Why we serve all students...

A common criticism of charter schools is that they kick out, push out, or counsel out students who are struggling academically or behaviorally. It is sadly accurate that some schools do this and a student with special needs, behavior problems, or extreme academic needs never makes it into the school or doesn’t last long.

We don't do that and we do our very best at KPEA to make sure we are serving all students and that our students are staying with us. And so far, we’re doing this pretty well with well over 80% of our students qualifying for free/reduced lunch and 20% of our students receiving special education services. Included in that 20% are students with autism, Down’s syndrome, and severe emotional needs, among many other diagnoses.  Even though we’re working with students who need us most and we’ve moved locations three times in two years, we’ve lost just a handful of students. And every student who left our school did so because of transportation and location issues, not because they were unhappy with the school or we weren’t able to meet their needs.   

We take the responsibility to serve all kids really seriously for a few reasons. First, from the earliest days of KIPP, this organization has always believed in the simple idea that all students not only can learn, but will learn if taught in a high-quality way. Second, if charter schools are really going to prove what is possible for district schools, we need to be making an apples to apples comparison. If we have great results but do it with only “easy” kids, we’re not proving anything useful. Third, it’s the law and is what we promised to do in our charter.  

But the reality is that serving all students, even students who other schools might look for a way to get rid of is hard work. Being patient with a student who has had her third severe tantrum of the week and knocked over every book in your classroom library is not easy. Planning individualized work for students who can recognize just three letters at the beginning of kindergarten is not easy. Helping a student learn social skills so he doesn’t call other students names every time he gets frustrated is not easy. Picking up a student each morning and bringing him to school because his family’s car is broken and he wouldn’t have a way to school any other way is not easy.

It’s not easy but I know this is the right thing every time I talk to our students’ families who are just as, if not more committed to doing whatever they need to do for their child to be successful as we are. If they are working so hard and doing so much, there is no reason we can’t do the same. Just off the top of my head, we have families who:

• Commute almost two hours each way on three different buses to get their child to school each day
• Have taken in other family member’s children who are struggling so they can go to KPEA even if that means making major adjustments at home and making their own life much more difficult. 
• Say that their outlook for what kind of academic work their child is capable of doing is completely changed after being at KPEA    
• Call every day to check on their child’s enrollment status and scream when they hear their daughter was picked in the lottery
• Hold their son back in kindergarten so they he could go to KIPP when we didn’t have a first grade
• Go to literally dozens of doctor visits to get the counseling, medication, or other services that their child needs to be successful
• Rearrange their work schedule so they can get their child to school and home each day
• Call us during our enrollment season and use a fake name when asking about our SPED program because they’re afraid of us not taking her son who has special needs. And then crying in excitement when she hears about our SPED approach
• Tell us they will quit their jobs and come to school every day if that’s what it takes for their child to be successful. And mean it

So I guess there might be a day that I think our school is not the right place for a certain student, but that hasn't happened yet and it would be the hardest decision I would have to make as a school leader. If the families of our students are doing all of this and much more, we have to make the same kind of unconditional commitment to their children. No matter what. Even if it is hard sometimes. Because it is hard. 

Guided Reading and Radioative Decay

We don’t make our teachers write out detailed guided reading lesson plans like we do for other lessons they teach. We don’t do that even though our lessons might be slightly better if teachers did this. The reason is radioactive decay.

Radioactive decay is the process through which atoms lose some of their energy and transform into another, lighter element. This process takes a vastly different amount of time for different elements. The half-life (which measures how long it takes half the atoms to decay) of lithium is .838 seconds. Sulfur, 87 days. For silver, 418 years. And it takes 245, 500 years for half of a pile of uranium atoms to change. Since this process happens at the atomic level virtually nothing like heat, pressure, magnetic fields or anything else can change the process. Uranium is always going to take about 245,500 years for half the atoms to decay.

This leads to a question for everyone involved in the high-performing charter world; is teacher retention more like lithium or more like uranium? How long can our teachers put in the extraordinary effort they do for their kids each day? And like radioactive decay, is teacher turnover unstoppable and even unchangeable? Or can we do better?

Teachers at KIPP are never going to be uranium (half-life 245,500 years) where most of the staff at a KIPP school has been teaching with us for 20+ years. Even if we do everything right, there are two factors that make this kind of traditional teacher stability really unlikely:

• Working at KIPP (or Achievement First, Rocketship, Mastery, etc) is really hard work. Hours are long. Lots of pressure (you know kids depend on you teaching well). High expectations for your work (mostly self-imposed). This is hard to keep up for many years. Not impossible. But hard.   

• Teachers may leave even if they are happy. Our teachers are super smart and really dedicated so they have lots of options for what to do with their lives. They are primarily under 30 and at the prime age for starting a family, which makes the bullet above trickier. Many of our teachers are from areas other than Philadelphia and may at some point want to move closer to their family. Significant others are often just as in-demand and may have to move for work or grad school. Etc.  

But we’re not lithium (half-life .838 seconds) either. There are teachers who started at KIPP Philadelphia 8 and 9 years ago still in the organization. One of the founding teachers at KIPP Academy in the Bronx has taught there ever since 1995 and just recently became the principal. I know of many teachers who have worked at KIPP in multiple cities when they have had to move because of family reasons. I’ve been with KIPP for 7 years and don’t plan on going anywhere else.

But nationwide and in Philadelphia, we know that we have to get better at retaining our best teachers for not just 3-4 years, but for 5,10, or 15 years. Teacher quality is by far and away the biggest in-school factor on how much kids learn. We have great teachers at KPEA so our kids learn a ton. And retaining great teachers is doubly important to the quality of the school as we grow a grade each year which automatically means we are adding 5-6 teachers every year.

So we’re somewhere between sulfur (half-life 87 days) and silver (half-life 418 years), but is teacher retention like radioactive decay? Can you change it? Yeah, you can, but it’s hard. For a variety of reasons (see above) some teachers are only going to be working at KIPP for a certain amount of time. It might be 3 years; or 5; or 8, but the amount of work and job intensity that someone loves at age 26 might not be what they want at 32. And that’s ok. But my job is to stretch out that half-life as long as possible.

And we’re making tons of progress on this front. KIPP Philadelphia’s teacher retention number was the highest it’s ever been last year with about 9 out of 10 teachers returning this year. What do we need to do to get that number higher and make sure we keep our great teachers as long as we can? Two pretty obvious things, that nonetheless, need to be in my mind at all times:

• Make the rewards of the job as high as possible. This means the obvious things like good pay (which we have at KIPP), good benefits (ditto), school provided laptop (tri-tto?), etc. But even more important than that are things like knowing your work matters, you work with great people, your job is fun, and you’re supported to get better at what you do every day. And it means feeling successful with your students each day. If your students are learning, if you are helping them to be nice, if you are enjoying being with your kids, you will stay at KIPP for as long as you possibly can.

• Make the demands of the job as low as possible. This means making the job easier, not easy. It means giving teachers as much planning time as possible each day. At KPEA we reduce planning responsibilities by departmentalizing the work so a kindergarten teacher is just responsible for planning reading and not reading, math, writing, and science. We try to do a good job handling difficult students so the stress is not entirely on the teacher. It means never making teachers do paperwork that has no purpose. It means never having your planning period taken away, even if the art teacher is out.  

To return to where we started, my job is to balance what will make the most immediate student impact with what is best for our teachers’ satisfaction, health, and long-term sustainability. Our teachers spend between 6-10 hours a week planning and a week’s worth of lesson plans is about 100 pages per grade. It’s so big, we can’t staple the packet together so we use giant binder clips to keep the weekly plans together. So our planning is super detailed and really strong. And because we do so much small group reading, our teachers do about 15 guided reading lessons a week. If we made teachers do highly detailed lesson plans for all 15 lessons I would be adding another 6-8 hours of planning each week and I don’t think that’s a good idea. Instead, teachers do a 3-week planning form that has them analyze the needs of their students, what objectives to focus on, and what books to use and then they write their daily plans in whatever format they find most helpful. And we do this because our teachers are the most amazing teachers I have every worked with and I want their half-life at KIPP to be as long as possible. And that is going to be what helps our kids get to college in 2023 and 2024.   

The schools we deserve

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is one of my favorite authors and a blogger for The Atlantic (if he’s not in your RSS feed, add him right now), frequently writes about the idea that dysfunctional systems are often more reflective of society at large than of people at a particular institution. One example is our political press which spends more time on the campaign horserace – who got a key endorsement, what the newest polls “mean”, how the latest fundraising numbers will change the election; than on explaining the issues or breaking down what each candidate is really proposing. Instead of explaining why a key piece of legislation is blocked, even when it has a majority of senators supporting it, reporters focus on a candidate’s eyebrows. Really.

Absurd stuff, but why is this the reporting that’s produced, even by a paper like The New York Times? As Coates writes,

But when you start delving into this stuff, you realize that often those institutions are performing in the service of actual human beings, many of them not so rich, and not so powerful…The shouting heads exist for a reason--we invented them.

The same is a true for more important issues, like policing, violence, and what people will accept to feel safe and protected. Writing about a Bay Area police officer only being sentences to two years in prison for shooting and killing an unarmed man, Coates says,

I think another argument for sentencing Mehserle (the officer) to serious time is that a message needs to be sent to other cops that the society takes their crimes seriously. But that gets its backwards. It is a society that passes laws which send SWAT teams into gambling houses that is need of a message. These are the cops that we deserve. In that sense, I am not so disturbed that Oscar Grant's killer will do little, if any, jail time. I am disturbed that this will happen again. I am disturbed that we are so fragile a people, that we know this, and that all we can do is look away.

Powerful stuff and it’s super relevant for anyone who works in urban education. It’s easy to blame high drop-out rates, low test scores, and persistent violence on school district administrators, teachers unions, elected officials or any other institution who people often point fingers at. Pointing out what others could be doing better might make people feel good sometimes and there really are steps that any number of institutions or organizations could take that would improve outcomes for kids. But the vast majority of urban schools in this country are not good enough and that is the case because we, as a country and as a people, haven’t made changing that a priority. We’re ok with the fact that most of the largest districts in this country graduate only about 50% of their high school students and that says something about us as a people.  

We as a country need to change how we fund schools, how we pay teachers, and how we expand high-quality charter school options, among many other practical issues. But we need to change ourselves, what we believe, and what we expect. It’s not enough to celebrate that a few kids beat the odds and make it to and through college; we can’t be satisfied until the odds of a student in North Philadelphia going to college are the same as a student on the Main Line. It’s not enough when test scores at a school rise by 20 points…but are still far below the state average. It’s not enough for a school to be damned with faint praise when people say it’s a good school for “that” part of the city.

Our goal at KPEA is to be part of this change. We don’t want to be a good school, or even a great school compared to the other options in our neighborhood. We want to be a great school, period. We want our kids to have an educational experience that other families would pay $20,000 for. We want our students to read and do math way above grade level, develop strong character values, learn Spanish, create imaginative art projects, run around at recess, and everything else that’s important for five through ten year olds. We want to create a school that any parent, anywhere would want to send their child to. Nothing makes me prouder of the fact that we have multiple KIPP staff members who send their children to KPEA because they know what to look for in a school. And I know that I would be excited to send my 8-month old son to our school when he’s old enough.

All of which is why this blog is titled “Building a (great) school”, because the amazing team of people working to create KPEA are not interested in simply starting another school, but in changing the conversation about what is possible for our kids. By giving our students and families the very best education we can, we’re trying to show that a great school can be found in any zip code. And that it hard, hard, hard work, but we’re not going to be satisfied with anything less for our students.  

PSA screenings and STEP assessments

The big health news of the past week, especially if you’re a guy, is the release of new recommendations for how to screen for prostate cancer. To quickly summarize, until now, the basic advice was for all men 50 and over to have a PSA test each year. The PSA test is a blood test that measures certain proteins that can signal the presence of cancer. If the PSA score is over a certain threshold or has rising by a certain percentage, a biopsy is performed to confirm the cancer. Treatment options include the removal of the prostate and localized radiation. Both treatment options often lead to severe side-effects, but when caught early, prostate cancer is rarely fatal.

But the revised recommendations by the Unites State Preventive Health Services Task Force are that healthy men not get the PSA test. Ever. The reasoning is that the PSA test does not do a good job identifying who actually has cancer and the combination of the PSA test and biopsies that often follow do not do a good job sorting which cancers are truly life-threatening and which are so slow-growing that they pose no real threat. While the use of the PSA test has gone up dramatically in recent years, as has treatment of prostate cancers, there has been little effect on prostate cancer deaths.

It seems counterintuitive that having less information can lead to better health, but that’s what the task force is saying. As Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer write in the New York Times, “if there is one lesson from the P.S.A. test, it is that more information and intervention do not always lead to less suffering.” It’s not too much of a stretch to see the significance of these themes to the use of assessments in classrooms:

•  More information is not always better. Teachers and school leaders have a limited amount of time and energy to give tests and analyze data. And it’s pretty much zero-sum. Adding another assessment means cutting something else or at least reducing the amount of attention you can put into other assessments. One of the big reasons I love the STEP literacy assessment is because it assesses all key areas of early literacy including letter identification, letter-sound correspondence, reading comprehension, concepts of print, phonics, etc. So instead of giving five different literacy tests to our new kindergarten students, we give one. When we want to see if our students are on track to meet their end of year reading goals, we look in one place. We talk about one assessment with families. This focuses our teaching, gives everyone a common language, and means we can actually use our results to drive instruction. 

• It’s ok to say no. The prostate task force is basically telling patients and doctors to say no to taking the PSA test. It’s out there. Some people are taking it. But you don’t have to. And that same message should apply to school leaders and teachers. The default position should be that we are not adding any additional assessments, not to have a “one more can’t hurt” attitude. One of the great things about being a school leader at KIPP is we’re part of a national network of great schools and smart people who are suggesting new ways to do things all the time. This is super helpful, but just because using the EMDA math assessment works for someone else’s school doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for us. At KPEA we would need to be blown away by a new assessment to add it to our portfolio. And that hasn't happen in our first two years.

• Assessment data needs to be actionable. One of the big issues with the PSA test is knowing what to do with the results. There is no proven threshold to indicate when cancer is present so it’s hard to know definitively what next step makes the most sense. And often that means erring on the side of treating the possible cancer as aggressively as possible. Having a teacher give an assessment that doesn’t give back actionable information is a waste of time. When teachers at KPEA create our quick interim assessments that we give every 2-3 weeks to spot check if kids are learning what we have most recently taught, we push ourselves to think about questions like:

o   Would knowing how many kids get this question right impact my planning and teaching?

o   What would I do differently if most of my students get this right? Or get it wrong?

o   How would I use this information to plan intervention groups?

o   Do I already know this information from another source? Is asking this question going to give me a better read on my students’ skills?  

If the conversation at our assessment planning meeting shows that a particular question doesn’t give us new knowledge or that the results wouldn’t change how we teach moving forward, we don’t ask it. Because we’re thoughtful about our assessments, we get back high-quality information about what our kids know and don’t know and can adjust our teaching to make sure all our students get the instruction they need.  

  

On joy

If there is one thing you remember from your Kantian philosophy class in college (and there might not be :) ), it’s probably the distinction between means and ends. Kant argued that people should never be thought of as means to getting something else, but as an end in itself. People should be valued and appreciated because people deserve that, not because someone is a means to achieving something you want. You should be nice to your friend because he is your friend, not because he might get you a job at his company next year.

While hard-core philosophy and joyful kindergarten classrooms don’t have much in common, the distinction between means and ends is important to how we think about joy at KPEA. Joy is one of our five school values and creating a joyful learning and teaching environment is one of our big goals as a school. We want students, teachers, families, visitors, and supporters to be happy when they are in the building. As our KPEA student culture vision says:

• Students are having fun. They smile and laugh as a regular part of any lesson. 
• Teachers  are having fun. They smile and laugh as a regular part of any lesson.
• When you walk into a classroom at KPEA, it feels calm, comfortable, and happy. You want to pull up a chair and make yourself at home.

So joy is important. People should be happy. Got it. Point made, right? Well, not totally, because I’m going to argue too often in education we talk about joy as a means and not as an end in itself.   

Joy is good because kids will be more engaged by a task they like doing. Joy is good because happy students will misbehave less. Joy is good because happy students will be more likely to persist through challenging times and work. Joy is good because happy students will be less likely to drop out, transfer schools, or be absent. Joy is good because happy teachers will be more effective and are less likely to want to work somewhere else. All of these things are 100% true and super important. But looking at joy only like this reduces it to purely means to get to some other end.

But joy should be an end too. 6 year olds should get chance each day to sing Justin Bieber really loudly. They should jump rope, hula hoop, and hopscotch. Early elementary students should play games where they try to make their partner laugh by making the craziest face possible. They should act out “Going on a Bear Hunt” and scream their heads off when they find the “bear” hiding in the cave. Kids should do the “Batman” celebration after working hard at math centers, complete with putting on their Batman mask, getting in the Batmobile, and singing the Batman TV show jingle. They should get to build the tallest block tower they possibly can. They should be engaged in joyful activities because having fun is fun! Joy is not just a means, it’s an end too.  

I would argue that pure, unadulterated joy is important for any age, but it’s vital for an early elementary school. Kids need to work hard. They need to learn through engaging, fun lessons and centers. But they need to just have fun for fun’s sake too.     

Icebergs and Teacher Coaching

Everyone knows the saying “that’s just the tip of the iceberg” and most people have seen that cheesy motivational poster with the giant iceberg that shows just what a small percentage of the ice is actually above the water. The point is simple, but profound – oftentimes what we see is just a small part of what is actually there and by extension, we miss what is most important if we ignore what is not clearly visible.  Lots of things in life are good examples of this. The housing crisis of recent years was just the leading edge of a much larger economic collapse. Congressional scandals that become public are just a small fraction of the bad behavior in DC. The work you see pro athletes do before games is just a tiny bit of all the training that goes into making them great.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how this metaphor applies to teacher coaching, specifically about observations of teachers. At our school, all teachers are observed at least two times every three weeks (co-teachers every week) for at least 20 minutes with an in-person feedback session to follow. This feels like a good amount of time and teachers cite helpful and frequent feedback as one of our strengths as a school. But is there an iceberg problem here? Are we looking at what is visible and easy to measure, while missing out on the larger factors that really matter?

Lesson observations by definition focus on what is happening in front of the observer – what engagement strategies teachers are using, how on-task students are, what kind of questions are being asked, how teachers respond to misbehaving students, etc. Good stuff to be sure. And helpful no doubt. But are these conversations always the key driver to improved teaching and student achievement? Lots of things can make a lesson not strong and many are not directly visible in an observation. A teacher who is not using assessment data well and so is focusing on the wrong standards, or isn’t aware how he sounds when talking to families, or isn’t working well with team members to plan collaboratively, etc. That stuff can be the giant mass of ice below the water. And focusing on how a teacher responded when a student called out doesn’t mean you’re getting at what really matters.

Really strong teacher coaching and support needs to include work on the front end – what are you teaching and why; on the back end – are kids learning and how do you know; as well as work around beliefs and habits of mind – how self-aware am I or am I modeling values I want my students to emulate. Some of these are visible in a lesson observation, but not always very directly. So what to do? More thoughts and some things we’re doing at KPEA coming shortly.