School of Hard Choices
In the
KIPP Academy Program, It’s Motivation That’s
Fundamental
The Washington Post, by Jay Mathews (August 24,
2004)
NEW YORK
When Mike Feinberg, then a
recent University of Pennsylvania graduate, and Dave Levin, just out
of Yale, met at a 1992 summer teacher training institute in Los
Angeles, they were typical of young people signing up for the Teach
for America program -- smart, idealistic, confident. That summer
they spent as much time playing basketball as they did learning how
to handle a classroom. Yet when they got into Levin's rotting gray
Taurus, loaded with soft drinks and Doritos, and headed for their
new jobs in Houston, they thought they had all the solutions to the
problems of educating low-income kids, and even outlined a grand
strategy while they drove through the Mojave Desert.
Then they started to teach,
and realized they had no idea what they were doing.
Levin's class was in chaos.
His tires were slashed in the teachers' parking lot. A student sent
to the office for throwing a book at Levin's head returned smiling
with a Tootsie Pop. Feinberg, recruited as a bilingual teacher at
another elementary school, spoke Spanish so poorly he had to keep
asking his students what they were saying, especially one word he
kept hearing.
"What does chupa mean?" he
finally asked.
"Mr. Feinberg, it means
'suck.' "
"Oh. Thank you."
Most such stories in
America end right there. Young educators intending to be classroom
heroes discover that they lack the skills and energy and patience.
Then they do what their mothers always wanted and apply to grad
school.
But this story is
different. Levin and Feinberg, more than a decade later, have
invented something very rare in American education: a way of
teaching low-income children that actually works in 36 public middle
schools, producing the largest and fastest learning gains around the
country. Even in the District, where most of the educational news
has been very bad, the school they established three years ago in
Southeast is beating schools in middle-class neighborhoods, and is
about to expand as a model for what the poorest Washington schools
could do if they paid closer attention to each child's habits of
living and learning.
Their method becomes clear
during a visit to the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy New
York, where Levin spends most of his time. One day during the most
recent school year, he was standing in the aqua-green hallway of the
academy's quarters on the fourth floor of a public school in a
grimy, unreconstructed corner of the South Bronx, along with five
frowning eighth-graders. While their classmates headed out for a day
at Central Park, they had to stay behind because they lost points
for misbehavior, missed homework and other failings in the incentive
system that rules their days.
Levin is 34, tall and
curly-haired. He leaned close to whisper words of encouragement into
the ear of each disgruntled 13-year-old. He told them, as he had
many times before, that they were smart and capable, but they had to
focus on what is important. The school motto is "Be nice, work
hard." Those who did that not only went on outings to Central Park
but had other good things waiting for them.
That old-fashioned
motivational blend of the bitter and the sweet has come from nowhere
with no establishment support -- barely escaping strangulation at
birth -- to capture the attention of school superintendents,
policymakers, scholars and the president of the United States.
It is becoming the model
that all other attempts to close the achievement gap between rich
and poor students must measure themselves against. It is so
successful that even affluent Montgomery County, which usually
resists departures from its highly rated public school programs, is
trying to get KIPP to put a school in one of its low-income
neighborhoods.
And in the District, under
the direction of Susan Schaeffler, a Feinberg and Levin protege, the
public charter KIPP DC: KEY Academy has produced the highest math
scores and nearly the highest reading scores in the city. Washington
education leaders, such as D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous,
embrace KIPP, although school system administrators have not been
able so far to find the organization more space.
Schaeffler wants to open
two more KIPP middle schools and a KIPP high school in the District
in the next three years, in every case with low-income students just
like those in the lowest-scoring schools. "I am getting a head start
on college," said Shakiera Mosby, an eighth-grader -- or what the
school calls a senior -- at the KEY Academy. Evoking the dream of
higher education is a KIPP hallmark.
Feinberg, 35, and Levin say
they might have given up on teaching that first year in Houston if
their egos had not gotten in the way. They were so annoyed by their
inability to make headway in their classrooms that they began to
devote every waking hour to turning themselves into at least
passable teachers. They started visiting students' homes in crowded
apartments and little houses, in hopes the parents could help them
with discipline.
And right across the hall,
they met their savior: a classroom magician named Harriett Ball.
The Teacher
Ball's classes often
exploded in songs and chants, and then just as quickly, when she
said the word, were silent. Her test scores were very good. Levin
spent every spare moment watching her work. After school, he would
join Ball for happy hour drinks -- beer for Levin, soda for Ball --
at a little club near the school called King Leo's. They would also
get together on weekends at her house or Levin's apartment, with
Feinberg joining them. Ball, now a popular consultant to school
districts, said they were "very, very hungry" for something that
would make them good teachers.
They began to borrow her
chants -- such as "Rolling the Sixes" -- using a rhythm irresistible
to 10-year-olds:
"Six, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36.
And the spider says, 42, 48, 54, 60, 42, 48, 54, 60, 66, 72. How do
you do? How do you do?"
The two neophyte teachers
kept visiting the homes of their mostly Hispanic and African
American students. A child would open the door and then slam it in
shock at seeing a teacher. After much whispering and laughter, the
door would open again and parents would invite them in.
They would get home about 6
p.m. and religiously watch "Star Trek: The Next Generation" "because
in the 25th century, everyone was literate," Feinberg said.
"Everyone walked around with this little tricorder, and the
15-year-old was doing nuclear fusion. That was always our escape.
Then we would eat dinner."
They would be up until 11
p.m. comparing notes and preparing lessons for the next morning.
Gradually, they improved. Each is 6 feet 3, already hard to miss,
and they became classroom dynamos, full of games and demands and
rules and standards, sweetened with pizza parties, dramatic
productions and a year-end trip to the AstroWorld theme park.
Levin became so confident
of his progress at Bastian Elementary School that he defied a
principal's order to exempt several of his low-scoring Hispanic
students from state tests, a popular technique for getting the
school's average scores up. Passing the test was the children's only
chance to get into a good middle school, and he thought they could
do it. When school administrators told the parents to sign a form
exempting their children from the test anyway, they declined on
instructions from that nice Mr. Levin, which got him on the
principal's troublemaker list.
Levin was voted teacher of
the year by his school's faculty. Ninety-six percent of his students
passed either the math or reading test, and 70 percent passed both.
But at the end of the 1993-94 school year he was fired for what his
principal called insubordination. It was a bad omen because he and
Feinberg were starting the Knowledge Is Power Program that summer
for 50 fifth-graders stuffed into one classroom in Feinberg's
school, Garcia Elementary.
From the very beginning,
homework was crucial. They gave each student the telephone number of
their apartment, and told them to call if they had any homework
questions. Feinberg said to a student he dropped off at home: "I
don't want to hear tomorrow that you didn't understand it. I want to
hear from you tonight." They only had one phone line, so they took
turns fielding calls, as many as 20 a night. There was no more time
for "Star Trek."
They jumped on misbehavior
immediately. "We are not drill sergeants, we are not babysitters and
we are not behavior correctors," Levin shouted after an early
hallway scuffle. "We are teachers, and we're busting our butts to
prepare you for Miss Such-and-Such's class in that middle school so
that when all hell is breaking loose, you'll be the one who's still
learning."
And it worked. At the end
of the first year of KIPP, a class in which about 53 percent of the
students passed the state fourth-grade tests suddenly had a 96
percent passing rate in fifth-grade math and a 93 percent passing
rate in fifth-grade English.
That meant little to the
Garcia principal, who became increasingly impatient with what she
saw as their disruption of her school. Levin said she didn't change
her mind even when Levin, willing to try anything, asked her out on
a date.
A Program on the Move
Levin thought his home town
might work better for KIPP. Armed with the first-year scores, he
persuaded the New York City school district to let him open the
second KIPP school in the Bronx. But it had the same ugly beginning.
His new principal verbally flayed him to show her staff she wasn't
playing favorites, he recalls. To find more students, he had to
sneak into a parents' meeting from which he had been barred, and
whisper invitations to take a look at KIPP, before he was escorted
out.
Back in Houston, Feinberg
was being forced to move the original KIPP school every year, even
when he was about to add a seventh grade to a thriving fifth- and
sixth-grade operation, with a growing young staff and
still-impressive test scores. There was no room anywhere for that,
he was told. He would have to tell some kids to forget it.
Such resistance was typical
of big-city school district administrators, who had little patience
with innovators, particularly novices like Feinberg and Levin;
rookies with big innovative ideas have a habit of disrupting
comfortable routines and often fail to deliver. Feinberg's attempts
to see Superintendent (and later U.S. Education Secretary) Roderick
Paige were rebuffed. So at about 2 p.m. one sweltering April day he
sat on the rear bumper of Paige's maroon Acura in the parking lot
outside the ornate school district headquarters and graded papers
until Paige, heading for home, showed up four hours later.
"Dr. Paige!" Feinberg said,
using the excited voice that worked so well with fifth-graders. "I'm
in a pickle. You've got to help me. They are trying to take away my
babies!" The superintendent arranged a meeting the next day with the
aide who had been the roadblock. Feinberg said she looked as if she
wanted to fry him in oil, but he got the space he needed.
By 1999 Feinberg -- with
fifth- through eighth-graders in trailers on a school parking lot --
and Levin -- with the same grade levels on the fourth floor of a
public school surrounded by housing projects -- had the best
performing middle schools in Houston and the Bronx, respectively.
That led to a story on "60 Minutes," and a major investment by Doris
and Donald Fisher, founders of the Gap clothing stores, who leapt to
support an educational initiative that actually seemed to help
disadvantaged kids. President Bush has since been to two of the
schools, and Democratic and Republican legislators, including vice
presidential nominee Sen. John Edwards, have endorsed KIPP.
One hundred percent of
eighth-graders at KIPP Academy Houston passed the Texas state tests
last year. KIPP Academy New York ranks in the top 10 percent of all
New York city schools. Students at KIPP schools opened since 2001
averaged score increases last year of 39 percent in mathematics and
20 percent in reading. About 80 percent of KIPP students in 15
states and the District have family incomes low enough to qualify
for federal lunch subsidies, and they are all of the hormone-addled
middle school age that makes even teachers at wealthy private
schools tremble. (KIPP is starting an elementary and a high school
in Houston this year.)
Feinberg and Levin say they
want discipline, attention and steady, measurable progress that
supplants the distractions of their students' homes and
neighborhoods. Their secret is what they call "the joy factor":
excursions in Central Park, games, songs, trips to Disney World or
Los Angeles, and music. The 180-piece orchestra at KIPP New York
gives bewildered and frustrated preteens an incentive to go to
school each morning. They must earn the right to play by being nice
and working hard.
KIPP combines several
methods -- up to 9 1/2-hour school days, required three-week summer
school, regular Saturday sessions, close teacher cooperation,
regular parental contacts, consistent methods of punishment and
reward, and keen attention to test results -- that each have proved
to be effective in isolation. It then tells young principals and
mostly young staffers -- paid somewhat above regular public school
salaries for their extra hours -- to make it work in ways that make
sense to them.
At the end of each week,
students receive up to $40 in virtual cash that can be redeemed for
snacks and other favors at the student store, and also count toward
day excursions like the trip to Central Park or what KIPP calls
year-end "field lessons" to Washington, D.C., California, New
England, Utah, Florida or Tennessee. Each grade is known by the year
that its members will be going to college. Each classroom is named
after the college that its teacher attended. Graduating KIPP
eighth-graders are usually placed in private schools or magnet
schools that can be counted on to maintain the same high standards.
On average, a new federal study shows, charter schools are no better
and in some cases worse than regular public schools, but KIPP's test
scores show it to be a glaring exception to that general rule.
There is no active
opposition to KIPP, although some skeptics say they want to see how
the achievement gains hold up, and note that it will take many, many
more such schools to make a dent in the problems of low-income
neighborhoods. They also suggest that KIPP might be doing well
because it attracts the most motivated parents, to which KIPP
teachers reply that their students had the same parents when they
were doing terribly in regular public schools. KIPP schools have
many students with disabilities, and expulsions are rare, their
enrollment figures show. KIPP accountants calculate that the longer
hours and trips increase per-pupil costs by about 13 percent in
their schools across the country. In some expensive cities like New
York, however, KIPP is still spending less per student than regular
public schools are.
Feinberg, married now to a
former Teach for America teacher, has left his post at San Francisco
headquarters to go back to Houston and be with kids again,
supervising two KIPP middle schools and the new elementary and high
school. Levin, still looking for the right woman, resisted attempts
to move him to San Francisco and remains at KIPP New York, helping
the new principal, Quinton Vance, while focusing on KIPP principal
and teacher training and the development of KIPP curriculum
materials.
The real work, they say,
starts every summer with the new fifth-graders, and requires regular
reinforcement. The New York fifth grade recently had an afternoon of
miniature golf, and Levin remained behind with the dozen or so who
did not earn the trip to plant the seeds of future achievement.
"What are the choices you made that left you in this situation?" he
asked them. "Are you going to be ready for the next trip five or six
weeks from now? We will probably go to the movies, or whatever, but
will you be ready to earn that?"
The sixth-graders had come
back from their miniature golf excursion the day before. Levin
watched them closely to gauge their mood. They were happy and
energetic, 11-year-old batteries recharged by the joy factor. "They
came back much more motivated for the academics," said Levin. "So it
works."
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