KIPP-Nosis

It has been nearly a month since my last post and it is with good reason. I have been busy getting KIPP-notized.

Most Americans have no idea what this means just yet, but I am sure many will know very soon. For the next two (probably plus) years I will be embarking on an incredible journey - to try to become one of the top educators in the world for low-income students. In what was a small, simple idea from two, young, idealistic tecahers in Houston only a decade ago, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) now reaches 17 states including the District of Columbia, 57 schools, and 15,000 students.

While KIPP is a very complex program, the the concept from which it originates from is very simple: no excuses.

Two words that, I have no doubt will forever change the American education system. In 1994, two audacious teachers founded KIPP to change education for the better with this philosophy. So far, nearly eighty percent of KIPP graduates have gone off to college, a number than rivals most competitive schools in America. What makes KIPP different is that the students that they are teaching are all low income students who otherwise would have only a one in five chance of college. Moreover, the progress of such schools is undeniable. As Jay Matthews, education reporter for the Washington Post reported from the annual KIPP Summit, "the 1,400 students at 28 schools in 22 cities who have completed three years at KIPP so far have gone from the 34th percentile at the beginning of fifth grade to the 58th percentile at the end of seventh grade in reading and from the 44th percentile to the 83rd percentile in math." Click here to read the entire article.

However, even more importantly than getting their students into college, KIPP is instilling their students with priceless life skills that most American students don't even have when they graduate from college. While KIPP schools aim to get all of their students into college, they also are aware that this is only one of many challenges that these students face. These students will need to succeed in college and in life long after they leave the halls of KIPP.

Therefore, in order to do so, the students attending KIPP schools usually have actioned packed 8am-5pm school days, including Saturday schools when needed or in addition as a means to learn other life skills on top of their academic workload. Moroever, every morning, as soon as a student enters a KIPP school, they go straight into their morning work. This is a form of school work that they immediately do in silence as soon as they arrive and while they eat breakfast. In classes, students start each class with a "Do Now" another exercise that gets students directly into schoolwork unlike the lack of urgency that exists in most other schools. In fact, in KIPP: Gaston College Preparatory (where I work), mirrors have even been taken from the bathrooms so students will spend less time in the bathroom and more time in classes.

Moreover, KIPP schools have summer school in August before the grading period statrs to build the community of the schools while instilling the cultural norms and core values that are expected from each student. While each KIPP school does so in their own unique way, the amazing part of this is that unlike the other schools systems in America, these students are constantly challenged to take ownership of their actions, to make critical explanations of what their consequences should be for every action (whether it be positive or negative), and earn everything that they receive from college visits to even homework. Who would think that teachers could get students to be begging to go to class or be given homework? Somehow KIPP has found a way to do so.

This is not to say that KIPP does not have its shortcomings. In fact, the biggest critics of KIPP seem to be within KIPP. I have never seen an organization so proud of its commitment to a shared mission, yet so critical of their work as I have with KIPP. While there have been incredible gains in KIPP, teachers, principals, and students operate under the rule that "we are never done." There are always more challenges to come and we can always get better.

To make sure all of this happens, teachers, parents, and students all must sign contracts promising each other that as a collective team, they will all do as much as they can to help the student succeed by continuously supporting and challenging them to do better. Parents must sign the planners of students every night to verify that they have checked their son/daughter's homeowrk is done and teachers are given cell phones that students can call at night to get help with homework so that no child has the excuse not to have done their homework. Therefore, as the KIPP motto goes, there really are "no excuses." Moreover, when students do poorly on their assessments or make mistakes like being mean to another classmate, no one takes this as hard as the teachers of KIPP. There is a shared responsibility with the student to know that it is up to the teachers to teach these things and for the students to practice them. Therefore, teachers can always find a better way to teach and students can always find better ways to execute.

In the end, one of the main goals of KIPP is to disappear, which might sound a little crazy if it is doing so well. The point of KIPP is not to replace other public schools in America, but to challenge them to look at education as more than just a holding place for youth until they turn eighteen. Rather, KIPP challenges themselves and the rest of the country to push every student to acheive to the level where they can have more choices - the choice of whether or not to go to college, the choice of what college to go to, and most importantly the moral choices that we will have to make for the rest of our lives. KIPP teaches life long learners and not just middle school students. As the walls read in the KIPP school in which I teach, there is college, a better life, and then a changed world. With a little more KIPP-nosis, I believe that we will be closer to our goal of a changed world.