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.