroom problems, case by case. The rest of her day is packed with endless meetings, phone calls, ceremonies, donor gatherings, alumni outreach programs, classroom visits, and more systematized efforts to track corps members’ effectiveness and support them with curriculum models and individualized counsel when they inevitably hit snags.

To be a passenger in her cherry-red Chevy Cobalt rental car is to watch her Blackberry sputter every two blocks and see her answer it every time. It’s a relentless performance of gear-switching and quick thinking. During one recent week, she graciously accepted Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian’s check for $1 million — one of Teach For America’s largest regional contributions to date. A few days later found her taking a pulse at the recently renovated Thurgood Marshall School, now an umbrella facility housing numerous experimental new charter schools. She stood quietly in the back of a sun-drenched classroom as an Ivy League graduate graphed the pizza preferences of a roomful of fourth-graders on an overhead projector.

The increase in Teach For America teachers is a phenomenon that New Orleans has only begun to feel. Paul Vallas, the new superintendent of New Orleans’ Recovery School District, believes Orange-Jones and her ilk will have plenty of impact. A veteran reformer of deeply troubled schools in Philadelphia and Chicago, Vallas has seen Teach For America in action for years and maintains that it is the best alternative certification program in the country.

“When you recruit teachers in the traditional route, you don’t always get the best and the brightest,” Vallas says. “Teach For America is designed to attract not only the most talented on the college campus, but individuals who have a passion to make a contribution. They may lack teacher training, but we easily can compensate with instructional models and data delivery systems. You can’t buy a work ethic. You can’t buy intelligence and enthusiasm. You can’t buy hope. At the end of the day, that stuff is priceless.”

Vallas sees those qualities in Orange-Jones — in fact, he tried and failed to hire her soon after he met her. She has everything required for her new job, it seems, but time. She rarely gets to relax in her century-old Creole cottage with buckled herringbone brick sidewalks in front, a handsome rental that’s tucked on a middle-class block in the Uptown section of the city. She still hasn’t unpacked boxes or acquired furniture. But she knows how to make sitting cross-legged on her living room floor and staring into an open IBM Thinkpad seem not only purposeful but downright hospitable.

“This is our new video to recruit grads to New Orleans,” she says excitedly, shimmying sideways to share the screen. “Ten thousand graduating seniors will see this. The grads who become corps members get to request where they want to teach, and so far, not enough of them have requested New Orleans.” She hits a button and it begins: an impassioned mini-documentary with teachers and others describing the reinvention of education in post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s an unprecedented historical opportunity, they all say. She stops the video, reverses it, starts it again to underscore a point. She watches herself as a talking head. Her old love of film seems to suffuse her.

“If you knew how much time, energy, and resources are going into our effort in New Orleans,” she says, “it would blow your mind.”

— Mimi Read is a freelance writer and former Times-Picayune reporter who lives in New Orleans.

— Photos by Ted Jackson

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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