Importing the KIPP Model

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It’s 7:15 on a chilly spring morning…kids from all over New Orleans are coming in by the bus load to KIPP Central City Academy and Primary. A group of sixth graders is hanging outside, waiting for the bell to ring. So I ask them what they think about their school. Three of the boys say they like it just fine. The fourth one, Troy Picard, is not a fan.

“No, their rules are just too strict for me,” says Picard, prompting a quick rebuttal from his friend Carl Lacoste.

“Troy, I disagree what you said about strict rules,” Lacoste says. “The only rules we have are work hard and be nice.”

“But a lot of other rules fall under that category,” Picard says.

Students aren’t the only ones with rules. Jonathan Bertch, who runs the business side of things at KIPP Central City, says adults at the school have rules, too. The main one is “no excuses.” As in: All those excuses you hear about why inner city kids can’t succeed? Out the window.

“Oh their home life, oh they didn’t eat breakfast, there’s a million excuses that you can make,” Bertch says, “but what we have to do in order to make this work is we have to eliminate the excuses and say we’re gonna take responsibility, we’re gonna make sure this works.”

In other words, you get your kid on the bus, and KIPP will take care of the rest. The school provides breakfast for all the kids, or KIPPSTERS, as they’re called, and nearly all the students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The teachers give out their cell phone numbers, so students can call and get help with their homework. And every new student gets a home visit from the principal or a teacher before the school year even starts.

“We’ll go and sit down with that family and spend about 45 minutes talking about the school, talking about the expectations, answering questions and starting to build that relationship with the child and with the parent,” he says. “And I think that’s the foundation of a lot of what we’re able to do at this school.”

The students are in school for nine and a half hours a day, plus three weeks of summer school, and homework every night. There are also mandatory Saturday classes where the kids go on field trips and do community service.

6th grader Waynell Fountain is like a lot of kids at the school. She was at a failing school up until last year and came in at a 3rd grade reading level. Today she’s caught up. She’s says has her teachers at KIPP to thank for that.

“We have to read for 30 minutes, write about what we read, and that’s what made me grow more and I was reading more challenging books,” she says, adding that she didn’t do a lot of reading at her last school. “I don’t think they really had a library,” she says.

But the KIPP model isn’t for everyone, even for kids in the same family. Audrey Stewart has two sons. She sent her oldest son to a KIPP school in the French quarter:

“It’s really, really regimented and I just wasn’t sure it was what he needed,” Stewart says. So she pulled him out and enrolled him at a different school the next year. Her youngest son, on the other hand, loves the structure of KIPP. So he’s staying there.

Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise is the executive director of KIPP New Orleans. She says the goal is to eventually serve fifteen percent of the public school kids in the city, almost all of them low income students of color.

“By 2022, we’re predicting…that we’ll have 1,000 college grads in new Orleans that would not have, were it not for KIPP, been college graduates,” Kalifey-Aluise says. “So I think what that does for the city is pretty transformative.”

Detroit school leaders want to see that same kind of transformation.

KIPP is predominately a middle school model, and they’ve started to expand and open elementary schools around the country.

But charter advocates in Detroit say you can’t just fix elementary and middle schools. They say you’ve got to tackle the toughest problem: high schools.

Lou Glazer heads a new initiative called Michigan Future Schools. It’s hoping to open 35 new, college-prep high schools for Detroit kids by 2018. But Glazer says when he went to New Orleans to talk to folks there about starting up new schools, they gave him some advice:

“Their recommendation to us was don’t do high schools,” he says. “High schools are the hardest, I think everybody understands that.”

But Glazer says Detroit desperately needs better high schools. So that’s what his group is working on. Starting at Detroit Edison Public School Academy – or DEPSA, which will add ninth grade in the fall.

Eighth grader Ashley Franks says she plans to be part of DEPSA’s first class of high school graduates in 2014. This is her first year at DEPSA. She says it’s a huge improvement from the school she used to attend – Halley Magnet Middle School, in the Detroit Public School system.

“Well Halley, most kids were from the east side…they brought guns to school and bad habits. The school was unprepared, they wasn’t organized, they just let anyone get into the school and do unappropriate things,” she says.

And safety isn’t DEPSA’s only draw. Nancy Garvin handles outreach for the school. She’s pointing at a chart on the wall that shows the school’s year-by-year scores on Michigan’s standardized test – called the MEAP. In 2008, the school’s fifth and eighth graders outscored Detroit Public Schools kids in reading and math tests by an average of more than 30 percent.

Garvin says when the school opened its doors 13 years ago, the scores were very low.

“But each year we improve,” Garvin says. “We look at what the children score and where the gaps are and we’ve changed curriculum, we’ve brought in more professional development. Wherever we see that students need more, we bring it in and provide it.”

DEPSA is getting $850,000 to help it open its high school this fall. And Superintendent Ralph Bland says he plans to implement the same strategies that have worked for his elementary and middle schoolers in next year’s ninth grade class.

“And you’ll probably hear the word high school come out of our mouth very little,” Bland says. “It’ll be more college. College, college, college.”

Bland says his goal for the high school is for every graduate to be ready for college (without needing to take remedial classes when they get there), to graduate from college, and hopefully return to Detroit help improve it.

The non-profit Michigan Future Schools has $13 million it’s ready to hand out to schools like DEPSA, or KIPP: schools that can promise 85 percent of students will graduate and go to college, and that 85 percent of them get a college degree.

Lou Glazer – who runs Michigan Future Schools – says that’s enough money for seven high schools. But the goal is five times that many.

“So if we get to 35 high schools, and they’re all high quality, and we get to 14,000 kids, we’ll change the landscape,” Glazer says, “because it will take so many kids out of low-quality schools that they’ll go out of business whether policy makers are willing to close them or not.”

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

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