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”.

Be an Editor, Not a Writer

My argument of the day:
People think of being a school leader, especially a school founder, as an exercise in creating akin to being a writer. A writer creates something from nothing, taking a blank page and filling it with wonderful, unique writing. In fact, the better analogy is to being an editor who sifts through thousands of ideas, many of them good, before eventually finding the right areas to focus on. 

Tina Brown- ruthless editor

Editing means making the hard decisions between many good ideas. The editors of The Paris Review have the almost impossible tasks of sorting through and selecting about 20 fiction pieces to publish each year from the roughly 15,000 submissions they get each year. In the same way, David Foster Wallace’s editor had to make the hard decision to cut 300(!) pages from Infinite Jest that no doubt contained some genius writing. Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair would regularly kill almost finished pieces, even after having spent tons of a writer’s time and the magazine’s money on it, if she wasn’t convinced it was good enough for the magazine.

School leaders, especially founders, find themselves having too many possible initiatives or tasks to do them all. There are hundreds and thousands of great ideas out there in education, taking place in every conceivable setting and type of school. From great strategies for parent involvement to fantastic arts integration to the use of blended learning technology to the use of video to improve teacher observations, the list could go on and on.  Any of these ideas is working somewhere and could be great for your school, but only if it is the right match for what the school needs, the personality of the staff, and the available resources (time and money especially).

What does thinking like an editor mean in practical terms?

• You can’t pick great ideas if you’re not aware of them, so school leaders need to be constantly on the lookout for new ideas by talking with peers, reading widely (and not just education articles), and talking to your staff who often have the best ideas of how to make the school stronger.

• Awareness of your school and what it needs is key, because you can’t decide which of the thousands of great ideas would work for you and your team without knowing you and your team really well.

• You can’t be afraid to say no. In fact, great editors say no to tons of good ideas so they can focus on the great ones. You don’t have to implement every new initiative that you hear about at a conference or that is working for a peer.

• Don’t feel pressure to invent everything from scratch. That’s thinking like a writer. Instead, spend your creative energy customizing ideas to fit your school’s unique needs. 

Creating and running a school is an exercise in having a keen eye for the quality ideas of others and ruthlessly prioritizing what will have the biggest impact on your kids. Think like Tina Brown, not David Foster Wallace.

Ribbon Cutting!

We had our building’s official Ribbon Cutting ceremony on Tuesday to celebrate the opening of our just-completed cafeteria/gym space. This facility is our third building in the 18 months since we opened up and it’s awesome to know that this will be our home forever and ever, especially because it’s such a beautiful space


for our kids to learn and our teachers to teach. The event itself was fantastic with our kindergarten students kicking off the show, speeches by our friends and supports including Mayor Michael Nutter (who made a passionate speech about the importance of education) and Andre Agassi (whose charter school facilities fund helped make our building possible), and then our 1st graders closing out the program with an original version of Lupe Fiasco’s “The Show Goes On” (watch it here). Our new cafeteria was packed with over 200 friends, families, and supporters, including at least 120 KPEA family members (of our 150 kids).
 
The event was a huge success and I wanted to (cliché alert) put the day in perspective for my staff so I sent them an email that night that included the following two ideas that I’ve edited slightly here:

I made this point when I spoke before the kindergarten students performed, but it’s really important so I want to make sure I say it in writing. The reason why it’s so exciting to have such a nice building is not because it makes us better teachers or makes our kids any smarter. KIPP schools have been located in church basements, old trailers, just barely modified commercial spaces, and substandard district buildings to name a just a few not-ideal locations for great schools. And teachers have taught well, kids have learned, and families have been happy. So we don’t “need” a nice building. But that doesn’t mean that our students, their families, and you all don’t deserve to have the same caliber of facilities as students in the suburbs. I sincerely believe you all are the best teachers in Philadelphia, our students’ families are the most dedicated supporters of their students around, and our kids are the most brilliant and talented kids in this city and our building should be just wonderful as you are.

Finally, this is a version of what I said to the first graders when I met with them at the end of the day. To my mind, the most powerful part of this event was seeing our multi-purpose room jam-packed with people from all walks of life and from all over the country who all came to support us. Our job is hard and it can sometimes feel like we’re trying to do this alone. But we’re not. From a tennis great, to a president of a major bank, to so many of our students’ families, to local politicians, to the KIPP Foundation, to our board, to other community leaders in Philadelphia, and many others, we have friends and supporters all over; all who love our kids and are committed to doing what they can to help them climb the mountain to college. I’m not sure you could find a more diverse group of people anywhere in America today and they were united around us and our students. And because of your great work, everyone who came today is even more inspired to help us help our students and that’s pretty cool.

Tuesday was a great day and a fun celebration but what makes KIPP great is that 5 minutes after the first graders finished performing, they were back in class working hard adding details to a writing piece.  

Almost Full Circle

These are 1st graders at KPEA (Class of 2023) talking to Chris and Jessica (who blogs here), both of whom are KIPP Philadelphia alums from the Class of 2011 now doing well as freshmen in college. Talking to our kids about college, putting slogans on shirts, and naming homerooms after colleges all are great ways to put the goal of college front and center for our elementary kids. But nothing is as powerful and tangible as having KIPP alumni explain what college is like to our kids. So awesome and such a powerful moment for KIPP Philly as we now have proof positive for our current students and families that what we do works. And our alums get the chance to play a part in helping the Class of 2023 and the Class of 2024 climb the mountain to college, just like their teachers, family, and friends have helped them. Awesome stuff and it will be even better when Jessica, an education major at Temple, completes the circle and comes back to KIPP as a teacher in a few years. 

Lucky Peach and Points of View

If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning you know I have a thing for chefs and for David Chang in particular. Besides being a bad-ass chef, Chang created the best new magazine in years when he started Lucky Peach this summer. It’s been an unexpected hit because as David Carr of the Times explains, it breaks all the rules of what we expect from magazines these days,

“It breaks many of the conventions not only of food journalism, but of magazine journalism in general as well. The glamorous star on the cover? It’s a chicken being lowered into a pot with its wrinkly backside depicted squirting out graphic eggs. The so-called front of the book — which in most magazines is filled with infographics and breezy snippets — is filled with a trippy, 9,000-word, rambling eat-a-logue through Japan by Mr. Meehan and Mr. Chang.”

But what makes it work is what Anthony Bourdain, of the TV show No Reservations and a writer for Lucky Peach says, “The guiding ethic was that the important movers in the project cared less about the business success than making something that is good and interesting.” And making something good and interesting means infusing every page with passion, curiosity, and personality. Lucky Peach could only have come from the David Chang, in the same way that No Reservations – one of the best shows on TV in any category and the best “travel show” – could only be created by Bourdain. Chang spends all of this time and energy starting a magazine from scratch and then makes the whole first issue about ramen – not the supermarket instant kind that everyone eats when they’re 19, but the Japanese specialty that few Americans ever experience. Nothing in the magazine is at all “practical”, even to someone who is a minor foodie like myself. For goodness sakes, there is a whole section comparing the ramen specialties of different regions of Japan and another with comic book illustrations featuring top ramen chefs, but I read every single page.

Why? For the same reason I love No Reservations, The Tony Kornheiser Radio Show, the band TV on the Radio, and David Fincher movies – there is a point of view. Not everyone is going to like Fincher’s Zodiac – a procedural where they never catch the bad guy and not everyone is interested in hearing Kornheiser rant about not being able to set up his new TV, but that’s sort of the point. When something, be it a magazine, band, or a movie, is designed to be popular with everyone, it’s going to be hard to be more than mediocre. See Time magazine, Rick Steves, and Nickleback for examples.

And I think this applies to schools too, especially in regards to hiring. When we’re recruiting teachers, I’m very open about the fact that working at KPEA is not for everyone. We have a style, a way of doing things, a point of view for how we teach and how we work together as adults. This style borrows from other KIPP schools, is informed by my travels as a Fisher Fellow, and has now been augmented by the personalities and experiences of our 16 amazing staff members. The end result is a culture that works for our school, but that is not going to be a good fit for everyone. And that’s ok!

The easiest (and one of the most important) example is how we do common planning at KPEA. To allow teachers to focus their energies and make each lesson plan really strong, we common plan with one teachers being in charge of writing plans for one section of the day, like reading, math, or writing. We divide this work and then put it together again so that each classroom in a grade teaches off the same lesson plans. This has lots of benefits (less work, experts can focus on what they know best, etc.) but it means that teachers have to teach off other people’s plans and don’t have total control over what happens in their classroom. Some prospective teachers will love this idea and some will hate it. And that’s ok!

We try really hard to make sure our prospective teachers know what they’re getting themselves into, including going as far as giving applicants a document called “What should I expect if I work at KPEA?” that lists two pages of bullets like:

• There will be a strong focus on data to ensure that our students are learning. We will have regular, common assessments, formally analyze the results, talk openly about our students’ progress and be accountable for their learning.

• Expect to share a common instructional belief at the school about the necessity of small group, differentiated instruction. If you don’t believe that this is the best way for students to learn, this is not the school for you. 

• You will work hours that will be long and sometimes hard. It will not be unusual, especially at the start of the year to work more than 12 hours a day. Most teachers will also be doing at least 4-5 hours a weekend of planning, grading, and prep for the following week. You will feel exhausted at times.

My goal when I talk to prospective teachers is not to convince every single one that working at KPEA is the most awesome thing ever, it’s to be as honest, transparent, informative about what working at our school is like. To get really meta here, part of the reason I write this blog is so prospective teachers can get a really good idea of what I think about and what I’m like so they’ll know if they want to work with me. We don’t want to try to be the school that is the right place for everyone to work because then we won’t be a good place for anyone. We have a point of view. And that's ok.

Quadrant I

When I was a Fisher Fellow spending a year thinking, visiting, observing, talking, traveling, writing, and planning in preparation to open up KPEA, people who were slightly familiar with KIPP would ask me what KIPP looks like with 5-year olds. They had enough prior knowledge to know about some of common behavior management systems used at many KIPP middle schools, like students earning a “paycheck” each week that monetizes all the good and bad choices they made that week. They might also have heard about “the porch” or “the bench” or other systems where middle school students lose privileges like eating lunch with their friends or sitting at their normal seat in class when they make lots of bad choices. While these systems work for our students in middle school, people often asked this question with an understandable amount of skepticism as they struggled to see how this would work with early elementary students.

As I told them, it wouldn’t.  We were going to build strong student culture in a way that made sense for our age students, while also reflecting the big ideas that have been the foundation of KIPP’s success for almost 20 years. Character is just as important as academics. Holding students to high expectations works. You need to teach, model, and practice how to be nice if kids are really going to do it. Structure and consistency are important. Families need to be actively involved.

Our guiding principle was to create a student culture that is structured, organized, and orderly, while also being fun, positive, and relaxed. We call this “staying in Quadrant I” as shown in the diagram.
Some teachers and schools see these ideas as being in opposition, but we look at them as actually reinforcing each other. If we teach students what we expect and hold them accountable, we’ll have more time for dance parties. If we make learning fun for our students, they will be more likely to pay attention when they need to. If we have shown students that there are consequences for bad choices, then we can be more positive since students will be less likely to “test” their teachers. This is tough to pull off, but it’s what we aim for. A classroom with students on task and working hard, but only doing it of fear for getting in trouble is not a strong classroom culture. Conversely, if there is a classroom where students are having fun and invested in learning, but where many minutes of instruction are wasted with student calling out or students transitioning noisily between activities is not what we want either.

What does this look like in practice? It means:

• We try to bring joy into everything we do. See this post for more.

• Instead of calling our students something like boys and girls, scholars, or simply students, we call our students “friends”. So we say, “Friends, I need your eyes on me right now” or “That was not a good choice friend”. It’s sort of hokey (ok, very hokey), but it makes the idea of a school being a team and a family ever-present for our students and for the staff too. 

• We have an amazing social skills curriculum that teaches students skills like following instructions, paying attention, and accepting “no”, with three easy steps, fun songs, and colorful posters. Besides giving all teachers a common language (also a huge part of what we do with our values and behavior system), having students with a strong grounding in social skills will prevent a ton of misbehavior.

• Our five school values (joy, integrity, excellence, teamwork, and determination) are explicitly taught to students in once a week classes led by me or our assistant principal and then woven throughout the rest of the day. We have an awesome values song that we sing all the time. Student actions are constantly being tied back to these values so students hear comments like, “I love how you helped your friend when his crayon fell. What a great example of teamwork!” all the time. 

• Each classroom uses the same behavior system that is a variation on a clothespin or color system common in almost every early elementary classroom. We emphasize the concept of “turning it around” and students can move their name back as soon as they make good choices, whether that is in five minutes or five hours. 

• Families get a behavior report each night that has to be signed so families are in the loop with how their child is doing and can follow up as they see fit. Our teachers all have school provided cell phones so families can get in touch easily and we have in-depth conferences twice a year with families.  

• We don’t have school or classroom rules, but rather teach what our expectations are for when students sit on the carpet, work at tables, get in line, or any other situation you can think of. Students know exactly what to do in each moment of the day and are corrected when they’re not doing it right in a way that focuses on them doing it right (“When we walk in the halls we have our hands at our sides”) not on breaking a rule (“I can’t believe you just did that!”). We want the focus not to be on a student making a mistake, but helping them do it better next time.

• We teach a structured conflict resolution process called “The Peace Path” where students learn to solve minor problems themselves. By November of kindergarten, students can go to the Peace Path, talk through the issue, apologize, and end it with a hug, high five, or handshake. Besides cutting down on tattling, it also gives students ownership over their actions.

• We are firm with consequences. Students have their name moved. They get on timeout (5 minutes max). If they have made a really bad choice, they get sent to the office. They miss recess. They get a bad behavior report. Families get called. Kids cry. And that’s ok because students need limits and need to understand that there are consequences when they make bad choices. But this part only works if we do all the rest and we discipline firmly, but not meanly. Teachers at KPEA do not yell at students. They speak firmly and strongly when they need to, but they never, ever yell. I sometimes do when I think that is the right choice, but that’s part of my job and I don’t want it to be part of my teachers’.