On How We Think About Sending Kids to the Office

What follows is a long piece of writing that explains how we at KPEA are thinking about when, how, and why teachers send students struggling with their behavior to the "office" and what happens when they get there. The leadership team and I used this essay to kick off a discussion with our teachers about some pretty big changes to this system that will bring our student office visit approach more in line with our overall student culture ideas.

The full text is below the fold, but the main idea is contained in these two excerpts:

This is not about lowering the bar in any way – what we’re talking about is confronting the reality that traditional ways of looking at office visits don’t make student behavior better and often times can make it worse.

All of our kids, even our most challenging ones want to do well and we know that is true because when we did make progress with Ramon, Talyse, or anyone else it was not because they went to this magic place called “the office” that changed how they behave, it was because we worked as a team to problem solve what was challenging for them, thought about how to support them in the skills they were lacking, and made expectations and boundaries really clear.

Teacher Professional Development Week Notes...

Here are some quick notes as KPEA is starting to wrap up our 3 weeks of teacher professional development and get ready to welcome our new kindergarten students on Thursday:

• Inspirational family story - One of our families that includes three students at KPEA, was planning on moving to New York this summer. This is a family who has been through many ups and downs in their two years with us and as a result many teachers on staff have a close relationship with the students and parents. Based on challenges this family has had in the past, when they told us that they would be moving this summer we both worked to give them advice and connections with schools in New York, while also wondering if they would end up moving back to Philadelphia quickly since this is where the rest of their extended family lives. Teachers tried a couple of times during the summer to get a hold of the mother to see how things were going and all her numbers were disconnected - not an uncommon fact for this family. So we waited to hear something before we had to officially drop them from our rolls and take new students off our waitlist this week. And then on the same day we were going to contact new students, one of our teachers gets a call from the mother. In her words, her children kept asking when they were going to get to go back to KIPP because in his 7-year old words "KIPP is home". As a result, she decided to move back to Philadelphia so her children could continue at KPEA. In fitting timing, we got this news just as teachers were in a training on how we build powerful, lasting relationships with families and when teachers heard the news there were tears of happiness. Like I wrote here, keeping our kids is core to what we believe at KIPP and KPEA and that happens when great teachers build deep relationships with kids and families.  

• Our teachers and staff have been doing a lot of work with ideas from the book Lost at School and I couldn't recommend it highly enough for teachers and leaders thinking deeply about how to work successfully with challenging students. The book is full of both deep ideas and practical strategies with the most foundational being the switch in thinking from "Kids do well if they want to" to "Kids do well if they can". It might seem like a little change but the impact on how we see our roles supporting challenging students is profound, because the role of teachers and support staff changes from "making kids want to behave/punishing them into not wanting to get into trouble" to "giving kids the skills and support to be able to do well". We're working hard to combine these big ideas with our already strong focus on clear expectations, social skills education, and strong use of teacher moves from Teach Like a Champion. I'll blog more about how this goes throughout the year, but I'm really excited to continue the work of shifting our student culture to one that is always about purposefully thinking about what is best for our students' character in the long term and never about just compliance.  

• We've been using this TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on "The Single Story" to talk about how our kids, families, and each other are made up of many stories, characteristics, and identities. In her talk, Adichie says, "the problem with stereotypes is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete." The term "single story" has been a really good phrase to help us balance the realities that we know broad truths about everyone we do this work with but we must dig deeper to know each person as an individual. Totally worth the 18 minutes to listen to her talk.

• One of our areas of focus this year at KPEA is represented by the phrase "We work and teach in such a way that students achieving is the constant; how we get them there is the only variable." This does not mean that achievement is a fixed, inflexible target - notice that the phrasing is "students achieving" not "student achievement" - because we are a school that values student progress and are just as excited for our students who make a ton of growth but are not on grade level yet as we are for our highest readers. But what is not ok is us being ok with kids not learning - for any reason. A teacher was out on maternity leave for a while? Shuffle staffing around to make sure great teachers are covering in that room. There is a new 2nd grader who comes in reading on a kinder level? Make sure she gets double or triples doses of reading each day. A student's behavior is spiraling because mom is working the overnight shift and can't come in for a problem solving meeting at school? Go to her house for a home visit. Our language around this comes from a blog post by Dan Meyer about a speech by Uri Treisman on the concept of "fault tolerance". The powerful idea is used to describe systems where we know problems will happen and engineers must design systems that are robust enough to withstand these challenges. Planes get hit by lightening and keep flying. Google servers crash but email keeps sending. Not all kids in school come in on grade level with perfect behavior and our schools, especially in under-resourced settings must be ready to ensure that kids learn no matter what.

Essential School Leader Reading

This article by Atul "Better" Gawande is pretty essential reading for most anyone in school leadership or education policy. The article is about how ideas spread and follows the story of how doctors are working to increase the percentage of hospitals using very basic protocols for newborns. Read this long-ish excerpt to get the idea:

"As with most difficulties in global health care, lack of adequate technology is not the biggest problem. We already have a great warming technology: a mother’s skin. But even in high-income countries we do not consistently use it. In the United States, according to Ringer, more than half of newborns needing intensive care arrive hypothermic. Preventing hypothermia is a perfect example of an unsexy task: it demands painstaking effort without immediate reward. Getting hospitals and birth attendants to carry out even a few of the tasks required for safer childbirth would save hundreds of thousands of lives. But how do we do that?

The most common approach to changing behavior is to say to people, “Please do X.” Please warm the newborn. Please wash your hands. Please follow through on the twenty-seven other childbirth practices that you’re not doing. This is what we say in the classroom, in instructional videos, and in public-service campaigns, and it works, but only up to a point.

Then, there’s the law-and-order approach: “You must do X.” We establish standards and regulations, and threaten to punish failures with fines, suspensions, the revocation of licenses. Punishment can work. Behavioral economists have even quantified how averse people are to penalties. In experimental games, they will often quit playing rather than risk facing negative consequences. And that is the problem with threatening to discipline birth attendants who are taking difficult-to-fill jobs under intensely trying conditions. They’ll quit.

The kinder version of “You must do X” is to offer incentives rather than penalties. Maybe we could pay birth attendants a bonus for every healthy child who makes it past a week of life. But then you think about how hard it would be to make a scheme like that work, especially in poor settings. You’d need a sophisticated tracking procedure, to make sure that people aren’t gaming the system, and complex statistical calculations, to take prior risks into account. There’s also the impossible question of how you split the reward among all the people involved. How much should the community health worker who provided the prenatal care get? The birth attendant who handled the first twelve hours of labor? The one who came on duty and handled the delivery? The doctor who was called in when things got complicated? The pharmacist who stocked the antibiotic that the child required?

Besides, neither penalties nor incentives achieve what we’re really after: a system and a culture where X is what people do, day in and day out, even when no one is watching. “You must” rewards mere compliance. Getting to “X is what we do” means establishing X as the norm. And that’s what we want: for skin-to-skin warming, hand washing, and all the other lifesaving practices of childbirth to be, quite simply, the norm.

To create new norms, you have to understand people’s existing norms and barriers to change. You have to understand what’s getting in their way. So what about just working with health-care workers, one by one, to do just that?"

Besides the obvious parallel to a school leader building or changing staff and/or student culture, I love this excerpt and the whole article because it really hits on one of my pet peeves about many education folks (especially on my side of the "ed reform" debate)- namely, that there is a technocratic solution to every challenge. What I mean when I say technocratic is that the solution lies in some new system, process, or technology. Anyone involved in education for more than a few years could create a long list of local, state-wide, or national education initiatives that sounded good on paper but failed when implemented at scale. Great ideas are necessary but so far from being sufficient and that applies equally to something as small as student culture systems at one school to something as large as implementation of Common Core assessments nationwide. What matters most in Gawande's eyes is the slow, deep, individualized work of really knowing people, relationships, and communities. In other words, culture matters more than ideas and building culture is way harder than coming up with a great system.

Mural!

Our school is pretty lucky that we had the honor of moving into a brand new, renovated facility in our 2nd year. Then this fall we partnered with Kaboom! to build a new playground for our students. The final part of our building was complete this past month when we worked with the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia to paint a giant mural on the wall by our playground.

Working with a team of teachers from all four KIPP Philadelphia schools, artist Jared Bader created an amazing design that depicts our students' path to college. Then students from all our schools worked to paint panels that were then applied to the wall to complete the finished mural.

At KPEA, not only did our students get to help paint, but because we did our painting during a Saturday School, our students' families were able to participate too, making this a real team and family effort.


Besides looking really cool, this mural is going to be a daily reminder to our kids, families, and staff about what our hard work is all about.

Assessment Stories

Like many schools, we give our kids internal assessments a few times a year to track their growth, inform our teaching, and communicate progress with families. In reading, we use the STEP assessment which is similar to a DRA or F&P test, while in math, we use our own internally created assessments based off our standards. Since these assessments are given 1-1 or in small groups, we give them slowly over two weeks while continuing with our regular teaching. As we finish with each student, we enter these results in fancy spreadsheets. The documents do relatively snazzy things like change the cell color based on how much kids are learning and spit out stats about the average reading level or the amount of growth a class is making.

These stats are really useful and crunching these numbers makes us better able to teach our kids. But we really, really believe that kids are more than numbers and we shouldn't only be talking about student progress by using Microsoft Excel. To make sure that this sentiment stays squarely in front of us, we send out all staff emails throughout our testing window celebrating students who have made awesome progress. What is great about our staff and these emails is that we know we work in the real world with real kids and that means not all of our kids will be above grade level. That's ok and our teachers are equally excited about students who made great progress, but for one reason or another are below grade level as they are about students scoring way above their grade.

Below the fold are some of these teacher emails from this last round of testing, lightly edited for clarity and with student names removed for privacy. I've also added some background on STEP levels where relevant.

3 Things At Once

It’s hiring season so I’ve been doing a lot of talking to prospective teachers recently about what we do and how we do it. A lot of what I say I’ve been saying for the last 4 years – I talk about our mission of sending kids to and through college, about our focus on developing student character, about the teamwork our staff shows each day, as just a few examples. But I’ve found myself coming back to an idea that’s always been implied in my conversations about KPEA, but that I’ve been making more forcefully this year.
  
My teachers and I are trying to make a school that does three things:

• We take in all kids (enrollment process held up as a model in Philly. 88% F/R lunch, 21% SPED rate)

• We keep our kids (2% student attrition or less each year, no expulsions) 

• We are creating a great school (strong academic growth and achievement on multiple assessments, high family satisfaction) 

Why do I keep coming back to this set of ideas this year? Like I’ve written about before, not all charter schools and ed reform leaders think doing these things are important and as a result, it’s more and more important that leaders in the charter movement who believe in serving all kids are vocal about what we do. With more and more school choice options, it’s our obligation to make sure teachers, parents, and policy leaders understand who we are and what we stand for. If folks outside of our organization are confused about what we do, it’s on us to do a better job explaining what we care about.

Awesome 1st grade artwork

I’m also talking about these ideas because I want our new teachers to know that doing all three is really, really hard! I want them to know that part of working at KPEA means embracing the challenge of having crazy high expectations for kids while working with students who have special needs, behavior challenges, or tragically sad home lives. If you’re not at least a little crazily idealistic this might not be where you want to work. Our teachers celebrate when we get 92% of our kindergarten students reading on/above grade level. But we celebrate even more when one of the students who came to us not knowing any letters finishes the year almost on grade level and starting to read.

As every single person who works at KPEA would tell you, doing all three of these at the same time is really hard and we don’t always get it totally right. There are many, many things we’re working on doing better, like student behavior on buses, building student vocabulary in a more coherent way, and making this work more sustainable for teachers, to name just a few. But we have no interest in making a school that gets great results by only taking in the “best” kids. Or getting great results by getting rid of the “bad” kids. Or a school that tolerates not great results because our kids are “hard”.

We can take all kids, keep our kids, and have a great school. We can and must do all three.

Tyranny of the Anecdote - An Experiment

Part of being a manager/boss, is knowing how the people who work for you are doing. Are they happy? Are they feeling successful in their work? Any major personal challenges that are popping up? Any conflicts with folks on their team? Any conflicts with you? In other words, you need to have your finger on the pulse of your team because knowing how people are doing and feeling lets you take action to address any concerns or reinforce what is working.

That was easy for me to do when KPEA had 8 staff members, a little bit harder when we had 17, and pretty much impossible now when we have 26 team members. Even though I’m active and present throughout the school each day and talk to pretty much everyone on staff at least quickly each day and even with all managers having regular check-ins with everyone on staff, it’s impossible for me to really know how every single person in our building is doing.

While I have to keep trying to know how people are doing as best as I can, I need to understand that any feeling I have for overall staff satisfaction is at best a guess and at worst, in incorrect guess. Not only are there tons of people in the building having very different experiences each day, I’m also very aware that whether I have a “good” or “bad” day has little to do with everyone else’s. When you’re in a leadership role, you spend a lot of your time dealing with the challenging conversations and hard situations. I may have a “bad” day because I have two hard parent meetings and am dealing with an extreme student behavior issue that sucks up two hours of my afternoon. But those situations may not impact the other 25 folks in the building at all. And of course the opposite is equally true.

So what to do? One thing is to get past the tyranny of the anecdote and get some more objective data. All KIPP schools do this every January in an in-depth way with a network-wide survey to every teacher that asks a whole bunch of questions about everything from overall satisfaction to recruitment to training. We also do smaller surveys throughout the year as a region and/or school. But these are still pretty big picture and infrequent so I’ve been experimenting with something new – using quick, daily surveys. Teachers answer one question each day – how would you rate today on a scale of 1-5? We use the website polleverywhere.com so teachers can answer that question by going to the website or by texting (think voting for American Idol). In short, I’m trying to see each night, how teachers felt about that particular day.

I’m looking at this very much as an open-ended pilot – I don’t have any idea what the data will show or what I will do with it, but figured it could be interesting to see. We’ve been doing this for about the last two weeks and I have two big take-ways so far:

• The overall satisfaction for each day is within a pretty narrow band – no real extreme highs or lows. This is true even though the days we’ve polled have included field trip days, days when we have a bunch of teachers out, and totally regular days. There have been days I thought would have scored lower that haven’t and vis versa.

• Within each day, there are wide variations among teachers, which makes sense. For almost every day, there are teachers who have horrible (score of 1) or bad (score of 2) days and other people on the same day and in the same building who have great (4) or amazing (5) days. This is obvious, but seeing those extremes has been a good reminder that trying to generalize “how people are doing” is impossible with any degree of precision.

We’re going to keep the experiment going at least for a few more weeks to see if more trends start to emerge. I’ll keep you all posted.

My Typical Week as a KIPP School Leader

So you want to be a KIPP school leader? Good, because it’s a great job and I don’t think I could love any job more than this one. 

But you probably have lots of questions and one of them might be just how hard this job is and what kind of hours you’re going to be working. I don’t think I’ve seen a good breakdown anywhere of what a typical week looks like for a KIPP school leader, or really any charter school principal so I figured I would share what a typical week looks like for me.

Before we dive in, here are a bunch of caveats:

• This is what my week looks like and I’m sure there are school leaders who work way more than I do and some who might work less. I can only speak for myself.

• I’m in my third year doing this so I’m hopefully more efficient at my job than I was in year one and I can work fewer hours. 

• I have two young sons so my schedule naturally revolves around my family more than other folks.

• Sustainability for teachers and leaders is a key initiative at KIPP and has been a big part of our work at KPEA since we opened. Our staff culture overall is way less intense than some other KIPP schools so you’ll see that reflected in my schedule. 

• There really is no “normal” week in this job, which is part of what makes it fun but I tried as best I could to capture what is most typical in a week.

Weekend:

• I work for 3-4 hours on either Saturday or Sunday morning (but not both) sending out the staff Weekly Memo, setting up my observation and coaching meetings, responding to emails from the end of the week, and setting my weekly objectives.

• During nap time or after the kids go to bed, I probably work another 4-5 hours over the course of the weekend. I make it a point during the weekend and on weeknights to never do work when the kids are awake.

A Typical Workday: 

• I get up around 6am most mornings and am at school between 6:45am and 7:00am. I live 8 minutes from the school which makes the morning commute pretty easy. 

• From the time I get in until kids start arriving at 7:30am, I’m informally checking in with teachers, having scheduled coaching meetings, or meeting with parents. 

• From 7:30am to 8:00am I greet our kindergarten students as they are dropped off in our parking lot. Our Assistant Principal or Director of Operations greets our 1st and 2nd graders as they get off the bus at our front entrance. This is one of my favorite times of the day because I get to spend some informal time with other staff members on drop-off duty and see so many of our kids and families excited for the day. We do this outside greeting even in the rain, ice, or cold weather so that our kids and their families get to see a smiling, familiar face each morning as they come into the building no matter what. 

• 8am-11:30am – During the morning hours I am doing one of a hundred things. I’m doing instructional walkthroughs of our classrooms, observing teachers, handling students sent to the office for misbehaving, talking with families, meeting with leadership staff, giving tours, teaching classes for absent teachers, etc. Every single day is different, but it’s pretty much non-stop one way or another. I try to squeeze in 30 minutes of work time each morning, but that doesn’t always happen. 

• 11:30am- 1pm – Our students eat lunch in three shifts during this block and I try to be in the cafeteria for a good chunk of this time so I can check in with specific students and help teachers help our kids make good choices at lunch (no, that’s not how we eat our oranges). 

• 1pm-4pm – More teachers have their planning periods during the afternoon so I tend to have more coaching meetings during this time. I normally have about 5 teachers I’m observing and meeting with each week, on top of meetings with school leadership members. I also have regular meetings with regional staff like our CEO (to talk about everything since he’s my boss), the Director of Finance (to talk budget), and our Director of Talent (to talk hiring). I also teach more often in the afternoon when teachers have to leave early for appointments or because of child-care needs.

• 4pm-4:15pm – This is our dismissal time and I’m in the cafeteria with our 150 1st and 2nd graders making sure they are getting on the right bus. This is a complicated process especially since some students have differing routines on different days. My role is to make sure students are all in the right place and following instructions while teachers take attendance for each bus before walking them outside. 

• 4:15pm-5:15pm – We have a variety of after school meetings happening during this hour. Depending on the day, it could be a grade level meeting, a staff meeting, intervention/student support meetings for a particular homeroom, or nothing at all. These meetings happen on a rotating schedule with most teachers having 2-3 meetings per week. On days that they have no meetings, they can leave as early as 4:15pm. One of the great things about being in our third year is most of these meetings are led by other great leaders in our building and I get to sit in as a participant or pop into a variety of meetings like on Mondays when all of our grade levels have their weekly meetings. I lead our staff meetings which happen every other Wednesday. 

• 5:15 – 5:45ish – After meetings wrap up, I might have a meeting with a teacher or informally meet with our Assistant Principal to debrief the day. I try to leave the building by about 5:45pm so I can be home by 6pm. Sometimes it’s earlier than this and often it’s a bit later, but I’m almost always home by 6:30am unless there is some special event like a prospective teacher open house. 

• 6pm-9pm – Family time! I get home, eat dinner with my wife and kids, and then play with my 2 year old and almost 4 month old for a few hours. They’re normally both in bed by about 9pm. Like I wrote above, I don’t do any work while they are awake. 

• 9pm-11:30ish – Depending on the night, this is time for catching up on some cheesy TV shows with my wife, responding to emails from the day, or planning for an upcoming meeting. I try to be in bed by 11:30pm, but that doesn’t happen too often.

So that’s my week. I’m sure some folks are looking at it and thinking working about 70 hours a week is crazy, while maybe others are thinking that doesn’t look too bad. All I can say is that at this stage in my life, this works for me, my family, and KPEA. And that working this many hours can be a lot of fun if you love your job. 

One of My Favorite Books

If you're reading this piece, you've probably already read the great NYT piece on three college students from Galveston, TX and their bumpy road trying to not only make it to college, but to graduate. Lots of smart people have already responded to the piece and there's not much more that I have to add. But the piece did contain some quotes from a UPenn sociologist named Annette Lareau who wrote one of my favorite education/parenting books, called Unequal Childhoods. This is my pitch to convince you to read it.

• Lareau's work is grounded in hundreds of hours of field work with real families from a variety of races and classes. These rich experiences allows her to get past easy stereotypes, pop-psychology analysis, and judgement rooted in classism and racism that often mar these important conversations. In other words, she's not Ruby Payne.    

• The thesis of the book is that different social classes (and because of the segregation inherent in our American society, different races) raise their children in different ways. This argument verges on stereotyping, but Lareau walks this delicate line really well in the book. To summarize a complex argument, Lareau finds that poor and working class families parent with an idea of "natural growth" where kids are basically who they are and a parent's main responsibility is to keep them safe and happy. On the other hand, middle and upper class families practice what Lareau calls "concerted cultivation" where parents take an incredibly active role in bringing out the potential of their child. As a quick example, a child from a parent from a poorer family will likely only sign up her son for the age group basketball team if he really asks to, while a parent from a middle or upper class family is likely to sign a child up for the basketball team even if the child isn't that interested because it will be "good for him". Middle class families are looking for how to develop their kids and prepare them for what's next, while lower income families are more interested in kids being happy kids.

• Where the book is so valuable is Lareau's steadfast even-handedness in comparing and contrasting the two parenting styles and the effects of each on children. Wealthier families expose their children to more cultural experiences, advocate for them more in school, and sign their children up for more organized sports or dance classes. Children from poorer families have much closer relationships with their families, are less stressed out from constantly bouncing from activity to activity, and learn to be more independent at an earlier age. While both styles of parenting have their advantages, Lareau argues (like she does in the NYT article) that the skills wealthier children learn, like being able to advocate for yourself to get what you need from large institutional systems, are better matched with what is needed to be a successful adult in the United States in 2012. In other words, kids from more affluent families are taught to play the game. 

• When I read this book with my educator hat on, I think about things like how to teach my students to have the confidence that will allow them to go to the financial aid office at their college when they think something is wrong with their bill or how to engage our families at KPEA so we make our school a place they feel confident asking questions of teachers and being a real partner in this work. As a parent, I think about how not to be some of the more affluent families in the book, who are full of busy, unhappy adults and kids running non-stop from activities they think will give their children an "advantage" in life. I think about how to help my children have the right amount of self-confidence without being entitled. I think about how to make sure they have the unstructured time to just be a kid.

I've barely done justice to the book and the deep implications for parents, teachers, and school leaders. I can't recommend it enough.