Piedmont residents step in to support education reform
March 28, 2012
By Luke Tsai
It’s a Thursday night, and the home of Abe and Jennifer Friedman is packed. Nearly 100 friends and neighbors have jammed into their living room and foyer area, everyone under the spell of the two school administrators and handful of sixth and seventh graders who have come to share their story.
The reason behind this wildly successful social function? West Oakland’s KIPP Bride Charter School, part of a nationwide network of schools—seven of them in the Bay Area—that is capturing America’s imagination and giving new hope to a public education reform movement that has long sought to bridge the achievement gap between the rich and the poor.
On March 8, the KIPP movement (Knowledge Is Power Program) made new inroads into Piedmont, as the Friedmans hosted the city’s first informational fund-raising event in support of the KIPP Bridge middle school. Joining them on the host committee for the evening were several reform-minded Piedmont families: Beth and Jamie Barrett, Eva and Jeff Camp, Kelly Corrigan and Edward Lichty, Lauren Dutton and Glen Tripp, Sarah Pearson and Evan Seevak, and Laura Pochop and Chad Olcott.
The guests had gathered to hear several KIPP Bridge students speak first-hand about the impact the school has had on their lives. Most of the audience members had become curious by conversations and e-mail exchanges with the event hosts; several had already been spurred by those exchanges to take a tour of KIPP Bridge, a school serving 260 students in 5th through 8th grade, located just four miles from Piedmont.
Here’s the thing: For anyone with any involvement in education reform, it’s almost impossible to have not at least heard of the KIPP schools, so sparkling is the reputation. KIPP has garnered countless accolades for the remarkably consistent results—as measured by test scores, college matriculation rates and more—delivered by its 109 schools in poor communities all over the country. Indeed, the schools have such an impressive record that they’re poised to alter the basic terms of the conversation about public education in the United States.
“[KIPP] challenges the expectations in this country about what low-income students can achieve,” explained Dutton, Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for KIPP Bay Area Schools, and one of the co-hosts of the Piedmont event. “It makes adults think differently about what we need to do to make sure that all children are served. Because it’s proving the possible.”
Passionate supporters
“Each of the event’s co-hosts had a story to tell about how they discovered KIPP. Abe Friedman’s is typical: Three years ago, Dutton invited him to the annual San Francisco luncheon that’s sponsored by KIPP Bay Area Schools, the regional support office for the Bay Area’s seven schools. Friedman went, and he went again last year, and eventually took a tour of KIPP Bridge. The more he learned, the more he was moved by the education that KIPP was providing for its students.
“The program really speaks for itself once you have a chance to see these kids in action,” he explained. “I’ve never seen any school that has been able to achieve the kind of results that KIPP is achieving for these kids.”
For Friedman, a former Piedmont mayor, the sense of connection he felt to KIPP’s mission was personal: Even though Friedman has spent most of his career working in finance, his master’s degree is in public policy with a focus on education policy. The educational inequities that the KIPP schools are working to address are issues he has been passionate about for a long time.
After last year’s KIPP event in San Francisco, Friedman and Dutton started talking about whether there was something more they could do to garner support for KIPP within the Piedmont community. In December, they met with a small group of friends, a group who formed the rest of the host committee, and started making plans to host a part of sorts.
The March 8 event grew out of those initial conversations
Friedman isn’t the only Piedmont resident who learned about KIPP through Dutton—several of the party’s other co-hosts also credited her with their initial exposure to the program. Dutton herself first heard of KIPP in 1999, when “60 Minutes” aired a segment about the program. At the time there were only two KIPP schools, one in Houston and one in New York, but Dutton was impressed by what she heard.
It’s been five years since Dutton joined the board of KIPP Bay Area Schools, but she’s spent most of her career focused on public education reform, starting in 1991 when she founded the Oakland chapter of Teach for America.
In those 21 years Dutton has seen a lot of different schools and educational programs. So it means something when she says she can’t think of a single program in America that’s having a bigger impact than KIPP.
She explained that after Teach for America alum Dave Levin founded the first KIPP school in Houston in 1994, people were skeptical of the program’s success.
“People would come to Houston and say, ‘Yes, but that’s Houston.’” Dutton recalled.
Now, with 109 KIPP schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia, all with an impressive track record, there’s tangible evidence that low-income students can succeed.
The KIPP difference
Back at the Friedman house, guests were mesmerized by a short promotional video documenting the program’s many successes. By far the highlight of the evening was hearing testimonials from KIPP Bridge students and staff. And for each of the five students who spoke, the high expectations inherent in a KIPP education were one of the main themes.
Before seventh grader Davonte Tyson came to KIPP Bridge, he attended Allendale Elementary in East Oakland.
“All I had to do was show up and I would get an ‘A,’” Tyson recalled. He explained that after he started at KIPP, that “A” at his old school was only worth a “C,” and he had to buckle down and really work to get his grades up.
Likewise, Mitchell Fullwood, a KIPP Bridge alum who’s now a senior at KIPP King Collegiate High School, in San Lorenzo, spoke of the rigors of his KIPP education.
“It’s challenging because every single teachers wants the same thing,” Fullwood said. “They expect the best person you can be every single day.”
Lolita Jackson, the principal at KIPP Bridge, explained her approach this way: “When the students come into the school, we assume they know nothing, and we teach them everything.”
Thus, kids who come into the school with skills that are two or three grades below grade level are nurtured and pushed toward their ultimate goal: a college education.
“We don’t allow the students to have any excuses,” Jackson concluded.
Among those familiar with the charter school movement, the KIPP schools are famous for their remarkable test scores, for their gruelingly long school days (7:30am to 5:00pm, plus tutoring on Saturdays for struggling students), and for the upbeat chants and hand signals employed by KIPP teachers to keep students engaged.
But none of these things cuts into the heart of the matter. As Debbie Fine, a spokesperson for KIPP Bay Area Schools, explained, at its core KIPP is about a commitment to deliver on the unique promise to do whatever it takes to get low-income students through college.
What does it take? For one, a heck of a lot of hard work. Fine explained that even after students graduate from KIPP Bridge, the KIPP staff continues to track them and support them while they’re in high school—all the way through college graduation, an incredibly ambitious undertaking.
Fine noted that a KIPP education isn’t only about academics, pointing out that one of the benefits of an extended school day is that it gives students more time to participate in extracurricular activities like music and sports. She also stressed KIPP’s tagline: “Work hard. Be nice.”
“The key is the combination of academics and character,” Fine explained. “That’s where the magic happens.”
In spite of all the accolades the KIPP schools have enjoyed, the program is not without naysayers. There are some who question the intensity of the school’s focus on test preparation. Others wonder if such long school days can really be a sustainable model—for the teachers who have to put in those hours, much less for the students.
But as Friedman and Dutton and many others have pointed out, in the end the numbers really do speak for themselves: Nationwide, the college matriculation rate for low-income students is only 40%, with only 8% actually graduating from college.
At KIPP Bridge three quarters of the students qualify for free or reduced-price meals; 95% of the students are either African-American or Latino. When the school’s first crop of 36 students graduated from high school in 2010, 85% enrolled in college. Of those, 90% continued into their sophomore year.
Meanwhile every public school in California is assigned an Academic Performance Index (API) score each year as an overall measure of the school’s academic performance and growth. A school with an API of 800 has met the minimum target set by the state—many of the schools in West Oakland routinely hover in the 600s and 700s. In 2011, KIPP Bridge’s API was a whopping 911, a score comparable to those typical in high-powered, affluent school districts—Piedmont High School’s 2011 API was 917, as a point of reference.
It’s no wonder, then, that KIPP Bridge was named the 2011 Charter School of the Year by the California Charter Schools Association, beating out more than 900 other schools statewide.
Ways to get involved
Piedmont’s first KIPP event ended with a pitch, delivered by Mulberry’s Market owner Chad Olcott, who spoke of the privileges he and his children enjoy as Piedmont residents.
“The mile [I drive] from my house to my work to my kids’ school, I pass by 100 safety nets,” he said. “That’s why we live here.”
Olcott recalled that the first time he drove through West Oakland to visit KIPP Bridge, he saw that there weren’t any such protections in place for the kids who live there.
“But I got inside [Mrs. Jackson’s] school and the safety nets were there. That’s what KIPP is doing—giving these kids the same things our kids get. It’s so important.”
Like other charter schools, the KIPP schools are privately run but publicly funded. KIPP Bridge receives the same basic state funding as other Oakland public schools, but then KIPP raises additional revenue so that it can offer students the same resources available in affluent school districts.
School tours start April 3
What that means for Piedmont residents is that there’s an opportunity to contribute. In part, that’s why Friedman, Dutton, and the other host committee members felt it was so important to get the word out.
According to Friedman, the March 8 event was tremendously successful by all measures—in terms of excitement generated, as well as people expressing a desire to make a financial commitment to KIPP. Ultimately, Friedman said, his goal is simply to let his friends and neighbors know about the amazing achievements in this West Oakland school—just four miles away from Piedmont.
Toward that end, Friedman and Dutton are organizing a series of tours of KIPP Bridge, allowing visitors to see the school’s students and faculty in action. The next two tours are scheduled for April 3 and April 20, from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
