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.