Charlotte Observer - “Charter School Coming To Charlotte; Teaching style yields success; KIPP approach rejects notion that poverty, race hinder students”

By Ann Doss Helms
March 25, 2007

ROANOKE RAPIDS -- In Francie Webb's fifth-grade class, a vocabulary drill looks like a pep rally. Hands wave wildly when Webb asks a question. Chants and gestures, done in unison, help the words stick in young minds.

Most of the 458 students at KIPP Gaston College Prep, a charter school in northeastern North Carolina, are African Americans from low-income homes. They're outperforming white and middle-class peers on N.C. reading and math tests.

Now Keith Burnam, a 26-year-old KIPP math teacher, will see whether the Knowledge Is Power Program works in Charlotte, a city desperate for similar success.

In Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, pass rates for poor and minority students are so low that a judge has threatened to close inner-city high schools.

KIPP Gaston opened a high school last year. Pass rates were comparable to those at Providence High, CMS's most affluent and highest-performing school.

Burnam, who will be principal at the east Charlotte school when it opens this summer, is out to prove that race and poverty need not hobble Charlotte students' prospects, either.

"This," says Burnam, "is the civil rights struggle of our time."

Experts have analyzed why the Knowledge Is Power Program, with schools in 16 states, succeeds where most of the nation's best educators fail.

There are the eight- or nine-hour school days. The Saturday and summer sessions. The parents who get their kids to school and make sure their homework is done. The young teachers working insane hours.

And there is a culture that immerses students in the value of hard work and academic success.

"This school, it's not an ordinary school," says fifth-grader Jovonte Simmons. "It's a learning school."

No shortcuts

Alazzia Hasty, an eighth-grader, says she left a school where she got picked on for reading avidly and speaking correctly.Selene Wynn chose KIPP for her son, Justin, when he started saying families like his, with two college-educated African American parents, were abnormal.

With an evangelical fervor, KIPP staff work to demolish the notion that dark skin, poverty and academic failure go hand-in-hand.

From the moment fifth-graders arrive, they're taught to make eye contact, speak up and show enthusiasm. They're imbued with college ambition. Good behavior and extra effort earn field trips to universities.

Walls sport messages such as "No excuses, no shortcuts."

Have weak skills or learning disabilities? Stay after school and catch up.

Parents can't help with homework? Call a teacher. They expect to spend nights answering questions.

"It's a big test of time management," chuckles science teacher Michele Stallings, who often finds her evenings a juggling match between her cell phone and her baby.

Zeal is a must

Young teachers with missionary zeal and workhorse stamina fuel KIPP's success.

"It's a lifestyle," says Burnam, who often started work at 7 a.m. and left late at night. "We're trailblazing."

As a charter school, KIPP decides how to spend the state and local tax money it gets for each student. Classes are large -- 25 to 30 students -- and students sit in folding chairs at bare-bones desktops. That frees money to pay teachers 20 percent more than counterparts in traditional public schools, to cover the long hours, Saturdays and summers.

But money isn't what draws teachers like Webb, a Duke graduate who gave up the social life of New York City to work in a community where timber, prisons and paper mills are the economic lifeblood. She heard about KIPP Gaston, came for a visit, and was overwhelmed by the passion she saw in class.

"I came here for a couple of hours and was in tears when I left," she says.

Teach For America, a national program that recruits top college graduates for two-year stints teaching disadvantaged kids, is entwined with KIPP. Two men who had finished their work in inner-city Houston launched the first school.

When their success brought a grant to expand, one of the first people they hired was Caleb Dolan, whom Teach For America had sent to Northampton County Public Schools.

That's how a program hailed by many as the best hope for urban education came to have an outpost in a peanut field 90 miles northeast of Raleigh.

KIPP Gaston hires many Teach For America alums who didn't study education. The downside: The staff looks dismal on paper. Last year 6 percent of KIPP Gaston's teachers were "highly qualified," as defined by federal law, compared with 86 percent statewide.

Dolan, who leads the Gaston middle school, says he's working on getting his staff licensed, but admits he's more focused on results than credentials.

"You're in school from 8 to forever," Burnam says. "When do you have time to take classes?"

Cream of the crop?

KIPP's critics say part of its academic advantage comes from pulling hard-working students and supportive families from traditional public schools."We have lost a number of our top students to the KIPP Academy," says Northampton County Superintendent Kathi Gibson. "Their clientele is basically a different clientele."

Not so, say Dolan and Burnam. They get kids like Justin, who earned A's and B's in his old school. But many read at a second- or third-grade level when they start fifth grade.

Tonya Cowan says her daughter, Danielle, was being promoted despite failing state tests.

At KIPP, Cowan says, staff constantly assure Danielle that she can get into college if she works hard. And they find help for her learning disabilities.

Danielle, a seventh-grader, still struggles with academics and self-confidence, but she's improving. "She would struggle to read one page," her mom says. "Now she goes right through."

KIPP schools use nationally normed tests to gauge students' progress. Independent studies have concluded that students make significant gains, not only compared with public-school peers but with how they did in previous schools.

KIPP's demands aren't for everyone. Students and teachers say at some point, almost everyone begs to quit.

Eighth-grader Johnelle Kincaid remembers how much she resented being at school at 9 a.m. on a Saturday. Now she's bought into the mission.

"Is it actually worth watching cartoons rather than go to college?" she said.

About KIPP

• Launched in 1994 in Houston.

• Has 52 schools with 12,000 students in 16 states and Washington, D.C.

• More than 95 percent of KIPP students are black or Hispanic; more than 80 percent come from low-income homes.

• Almost 80 percent of students who complete eighth grade in KIPP schools go to college, compared with one in five low-income students nationwide.

• KIPP Houston just raised $65 million to expand from eight to 42 schools in that city.

• Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of clothing retailer Gap, have given more than $40 million to expand KIPP nationwide.

• Details: www.kipp.org

KIPP GASTON COLLEGE PREP

• Opened in 2001 in Gaston, N.C., just south of the Virginia line (not connected with Gaston College in the Charlotte region).

• Only KIPP school in the Carolinas.

• Currently has 458 students in grades 5-10; will expand through 12th grade in 2009-10.

• 87 percent of students are black, 10 percent white, the rest Asian, Latino or other. Twelve percent have disabilities.

• Poverty level is about 70 percent.

• Details: www.kippgcp.org

What KIPP Expects

STUDENTS

• Attend school eight to nine hours a day, alternating Saturdays and three weeks in summer.• Do homework every day.

• Stay after school for if they need extra help.

• Work hard and show enthusiasm.

PARENTS

• Make sure students attend school and do homework.

• Provide 30 minutes of reading time each night.

• Support the staff on discipline and other decisions.

• Allow students to attend any field trips they earn.

TEACHERS

• Commit to long classroom hours and after-school tutoring.

• Are available by phone to help with homework.

• Constantly review their teaching for ways to improve.

• Help all students achieve at high levels or lose their job.