KIPP: DIAMOND Academy

The Washington Post (online column)
“Getting Mad About Schools”
By Jay Mathews
June 6, 2006
http://www.washingtonpost.com

One chilly morning in January 1996 Anne Patterson, superintendent for the western region of the Houston Independent School District, picked up the telephone in her office and listened with growing puzzlement as an administrator at district headquarters began to yell at her as if she were an errant seventh grader who had just pulled all the fire alarms.

That was only the first call. There were several others that day, full of anger at Patterson and at a 27-year-old principal named Mike Feinberg. Feinberg's innovative little middle school, a favorite Patterson project, had apparently ruined what might have been an otherwise peaceful day of reading papers and attending meetings for many people at headquarters. They wanted something done about it.

It took awhile for Patterson to sort through the bile and venom spewing out of her telephone receiver, but eventually she learned that Feinberg, in the guise of a lesson on advocacy in American democracy, had instructed his 70 fifth-graders to call about 20 downtown administrators and complain that nothing had been done to find them a school building for the following year. Their school, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy, planned to add a sixth-grade on its way to becoming a fifth-through-eighth grade school, but no space had been found. The 10-year-old callers, all from low-income families, were well taught and very polite. That apparently only made it worse, since the calls aggravated the feelings of guilt that are a part of nearly every inner city school administrator's emotional makeup.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!? they shouted at Patterson. GET THAT GUY OFF MY BACK!!

How and why Feinberg fomented this crisis, how Patterson handled it and what was the result are all interesting parts of the KIPP story. But what interests me is the idea of pushing boundaries to improve achievement and getting slapped around for it. I think it is a useful lesson for educators in the D.C. schools, and several other big-city districts, as they attempt to revive their moribund schools and give their mostly low-income students the creative and challenging educations they deserve.

I have spent a lot of time in the worst schools in the District and Los Angeles and visited similarly struggling schools in other cities. What strikes me is how little anger is ever expressed about the mediocre lessons, low standards and decrepit conditions that characterize such places. When I ask good teachers why more is not being done, the common response is a roll of the eyes and a shrug of the shoulders.

It can't be helped, they say. Getting mad won't do any good. Apathy rules.

But when Mike Feinberg became angry and did something outrageous about it, in turn infuriating several headquarters officials and Patterson, his friend and protector, it did make a difference. He got the space he needed for the next year, and after several other such episodes -- one so bad that even Patterson stopped speaking to him -- he and his young and energetic staff had produced the greatest gains for low-income students anywhere in Houston, or the country for that matter.

The same thing happened with Dave Levin, co-founder with Feinberg of the KIPP schools. He taught in Houston with Feinberg and later started a KIPP Academy in the south Bronx. Levin, then 25, disobeyed orders, broke rules, was regularly yelled at by administrators twice his age and only survived because, like Feinberg, he found a savvy, experienced veteran -- Susan Winston -- in the school district administration willing to clean up his messes and show him how to get through the next day without offending too many bureaucrats.

Patterson, 61, has started speaking to Feinberg again, and she is now a consultant to the growing KIPP empire. She described herself as "Mike's babysitter," but is officially a mentor to new KIPP principals in Houston. Winston, 56, has similarly retired from the New York City school system and now mentors KIPP principals there. By this summer there will be 52 KIPP charter or contract public schools in 16 states and the District, where KIPP DC executive director Susan Schaeffer, like Feinberg 10 years ago, is fighting for space for her newest school. KIPP students in the five schools that had eighth-grade test results in 2005, including the original schools begun by Feinberg and Levin, improved on average from the 28th to the 74th percentile in reading and math in just four years.

To get such results, do teachers and parents and administrators have to be insufferable? Maybe not. Both Patterson and Winston say their favorite clients -- Feinberg and Levin -- are more mature and less irritating now. Feinberg in particular, by most accounts the more troublesome of the two, is now "quite the diplomat," Patterson said.

We have examples of some big city school systems that have made significant progress under persistent but polite pressure from above. The impressive record of Boston school superintendent Tom Payzant, retiring after 10 years, is one example. Patterson said she thinks she and Feinberg only managed to make headway in Houston for KIPP because that city had a far-sighted and intelligent school board, and an accomplished superintendent, future U.S. education secretary Rod Paige. Paige saw the value of Feinberg's efforts even when the KIPP principal waited beside Paige's car in the school district parking lot all day so that he could ambush him with a request for help in another space crisis.

Yet anger, or at least firmness in the face of apathy, has its uses. I would like to see more of it in the D.C. schools I visit. I would like to see students given more homework, and disciplined when they don't complete it. I would like to see principals point out to teachers that they are not engaging every student in their classes and showing them how to do it. I would like to see parents complaining to school board members about inadequate teaching and low test scores, rather than just school closings and changes in vacation schedules.

After all, what was so wrong with Feinberg's disruptive lesson in advocacy? He timed it for a teacher training day when his students had a holiday, but administrators would be in their offices. He gave a lesson on how peaceful change comes in America and gave the students a script to help them out. They practiced the words: "I am an extremely hard-working student. I am part of the KIPP Academy and we were supposed to know where we were going to be next year, but we don't know yet. I wonder if you have any information about where our new building will be. My family and I are very worried about where we're going to be next year. We want to make sure we continue to get a great education."

Feinberg told them what crank calls were, and made sure they understood this was something different, a polite appeal to the authorities for redress of appropriate grievances. They had to act like adults. "Look," he said, "the minute you call up and start giggling on the phone, this is all ruined."

Patterson called Feinberg in and shouted at him herself, but they both knew that was not her style and her heart was not in it. To protect herself, she wrote him up -- a method of toothless discipline popular in many school districts. She gave him an official letter, to be placed in his personnel file, telling him what he had done wrong and directing him how to act differently in the future. She told all of the officials that had complained to her about Feinberg that she had written him up.

What actually happened was that after Feinberg signed the reprimand, adding the smiley face that both he and Levin often use in their communications, she tossed the letter in one of her drawers, not Feinberg's file, and forgot about it.

"This is something Ann and I still kind of argue about," Feinberg told me. "The fact that, to get through to the school district, they are like the ocean liner. It takes forever to get them to turn." His advocacy homework had been partly motivated by his view that schools in the wealthier parts of Houston got much of what they wanted because "those affluent, white parents scream and yell if they don't get it for their kids."

Patterson said Feinberg finally pushed her too far the night when he failed to come to her defense as parents accuse her of not caring for the students in his school. Five years later he finally persuaded her to forgive him.

Patterson acknowledged that the last several months before her retirement might have been happier if some administrators in her area, including her, had been more sharp-eyed and pushy. Two high schools that were in the center of Houston's dropout statistics scandal were her responsibility. She said she did not know that the schools had been falsely reporting they had no dropouts. She trusted the principals and the staff to do their jobs, and nobody risked angering the people who faked the numbers by suggesting they were part of a cover-up until Sharpstown High School assistant principal Robert Kimball spoke up.

Patterson recalled that at her first teaching job in Houston 34 years ago, she found herself continually short of supplies for her fifth-graders and had to wheedle money out of her husband to buy what her students needed. After several months, she happened to visit the office of the school's supplies coordinator and found behind the woman's office a large storage room with all the supplies that she had been denied.

Was the coordinator hoarding supplies to sell for a profit? Did she give them just to teachers she liked? Patterson never found out, and as a 27-year-old probationary hire, she never asked, or complained.

She first met Feinberg and Levin when they were that age. Asked how she thought they would have handled the case of the missing supplies, Patterson said she had no doubt: "They would have staged a robbery or something, but they would have got them."