In my travels over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many members of the KIPP Team and Family, and numerous KIPP partners and friends. At KIPP School Summit, I was able to spend time with many of you in person. As members of my team listened to me answer a variety of questions, they wondered if there might be a way to address several topics in one correspondence, particularly for those of you whom I might not have the chance to see any time soon. So Liz Meehan, the Foundation’s Director of Development, sat down with me recently to discuss some of the more frequently asked questions. Below is the resulting Q&A. We hope this is helpful. Please let us know what you think of this format, which we are trying out for the first time.
Q: What is new at KIPP? Can you share some highlights?
RB: We opened 17 new schools this summer. We now have 99 KIPP schools in 20 states and D.C., serving more than 26,000 students. In August, we hosted the largest KIPP School Summit in our history. More than 2,800 teachers, leaders, board members and friends of KIPP gathered together. And while we were all there, we learned that KIPP won a $50 million federal Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) scale-up grant.
Q: So what is keeping you up at night?
RB: Making sure our KIPPsters are prepared to make it to and through college. Making sure we are really giving our kids the chance to live the American dream. The reality is that even in today’s absolutely terrible economy, the unemployment rate for people with college degrees is still under 5 percent. If you don’t earn a college degree, it is unlikely that you will make even half the annual salary of someone who does have one. That’s what keeps me up at night. This is a really hard climb for our students, and while we have to recognize important milestones on the way to college graduation, we can’t overly celebrate them. High school graduation is one step. College admission is another. Matriculation is another. But none of those are as impactful as college graduation.
The reality is that when it comes to first generation college students, there is an absolutely huge drop off between college matriculation and college completion. We are just beginning to create public awareness around this issue. For KIPP’s part, we are going to put out a publication on this in the next six months. It’s not going to be a policy abstract. We are going to share all our data so that everyone can get a sense of this challenge, even for KIPPsters. And we hope if we’re willing to put our data out there, it will encourage others to do so and create a safe space for discussion. Discussion that we hope will lead to action.
Q: Beyond putting the facts out there, what is KIPP doing to address this college completion challenge?
RB: We’re focused on several things. First, we know our number one job is to provide a rigorous academic preparation of our KIPPsters. And that includes a commitment to building the character strengths our kids need to persevere in spite of many obstacles. As you know, KIPP started off as a middle school network. We’ve learned that four years is not enough to ensure all our kids make it through college, so our future growth is K-12. And pre-k when there is state funding to support that.
Beyond that, however, we need to take a whole new look at our relationship with higher education. We need to get out there to find college partners that have the support services and commitment to ensure KIPPsters graduate. We hope to partner with colleges at every level of selectivity. Keep in mind that there are 1,100 KIPP alums in college this year at more than 350 campuses across the country. We are going to have more than 10,000 KIPPsters in college by 2015-2016. So, we have to get going on this fast. I would expect that three years from now, we will have a pipeline of 40 to 50 local and national college partners.
So academic rigor and building partnerships are the building blocks. We also know that we have to make headway on the financial side of all of this. Today we are working to launch the Partnership for College Completion (PCC) with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED). Through the PCC this year, a selection of KIPPsters in the Bay Area, Houston, Chicago, and DC will receive college readiness and financial literacy education through collaboration with the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute’s 6to16 program, and seeded and matched incentivized savings accounts provided by the Citi Foundation and Citigroup. They will also be eligible for PCC college scholarships. Meaning, KIPPsters and their families in these 4 pilot communities are going to save money for college – and funds they save will be matched through the PCC. The money will be held in a fiduciary account by UNCF.
We don’t know exactly how this is going to play out, but we do know that a decade ago, folks thought 5th graders wouldn’t go to school from 7:30 to 5:00, on Saturdays, or during the summer. Now no one doubts that. Now we are all going to see if our kids, their families and friends, are able to save for college if given better vehicles to do so. And we are committed to rolling this out nationwide if our pilots take off.
And a final really important part of all this will be ramping up our KIPP alumni tracking and support. We will be focusing on making connections between KIPP alumni from different schools and regions when they are on the same college campus. We’ll also look to KIPP schools near college campuses to engage with these alumni – extending the power of KIPP’s team and family right through college.
Q: College completion is obviously a key focus area. What else are you excited about?
RB: We’re hoping to develop the best online teacher-to-teacher content sharing platform in the country, which we call KIPP Share. This is all about trying to make life easier for incredible teachers and improve outcomes. We want teachers to be able to find great content quickly and easily. We want teachers to be able to watch great teachers on video, and not just see what they are doing, but watch them as they are interviewed to explain the ‘why’ behind what they are doing.
We are building this through a partnership with a start-up called Better Lesson. We launched KIPP Share in August and we now have more than 1,800 teachers online. And more than 45,000 instructional resources have been loaded on the site. So, good early progress. But we have a long way to go to know if this is really helping our teachers. Is KIPP Share truly making their lives easier? Is it helping them become better teachers?
Personally, I am excited about this approach to finding solutions through partnerships rather than through in-house product development. If there is one thing we are not, it’s technology product developers. For us, part of this has been about creating pride in being a world-class product development partner and not feeling that we are missing something by not being the product people ourselves. We like this approach because we stay one-hundred percent focused on pushing for a service that meets the needs of our teachers. And we do feel good that if we ultimately meet the needs of our teachers, we will likely have helped Better Lesson create a product that will meet the needs of thousands of teachers who work in non-KIPP schools across the country.
Q: Are you only focused on partnering with start-ups?
RB: Not at all. We see opportunities for partnership across several different areas including instructional technology, student data, assessment, performance management, knowledge sharing, and so on. One example is Microsoft, who is working with one of our regions on instructional technology to support student engagement and teacher efficiency. This isn’t about infrastructure or software. This is about how technology – in the hands of masterful teachers – can really impact student learning.
In addition to our work with Better Lesson and Microsoft, we are excited about our early work with Great Schools to pilot College Bound, a program that is all about inspiring and guiding parents to raise college-ready high school graduates using online learning tools and coaching.
And while we’re talking about online learning, I would be remiss if I didn’t say how excited we are about the opening of what people would consider KIPP’s first hybrid school. This fall KIPP Empower Academy, an elementary school, opened in LA.
Q: When people think about KIPP, they think of the network’s focus on leadership. And this summer KIPP was awarded a $50 million federal Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) grant. Can you talk about the i3 grant and what the next few years looks like for KIPP leadership development?
Absolutely. Our grant is all about expanding our pipeline of school leaders. Every single KIPP school needs strong leadership “bench depth” to make sure there are great aspiring principals ready to succeed current leaders when the time comes. It’s pretty simple – strong school leadership is the key to making sure our kids make it to and through college. Great principals lead great schools and attract great teachers who are committed, results-oriented educators who put kids on the path to a college degree.
Folks who like to talk about growth sometimes miss out on the fact that to grow from 100 to 200 schools, we don’t need 100 new school leaders. We need at least 150 or 160. We need new school founders, and during that time we also need a robust pipeline of amazing school successor leaders.
So over the next few years, we will continue to run the Fisher Fellowship, which is our signature training program for new school founders. But we’ll also be focused on helping our schools and regions build their local leadership capacity and training programs, and we’ll invest a lot of resources to expand our Leadership Pathways programs, which offer differentiated training for people interested in taking on roles with increased leadership responsibility. This year we have almost 200 folks in our Leadership Pathways programs, and we’re projecting about that same level of participation for the next several years.
Q: Shifting from leadership development, can you share some thoughts about growth?
RB: Sure. I’ll speak to that on two levels – the number of kids we will reach and the growth in funding. It has taken us 15 years to get from the original KIPP program for 48 5th graders to 26,000 kids this year. Now with help from i3, we think we can reach more than 55,000 students by 2015. And we think we can do this by growing deeper before wider, reaching more children in the cities in which we already operate. Simultaneously we are preparing for the reality that our number of KIPPsters in college will grow from 1,000 to 10,000.
For those who like to think about it financially, between the 2010-2011 school year and the 2015-2016 school year, our network-wide public revenues will grow from approximately $250 million a year to somewhere in the range of $550 million a year.
When you hear about our $50 million i3 grant, it’s important to understand the scale at which we’re operating. It’s an awesome, catalytic grant that is going to support our efforts to grow without sacrificing quality, but it is $50 million paid out over 5 years. $50 million against an overall public revenue base of somewhere between $1.7 and $1.9 billion.
The biggest single investment we are making through our i3 funding is enabling our schools to hire Assistant Principals in their second year of operation. Historically, KIPP schools have not hired APs until the fourth year of their existence, due to financial reasons. With i3 funding, we’re letting our schools know they can hire that AP in year two. This means a significant acceleration in the building of our leadership pipeline, fueling future growth while maintaining quality.
I realize I have just talked a lot about leaders – but let me finish my answer to your question by sharing that, particularly as we grow, I wake up every day in awe of our incredibly committed, brilliant teachers. As a father of four kids, I have experienced the power of an individual teacher in the life of my own children. Teachers make the difference for our KIPPsters. Day in and day out. And we are blessed to have teachers at KIPP who are passionate and uncompromising in the belief that every child can achieve at high levels.
Q: Over the last two years, the charter school movement has been center stage. Between the Race to the Top Fund and Waiting for “Superman” it’s a charged atmosphere. How do you see the landscape today?
RB: Let me start with what is different today.
The public awareness of charter schools is greater. And beyond increased awareness, charters are viewed much more favorably. This is very good news.
My second and third thoughts are around what isn’t all that different. It is not different that, in spite of the growing awareness, we still have a ton of work to do to get folks out and into our schools to see what’s happening in our classrooms. Because as much as policy papers and blogs help, what we have found over and over again is that the way people really understand this is getting into a school. For our part, we are working incredibly hard on this. We have been inviting policy makers and thought-leaders to come visit us and meet KIPPsters. In the past few months, members of Congress have visited our schools in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Jacksonville, and the Arkansas Delta. They toured KIPP schools, spoke with our school leaders, and got to engage directly with kids. It’s really important to show policymakers our work in action. We hope to get more people in to see firsthand what we are doing, to meet our KIPPsters, and to have frank discussions about our progress to date, as well as what the future holds.
I emphasize the need to get people into our schools, meeting our kids, because folks in the charter movement tend to focus on the people who love charters and the people who want to see us go away. We tend to focus a lot of time on those two groups. The majority of policy makers, however, don’t have deep convictions about charter schools. Right now most legislators are worried about the economy, jobs, healthcare, and other things. As much as it might surprise us, they are not thinking about us every day!
Which brings me to my last point. I believe that one of the greatest leadership opportunities for the charter movement today is to acknowledge that people who don’t like what we do sometimes actually make legitimate points. We need to acknowledge when they do. And, we’re still not doing a very good job of doing that.
Q: Could you provide some examples of legitimate issues critics raise?
RB: There are a number. But one that gets a lot of attention, and I think justifiably, is student mobility. Speaking just for KIPP, I can say that a school with great test scores but high student attrition is not a great KIPP school. It’s not a healthy KIPP school. And, if we tell people it’s a great KIPP school, the critics and skeptics should take us to task. Speaking again just for KIPP, we have spent the last 24 months laying out a definition of a healthy KIPP school that leads us far beyond the single obsession with state test scores.
Q: What is your definition of a Healthy KIPP school?
RB: Our top-line dashboard is really simple. It answers a small set of questions:
· Are we serving the kids who need us the most?
· Are they staying with us, year after year?
· Are they making real academic progress, as well as meeting whatever absolute bar the state has set for them?
· Are they finishing college?
· Are we building a sustainable teacher and leader satisfaction, retention, and development model?
Q: That’s a short set of questions that mean a lot, isn’t it?
RB: Yes. This means being focused on ensuring that we’re not serving more advantaged kids as our schools mature. And that’s not easy. If we didn’t focus on this, we could see our network evolve from one that is serving a student population of whom 80 or 85 percent are eligible for free and reduced price lunch to one that is serving 60 or 70 percent. That’s huge. And when we talk about serving kids who need us the most, that means serving special needs children and English language learners.
This means we track and report our student mobility. We put it right in our Report Card every year. Bottom line… a school with strong state test scores and high student attrition is not a healthy school.
We report our student growth as measured by a national norm-referenced assessment. That way we are not vulnerable to the vagaries of state assessments, and the risk of believing our kids are on track to college when they are not.
And, when we are reporting on our college completion numbers, we are reporting against every single child who finished 8th grade at KIPP. That’s a different story then tracking kids who got high school degrees. We want to make sure no one at KIPP falls into the trap of reporting on college success based on graduating high school seniors.
This also means we are looking closely at teacher and leader retention, and at growth in our leadership pipeline.
We have a ton to learn, but I know we are on a good track in looking at school health in a much more robust way than simply examining a given year’s state test scores.
I’d like to share one last thought on this. If I had to make a prediction, it would be that if we are willing to assess a school’s performance in this way, we will learn once again that there are no shortcuts. That this is hard work. And that we will have to stay with it, day in and day out, if we are going to achieve our aspirations. For the past 16 years our KIPPsters have shown us that they are willing to do the hard work every day, so we shouldn’t hesitate to acknowledge that this is what it will take.
Q: Final question. Are you optimistic about the future?
RB: Yes. Not Pollyannaish, but very optimistic. Twenty years ago, when I started out in this work, there were only a handful of schools that were giving the public reasons to believe that the children we serve can truly achieve at levels that can lead to success in college and life. One decade after KIPP as a network was born, we are seeing great schools created in communities across the country. Today, there are hundreds of these schools. Now, we all know we need thousands of these schools, not hundreds. But, until there were dozens, we could not get to hundreds. And now that we have hundreds of these schools, we know we can accept nothing less than continuing down this path.
I am also optimistic that we have a chance in the next ten years to move beyond the debates about who has caused whatever problems we have, and to focus on creating more and more great opportunities for kids. We just have to stay focused on the ultimate report card: in community after community, what percentage of children have a shot at an education that will truly prepare them for a successful life? After all is said and done, that’s all that matters.
