New School Paves Road to Success

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, April 2, 2002; 11:57 AM

Here is something I have learned from talking to parents the past 20 years: There are no good middle schools.

Sure, many of those hormone-flooded enclosures, usually reserved for pre-teens and early teens in grades five (or six) to eight, have fine teachers and devoted principals. But that does little for their reputations in the community.

You expect public middle schools to have image problems. But this malady extends to the most expensive private schools in our wealthiest neighborhoods. Ask those parents for an assessment and many will way, "Well, it's a pretty good place, except for the middle school."

Why is that? The behavioral outrages of early adolescence play a part. So does the modern practice of making middle school classes p; with the possible exception of mathematics p; not so demanding that the young scholars might foment open rebellion against the adult criminal conspiracy that oppresses them.

So it surprises me that one of the most rigorous p; and to me most interesting p; educational programs in the country at the moment is a small group of middle schools. They are called the KIPP Schools. The acronym stands for Knowledge Is Power Program. They are not precious little experiments just for gifted kids in the suburbs p; quite the opposite. There are two full-sized fifth-through-eighth grade KIPP schools, one taking its students from a low-income Hispanic neighborhood in Houston and the other from a low-income African American neighborhood in the Bronx.

This school year three more KIPP schools opened, one in Houston, one in rural Gaston, N.C. and one in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C., each starting with just a fifth grade. All are public schools, under charters or contracts that allow them to use their own rules. Ten more are scheduled to open in the fall in Asheville, N.C., Austin, Baltimore, DeKalb County, Ga., Denver, Memphis, Newark, Oakland, Oklahoma City and Helena, Ark.

I have been visiting the school in Anacostia, called the K.E.Y. (Knowledge Empowers You) Academy, which began in a church basement last summer with 80 fifth graders. Like the other KIPP schools, it is a startling departure from every other middle school I have ever seen. I think it shows a promising p; if necessarily difficult p; way to fix many schools that need fixing.

K.E.Y. Academy classes start at 8 a.m. It does not send students home until 5 p.m., at least two hours longer than the usual school day. Most weeks students also come Saturday mornings for lessons in sports, manners and other extras. Summer vacation is only a month long.

The mostly young teachers are committed not only to those long hours but also to the notion that every lesson must be planned in detail so they do not waste time and can maintain the pace that helps ten-year-olds stay focused. They give their students the numbers of their school-provided cell phones and instruct them to call if there is anything p; including the smallest detail p; on their homework they can't handle.

There is a student dress code, with K.E.Y. Academy shirts required. Students receive "paychecks" for good behavior and good school work that can be redeemed at the student store for school supplies or snacks. Discipline is swift and consistent, using the American child's dread of being separated from the pack. A student who fails to do her homework or does not pay attention in class is "benched," isolated from the rest of the class and forbidden to communicate with anyone but the teacher. Any other student who speaks to her is also benched.

My favorite KIPP innovation takes the rusty maxim about the need for involved parents to a logical and necessary extreme. If a student does not produce his homework, his parents are immediately called to the school. "The parents are very surprised," said K.E.Y. Academy principal Susan Schaeffler. "They say, 'You mean you are really serious about those rules?'"

In the KIPP classes I have attended, this leads not to the sullen submission to adult rule that you find in many middle schools, but an excited realization that academic work is important and must measure up to the highest standards.

At the K.E.Y. Academy, one of the chants begins, "What class are you!!??"

The answer comes at window-rattling volume, "2009!!!!"

Schaeffler's father, seeing the Class of 2009 signs, said, "Oh, so that's the year they graduate from high school."

"No," Schaeffler said, emphatic about a concept at the heart of the KIPP method. "That is the year they go to college." Many of her students would be the first in their families even to consider higher education. They are all from low-income families and some of them have learning disabilities.

For a school that values good manners and close attention, the K.E.Y. Academy is a noisy place. I watched Schaeffler recently take a math class through an exercise called "Around the World." One child stood beside the desk of another child. Who would be the first to solve a standard algorithm?

"Eight times nine," Schaeffler said. "SEVENTY TWO!!" the contestants said simultaneously, pointing their fingers back at the teacher. Schaeffler needed two more tries to discern the winner, who moved on to challenge the child in the next desk. At one point, with every student in the room spellbound by the competition, one girl delivered her answer so enthusiastically that she fell on the floor.

In the English classroom students were reading poetry aloud. In the social studies class, some students had assumed the roles of patriots and loyalists in the American Revolution and were arguing the future of their continent.

The KIPP program, like many of the most interesting educational innovations, is a bottom up reform. Its founders, Michael Feinberg and David Levin, now both 32, conceived the idea while driving through the California desert in Levin's blue-gray Ford Taurus on their way to their first teaching jobs in Houston. They had just completed a Los Angeles summer training program run by Teach For America, which sends recent college graduates right into disadvantaged schools, hoping their intelligence and enthusiasm will make up for their lack of experience and full-fledged education degrees.

Consuming a six-pack of soda and some Hostess cupcakes, Feinberg and Levin worked out a master plan of longer school days, more consistent discipline and better teacher pay. Then they got to Houston and realized they didn't know anything. So they shut up and tried to teach, getting a little better each year as they soaked up the best ideas they encountered in other teacher's classrooms. They were inspired by Harriett Ball, a Houston teacher who created what is now a nationally known system of teaching with rap, rhythm and rhyme, and by Rafe Esquith, a Disney Teacher of the Year from Los Angeles who preached the power of emphasizing college and finding more class time in the school day and school year.

They started their first KIPP school as a fifth grade at Garcia Elementary School in Houston in 1994. When 98 percent of their students that first year passed the Texas state tests, compared to 50 percent at the school the previous year, other educators began to notice. Levin accepted an offer to start a similar school in the Bronx. Both schools recorded test scores far above the other schools in their neighborhoods. Sixty Minutes visited. Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the Gap, Inc., set up a San Francisco foundation to fund KIPP's expansion.

What I find most interesting about the KIPP schools is that they are not doing anything that many successful educators do not already do. But they are doing them all at once, with remarkable adherence to what Feinberg and Levin call the Five Pillars: high expectations, freedom of students and teachers to choose to participate in the program, more time spent in class, administrative autonomy and a focus on results, particularly the test scores that some suburban educators find so annoying.

Schaeffler, 31, the K.E.Y. Academy principal, had taught for Teach For America in Baltimore in 1992 and at the District's Shepherd Elementary School, where principal Katherine James said she had a talent for "getting inside kids' brains." Her staff consists of language arts teacher Julie Conrad, 30; math teacher Sarah Hayes, 25; science teacher Mike Diaz, 25, social studies and music teacher Khala Johnson, 29; assistant administrator and physical education teacher Andrew Zuckerman, 25; special education coordinator and counselor Laura Hardy, 28, and computer teacher Tom Brown, 35. All but Hardy and Brown are former Teach For America participants.

The K.E.Y. Academy is a D.C. public charter school, so its teachers are paid the standard D.C. rate plus about $7,000 a year in overtime. Schaeffler found students by spreading the word at D.C. elementary schools and standing in front of Anacostia stores, calling out to passersby that she was starting a fifth grade that kept kids nine hours a day. The school's first months have gone relatively smoothly, with only one student having to transfer out and being quickly replaced. However, Schaeffler is having trouble finding suitable quarters for next year when she will have both a fifth and sixth grade.

KIPP Schools have their problems. Scott Hamilton, managing director of the Fishers' Pisces Foundation, gave me case studies of the two founding KIPP Academies that show plenty of staff tension. Surprisingly, the heavy work load has not been nearly as much of a factor in faculty turnover as disputes over how to discipline and how to teach. Both Feinberg and Levin are known to erupt at signs of inertia and backsliding, the cancers that infect most failing schools. Feinberg once shoved a chair so hard in frustration at a rash of bad student behavior that he broke a window.

And they have a problem that is going to become greater with every new KIPP school. Where are the students going to go when they graduate from eighth grade? From the KIPP vantage point, the local public high schools are poisonous pits of sloth and mischief. So almost all the Houston and Bronx graduates have been placed in private schools around the country. There is still room for more. Many private schools ache to include serious students whose parents don't drive BMWs. But eventually KIPP is going to have to start its own high schools, or lose its momentum.

Can such a daring experiment survive and prosper? I don't know. But it is worth a try. The KIPP motto, borrowed from Esquith, is "There Are No Shortcuts." This is so obviously true that everyone nods when you say it, and yet few educators act as if they believe it is possible to avoid some compromises.

Some people who took the motto seriously have produced, miracle of miracles, a few middle schools that everyone agrees are very good. Why can't schools at every grade learn from that?

=====================================

Kids Love Learning in This Program, but Can the City Give It Space?

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post

Thursday, June 13, 2002; Page DZ11

Five years ago, Mike Feinberg was desperate. The public middle school he and his friend Dave Levin had established in Houston was showing phenomenal results teaching the poorest children in the city, but he needed more room and no one would give it to him.

Feinberg and Levin were still in their twenties, so ignorant of the realities of education bureaucracies that they had started their KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) school with only three years' teaching experience each. Having found a way to double in one year the percentage of students passing state tests, they decided that following their instincts was not such a bad idea.

So when Feinberg could not get an appointment with the Houston school superintendent, Rod Paige, to discuss the space problem, he found Paige's car in the district headquarters parking lot and sat on it. He knew Paige worked hard, but the man would have to go home eventually.

Three hours later the superintendent came out, greeted Feinberg amiably and listened to his story. "Come see me in my office tomorrow," he said. By noon the next day, KIPP had the space it needed. Within three more years, Feinberg and Levin were the talk of the education world. The KIPP school in Houston was posting the best test scores of any middle school in its area, and a second KIPP school in the Bronx, run by Levin, was doing the same.

Now the latest offshoot of the growing KIPP network, the KIPP DC KEY Academy in Anacostia, is facing the same situation Feinberg did in 1997 -- no space. Many of the nation's 2,400 charter schools -- public schools that operate independently of school district control -- have the same problem.

The KEY (Knowledge Empowers You) Academy has only two months left on its one-year lease of a church basement. The 80 fifth-graders that made up the charter school's first class will become its first sixth-graders next year. Eighty more students have signed up for next year's fifth grade as the KEY Academy moves toward its plan of a 320-student fifth-through-eighth-grade middle school.

The KIPP schools -- -there are five in four states, and 10 more are scheduled for this fall -- thrive on a no-nonsense approach. School goes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each weekday and a half-day on many Saturdays. Summer vacation is only one month long. Parents must come to the school with an explanation when their children have not done their homework. Teachers are issued cell phones so they can answer student questions far into the night. To make sure their graduates don't lose their edge, KIPP administrators try to place them in private schools or in the most competitive public schools when they complete eighth grade.

The KEY Academy principal is Susan Schaeffler, 32, hand-picked by Feinberg and Levin and like them a veteran of the Teach For America program. Despite making great strides with her fifth-graders this year -- students are visibly enthusiastic during math drills and intense history simulations, and there are few disciplinary problems -- she has had little luck finding commercial property or persuading District officials to help her find space.

Schaeffler said she thought the best place for her school would be the old Douglass Junior High School building in Southeast, not too far from her current location. When I asked Linda Wharton Boyd, spokeswoman for D.C. school Superintendent Paul L. Vance, if KIPP could use Douglass, I received this response:

Boyd quoted Sarah Woodhead, deputy chief of facilities for D.C. schools, as saying "we understand the seriousness of the KIPP DC KEY Academy's need for space to expand" but "the Douglass JHS building is not a vacant building." Woodhead said it was the permanent home of a D.C. alternative high school for students who need extra academic support. It was also serving as temporary quarters for schools that vacated their usual locations for major reconstruction and remodeling.

"DCPS has been and remains open to try to support the space needs of the charter schools," Woodhead said.

Woodhead suggested Schaeffler might have more luck with City Hall. "Space remains available throughout the city in the form of surplus schools currently in the mayor's inventory," she said. I asked D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams's spokesman, Tony Bullock, about that.

He told me that many of the old school buildings under city control "are not in decent condition for use at this time." That does not mean, he said, that the mayor has not been doing his best for schools like the KEY Academy. "He is the strongest advocate of charter schools in the history of the city," Bullock said. "In just three and a half years, the number of students enrolled in D.C. public charter schools has increased sixfold and the funding for charter schools has increased 1,000 percent . . . from $22 million annually in 1999 to $132 million proposed for 2003."

Paige, the Houston superintendent who found Feinberg staking out his car, is now the U.S. Secretary of Education. He also is trying to help charter schools. On Thursday, he announced Charter Schools Facilities Financing Demonstration Program grants of nearly $25 million to five organizations, two in Washington and one each in Phoenix, Oakland and Braintree, Mass., for use in helping charter schools buy, build or renovate buildings.

Sadly, two months is not nearly long enough for the new federal grant to get Schaeffler what she needs.

I was getting discouraged, but late Friday something happened. Woodhead, despite her earlier message of no room at Douglass, called Schaeffler about 4 p.m. to say that DCPS thought it could find space for the KEY Academy at that old school, after all. An ecstatic Schaeffler called to say the school system was ready to negotiate a deal. Boyd said Vance decided in favor of the charter school.

So the KIPP DC KEY Academy may have a happy ending.But Schaeffler doesn't have the space yet, and the deal is only for one year.

Because the KEY Academy runs through July, she is going to have very little time to get her new place in shape, assuming the negotiations with Woodhead are successful. I asked Schaeffler about Feinberg's approach to bureaucratic slights, and whether she wanted me to ask Boyd for the make and model of D.C. superintendent Vance's car.

It is, I gather, annoying sometimes to work for a young legend like Feinberg. "I have heard that story about a thousand times," Schaeffler said. "Security is different these days." But she said that when fighting for her kids, she cannot ignore any possible way of reaching a crucial player like Vance. "Let me know where he parks," she said.

FAIR USE NOTICE

This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of educational issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Back to "What Parents Need to Know About Middle School Reform"