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.