At the KIPP Philadelphia Charter School on 27th and North Broad Streets, the eighth grade English room is named for Penn, the alma mater of its teacher, Elizabeth O'Flanagan, C'97. Each of the students inside has won a highly competitive lottery allowing him or her to be in school over nine hours each weekday, on alternate Saturdays and for a month of the summer. All are African-American or Hispanic; some travel for up to an hour and half each morning to make it to class by 7:30 a.m. They dream of attending the country's best high schools and colleges, and thanks to the Knowledge is Power Program, these dreams are likely to come true.
KIPP was the brainchild of two Teach For America corps members, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who were both teaching fifth grade in Houston in 1992. Feinberg, a 1991 Penn alum, said that the two roommates felt like they were making progress with their first groups of fifth graders, but noticed that their formerly well-behaved kids reverted to truancy, drugs and gang activity once they left their classrooms and advanced to middle school. Unlike their colleagues, Feinberg and Levin were unwilling to lay the blame on the schools, the district, the students, their families, society or anyone else.
"We had this epiphany," says Feinberg. "We had to look in the mirror and know who to point the finger at. We sat down at the computer all night long in late '93. and by 5 a.m. we had KIPP on our screen."
In a "desperate desire to be part of the solution," they based the program on their strong belief that there are no shortcuts in education. They wanted to work hard and become the best teachers they could be - and then train others to follow their model.
For Feinberg, Teach For America was supposed to be a short commitment between college and law school. But he decided not to leave until he had made a truly lasting positive impact. "Sixteen years later, I'm still working toward that," he says.
The program was up and running by the summer of 1994, when Feinberg and Levin met the Houston school board's requirement of recruiting at least 50 fifth graders by going door to door. Watching their kids hurry back into the classroom after lunch on the very first day, they knew that they were on to something.
During the early years, they were part of the Houston school district, moving from school to school, wherever there was room for the growing program. They encountered opposition from just about everyone - the school district didn't understand what they were doing, principals denied them access to facilities like auditoriums and many local businesses rejected their appeals for financial support.
"Plus, not to mention, we were young and white. What did we know about working with kids, especially in underserved communities?" Feinberg says, echoing a common objection to their project.
In spite of these challenges, Feinberg and Levin resolved to plow ahead. "Knowledge might be power, but ignorance is bliss," he says. "Our North Star was that we were just trying to do right by our kids." By 1998 they had received a charter from the state of Texas, effectively to become a one-school school district. At the same time, the program was expanding nationally. Levin had left in 1995 to start a KIPP school in the Bronx and the two actively sought good educators across the country, opening schools anywhere they found individuals capable of leading them. New sites ranged from inner-city neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago to rural communities like Gaston, North Carolina, which has a population of 900.
The KIPP school in North Philadelphia was born when Feinberg met Marc Mannella, the school's current head, at a Teach For America recruiting event on Penn's campus in 2002. Feinberg heard Mannella's impassioned speech and asked him to open a school in Philadelphia, a locale he'd been eyeing for a while. Mannella recalls being surprised at the offer.
"Mike, I'm too young - I'm only 25. How can I open a school?" Mannella protested.
"Well, I was 23 when I did it," replied Feinberg.
After a year of training on how to start and operate the type of high-performing school that KIPP had come to promote, Mannella leased a building, set a budget and recruited 90 students and four teachers, all for the 5th grade. Doors finally opened on July 14, 2003.
In the five years since then, the school has grown in capacity and reputation. There are now 320 fifth through eighth graders and Mannella no longer has to enlist families outside supermarkets and churches. Demand is such that potential students compete in a lottery, with unlucky hundreds remaining on waiting lists. The overwhelming number of willing learners recently prompted KIPP to plan a second school in the area, this one in West Philadelphia. "There are families who are desperate for a better educational option for their kids. We felt that if we could help them, we should," says Mannella, who will become CEO of the two schools when KIPP West Philadelphia Preparatory opens this summer.
Aside from longer hours and greater budget flexibility stemming from charter status, Mannella says culture and attitude are what truly differentiate KIPP schools like his from the district middle school down the street. His team of teachers, which includes four Penn alumni, emphasizes not that their students can go to college, but that they will, naming each homeroom after his or her own alma mater. According to Mannella, KIPP educators don't believe in excuses, neither for themselves nor from their students. They operate by two basic rules - work hard and be nice. "If our kids do that, we believe that they'll be successful," Mannella says. His staff abides by the principle that all children, when put in the right environment, will learn. "If you don't believe [this], you can't be in our building."
The majority of KIPP's Philadelphia students, 84 percent of whom qualify for the federal free or reduced lunch program, enter the program two or three grades behind in math or reading. After several years of ten-hour school days, most catch up and move on to magnet, college preparatory or boarding schools. None end up at their neighborhood high schools.
By the end of 2008, there will be 68 KIPP schools in the country, most of them serving 5th through 8th graders, though the program has expanded to elementary and high schools in the past few years as well. These days many communities - through their mayor's offices or local philanthropic organizations - are taking the initiative to apply for a KIPP school of their own. Feinberg hopes to open 10 to 15 per year, depending on how many qualified teachers he can find. The standards and expectations for KIPP educators are rigorous - half of all classroom teachers are Teach For America alumni, as are two-thirds of school leaders, KIPP-speak for "principals." Most are in their twenties. For Feinberg, a great teacher is someone who is passionate enough about the material that he doesn't need to consult a textbook, who can instill that kind of passion in his students and who will do whatever it takes to make kids learn. Among Feinberg's oft-cited quotes is one from writer James Baldwin: "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
Quality teaching like that seems to be paying off, according to 2006 statistics available on KIPP's Web site. In state exams mandated by the No Child Let Behind Act, nearly 60 percent of KIPP fifth grade classes - comprised of students who had only been with the program for one year - outperformed their local districts in reading and nearly 75 percent outperformed the districts in math. That same year, a full 100 percent of KIPP eighth grade classes outperformed their district averages in both reading and math. Most importantly, KIPP's track record as a college preparatory program has been highly successful. While fewer than one-fifth of low-income students typically attend college, 80 percent of KIPPsters who complete the eighth grade with the program later attend institutions of higher education.
Feinberg says he hopes that as the program expands in the coming years, it will come to influence how state governments regard education. Ever a good teacher, he provides a neat analogy, comparing KIPP to FedEx, whose business practices forced the post office - a government monopoly like the school system - to change its ways. Once KIPP has 42 schools serving 21,000 students in Houston (where Feinberg remains today) it will be educating 10 percent of Houston's youth, the same market share at which FedEx forced the post office to begin to offer next-day shipping by air, a service it had previously refused. Like FedEx, Feinberg says KIPP will obligate the government monopoly on education to stop making excuses and to provide real solutions.
Volunteers at KIPP schools say that they can see the learning come alive. College junior Jessica Gartner, who used to teach a cooking class at the KIPP Philadelphia Charter School, says just being inside was enough to see that it was a special place. "There are inspirational quotes on the walls, the children are so well behaved and really excited about learning," says Gartner. Acceptance letters to prestigious high schools are posted for all to see, parents and teachers communicate routinely and students work together to earn money for school trips. In fact, while
Gartner was there, she says the eighth grade class managed to visit Puerto Rico. The cooking class she taught was one of a handful of activities available for students on Saturdays, with others including ballet, Tai Chi, photography and mural painting.
College freshman Stephanie Lerner is equally enthusiastic when she describes her experiences working with KIPP. She got involved with KIPP Ujima Village Academy in Baltimore when she was in ninth grade and eventually organized a club for students at her private high school to tutor there. Today, she, her mother and her younger brother - who has inherited the club she founded - are all on the board of directors at the Ujima Village Academy. "You have to see how engaged the teachers are, how willing they are," she says. Despite the long school days, students get excited about otherwise mundane subjects like multiplication, using special chants and songs to help them learn. "They're going to school so many more hours than I ever did, waking up so many hours earlier than me," she says. Eagerly awaiting the opening of a new KIPP school near Penn's campus, she hopes that she'll be able to volunteer there through her membership in the West Philadelphia Tutoring Project. In the meantime, she'll be interning at KIPP Academy New York in the Bronx this summer. "I love this school and I want to be there all day long"