Below is next installment from Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through "No Excuses" Teaching. Please share widely.
Chapter 5
KIPP and the Teaching
Profession
. . . our teachers have normal
lives, and many have families and children. --Richard
Barth, KIPP CEO (Philanthropy News Digest, 2009)
The
KIPP Foundation has no requirements for professional preparation, and certification
requirements are governed by the state charter school statutes where each of
the 183 KIPP schools is located. While
a few KIPP advertisements state a preference for teaching credentials, no ads
could be located that required anything more than what the state charter laws
stipulate. The KIPP Foundation website
(2015d) states,
the primary
requirement for teaching at a KIPP school is a belief in a very simple concept:
that we will do whatever it takes to help each and every student develop the
character and academic skills necessary for them to lead self-sufficient,
successful and happy lives.
The
Foundation leaves it to each school to determine the qualifications required
for new teachers. While many KIPP
schools list two years of experience as a requirement in their ads, the
necessity of replacing teachers who quit or who are fired make these
requirements less applicable in real life.
The KIPP website (KIPP Foundation, 2015d) points out that some schools
have special programs for teachers with no prior experience.
In
2008, David Levin joined another charter school operator, Norman Atkins, and
hedge fund mogul, Larry “L-Train” Robbins to found a non-profit corporation,
the Relay Graduate School of Education, which focuses on preparing prospective
teachers for the No Excuses charter school environment. Begun as Teacher U in 2006 by KIPP,
Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, Relay requires evidence that degree
candidates can raise test scores before receiving their Master of Arts in
Teaching (MAT) degree.
In one
of the first cohorts, “seven
out of 110 teachers did not receive Master’s degrees because they could not
show that their students had made at least a year’s worth of academic progress”
(Green, 2011). The “pedagogical content” curriculum at Relay is
based largely on the Doug Lemov’s (2010; 2015) text, Teach like a champion… Lemov
holds an MBA from Harvard and is founder and Board member of Uncommon Schools,
a charter chain that largely emulates the KIPP organizational model.
Showing
steady growth, Relay has campuses in New York, Newark, New Orleans, Houston,
and Chicago, with plans in 2015 to open a location in Memphis. Prominent among Relay’s philanthropic
investors are the Gates Foundation, Credit Suisse, the Walton Family Foundation,
the New Schools Venture Fund, and the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund. These same organizations and
many others with them channel millions of dollars of tax-exempted donations
through their corporate foundations to supplement the hundreds of millions of
dollars in public education funds that go to KIPP each year.
When
Bill Gates delivered a TED talk in 2009 on two of the world’s most pressing
problems, malaria and bad teachers, he provided a copy of Work hard, be nice…, to all attendees, and in 2014 Gates told an
interviewer from the American Enterprise Institute that he had concluded “the
greatest cause of inequity” in America comes from “the failures of the
education system” (American Enterprise Institute, 2014, p. 3). Gates’ preferred solution, for poor urban
children at least, is the KIPP Model.
KIPP
has an attrition rate among teachers that would be unsustainable if it were not
for the large numbers of recruits from Teach for America that replace the 30-40
percent of KIPP teachers who leave KIPP each year. When David Levin and Mike Feinberg founded
KIPP in 1994, it is likely that they envisioned TFA, with its two-year service
contract for inexperienced teacher candidates who are heavily recruited from
top-tier colleges and universities, as a prime source of new teachers to
sustain, perhaps, the heroic demands and test performance standards that the
KIPP Model imposes (Horn, 2010).
While
former TFA corps members make up between thirty and forty percent of KIPP
teachers nationally, some schools have a much higher concentration. At the KIPP Endeavor Academy in Kansas City,
for instance, 80 percent of KIPP teachers were TFA corps members in 2014. Even though TFA has always attracted more
applicants than it has teaching slots, the organization regularly spends more
money for advertising and recruitment (Teach for America, 2007, p. 29) than it
spends on pre-service training, which lasts for just over four weeks.
One
would-be recruit from a few years back (Chernicoff, 2006) wrote this assessment
in the Yale Daily News:
In just a few years, TFA has established itself as one of the
smart-people-who-just-graduated-with-liberal-arts-degrees-and-now-have-no-idea-what-they-want-to-do-with-their-lives-but-are-pretty-sure-it-isn’t-remain-in-the-spin-cycle-of-academia-or-move-on-to-the-next-preset-hierarchy-in-the-finance-world
demographic. Used to be those poor souls could only go to law school or move to
New York and “go into, like, publishing or something.” But TFA positioned
itself in such a way that it gets the lost souls who have an impulse to do
something to help the world immediately upon graduating (para 12-13).
New TFA
recruits who are not assigned directly to KIPP are commonly harvested after two
years into KIPP teaching and leadership positions. As KIPP school leaders, they
are given CEO power in the principal’s office to make policy and rules that
were once the responsibility of public school boards.
KIPP’s
teacher turnover rate became a public fact in 2008, with the publication of the
SRI evaluation report San Francisco Bay
Area KIPP Schools. . . (Woodworth,
David, Wang, & Lopez-Torkos, 2008).
SRI researchers found KIPP’s teacher annual attrition rate ranged from
18 to 49 percent at the five Bay Area KIPP schools that researchers studied:
Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have
hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the
start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at
four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before
leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom
before leaving (p. 32).
While
SRI found KIPP teachers committed, they also found them clearly doubtful of
their capacity to continue under the stress of 60-80 hours of school-related
work per week (includes 2 hours per night for telephone homework duty). As one KIPP teacher told SRI researchers,
“the consequence is I can’t do this job very much longer. It is too much. I don’t
see any solution with our structure and our nonnegotiables. No one has really
presented any way to solve that problem” (p. 35).
Browne
(2009) found the average KIPP teacher leaves after three years of service (p.
174). KIPP researchers (KIPP Foundation,
2013) reported in 2013 that 33 percent of teachers left their teaching
positions in 2012 (p. 26). Teacher
attrition in KIPP’s largest district, Houston, was 36 percent across 24 schools
in 2014. Two other No Excuses chains
that are based on the KIPP Model, Yes Prep and Achievement First, report
average length of service for teachers between 2 to 2.5 years (Rich,
2013).
In an
analysis by the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt University,
Stuit and Smith (2009) found the teacher attrition problem severe across all
types of charter schools. Using NCES
data from 2003-2004, the authors “. . . found the
odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the
same school are 132% greater than those of a traditional public school teacher.
The odds of a charter school teacher moving schools are 76% greater”
(Abstract).
The KIPP Summit: Professional
Development Revivalism
An
important element of “teacher KIPP-notizing” comes each year when the KIPP
Foundation hosts an annual summit that brings together all KIPP teachers just
before the new school year begins. Part celebration, sales meeting, revival,
and professional development opportunity, the KIPP Summit serves to
indoctrinate new staff into the KIPP culture, which is referred to by the KIPP
founders as “Team and Family.” One
former teacher enthused about the KIPP Summit for the “interesting atmosphere”
and opportunity to “learn new things” and the chance to hear teachers and
school leaders “talk about successes that they had with kids going to
college.” Interestingly, she found the
Summit “fun . . .[and] real, even though “it was like a good educational
Nuremberg Rally, but a good educational Nuremberg Rally—they really got you
pumped up.” When I asked her to
elaborate she said,
. . .
it’s kind of rah-rah-rah, really this is what our mission is, and I . . .
everybody is marching in the same direction.
In this case it’s a good direction.
We want the kids there to get to college, but in a way it is kind of the
same direction, and kind of a lot of hype, and . . . there’s banners, and each
school had their banner, and that’s probably the worst reference to make, but
there is a certain correlation between the two [KIPP Summit and Nuremberg
Rally] in terms of—it’s an enthusiasm that a whole crowd is getting, and kids
would come up, and they would talk about their achievements, and everybody
would clap and cheer, and it was really, everyone moving in that same
direction.
And I think it was a good direction,
but I’m a history teacher so part of me was kind of outside my body going,
‘This is interesting. I’m glad this is
for a good reason, it’s really kind of whipping people up to go this
direction.’ So I’m glad it’s a good
direction, but I can see where, if you were in another place in time, it could
be whipped up into that way.
Summits
are often held in popular tourist destinations such as Orlando, Miami, or Las
Vegas. In 2011, for example, the KIPP
Foundation’s 990 non-profit federal tax return showed that $1,008,633 was paid
to Opryland Hotel in Nashville for hotel and hospitality during one Summit,
while almost $4 million was spent on travel that year. Most Summit expenses are paid by the KIPP
Foundation, but then KIPP recoups some of that money from each KIPP franchise,
which must pay up to $30,000 each year to use the KIPP brand name. In 2011, KIPP, Inc. collected a total of
$2,050,256 from individual schools in these licensing fees.
One
former KIPP teacher who had witnessed the extravagances of the 2014 Summit
wondered why KIPP would claim there is no money for hiring substitute teachers,
all the while renting huge arenas for general sessions and lavish hotel
ballrooms for after parties that featured an array of desserts and snacks, open
bar, and DJs: “To
me it seemed like if we have the money for a summit and we don't have the money
for substitute teachers, then we should kill the summit and find the money for
substitute teachers.”
Several
of the teachers I interviewed talked about their experiences at the annual
summits that always come just before school starts, thus leaving new teachers,
in particular, feeling unprepared to meet students. As teachers worry about a lack of lesson
planning, the Summit vendors sell books and kits that are advertised to fill
those needs and assuage those fears. One
teacher said, “They were pushing products and they were pushing new ideas from
business perspectives.”
One
first-year teacher attended a KIPP Summit in Las Vegas, which she described as
a “whole big feel-good session.” She saw
students receive awards, and she heard “inspirational stories with how KIPP
changes lives.” She said some of her colleagues “who had been in teaching for
awhile thought it was a waste of time,” but she said, “I enjoyed it because I’m
completely new, and I know nothing. . . . It was fun. I enjoyed myself. I got to go to Vegas for free so that was
pretty nice. Then we get back and
immediately, I mean I started work July 19 and did not physically stop working
until Christmas.”
When another teacher mentioned the KIPP Summit as she
described the beginning of school, I asked what she thought of the Summit. She replied:
Honestly, I was just kind of like what the hell did I get
myself into. It was just really weird . . . . I don’t mean everybody, but it
was like they were just so beyond enthusiastic, and I am kind of like, this is
a little off putting because, I don’t know—it felt cheesy in a lot of ways . .
. . I mean I am definitely a passionate educator and I think education is so
important, and I definitely get enthusiastic about my content area, but it was
just a little over the top, and I just felt like I didn’t fit in because I
wasn’t that way, and KIPP is really big on little songs and chants and things
like that, and that is just like not me at all. I mean there were a couple of
points where I kind of got into it, and it was kind of goofy.
Besides
feeling out of place at the Summit, this teacher thought the professional
development had much in common with other professional development she has
experienced during her six years in charter schools, where young teachers are
teaching other young teachers who know only slightly less than they:
. . . it was kind of like the blind leading the blind. It is
kind of hard to remember all the details, but I just remember thinking okay I
feel like I have learned nothing . . . and I don’t feel like I walked away with
things that made me feel like wow I can really use this in my classroom or wow
that is really meaningful. That sort of professional development is a hole in
charter schools. You need somebody coming in there who really has a lot of
experience.
Another teacher used the word “interesting” with a clear
inflection of disapproval. She noted
“there was a very common thread that ran through meetings and conversations
about the evils of unions.” During the
roll call of schools at the Summit, each school staff stood wearing their own
shirts and did a song or a chant. She
described the atmosphere as “frenzied.” She also said that when teachers in the
auditorium were asked to stand who had less than five years total teaching
experience, almost everyone rose:
[The KIPP Summit] had
a part where they would have everybody who has been teaching five years or less
stand up, and everybody pretty much in the auditorium stood up—for 5 to 10
years, very few, and there were hardly any over 10 years. That was for teaching
in general and not necessarily teaching at KIPP, but that was also very
interesting to see it. And [KIPP leaders] didn’t seem ashamed of that. They
seemed to think that was just fine.
“it was almost like a cult”
One teacher noted what she called the Summit’s “cultish
mentality” that others around her saw as well.
During the chanting of the KIPP motto, a friend said to her, “I’m not
doing this—this is some cult bs.” This
same teacher likened the conditioning to what she described as a fundamentalist
cult. When I asked one teacher how KIPP
values affected how she taught, she said,
You had to have all the KIPP values posted. You had to constantly remind the children of
the KIPP values. It was an Orwellian
type of teaching. You had to focus on
teaching almost like a cult. It was very
much brainwashing is how I could describe it.
It was like it wasn’t you. I mean,
believe me, if you didn’t have those KIPP values posted in your room, if you
did not go over them daily, someone would know and they would remind you, hey,
these are the KIPP values, teach them.
This
teacher talked about the “language they’ve created where they just rename
things,” which she described as “almost comical.” When I asked why “almost comical,” she
replied:
Almost comical because it’s not fully comical, because it’s
serious. It’s just serious. You’re working but it’s like you’re teaching these
values and if you stop and think for a second you’re like okay, wait a minute,
this is bizarre and ridiculous, but you keep doing it. It’s still serious. I don’t know.
Sometimes you laugh about it. You
had to laugh about it because you couldn’t stop and think, what am I doing. You
just have to laugh because you’re like okay, here I am stuck in this situation,
and I don’t want to quit, so very often you find yourself just laughing at
yourself because you fell for it. I
don’t know.
Another
teacher noted, too, the private language and the “different phrases that were
used” as “very cultish.” It has long
been noted among scholars (Lifton, 1961) who have studied thought reform
environments that a common characteristic is “manipulation of language in which
clichés substitute for analytic thought” (p. 419). A former KIPP teacher who was older and more
experienced than most offered this analysis:
. . . they take these young kids and they indoctrinate them
into the KIPP way. Whether it works or not doesn’t really matter. It works from
KIPP’s perspective; the teachers who stay are indoctrinated. It’s almost, and I
hate to use this word, but I’m going to anyway. But it’s almost like a cult.
References
American
Enterprise Institute. (2014, March
3). From
poverty to prosperity: A conversation with Bill Gates. Retrieved from http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transcript_082217994272.pdf
Browne, L. W.
(2009). A character education approach to founding a KIPP college preparatory
charter school. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Dissertation and
Theses database. (UMI No. 3344513)
Chernicoff, D. (2006,
October 27). I want you, Yalie, to teach
for America. Yale Daily News. Retrieved
from
http://yaledailynews.com/weekend/2006/10/27/i-want-you-yalie-to-teach-for-america/
Green,
E. (2011, February 14). A new graduate school of education, Relay, to
open next fall. Chalkbeat New York. Retrieved
from
http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2011/02/14/a-new-graduate-school-of-education-relay-to-open-next-fall/#.VLGzeyeTDOE
Horn,
J. (2010). Corporatism, KIPP, and cultural eugenics. In
P. Kovacs, (Ed.), Bill Gates and the
future of U. S. “public” schools. New York: Routledge.
KIPP
Foundation. (2015d). Frequently
asked questions. Retrieved from http://www.kipp.org/careers/application-resources/applicant-faqs#Candidate
KIPP
Foundation. (2013). KIPP:
2013 report card. Retrieved from
http://www.kipp.org/reportcard
Lemov,
D. (2015). Teach
like a champion 2.0: 62 techniques that put students on the path to
college. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Lemov,
D. (2010). Teach
like a champion: 49 techniques that put
students on the path to college (K-12).
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Philanthropy
News Digest. (2009, August 21). Richard
Barth, Chief Executive Officer, KIPP Foundation. Retrieved from http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/newsmakers/richard-barth-chief-executive-officer-kipp-foundation
Rich, M.
(2013, August 26). At charter
schools, short careers by choice. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/education/at-charter-schools-short-careers-by-choice.html
Stuit,
D., & Smith, T. (2009). Teacher
turnover in charter schools.
Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University.
Retrieved from
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/documents/stuit_smith_ncspe.pdf
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