First Year Teachers and First Time Parents

As often happens, I’m following in Mike Goldstein’s wake. In this case, Mike and associates had a couple of really good posts a few weeks ago on some of the challenges for teachers at this time of the year – challenges that are even greater when you’re a new teacher. His posts inspired me to write an email to the new teachers at KPEA that I’ve edited slightly for clarity below.

For context, here are some of the cast of characters:
Bri – my wife
Max – my son who is almost 21 months old. That's him below in his Halloween costume.
Owen – my newborn



I’ve been thinking a lot about how different having a second child is than having a first. While having Owen at this age is no walk in the park – no newborn is – it’s so much easier than when Max was this age. With Max, Bri and I literally had no idea what to do. You leave the hospital, where you are surrounded by nurses and doctors at all times and after two days you go home, where you have each other, some advice books on the shelf, and our own parents on the phone.

So to repeat, we had no idea what we were doing. What if the baby isn’t feeding? He’s sleeping a lot, is that ok? He’s not sleeping at all this afternoon, what’s up with that? What is that noise that just came from his diaper area? That can’t be normal – but what if it is? Is that rash getting worse? Is that sound normal? Why is he crying all the time? Are we supposed to feel this exhausted? Should the umbilical cord have fallen off by now? How do you give a newborn a bath? Do you really need to? Why is he crying – and not stopping? He has a fever, but is it high enough to be worried?

Dealing with the actual challenges is bad enough, but what is worst is the fact that you have nothing to compare it to you. This is your first child and making sure he is healthy and happy is sort of a big deal, so of course you worry. And you simply don’t have the experience to know if that rash actually is a big deal or something that will just go away. And you don’t have the context to know that there are going to be days and nights when a 3-week old cries a lot and there's not much you can do to stop if, but that it will get better.

Making any connections to being a new teacher? As you’re well aware, being a new teacher is hard and one of the hardest parts is that you don’t have experience or context that you’ll have in the future. It can be hard to tell how to handle every situation you’re going to face, what situation is a big deal (and which just seems that way), or have the confidence that a challenge is going to get better. And just like being a new parent, when you don’t know the answer and don’t know what to expect, new teachers get worried and stressed.

New teachers start to feel this more in October and November, as the honeymoon phase wears off and you begin to see some of the more long-term challenges you’re facing. Yes, that student really does have really loud tantrums on a regular basis, teaching at the end of the day is challenging, and weekends don’t ever seem long enough. And you start to worry about if those challenges are ever going to get better and if the issue is something you could be or should be doing better. And what makes it even harder is you don’t have the experience to know what it’s going to be like in two weeks or two months.

I hate to break it to you, but there is no fast forwarding to get the experience that you’re craving. There is no way to take the accumulated wisdom that fills the brains of our veteran teachers on staff and pour it into your heads. You only get that wisdom and experience by living it each day, learning from what goes well (and doesn’t) and stealing great ideas from those around you. 

What can you do in the meantime?

• Know that this is path that millions of teachers have taken before you including everyone else on staff. Every single first year teacher has wondered if something they are struggling with is going to get better. Every single one.

• Learn something each day. The good news is you don’t have to wait until next year to grow – each day you get another chance to take a new approach or try something again. Not to mention, each day is a chance to learn something from your mentor teacher and other staff. You will have more experience, knowledge and confidence two weeks from now and even more in two months. And just wait till next year! 

• Use the people around you. Bounce ideas and thoughts off your mentor teachers, your grade level chairs, Betsy (our AP), me, each other and anyone else on staff. Every single person around you would love to help you think through a challenge but we can only do that if you let us. Part of what makes the Co-Teacher program work is we don’t kick you out of the hospital after 2 days with your new students. You get to be surrounded by experts all year long – so make sure you’re using them. 

• Remember the Stockdale Paradox that Marc (our CEO at KIPP Philly) talked about at the all-region session this summer. We need to be honest with what is going well and what is not, but to never lose faith that we will reach our goals. Don’t be afraid to admit that something isn’t going as well as you want, but never doubt for a second that with hard work and clear thinking it will get better.

And as a former new teacher and now as a former first-time parent, I can tell you that this uncertainty and doubt about what is coming next gets better. With Owen, we don’t worry because we know that really is what he sounds like when you burp him after a feeding, that he is going to be wide awake from 11pm-1am each night, and that you don’t actually need to give a kid a bath for at least a few weeks.

In the same way, trust that this period of uncertainty will pass and you’ll soon know what’s normal, what’s not, and what to do about it. And as you work to build that experience, keep doing what you do every day so well, which is help our kids start their climb up that mountain to college. You all are doing a great job and I can’ wait to see what’s next for you all.  

Year 3!

Our kids are about to go into the third week of our third year at KPEA. A couple of cute pictures and facts about our third year:

• Our founding class of students is now in 2nd grade and while 2023 (the year they go to college) still seems miles away, middle school feels just around the bend.

2nd graders working hard and looking so mature!

• We're now up to a full-time staff of 25, including our first ever reading specialist and full-time speech therapist.
• After 16 months, construction on our building is just about done and our 2nd graders have moved upstairs into the newly renovated section of the building. 

The Class of 2023 during their lesson on using the stairs. Because we have stairs now!

• Thanks to KaBoom! our kids will be getting an awesome playground in early October as the final part of the conversion of an old warehouse into a sparking school for kids.

• There are now over 300 students on our kindergarten waitlist, which while flattering, means that there are hundreds of families trying unsuccessfully to get their children into a better school. This will hopefully be the year we start another KIPP elementary school in Philadelphia and double the number of kids we can serve.  

• Even with all the changes, the core part of the job stays the same. Over half of our new kindergarten students have such low literacy knowledge that they aren't even at a pre-reading level. A bunch of our students know less than 5 letters and can hardly hold a pencil to write their name. But if we can duplicate the success of our first two years, over 93% of our students will be reading on grade level by the end of kindergarten.

•  Our kids are pretty adorable :)

1st graders at recess putting on a puppet show

A Few Sometimes True Arguments and Some Facts

This post is about what I believe regarding charter school enrollment policies, comparisons with district schools , and other touchy subjects. I’m writing for myself and not for KIPP or KIPP Philadelphia.

There are lots of people who don’t believe in or like charter schools. They believe all kinds of things about what charter schools are like and why they are bad for American education. Working at KIPP for the last 7 years, I don’t agree with many of the critiques I hear, but there are more than a few that are rooted in fact. Here are some of the ones I believe are at least sometimes true: 

• Some charter schools play games with what kind of students and families they take in

• Some charter schools play games with what students they keep and who they kick out

• Some charter schools have mismanaged public monies, or worse, intentionally redirected money meant for kids to enrich school administrators.

• The distinction between charter schools and district schools doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the school. While studies have shown different things, there is no doubt that many charter schools do no better than district schools. 

• Some charter schools aren’t transparent with what happens in their buildings or what happens in the back offices. The current system of charter oversight in Philadelphia, with a well-meaning but small staff in the charter school office looking over 80+ charter schools is not sufficient.

• Some charter schools only care about high test scores and teaching to the state test 

• It’s too hard to close charters where kids aren’t achieving or are mismanaged

• Too many people look to charter schools as a silver bullet that will “fix” urban education.

But just like the still developing cheating scandal in the district (and yes, in some charters) doesn’t offset all the good things happening in many district schools and the hard work of thousands of teachers, the actions of some charter schools do not mean that all charter schools are trying to destroy the school district, make money for corporate interests, or impose a separate and unequal school system designed to prepare the urban poor for a lifetime of low-wage work. I don't know what happens at each charter school in Philadelphia, but I know what happens in the one I run. And none of the sometimes true attacks I listed above are what happens at KIPP Philadelphia Elementary Academy (KPEA), the school I founded in 2010.

Too often when I read education websites, blogs, and comment sections I see people on both sides of many issues repeating the same talking points without having as good an understanding of all the facts on the ground. This is as true of debates about the Common Core standards or phonics instruction as it is of charter school conversations. Just like with Middle East politics or figuring out why my wife is mad at me, a key first step in these education debates is getting all the information out on the table. While this is just the first step in having a productive debate, we can then at least have a conversation about the same set of facts and maybe even find some common ground.

So I’m going to try to do my part and give some information about how some anti-charter arguments stack up to the facts on the ground as I see them at KPEA. Before I begin, three caveats - to be clear, facts are never without interpretation so I expect that some will argue with my facts. I’ve tried to be as objective as possible but I’m obviously not a neutral observer here. Secondly, this is the information that I know best because it’s about the school I work in each day and the details are going to be different at every charter school even within the KIPP network. Finally, I can’t attempt to answer every criticism of charter schools in one post so I’m focusing on what I hear the most.

Charter schools play games with what kind of students and families we take in

At KPEA, our enrollment form is one, single-sided page that simply asks basic demographic information like address, phone number, and date of birth. Our open enrollment period is for two months (February and March) and no additional information is required for a child to be entered into the lottery other than the one-page form. No special in-person meeting, no bringing in proof of address, no essays, no report cards – nothing. We distribute these enrollment forms to locations where we can find lots of families in our neighborhood – places like community centers, Head Start centers, corner stores, and supermarkets. We go door-to-door in our immediate neighborhood handing out our information. The enrollment form is available online. We also host three voluntary enrollment Open Houses during our open enrollment time for interested families to see the school, observe classes, and ask me questions. It’s totally optional, but we think it’s important to provide a chance for interested families to see the school they want to send their child to.

As a result of our open process, our student population is reflective of the communities we serve, with over 85% of our student qualifying for free or reduced meals and over 20% of our students having an IEP, including more severe challenges like intellectual disabilities, autism, and Down’s syndrome.

Charter schools play games with what students they keep and who they kick out

Many people know that at KIPP, we do home visits to meet our new students and families before they start school. This happens after they are admitted and is basically an orientation to school that happens at the student’s home because we feel that this is a really effective way to start to build a strong home-school connection. This meeting has zero impact on which students are admitted. To be absolutely sure that all our families understand this, the very first thing I say to families when we sit down is “Relax, this is not an interview. Your child already has a spot.”

Our goal is to keep 100% of our students each year and for as many of our students who start with us in kindergarten to stay at KIPP for the next 13 years until they go to college. In our two years at KPEA, we have never kicked a student out and hope we never have an incident serious enough that this would have to happen. This doesn’t mean we don’t have hard kids, because we do. We have kids who were absent over 40 times in a year, students who were physically violent towards teachers, and students who were frequently defiant. But we don’t get rid of those students (this is no doubt easier for us as an elementary school than it is for both district and charter schools with older students because serious incidents are simply less extreme when kids are 6 and 7). When students are really challenging we just work harder to figure out how to meet their needs. Because we don’t get rid of students who are struggling and because our families are satisfied, our yearly student attrition rate has been under 2%.

Charter schools only care about high test scores and teaching to the state test

First, the caveat that our oldest group of students are only now in 2nd grade and won’t take the Pennsylvania state test until next year. But our students do very well on commercially available reading assessments like STEP and F&P and the nationally normed NWEA MAP assessment. At KPEA we believe a core part of our mission is to give our students the academic skills to succeed and this included rigorous literacy and math instruction taught in a student-centered way. This looks like students getting phonics for 30 minutes per day in small, leveled groups. It means students get small group guided reading four times per week and lots of time for independent reading and literacy centers. And it also means 70 minutes of math each day that includes at least 30 minutes of math centers. But we know if we are really serious about developing our students to be the kind of people and learners who can be whatever they want in life, that success in reading and math is necessary but not even close to being sufficient. 

Because we have a longer school day (8am-4pm) we have more time to fit in great core academic instruction with the “extras” that are so essential for elementary kids that calling them “extra” doesn’t do their importance justice. All of our students have 30 minutes of recess each day. All students have science or social studies for 45 minutes per day. Kids have art, Spanish, and gym each week, starting in kindergarten. Our kinder students have nap – real nap with cots, blankets, and (optional) stuffed animals. We have special education teachers in every grade, a full-time speech therapist, and part-time occupational therapists and social workers. We go on three field trips a year. Students put on extravagant musical performances. We teach character education classes focused on social skills and values. In other words, we try really hard to give our students the well-rounded education that families pay lots of money for. My goal is to make sure that KPEA is a place I would want to send my 18 month old son when he gets older and I know we're on the right track because there are multiple KIPP staff who send their own children to KPEA.

Charter schools aren’t transparent with what happens in their buildings or what happens in the back offices

One of the many reasons, I’m really proud to work at KIPP Philadelphia is because of our strong stance around transparency. We have created a special section of our website called Open Book where anyone can find information on our board, our budgets, school leader salary scale and tons of other topics. We’re a public school and the public deserves to know how we operate. And at KPEA we also have a literal open door policy at our school. Our families can come into our building to observe classes anytime they want, no appointment needed. We hosted between 50 and 60 visitors last year from other schools, foundations, and community groups and never said “no” to anyone. We’re proud of what we do and happy to share it with others. 

This post isn’t mean to show anti-charter advocates that they are wrong – because in some important ways they are right. It’s not to show that we have things figured out at KPEA, because I have a long list of what we’re working to do better this year. It’s simply to say that there is too much at stake for all of our kids to not find common ground where it exists and part of that is for everyone – myself included – to do more to engage with the real issues. That starts with getting down to the ground level to learn what is really happening in all of our schools, no matter the type. Please contact me if you’d like to visit KPEA. We’d be happy to have you. 

Anti-Initiatives

Summer is a time for trips to the beach, grilling in the backyard, and hitting the pool. It’s also time for teachers and school leaders to reflect on the previous year and plan for the upcoming one. As a school leader, this means focusing on projects and initiatives that I want us to do better next year, or maybe do for the first time. Things like tighten our dismissal routine, adjust our teacher coaching structure, or use our older students as leaders for our younger students. The list could go, and frequently does, go on and on. This cycle of reflection, planning, and action is one of my favorite parts of being a teacher and school leader.

But what if besides thinking of new areas to focus on, we thought about what we can cut/trim/reduce? I got to thinking about this while reading an article in The New York Times Magazine about the tech company Tumblr and its founder, David Karp. One of Tumblr’s funder’s says this, “it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, ‘Hey, got a new version coming up — and I took four features out!’”

As an organization grows, the temptation is to do more and more, and schools are no different. While we need to take on new ideas and focus on different projects each year, we should be better and more efficient than in prior years because we’ve done this already. As a result we should be looking for things to cut and what to make easier. In other words, we should not only be thinking about initiatives, but anti-initiatives.

At KPEA, we’re reducing the number of meetings we have this year because we should have less to decide in our third year than we had in our first. The amount of time it takes to plan for special events like Report Card conferences or the kindergarten Moving Up ceremony is a fraction of what it took two years ago. Our kindergarten curriculum is in such a good place that teachers are merely adjusting plans from previous years instead of creating everything from scratch.  

In Covey-speak, we can only have so many big rocks in our cup. If we’re going to put new ones in every year (and have them fit!), we need to turn the previous year’s big rocks into pebbles first.  

It Burns With a High Flame

The science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died a few weeks ago and as is now typical when someone dies, Twitter quickly filled with stories and anecdotes. One quote (retweeted by Ta-nehisi Coates) that Bradbury gave to the Paris Review caught my eye – speaking about the wide range of influences on this work, he said, “A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame."

Ray Bradbury- not looking too trashy here

Besides the creative (and self-deprecating) turn of phrase, what I love about this quote is how it captures the enthusiasm Bradbury had for the world around him and the influences that this “heap of trash” had on his work. Enthusiasm, energy, intensity, curiosity, wonder, inspiration. That's what he's talking about when he writes that he "burns with a high flame" and could there be a better description of the kind of passion we all want to feel about our work? This passion and intensity of feeling are not only characteristics of great writers, but I would argue, are also key skills in being an effective school leader. 

Great school leaders need to have passion for their work, joy for teaching kids, and inspiration to encourage their teachers. Those are the easy and obvious answers, just like an obvious answer for Bradbury would be that he read Verne, Shakespeare, and Steinbeck. Which he surely did, but what made him the greatest science fiction of all time was reading those authors, while also watching movies every week as kid at a theater four blocks from his house and being in the poetry club in high school. Just like Bradbury's influences extended beyond the usual masters, a school leader’s enthusiasm and passion needs to extend outside of the school building and beyond the usual narrow range of education and management books. I'm not saying don't read Fountas and Pinnell or Jim Collins. I'm saying don't think that's enough. 

Burning with a high flame as a school leader means you are always on the look-out for some small piece of information, some little story, a figment of inspiration that you can use to make your school better. You read often and widely. You talk to interesting people. You understand that brainstorming, daydreaming, and thinking with your head in the clouds is important work. You find connections to your work in virtually any situation and you probably annoy your family because you always want to explain how something you’re reading or watching connects to your job. You keep a list of these little ideas and insights and go back to them often, because you never know when some old idea is going to be useful. You record voice memos and take photos on your iPhone and email them to yourself. And you share all of these with people you work with (enthusiastically!), because you want to be an interesting person and you want interesting people to share back with you. The work of leading talented adults and educating brilliant children can be and I would argue, must be informed by the “heap of trash” that is around you at all times.

In the interest of sharing, here is my “heap of trash” with the rule being that everything on this list has sparked some personal insight, provided a hook for a PD session, or given me a story I use to build culture with students.

• ·     Twitter – I don’t use Twitter to share my thoughts on where I’m eating lunch – I use it as a curated reading list of interesting people. Twitter gives you direct access to incredibly smart people’s thoughts and what they are reading. I follow about 100 people, ranging from sports announcers to political pundits to punk rockers. Some of my favorite follows:

o  Kurt Anderson- novelist and host of Studio 360

o  Chris Jones- writer for Esquire

o   Anna Holmes- founder of Jezebel.com

o   David Carr – writer for The New York Times

o   Aziz Ansari- comic(and foodie)

o   Rembert Browne- writer for Grantland

o   Education folks like Kevin Carey and Kristen Graham of the Inquirer

• Kottke.com – personal website of Jason Kottke who has one of the first bloggers. His site is basically just him posting items that interest and fascinate him, like a video of a slinky on a treadmill or him explaining why it’s so hard to make a better tablet than an iPad.

• The New Yorker – there is no better magazine for great writing and great ideas. I don’t read it cover to cover each week, but I find at least two great articles in every issue.

• The New York Times – the best newspaper in the world. So much good stuff each day.

• Reality TV – remember, this is a heap of trash! I’ve been known to include video clips from The Bachelor in PD sessions and long-time readers of the blog know I used Top Chef to anchor an earlier post.

• Instapaper- an iPad app that takes articles from websites and strips out all the formatting to give you a nice, clean page with just the text so it’s like you’re reading a book. Besides the ease of reading, the app is great because it easily syncs with websites like longreads.com and longform.com which aggregate great long-form articles from tons of websites. Easy way to catch up on high-quality magazine pieces.

• Podcasts – super easy way to listen to great radio/internet programs on your own schedule. Favorites include: 
• The Tony Kornheiser Radio Show 
• This American Life
• Planet Money
• Fresh Air 
• Nerdist 
• The Jalen Rose Show on the Grantland Network  

• Education websites and authors 
• The Notebook – Philadelphia’s incredible local education paper and website
• Gotham Schools- NYC focused but national news too 
• Eduwonk.com 
• Starting an Ed School 
• Dy/Dan 
• Edweek and its various bloggers 

• Go for a walk or a run. Without headphones. Just look and think. 

   

Teacher Appreciation Week

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week. We have an incredible team of teachers at KPEA and here are just some of the reasons why I appreciate our amazing team:

Reason #12 and #16 in action

1. They work hard. Really hard. And they do it with a smile every day, even when it's December and they come to work in the dark and leave to go home in the dark. And it's cold. But they're still smiling. 
2. They love teaching our hardest kids. Kids who aren't always perfectly behaved. Kids who take lots of extra effort before they "get it". Kids who aren't always in uniform or don't always have their homework done. Kids who have tantrums or who sometimes say not nice things. Teachers at KPEA love these kids the most. 
3. Teachers at KPEA can write a catchy song about any learning objective and frequently do. 
4. They don't give up until students have mastered every skill they've taught. If this means pulling small groups of students for extra practice at breakfast, creating an entirely new center, or making sure families are practicing the skill at home, it's what they do. 
5. Even though they work hard, teachers work equally hard to have fulfilling lives outside of school because they know that they need to be happy and rested to be at their best for kids. Besides being great teachers our staff are great runners, dancers, wives, cooks, friends, sisters, activists, artists, mothers, and more. 
6. Every person in our building has the back of everyone else, no questions asked. Teachers clear paper jams from the copier when their colleague has had it up to here with the finicky machine, give each other rides to the auto repair shop, and watch each others class while they take an urgent parent phone call. 
7. Our teachers are the most patient, calm, caring people I have ever met.
8. They build incredibly strong relationships with families that enable our teachers to both be invited to family celebrations and to have tough conversations with families about student progress. 
9. Teachers pick kids up when they have no other way to get to school and take them for pizza as a reward for reaching their big goal. 
10. Our first graders read chapter books and write page long pieces clearly arguing why we should have a hot tub in their classroom.  
11. Kindergarten students come in not knowing all of their letters of the alphabet and leave reading 1st grade books. 
12. They can make a hat or crown the most exciting reward for any occasion!
13. They make teaching 25 six-year olds look like the easiest thing in the world, when in fact it is one of the hardest.     
14. They hand in things on time. Like 99.99% of the time. Without me reminding, badgering, or asking. Our teachers are pros who do great work because they know it is what is best for kids.
15. Our teachers always have the best interest of our kids in mind, even when that means calling a student every night at 9pm to remind her to go to bed or making individualized homework each week for a student. 
16. They are always up for a challenge. Moving to 3 buildings in 10 months? Sure, no problem. Put on a huge student performance for tons of VIPs? Yeah, why not. Set and reach really high academic goals for our kids? Of course!  
17. They are so much fun to be around, whether it is leading a dance party with their students or telling hilarious stories before a staff meeting, our team is always smiling and bringing joy to everyone they come into contact with. 
18. They are great teachers and yet they still work really hard to get better every day.
19. Teaching is hard and teaching in a start-up environment is hard, but our teachers never complain, gossip, or get down. Instead, the exemplify the KIPP ideal of looking for a solution when there is a problem. 
20. Our kids love school and love learning because they have great teachers.

Saying Sorry

School leaders have really hard jobs and even effective school leaders make lots of mistakes. And that means you need to say sorry frequently. To put it even more strongly, you need to be good at saying sorry if you're going to be good at the job.

• You need to be good at knowing when you messed up. 
• You need to be good at getting over your own (large) ego 
• You need to be good at not making excuses, hedging your apology, or doing the famous, "I apologize if I have offended you..."
• You need to be good at genuinely showing that you care that someone has been hurt or wronged  
• You need to be good at saying some version of "I messed up" or "It's my fault and no one else's" or "I apologize that this happened and I'll make sure it doesn't happen again"

Speaking from a few examples from just the past few weeks, being upfront about making a mistake and giving a sincere apology can almost instantly transform a tense situation or repair hurt feelings. Of course, an apology with no change in behavior or without action steps won't count for much for very long - an apology is just a starting point and not the end. But you need to start by saying "sorry".   

My Favorite Blog Post Ever...

Was written in 2008 by Kilian Betlach, who taught middle school in the same school district I did on the east side of San Jose, CA. Kilian was a year ahead of me in TFA and I admired his teaching and writing from a distance, knowing of him more than really knowing him. He is a both a great writer and a rock-star teacher and this is the best thing he ever wrote.

It's about what being a teacher is really like, namely: bone-crushing exhaustion, challenges both immense and infuriatingly small, and the intense pressure to know you can and must do better tomorrow.

Take 5 minutes and read it here. And then get sucked into reading his archives for the next 3 hours.

KIPP Report Card

KIPP's annual Report Card was released today. Check it out here. Here's why the report card is pretty cool.

1. Being transparent about our successes and our challenges is something we try hard to do well at KIPP, both nationally and at KIPP Philadelphia. The Report Card is a big part of this initiative because we publish tons of data about each of our schools and regions. We're proud of almost everything in the report, but we don't hide the information that we're not so happy with. We've taken this even further at KIPP Philadelphia, where we now publish everything from bios of board members to lease agreements for our buildings to our salary scale in the Open Book section of our website.   


2. Just like looking at a student's report card demonstrates what the school thinks is important enough to measure, the KIPP Report Card measures what we as an organization think matters most. And unlike what some critics may say, what matters at KIPP is way deeper than state test scores. The report contains information about our student attrition, staff retention, and the success of our alums in college, among other measures. 


3. This is the first year that KPEA is included! We're on pg. 112 if you're curious. 


4. Rowena Lesher, one of our amazing kindergarten teachers is highlighted in the report (pg. 11) and in a video on the report's webpage. Besides being a phenomenal teacher, Ro is the only person I know who has been a founding teacher at two KIPP schools, which is no small feat. 


5. Besides having one of our teachers featured in the report, a KIPP West Philadelphia Prep student named Brooklyn is highlighted in the Report Card and in the video on the website. She taped this interview when she was only in 6th grade and she's already a way better interview subject than I am. 


6. As always, the report looks cool, with vivid infographics, stunning photos, and a great overall design feel. Big props to fellow TFA Bay Area '03 corps member Rachel Young who creates the report for KIPP Foundation.


7. I love skimming through the report and being reminded of the scope of the work that we do at KIPP. It's sometimes hard to visualize what it means that we have 109 schools all across the country, but flipping through page after page of school reports (and seeing the great things happening in these schools) makes the power of our collective work incredibly tangible.

A Culture of Practice

In a previous post I laid out our big picture thinking about student culture and since I often get asked a version of “what do academics look like at KPEA?” I thought it made sense to lay out how we think about instruction at KPEA. Where we start at KPEA is not going straight to what purchased curriculum we should buy, but with bigger picture ideas. Just like I believe strongly that we need a point of view and an approach about hiring and student culture, a school needs to have a common understanding of what great instruction looks like and how kids learn. We use the term “Culture of Practice” to describe what this means at KPEA.

Carnegie Hall- Our visual anchor for Culture of Practice

The idea of a culture of practice means that we believe students will make dramatic academic progress when three key conditions are met: students have lots of time practicing skills and engaging with the material, the work is at the correct level for each student, and teachers give lots and lots of feedback to students. The corollary to these ideas is that just because you taught something doesn’t mean students have gotten it and kids don’t learn by osmosis. Kids need to be taught in an intentional way – and then they need practice those skills until they have mastered the concept.


What does this mean for our instructional programming? Lots of things:

• We maximize the amount of time that students are actually doing things. We try to limit carpet time to no more than 1/3 of each lesson so 2/3 of the time can be spent with students practicing and applying what they have learned. In reading, this looks like over an hour of guided reading and literacy centers (computers, phonics practice, buddy reading, etc.) each day so that students have guided almost every day. In math, this means a quick mini-lesson and then it’s students working individually or in small teacher-led groups to practice the daily skill and then cycling through math centers to review previously taught objectives. In writing, we use a workshop approach where students are doing authentic writing each day. In art class, students create their own sculptures, paintings, and collages. During Spanish, students sing songs to review basic vocabulary, draw and label family portraits with correct terms, and match which animals live on the farm or in the savanna.

• We make differentiation a part of what we do in every lesson so that students are working with material that is just the right level for them as much as possible. We use our reading data to place students in guided reading groups and then we adjust groups and objectives every three weeks to make sure we’re still hitting the right level. In math, we use our interim assessment data to identify students who need extra review and they get in-class small group instruction multiple times each week. We split students across all three homerooms for our word study (phonics) part of the day so that we can create up to 7 differentiated groups, ensuring that all students are mastering the key phonics skills they need and are pushed when they are ready. In kindergarten, we use different kinds of writing paper because we know that while some students are ready to write 2-3 lines of text, others still need larger spaces and handwriting guide lines to help them correctly form letters. Our special education teachers and reading specialist work with students who need even more individualized practice.



• The feedback part of the equation is where we have been working hardest this year to get better. A lot of our work has been done with guided reading since it’s the most important part of the day if we want our kids to become great readers. We’ve done about 15 hours of professional development on guided reading this year, with a lot of the focus being how to coach and support readers, going all the way down to the level of what prompts are best for when a student gets stuck on a certain kind of word. Teachers have also been working super hard on the delicate balance of how to guide and support students without simply giving them the answer. This means thinking hard about where the breakdown in learning is taking place, how far back you need to back-track, and what questions you can ask to help students get unstuck.  Our staffing plan and schedule are built around the idea of putting as many great teachers in front of our kids as possible because you can’t give good feedback as a teacher if you’re not working with small groups of kids. In both our kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms we have two highlight qualified teachers working with our students all day and both teachers are teaching all day. Both teachers are pulling guided reading groups, leading small math groups, conferencing with students about their writing, etc. By putting all our specials in the afternoon, I created a schedule where our “specials” teachers don’t just teach art, gym, and Spanish, but teach reading, word study, or math in the mornings. I and our assistant principal frequently teach guided reading, word study, and other subjects. 

This is just the beginning of how we think and what we do, but having a clear central concept is so important as a guiding tool because it gives us guidance as a school about what to focus on. For example, we’ve made a small but important change to the kindergarten schedule to increase the amount of time students have for independent reading. We’ve formalized our reading interim assessment schedule this year so that we are doing F&P running records every three weeks (combined with STEP assessments every 12 weeks) so that we are making sure to adjust reading groups frequently. And lots of the lesson plan feedback teachers get is around finding ways to increase the number of “at bats” a student gets to practice a skill.

If you want to see more details of what we think about instruction, check out our instructional vision document and our 1st grade schedule, both hosted at the KIPP Philadelphia website. 

On Trayvon

As the leader of a school that is 95% African-American and whose job it is to see my students make it to and through college, the killing of Trayvon Martin has been on my mind often the past few weeks. The killing of a 17 year old boy who was only armed with a bottle of iced tea, a pack of Skittles, and a hoodie has that effect on you, especially when the local police refuse to do anything about it. My students will look just like Trayvon in about 10 years and as this tragedy shows, just looking like Trayvon or Brandon or Joshua or Nadir can be dangerous, even in 2012.

In trying to wrap my head around what happened and what it meant, I’ve read a whole bunch of amazing writing about this case. The piece that is staying with me most is this one by Danielle Belton. It’s long and it’s intense and it’s personal. And that’s why you should go and read it right now. One excerpt in particular hit home, where Belton is writing about the advice that black parents give to their children:

That if we're just "good" we'll be safe. If your son doesn't listen to hip hop, goes to the church camp, gets A's and Bs in school, is polite, says "sir" and "ma'am," if he's a good kid, he'll be safe. That's the bargain black parents make with their children. 

If you are "good" the gangs and the violence and the racism won't get you. You will be safe. You will live to see 25. You will have a great life. Opportunity will abound for you. We will be proud of you. The community will be proud of you. You will be Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and life will be beautiful if you just want it enough. 

Just be "good." Be good, Trayvon Martin. Stay in school. Listen to your parents. And you'll be safe. 

But that's a lie.

I’m not black and my own little boy does not look like Trayvon. So I don’t understand the full intensity and heartache that Belton feels as she writes these words and I can’t pretend to. But the promises that all parents want to make to their children are similar to the ones I make to my students and their families every day. If you work hard, you’ll achieve. All of you are going to college and that’s where you learn to be anything you want to be in life. If there is a problem, we can find a solution. If you’re nice and you treat others with respect, they will do the same.

But this is a lie too. The full tragedy of the killing of Trayvon Martin, combined with the recent violent death of KIPP students in Houston and New Orleans, is that this lie is smacked across our face in a way that we can’t ignore. Being “good”, playing by “the rules”, and having families and schools do everything right isn’t always enough. At our little elementary school, we can teach our students to read above grade level, write beautifully, and master math skills their peers will learn in middle school. We can teach them to be good friends, solve problems, and treat others with respect. But that makes no difference if the wrong person thinks they look suspicious walking home one dark night.

That fact is inescapable and it’s depressing. There is no getting around how sad this fact is. But the killing of Trayvon demonstrates more than ever the necessity of what great teachers and schools do. There is injustice in this world and it’s not going away any time soon, but the only way to counter injustice, ignorance, and intolerance is through education and love. The hardest part of my job is that I can’t shield my students from the hard reality of the world around them, just like Trayvon’s family couldn’t keep him safe. As hard as it is sometimes, this is all the more reason that everyone working in our school needs to work as hard as humanly possible to make what happens inside our building as good as possible for our kids. We need to be building the intellect, character, and imagination of our kids during every single one of our 197 instructional days. Not because it’s going to change everything, but because it’s the only way we can change something. 

Ribbon Cutting, Part II

The official video from our Ribbon Cutting a few months ago is now available. Check it out below!

Getting Things Done

While I'm a very structured thinker, I'm not by nature a super organized person. I don't organize my closet by color, in fact, you're more likely to find my dress shirts on the floor in a pile than on hangers. When I was a young teacher, my desk would be overflowing with stacks of papers that were organized in no other system other than there was no system. This worked well enough as a teacher and I saw myself in opposition to people who I felt were too organized and fixated on their binders, planners, and filing systems. In short, I thought being organized had to do with what kind of person you were and had little to do with how effectively you did your job.

And then I read Getting Things Done by David Allen. The book and overall concept are nicely summarized in a piece in The New York Times this weekend, so go read that if you want to understand the main idea. While I've implemented lots of the key ideas that Allen writes about, the biggest impact his writing had on me was in changing how I think about organization. To Allen, being organized is not the goal. The goal is getting things done and accomplishing your goals. Organization and certain habits help you to be more effective. This seems obvious, but it had a profound impact on me because having a system for remembering important deadlines or learning how to deal with lots of email no longer was about if I saw myself as an "organized" person. It become about how to execute effectively so I would be good at my job.

While being a school leader takes instructional chops, strong people skills, and the ability to build relationships with families, you can't underestimate the necessity of being able to put your vision into reality. Not every school leader needs to love Getting Things Done, but every good school leader needs a system to make sure they are working as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Never Forget This Lesson

The finale of Top Chef was last week. The two finalists' task is to make an amazing four course meal for the judges and 100 guests. Since both chefs are cooking at a super high level, even one small mistake can be the difference between winning and losing and earning the $125,000 grand prize. To help the chefs out and build dramatic tension, the producers have brought back chefs eliminated earlier in the competition to serve as sous chefs. One of the finalists, Paul Qui, is doing well halfway through the meal, with the first group of judges raving about his food. Then he realizes that one of his sous chefs has overcooked the last batch of a key dish. Not a single one is properly cooked and there's not time to make any new ones, meaning he's going to have to serve the second group of judges food he knows is not his best.

As frustrated and disappointed as he is, this is what he says of his assistant chefs, "I can't be mad at him, because I'm the one who trained him how to cook the dish."

This is super obvious, yet super profound if you're someone who manages other people. And so important not to forget.

Big Goals and Big Smiles

8 things that are awesome about this picture:

1. Each of these students has made at least a year's worth of reading progress in 2/3 of a year. 
2. Each of these students is reading on an end of kinder/beginning 1st grade or higher reading level 
3. The kids and their families were so excited to walk into school and see their pictures on the Big Goal poster hanging above their classroom door that morning.
4. Birthday crowns and pieces of bulletin board border make great foundations for Big Goal hats. 
5. Kids with no teeth are particularly adorable! 
6. Students take naps in their Big Goal hats and try to wear them day after day 
7. One of the best things about working with kindergarten students is the effect of great teaching is so clear. Some of the students in this picture could not rhyme words, identify letter sounds, or write their full name when the year started. Now they're reading level "E" books, segmenting 4 sound words, and writing complete sentences. And we still have 3.5 more months of school left for them to learn even more.
8. The kids are SO happy and SO proud of their hard work!

Basic Rights and Cherese's Long Odds

Last week I got an email from a parent asking some questions about our enrollment process and her daughter’s chances of being admitted through our lottery. I get these emails pretty frequently during our two month open enrollment period each winter, but this email was different. This was from an email address that I remembered and a parent I knew, who I’ll call Ms. Winters. She had originally signed up her daughter, Cherese as a founding student at KPEA in July of 2010, she had completed all the required paperwork, and I had gone to her home for a home visit where I spent 90 minutes getting to know her and her daughter and explaining what our new school would be like. Both mom and daughter were super excited. 

Then on August 4th, just two weeks before our doors were to open, there were complications with our facility and we had to quickly find new space for the school. The only option that would allow us to open the school on time was moving from our first location in West Philadelphia to a temporary space in Center City, about an hour away on public transportation from where most of KPEA’s future students, including Cherese, lived. Even though Ms. Winters wanted to send Cherese to KPEA, her work schedule and the commute made it impossible. I talked through some possible options with her, but it just wasn’t going to work.  Ms. Winters reluctantly gave up Cherese’s spot and enrolled her somewhere else for kindergarten.  

Fast forward two years and Ms. Winters is unhappy with the education her daughter is getting at her current school. Like most students in Philadelphia, and like most students living in poverty, her school is not giving her a good enough education. Her mom has been following our progress, and wants to see if she can get Cherese in for 2nd grade next year. In her email, Ms. Winters asked if I remembered her and Cherese and of course I did, because it breaks my heart that Cherese (and a few other students in a similar situation) couldn’t come to KPEA through no fault of her own. Unfortunately, the odds of Cherese getting in to 2nd grade are basically 1 in 100.

Why are her odds so low? Like all charter schools in Philadelphia, KPEA is a public school that is open to any child in the city. Other than sibling preference for current students, there is no other requirement or preference – no admissions test, interview, review of grades, or anything else. We randomly pull names in our lottery to see which students get a spot. We’re going to be taking in roughly 80 new students (75 in kinder, and 1-2 for both 1st and 2nd grade) next year and less than halfway through our enrollment season, we have about 380 families who have completed an enrollment form. To make sure families in our neighborhood know about us, we do targeted recruitment at local childcare centers, libraries, and public housing projects, as well as going door-to-door in the school’s immediate neighborhood. But we don’t do anything fancy like buying billboards, producing radio spots, or advertising on city buses. Yet we’re going to finish with well over 500 enrollment forms for 80 spots, with the odds being particularly low for students trying to get into 1st or 2nd grade like Cherese where we only take in 1-2 students to replace those who might move over the summer.

Cherese and her mom are fighting for something pretty basic, the chance to get her an education that will put her on the path to success in life. But the odds are against her; whether it’s her small chance of getting into KPEA or the 8% chance that poor students in big cities have of graduating from college. Her mom is trying to get her the basic right of education that many Americans take for granted, but that has often been ignored if you’re poor, Latino, or African-American. To be blunt, the crappy education of poor, minority students didn’t much trouble most people for much of America’s history, but I firmly believe that is now changing. Attention is being paid to this issue like never before and new ideas are being tried, some of which are working  (far from all however). But we’re nowhere near the goal of giving each child a great education.

When I get depressed that this goal seems really far away, I try to remember that the history of the United States is a history of a gradual increase in the rights and privileges of the formerly underprivileged that once seemed impossible. It’s not just that African-Americans won their freedom, women won the right to vote, or gays are winning the right to marry, it’s that they weren’t even seen as rights much before they were won. To make the obvious point, the right of freedom for Americans of all races was still in so much doubt in 1860 that hundreds of thousands of men died to contest it. But they failed. As little as 20 years ago it was crazy to think civil unions, let alone gay marriage would gain broad acceptance, yet the number of states granting this right seems to increase weekly. 

So it’s not 1865 or 1920 or 1964, but there is an emerging consensus that what Cherese is going through is not ok and is in fact a failing of us as a country. Now everyone in education must continue to take on the incredibly hard challenge of making sure that a great education for every child is not just a hypothetical right, but one that is real.

On How We Need to Talk About the How

I spent this past weekend at the annual KIPP School Leader retreat where school and regional leaders get together for two days of workshops, conversations, and catching up with each other. One of the key goals of the retreat is to share best practices across our network of 109 schools. This happens formally, i.e. schools that are really great at something get to present to other school leaders and also informally through conversations over lunch or at breaks. I’m walking away from the weekend with lots of concrete ideas that I want take back to my school, especially from a day-long session with Paul Bambrick-Santoyo of Uncommon Schools on strengthening teacher observation and feedback. But this weekend reminded me of an issue I’ve been wrestling with for a while – how hard it is to share ideas that will move the needle for kids, even across the KIPP network. I’m going to argue that school quality is poorly correlated with the “what” a school does and highly correlated with “how” they do it. And that it’s way, way, way easier to share information, both in formal presentations and informal conversations, about the “what” than the “how”.

Many schools look very similar on paper and have many of them same structures, initiatives, and areas of focus. Just to name a few popular ones, virtually every elementary school in the country does “inclusion” for special education, has teachers teach “guided reading” lessons, and uses a “data-driven” approach around instruction and assessments. These similarities are even stronger in the “no excuses” charter school community, where you could add longer hours and a college focus to the list of items that almost every school does. So the “what” is similar, yet the quality of schools is incredibly varied. Just like humans and monkeys share virtually the same DNA, most schools and almost all “no excuses” charter schools look almost identical on paper. But humans aren’t monkeys and not all charter schools (and not even all KIPP schools) are outstanding.

So if schools look pretty similar and focus on pretty much the same things, why are some more successful than others? I would argue it’s all about the “how”, or the execution of the “what”. To break it down even further, it’s about how well people do their jobs and carry out the big ideas. This reasoning gets frustratingly circular (schools are good because people are good at their jobs), but I think it’s true. Almost all elementary schools teach guided reading, but some school leaders create a schedule that allows lots of guided reading to happen better than others. Some instructional leaders provide higher quality professional development for teachers on how to choose the right book than others. And some teachers are more skilled at teaching 6 year olds how to apply new phonics skills in their reading than others.

You could go on and on with this guided reading example and throw in more and more variables, but the point should be clear – what’s important is not that one school teaches guided reading and one doesn’t, it’s the thought, care, and detailed thinking that goes into execution on the big idea. But talking about the “how” is much harder than the “what” since it takes more time. To really get to the root of why one school’s reading results are better, it’s not enough to say they do guided reading or even that they do it really well. You need to understand what a school is doing at a deep, granular level around reading instruction.

The best sharing and development tries to get at this. Bambrick uses tons of videos of school leaders conferencing with teachers. KIPP school founders get to travel the country observing in schools to see the work that takes place on the ground. KIPP invests in people, both as teachers and leaders so that we are as good at executing on our ideas as possible.  But all of this takes a ton of time, money, and effort. As hard as this is, forcing ourselves to always go to the “how” conversations is what needs to happen.


After the jump, a teacher onboarding activity created by the wonderful Ellen Davis of KIPP Ascend Primary that I’ve slightly adapted and have used for the past two years to get new staff to think about the dangers of focusing on the “what” and not the “how”.

Be an Editor, Not a Writer

My argument of the day:
People think of being a school leader, especially a school founder, as an exercise in creating akin to being a writer. A writer creates something from nothing, taking a blank page and filling it with wonderful, unique writing. In fact, the better analogy is to being an editor who sifts through thousands of ideas, many of them good, before eventually finding the right areas to focus on. 

Tina Brown- ruthless editor

Editing means making the hard decisions between many good ideas. The editors of The Paris Review have the almost impossible tasks of sorting through and selecting about 20 fiction pieces to publish each year from the roughly 15,000 submissions they get each year. In the same way, David Foster Wallace’s editor had to make the hard decision to cut 300(!) pages from Infinite Jest that no doubt contained some genius writing. Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair would regularly kill almost finished pieces, even after having spent tons of a writer’s time and the magazine’s money on it, if she wasn’t convinced it was good enough for the magazine.

School leaders, especially founders, find themselves having too many possible initiatives or tasks to do them all. There are hundreds and thousands of great ideas out there in education, taking place in every conceivable setting and type of school. From great strategies for parent involvement to fantastic arts integration to the use of blended learning technology to the use of video to improve teacher observations, the list could go on and on.  Any of these ideas is working somewhere and could be great for your school, but only if it is the right match for what the school needs, the personality of the staff, and the available resources (time and money especially).

What does thinking like an editor mean in practical terms?

• You can’t pick great ideas if you’re not aware of them, so school leaders need to be constantly on the lookout for new ideas by talking with peers, reading widely (and not just education articles), and talking to your staff who often have the best ideas of how to make the school stronger.

• Awareness of your school and what it needs is key, because you can’t decide which of the thousands of great ideas would work for you and your team without knowing you and your team really well.

• You can’t be afraid to say no. In fact, great editors say no to tons of good ideas so they can focus on the great ones. You don’t have to implement every new initiative that you hear about at a conference or that is working for a peer.

• Don’t feel pressure to invent everything from scratch. That’s thinking like a writer. Instead, spend your creative energy customizing ideas to fit your school’s unique needs. 

Creating and running a school is an exercise in having a keen eye for the quality ideas of others and ruthlessly prioritizing what will have the biggest impact on your kids. Think like Tina Brown, not David Foster Wallace.

Ribbon Cutting!

We had our building’s official Ribbon Cutting ceremony on Tuesday to celebrate the opening of our just-completed cafeteria/gym space. This facility is our third building in the 18 months since we opened up and it’s awesome to know that this will be our home forever and ever, especially because it’s such a beautiful space


for our kids to learn and our teachers to teach. The event itself was fantastic with our kindergarten students kicking off the show, speeches by our friends and supports including Mayor Michael Nutter (who made a passionate speech about the importance of education) and Andre Agassi (whose charter school facilities fund helped make our building possible), and then our 1st graders closing out the program with an original version of Lupe Fiasco’s “The Show Goes On” (watch it here). Our new cafeteria was packed with over 200 friends, families, and supporters, including at least 120 KPEA family members (of our 150 kids).
 
The event was a huge success and I wanted to (cliché alert) put the day in perspective for my staff so I sent them an email that night that included the following two ideas that I’ve edited slightly here:

I made this point when I spoke before the kindergarten students performed, but it’s really important so I want to make sure I say it in writing. The reason why it’s so exciting to have such a nice building is not because it makes us better teachers or makes our kids any smarter. KIPP schools have been located in church basements, old trailers, just barely modified commercial spaces, and substandard district buildings to name a just a few not-ideal locations for great schools. And teachers have taught well, kids have learned, and families have been happy. So we don’t “need” a nice building. But that doesn’t mean that our students, their families, and you all don’t deserve to have the same caliber of facilities as students in the suburbs. I sincerely believe you all are the best teachers in Philadelphia, our students’ families are the most dedicated supporters of their students around, and our kids are the most brilliant and talented kids in this city and our building should be just wonderful as you are.

Finally, this is a version of what I said to the first graders when I met with them at the end of the day. To my mind, the most powerful part of this event was seeing our multi-purpose room jam-packed with people from all walks of life and from all over the country who all came to support us. Our job is hard and it can sometimes feel like we’re trying to do this alone. But we’re not. From a tennis great, to a president of a major bank, to so many of our students’ families, to local politicians, to the KIPP Foundation, to our board, to other community leaders in Philadelphia, and many others, we have friends and supporters all over; all who love our kids and are committed to doing what they can to help them climb the mountain to college. I’m not sure you could find a more diverse group of people anywhere in America today and they were united around us and our students. And because of your great work, everyone who came today is even more inspired to help us help our students and that’s pretty cool.

Tuesday was a great day and a fun celebration but what makes KIPP great is that 5 minutes after the first graders finished performing, they were back in class working hard adding details to a writing piece.  

Almost Full Circle

These are 1st graders at KPEA (Class of 2023) talking to Chris and Jessica (who blogs here), both of whom are KIPP Philadelphia alums from the Class of 2011 now doing well as freshmen in college. Talking to our kids about college, putting slogans on shirts, and naming homerooms after colleges all are great ways to put the goal of college front and center for our elementary kids. But nothing is as powerful and tangible as having KIPP alumni explain what college is like to our kids. So awesome and such a powerful moment for KIPP Philly as we now have proof positive for our current students and families that what we do works. And our alums get the chance to play a part in helping the Class of 2023 and the Class of 2024 climb the mountain to college, just like their teachers, family, and friends have helped them. Awesome stuff and it will be even better when Jessica, an education major at Temple, completes the circle and comes back to KIPP as a teacher in a few years. 

Lucky Peach and Points of View

If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning you know I have a thing for chefs and for David Chang in particular. Besides being a bad-ass chef, Chang created the best new magazine in years when he started Lucky Peach this summer. It’s been an unexpected hit because as David Carr of the Times explains, it breaks all the rules of what we expect from magazines these days,

“It breaks many of the conventions not only of food journalism, but of magazine journalism in general as well. The glamorous star on the cover? It’s a chicken being lowered into a pot with its wrinkly backside depicted squirting out graphic eggs. The so-called front of the book — which in most magazines is filled with infographics and breezy snippets — is filled with a trippy, 9,000-word, rambling eat-a-logue through Japan by Mr. Meehan and Mr. Chang.”

But what makes it work is what Anthony Bourdain, of the TV show No Reservations and a writer for Lucky Peach says, “The guiding ethic was that the important movers in the project cared less about the business success than making something that is good and interesting.” And making something good and interesting means infusing every page with passion, curiosity, and personality. Lucky Peach could only have come from the David Chang, in the same way that No Reservations – one of the best shows on TV in any category and the best “travel show” – could only be created by Bourdain. Chang spends all of this time and energy starting a magazine from scratch and then makes the whole first issue about ramen – not the supermarket instant kind that everyone eats when they’re 19, but the Japanese specialty that few Americans ever experience. Nothing in the magazine is at all “practical”, even to someone who is a minor foodie like myself. For goodness sakes, there is a whole section comparing the ramen specialties of different regions of Japan and another with comic book illustrations featuring top ramen chefs, but I read every single page.

Why? For the same reason I love No Reservations, The Tony Kornheiser Radio Show, the band TV on the Radio, and David Fincher movies – there is a point of view. Not everyone is going to like Fincher’s Zodiac – a procedural where they never catch the bad guy and not everyone is interested in hearing Kornheiser rant about not being able to set up his new TV, but that’s sort of the point. When something, be it a magazine, band, or a movie, is designed to be popular with everyone, it’s going to be hard to be more than mediocre. See Time magazine, Rick Steves, and Nickleback for examples.

And I think this applies to schools too, especially in regards to hiring. When we’re recruiting teachers, I’m very open about the fact that working at KPEA is not for everyone. We have a style, a way of doing things, a point of view for how we teach and how we work together as adults. This style borrows from other KIPP schools, is informed by my travels as a Fisher Fellow, and has now been augmented by the personalities and experiences of our 16 amazing staff members. The end result is a culture that works for our school, but that is not going to be a good fit for everyone. And that’s ok!

The easiest (and one of the most important) example is how we do common planning at KPEA. To allow teachers to focus their energies and make each lesson plan really strong, we common plan with one teachers being in charge of writing plans for one section of the day, like reading, math, or writing. We divide this work and then put it together again so that each classroom in a grade teaches off the same lesson plans. This has lots of benefits (less work, experts can focus on what they know best, etc.) but it means that teachers have to teach off other people’s plans and don’t have total control over what happens in their classroom. Some prospective teachers will love this idea and some will hate it. And that’s ok!

We try really hard to make sure our prospective teachers know what they’re getting themselves into, including going as far as giving applicants a document called “What should I expect if I work at KPEA?” that lists two pages of bullets like:

• There will be a strong focus on data to ensure that our students are learning. We will have regular, common assessments, formally analyze the results, talk openly about our students’ progress and be accountable for their learning.

• Expect to share a common instructional belief at the school about the necessity of small group, differentiated instruction. If you don’t believe that this is the best way for students to learn, this is not the school for you. 

• You will work hours that will be long and sometimes hard. It will not be unusual, especially at the start of the year to work more than 12 hours a day. Most teachers will also be doing at least 4-5 hours a weekend of planning, grading, and prep for the following week. You will feel exhausted at times.

My goal when I talk to prospective teachers is not to convince every single one that working at KPEA is the most awesome thing ever, it’s to be as honest, transparent, informative about what working at our school is like. To get really meta here, part of the reason I write this blog is so prospective teachers can get a really good idea of what I think about and what I’m like so they’ll know if they want to work with me. We don’t want to try to be the school that is the right place for everyone to work because then we won’t be a good place for anyone. We have a point of view. And that's ok.

Quadrant I

When I was a Fisher Fellow spending a year thinking, visiting, observing, talking, traveling, writing, and planning in preparation to open up KPEA, people who were slightly familiar with KIPP would ask me what KIPP looks like with 5-year olds. They had enough prior knowledge to know about some of common behavior management systems used at many KIPP middle schools, like students earning a “paycheck” each week that monetizes all the good and bad choices they made that week. They might also have heard about “the porch” or “the bench” or other systems where middle school students lose privileges like eating lunch with their friends or sitting at their normal seat in class when they make lots of bad choices. While these systems work for our students in middle school, people often asked this question with an understandable amount of skepticism as they struggled to see how this would work with early elementary students.

As I told them, it wouldn’t.  We were going to build strong student culture in a way that made sense for our age students, while also reflecting the big ideas that have been the foundation of KIPP’s success for almost 20 years. Character is just as important as academics. Holding students to high expectations works. You need to teach, model, and practice how to be nice if kids are really going to do it. Structure and consistency are important. Families need to be actively involved.

Our guiding principle was to create a student culture that is structured, organized, and orderly, while also being fun, positive, and relaxed. We call this “staying in Quadrant I” as shown in the diagram.
Some teachers and schools see these ideas as being in opposition, but we look at them as actually reinforcing each other. If we teach students what we expect and hold them accountable, we’ll have more time for dance parties. If we make learning fun for our students, they will be more likely to pay attention when they need to. If we have shown students that there are consequences for bad choices, then we can be more positive since students will be less likely to “test” their teachers. This is tough to pull off, but it’s what we aim for. A classroom with students on task and working hard, but only doing it of fear for getting in trouble is not a strong classroom culture. Conversely, if there is a classroom where students are having fun and invested in learning, but where many minutes of instruction are wasted with student calling out or students transitioning noisily between activities is not what we want either.

What does this look like in practice? It means:

• We try to bring joy into everything we do. See this post for more.

• Instead of calling our students something like boys and girls, scholars, or simply students, we call our students “friends”. So we say, “Friends, I need your eyes on me right now” or “That was not a good choice friend”. It’s sort of hokey (ok, very hokey), but it makes the idea of a school being a team and a family ever-present for our students and for the staff too. 

• We have an amazing social skills curriculum that teaches students skills like following instructions, paying attention, and accepting “no”, with three easy steps, fun songs, and colorful posters. Besides giving all teachers a common language (also a huge part of what we do with our values and behavior system), having students with a strong grounding in social skills will prevent a ton of misbehavior.

• Our five school values (joy, integrity, excellence, teamwork, and determination) are explicitly taught to students in once a week classes led by me or our assistant principal and then woven throughout the rest of the day. We have an awesome values song that we sing all the time. Student actions are constantly being tied back to these values so students hear comments like, “I love how you helped your friend when his crayon fell. What a great example of teamwork!” all the time. 

• Each classroom uses the same behavior system that is a variation on a clothespin or color system common in almost every early elementary classroom. We emphasize the concept of “turning it around” and students can move their name back as soon as they make good choices, whether that is in five minutes or five hours. 

• Families get a behavior report each night that has to be signed so families are in the loop with how their child is doing and can follow up as they see fit. Our teachers all have school provided cell phones so families can get in touch easily and we have in-depth conferences twice a year with families.  

• We don’t have school or classroom rules, but rather teach what our expectations are for when students sit on the carpet, work at tables, get in line, or any other situation you can think of. Students know exactly what to do in each moment of the day and are corrected when they’re not doing it right in a way that focuses on them doing it right (“When we walk in the halls we have our hands at our sides”) not on breaking a rule (“I can’t believe you just did that!”). We want the focus not to be on a student making a mistake, but helping them do it better next time.

• We teach a structured conflict resolution process called “The Peace Path” where students learn to solve minor problems themselves. By November of kindergarten, students can go to the Peace Path, talk through the issue, apologize, and end it with a hug, high five, or handshake. Besides cutting down on tattling, it also gives students ownership over their actions.

• We are firm with consequences. Students have their name moved. They get on timeout (5 minutes max). If they have made a really bad choice, they get sent to the office. They miss recess. They get a bad behavior report. Families get called. Kids cry. And that’s ok because students need limits and need to understand that there are consequences when they make bad choices. But this part only works if we do all the rest and we discipline firmly, but not meanly. Teachers at KPEA do not yell at students. They speak firmly and strongly when they need to, but they never, ever yell. I sometimes do when I think that is the right choice, but that’s part of my job and I don’t want it to be part of my teachers’.