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”.