Lessons from KIPP

I've been fairly critical of those darlings of the charter school movement, the KIPP --Knowledge Is Power Program-- Academies, so allow me to say something positive about them.  And their two founders, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin. 

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post writes that newly hired Washington D.C. KIPP/AIM Academy 5th grade math teacher Lisa Suben politely refused to use the prepared math lessons that have been so successful at most KIPP schools.  She wanted to use her own approach.

The results?  Suben's students "achieved the largest one-year math score jump* ever seen at a KIPP school... ."

To their credit, Feinberg and Levin, along with AIM's principal, allowed Suben to go her own way.  As Mathews reports, that's one of the keys to the KIPP success with inner city minority and disadvantaged students:

"... one of the secrets of KIPP's success in attracting the brightest young teachers and raising achievement for low-income children throughout the country is its insistence on letting good teachers decide how they are going to teach."

That's a lesson that Portland's school administrators have yet to learn.  In Portland, district leaders simply don't trust the teachers.  The attitude here, and it's palpable, seems to be that teachers need to be told what to teach and how to teach it.  And that lack of trust leads to teacher insecurity, dissatisfaction, and even alienation.

To be fair, the KIPP model, with its ten hour days and five-and-a-half-day weeks, is hardly replicable.  As I've written before, KIPP teachers are "running for sainthood."

Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned from the KIPP approach, especially when it comes to attracting talented young teachers.  And then treating them with RESPECT.

(* bear in mind that the "jump" is a  reference to a single standardized test score, which is not, as I've argued many times before, an adequate or sufficient measure of student learning.)

Comments

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