Thoughts to my staff on MLK Day

Every weekend I send an all-staff email to everyone at KPEA that sometimes includes some words of motivation, inspiration, or random thoughts going through my mind. Below is a lightly edited version of what I sent this weekend. 


On this long weekend that we have in honor of Dr. King, I know that like many of you, I’ve been thinking about his legacy, recent events in our country, and our work at KIPP. On one hand, it seems so long ago that the Civil Rights movement had to fight so hard for such basic ideas as fairness under the law, equality in opportunity, and more broadly the understanding that all citizens of this country are a party to the Constitution in the same way.

But the events of the past year have shown that those same challenges continue to define us as a country. Voting laws that are passed with the explicit desire to make it harder for Black and Latino Americans to vote are upheld by the Supreme Court even though it’s literally impossible to find more than 20-30 examples of voter fraud in the whole country over the past few decades. The head of a Hollywood studio feels comfortable joking that Barack Obama must be a big fan of Kevin Hart movies (not meant as a compliment to Obama BTW). We know all about the examples of Black men & young men barely older than children, being shot/choked to death by police without charges being filed against the officers and now we have an example of a Black police chief in Oklahoma being shot by a man 4 times when the chief came to a house to investigate a bomb threat. When I tell you that no charges were fired against the shooter, I don’t even need to tell you his race, do I? Closer to home, we know from our work with our kids and their families of countless examples of prejudice, inequality, and just plain old heartache caused by bone-grinding poverty – the cause that Dr. King was working on when he was killed.  

We know that society is not how it should be and we all work here because we want to do our small part in making the world more just. Each day when we come to KPEA we do important work to make this world a better place, both in the sense of giving our students a great education but also in the macro sense of helping to prove what students and families in North and West Philly are capable of when they have a great school working with them. This would be more than enough, but many of us do this work in other ways in our off-hours through church groups, volunteering at mission-aligned organizations, and direct activism.

At the same time we’re all trying to make this world a better place for our kids, we also know we need to prepare them as best as we possibly can to be successful in a world that is not yet as just as we would hope. That means character education. It means art and music. It means being surrounded by people who love them and who they love back. And it means teaching them to read, write, speak, and do math at the highest possible level.

Our society is unfair and unjust, but at least in the aggregate, it’s sadly predictable. We know the more our students know in elementary school means they will know more in middle school, which will lead to higher ACT scores in high school. This will give them more college options and help them get into a good school where the odds are much higher that they will graduate, thus giving them a better chance at having a happy, choice-filled life. That string of causality is not destiny – students who aren’t reading well in 4^th grade can catch up just like students in high school w/high ACTs aren’t guaranteed to graduate college. Like riding a sled down a hill over and over, we know from 11 years of history at KIPP Philly and 20 years of KIPP nationally that especially as kids get older, the path they are on gets dug deeper and deeper, and that forging a new path one almost impossible.

As just one example of this, take the class of students who just graduated from KDCA (our high school) this past May and then break out the roughly 50% of that class who were KPCS (one of our middle schools) promoters in 2009. I looked at how they did on the ACT in 11^th grade and compared that with their MAP percentile score in 8^th grade when they were finishing up at KPCS. 100% of the students who scored above the 75^th percentile in 8^th grade scored above the “college ready” bar of 21 on the ACT. Even with the great education kids get at KCA, of the students who scored below the 50^th percentile in 8^th grade, only 2% scored a 21 or above on the ACT.

100% vs. 2% - that’s about as drastic a difference as you can get. And make no mistake about it, those ACT scores matter. From our information on KIPP alumni in college, we know that students who scored above 21 on the ACT go to schools where +80% of first generation and/or students of color graduate. Many of our alumni who don’t get those high ACT scores end up at colleges where the odds of graduating are in the 20s and 30s percents, at best.

So why all of these potentially depressing stats?

<Some school specific details omitted here, but basic idea is our academic results are higher so far this year than last year.>

To remind us all that the work we do each day matters so much because our kids aren’t going to get the 2^nd/3^rd/4^th chances in life that more affluent peers get. Remember that stat we looked at last month that showed high school drop-outs from wealthy families were making more money as adults than college graduates who came from poor families? There is a huge difference for our kids in the future if they are reading on grade level vs. almost on grade level. It’s not right, but it’s real. We work each day to make the world better but we also know that our kids need an amazing education urgently for them to have the lives everyone who loves them wants for them. 

This is heavy shit. There’s no getting around that what we do each day adds up over 13 years to having major impact on what our students’ lives will be like. But if this work is so important, it’s vital that we have people like you all who are so smart and dedicated doing it each day. Our results in past years and even more so this year are showing that we are putting many of our students on a different path in life that will lead to them having great options about what they want to do with their lives.

Whether it’s community service, activism, or recharging w/friends & family, enjoy whatever you are doing today and know that when we get back on Tuesday we’re going to keep doing our small part to make the world a better place and help our kids grow up to be anything they want to be.