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our guest today is michael feinberg co-founder of the knowledge is power program
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kip foundation he launched kip in 1994 with his partner dave levin today almost 20 years later it has grown
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into a network of 141 high-performing schools in 20 states all over the u.s the network serves more than 50 000
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students most of whom are from low-income african-american or latino families mike thank you so much for joining us
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today thank you for having me here it's a pleasure now before you started kipp you taught
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third grade fifth grade for three years as part of the teach for america program
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could you tell me the story of your first teaching experience and how that led to the creation of kip
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sure actually i taught fifth grade for two years before starting the knowledge of power program
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in our third year uh we were 19 we were both 1992 teacher america corps members placed in houston and i was a fifth
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grade bilingual teacher teaching bilingual because i had a pulse there was such a shortage at the time
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dave was on another part of town teaching upper elementary as well and like all first-year teachers we were
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horrible teachers in fact i think that we probably gave everyone a run for the money for being the worst of the
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horrible teachers um we latched on to master teachers we learned how to teach you learn how to teach with
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apprenticeship the end of our first year we thought we were doing a pretty good job with our
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kids they loved learning they came excited about school and wanted to go to college and have a career we very
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naively thought we've done it on the k-12 assembly line we gave our kids a great fifth grade year opted to go on to
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bigger and better in middle school and that naive bubble burst about the second week into our second year of
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teaching when we watched our former kids start to just utterly fail and have the
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wheels come off in middle school and they were escaping school and joining gangs and doing drugs becoming parents
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alarming rates and the first was easy to blame the other schools and teachers and one night in late 1993 we had this
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epiphany that all that finger pointing was adding to the problem not contributing to a solution so we looked
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in the mirror we point the finger at ourselves we stayed up all night pouring our
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feelings of failure and frustration on the computer screen watch uh had you two oktong baby playing around repeat play
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and by about five o'clock in the morning we had the knowledge's power program kip
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on the computer screen and the premise of kit back then 20 years ago it is today is very simply there are no
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shortcuts if we're going to try to provide children with all the academic intellectual and character skills they
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need to do well not just in that grade level but in all facets of the k-12 college and the competitive world beyond
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then quit looking for the magic bullet let's just roll up our sleeves and get
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after it and so we started the knowledge power program thinking what can we do with fifth grade teachers everybody
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decided we were going to motivate kids to go to school from 7 30 to 5 4 hours on saturdays half the summer two hours
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of homework at night and we quickly realized one year was enough and so that's when we turned it
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into a school and now it's become a network of schools got it i'll come back a little bit to to
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to to the nature of the program but uh sticking for uh for now to the way you built kip what were some of
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the biggest challenges that you faced in the beginning and how did you overcome them the biggest challenge by far in the
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early years remains the biggest challenge today which is on any given day in any given hour in any
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given class period with any given student teaching and learning is extremely difficult it's
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everyone thinks that they know how to do it well because we've all got 13 14 15
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years of experience in k-12 but actually being in front of a group of children and and
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and imparting knowledge for from your brain heart into the brain heart of a 5 10 or 15 year old is an extremely
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difficult both art and science to do now that and to do it at a high level is the
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most difficult part about this the the other most difficult part is simply getting people to believe having putting
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forth an idea for a program and then a school that's going to end mass help underserved children succeed in school
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and life at the highest levels of society most people think you have two heads when you first say that now we've
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come a long way since the early 90s and more people believed today than did 20 years ago but collectively we don't yet
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believe in a society that the achievement gap is something that we can overcome and that's what we
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are trying to demonstrate and prove every single day that it can let's go back to
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talking about the basic structure of the program uh the no shortcuts approach is this something that you started with
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or is it something that evolved over time and how is your your the the basic uh structure of of kip uh the
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education model evolved over the past 20 years right uh the basic structure still
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in place i think i think the the most innovative part of kipp over the years is that we didn't try to be innovative
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we just tried to block and tackle really well we focused early on ourselves on just what could we do to
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become great teachers and to this day that that's the focus it's great great
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teaching um any school in the world that's doing a great job i'd argue has
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two basic ingredients it's great teaching and more of it that's simple now easy to say hard to do but it's a
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simple formula if there's any secret sauce is how do you create the culture that's such a great positive culture
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that allows great teaching and more of it to happen but that basic structure of longer
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school day week and year and focus on great teaching and learning and having a culture of high expectations and
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focusing on not just inputs but the ultimate output which is getting our kids to go to and through college and
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have the freedom to do this for what they want to do those things were put in place from the very beginning and we're
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focused on executing on those things day in and day out the last thing i think i'd say that is there from the beginning
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is our core beliefs and i think one of our most central core beliefs is that promises to children are sacred
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because kipp is a choice public school we we sit in living rooms and kitchen tables talking to kids and parents
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saying if you choose to come to kipp we will do whatever it takes to help you come to we will we'll do whatever it
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takes to help you get to and through college that that's a pretty bold promise
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because we're not talking about what we're going to do for that kin family
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next week next month next year sometimes not even next decade we're promising
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what's going to happen in 20 years in some cases and we're on the hook and
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that's something that we feel more accountable to that sacred promise then any accountability plan any state or
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federal government can lay on us and i think that that's what gets us out of
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bed in the morning and that's what motivates us to do right by our kids and parents and our communities do the kids
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and the parents also make a similar promise and and and uh so is is your approach to select the most highly
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motivated uh kids and people we don't select our kids and parents they select
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us uh it's a it's a public open enrollment school which means anyone can can come
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if there's if more kids and parents want to come in space available we have to go
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to a lottery and the only kids who don't have to be in a lottery are the younger
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brothers and sisters so we do not get to do any kind of selection we just are a public school of of choice and whoever
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wants to come we it we are we are on the hook with that sacred promise to deliver and help them learn
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everything they need to learn to be set up for success in school and life so you serve about 50 000 students right
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now across the 141 schools that are part of your network how many students apply
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uh to become part of cap and uh and how many are you able to admit it varies region or region where i am in in
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houston where we now have 22 schools and 11 000 kids last year we had nearly 10 000 kids and parents apply to come to
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kipp we had room for 2 000. so we had a very uh difficult lottery where we were saying sorry no room to 80 percent of
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all the kids and parents who want to come which that's one of the things the thing that i wake up in the middle
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of the night kicking and screaming having nightmares about are how we're going to keep our sacred promise to the
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kids we're serving and when i'm not having a nightmare about that the other
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thing that's making me wake up at night are how are we going to continue to grow
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to serve those other thousands of kids and parents who are looking for another option and we're not able to deliver yet
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so we're trying to grow as fast as we can but as slow as we must to maintain
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quality great so that's that's a great approach i think uh balancing growth and and not
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compromising on quality uh is is is really tough but yeah i'm glad you're straddling that
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there's people that are amazed about our growth and how big we've gotten and we
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are very proud of having this high performing network of 141 schools and 50 000 kids
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but remember it we're about to celebrate our 20th anniversary in 2014. there was
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no growth for the first six years right and so and then when we started growing we the first thing we did we put
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in place a terrific school leadership training program with just a few fisher fellows our school leaders we
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were training and over the last two decades decade and a half we ramped it up to now
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we can be growing at 15 or 20 schools a year but this has not happened overnight
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nor did it even happen in a decade it's taken 20 years to grow this way so this
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is this is just slow and steady progress keeping a commitment staying on track and just executing day in and day out on
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a strategy so uh you you mentioned that for the first six years it was kind of not much growth and then at the sixth
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year there was a jump start was that the year when you partnered with uh uh the fishers uh yes
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at the gas or the founder co-founders of gap right so uh how did that come about so kip started the program
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and we had a chance to start it as a school both in houston then in new york city right dave levin's from new york
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city so he went we had both offers and being young and dumb we took both offers so dave started kipp academy in the
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bronx i stay in houston star kip academy there both with fifth grade we grew one year
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at a time our heads were down we were focused on our kids and delivering on sacred promises by 1999 they be our two
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schools became full-size fifth grade through eighth grade charter schools uh they were they were some of the highest
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performing schools in the respective communities of houston new york city people started visiting 60 minutes did a
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piece on our kids that opened up the floodgates we had people calling saying we saw that program on tv can we order
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15 kips for next year please and we were saying let's go check inventory um and believing in teach for america and
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the mission of teacher america of one day all children should get a great education
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we start thinking so how do we leverage the success of this little tiny school in southwest houston and this little
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tiny school in the south bronx new york to greater good so we started asking people for help and advice on how to
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scale ideas and and scale success and we were fortunate enough to to get in touch with don doris fisher the founders
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of the capital navy that were very focused and passionate about ed reform in the united states and it was a it was
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a terrific match and and we created a new foundation together called kip foundation i want to call it the north
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shore cuts foundation but don is it a nonprofit yeah non-profit dot don knew more about brand
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names than me he said call it kip and we said yes sir and so we started kipp foundation in april of 2000 with the
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goal of finding amazing teachers who have a fire in the belly to do this work beyond the four walls of their classroom
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we would train them for a year in this fellowship the fisher fellowship to have them to get the business and leadership
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skills to complement their terrific instructional skills and from there help them start the school of their dreams
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and that's how we've been growing as we have for the past 13 years you've mentioned a couple of times the
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importance of passionate teachers what do you what do you think makes a great teacher
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and how do you identify the teachers who are the best fit for kip i think there are four things that make a teacher a
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great teacher first and foremost it's a teacher that that has a lot of knowledge
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and passion in the subject at the subject matter they're teaching they don't need to rely on the teacher's
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edition to teach they can bring a wealth of outside resources in the classroom and make the learning come alive and if
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they love history the kids will love history right second the teacher knows how to take all that knowledge and
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passion from their brain and heart and transfer it into the brain and heart brain heart of a five ten or fifteen
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year old which for some people is a gift for most of us mortals that's a skill
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which has to be acquired over several years to learn how to do that really well third we're looking for teachers who
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have the basic attitude of doing whatever it takes that they're they're going to be the constant not the
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variable and even though kids especially in from underserved communities come to
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school with lots of variables and lots of potential excuses why learning is difficult the teachers will try to be
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the constant not the variable for as much as possible and lastly to to avoid uh being the example of the the sports team
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that has the loaded with talent but never wins the championship you also have to have to have teachers
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that buy into the basic core beliefs and values of that school right it's possible to be a terrific teacher as i
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named but still not fit with the rest of the faculty and we need people who are going to be good teammates not just in
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their classrooms but in the teachers lounge in the locker room as well right um now so so so you partnered with uh
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the the fishers to to launch the create the kept foundation you took kept national
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uh what challenges did you face in scaling things up and how did you overcome them and what lessons did you
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learn uh you know for us if great teaching and more of it are the ingredients of grade school the critical
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path is the great school leader because that great the principal the principal or the school leader is going
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to be the one who's going to recruit the great teachers develop the great teachers retain the great teachers
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motivate the great teachers and so for us the most challenging part has been to recruit and select those amazing
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terrific leaders we've had in the last 13 years we've had over 5000 people
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apply for the fisher fellowship we've given out about 190 fellowships about 30
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people didn't make it through the fellowship so we're batting about a two
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to three percent acceptance rate um so god bless the fisher family and and many other funders who who've
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been who've been making this possible that's not a quota that's how many
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people we we've been able to successfully find to do this work and uh it's getting relatively easier as
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we've created this large footprint of schools more and more of our fisher fellows are our teachers who are
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developing over time to the leadership pipeline but finding these talented terrific
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school leaders and then keeping them because you know running a school these are like dog
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years right so it it it really you know i had a ponytail when i started um so we
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so it takes really just commitment and skill and hard work and tenacity and so finding these people and keeping them is
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the biggest challenge i have a question about your students and this is based on some discussions
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i've had with people in other countries who are trying to do similar work as you
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are doing here one of the things they've found is that although they may have a great program
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that that educates the kids in school when the children go back to the social and family environment
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sometimes it has the effect of undoing some of the good that has happened in school
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i wonder if you have ever faced that challenge and and uh have you ever how you've dealt with it we have families
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and we form great relationships with all of our families as part of this work we're
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partners with with our families and there are examples where the parents or grandparents almost feel threatened
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by their their child or grandchild suddenly learning more about the world than they
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have but that i would say is is more the exception to the rule just about every home i've been in and
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i've been over a thousand homes families are hungry for their children to to live the
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american dream and now that we're doing international work as well and we're in we're helping
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educators start these kip inspired schools in india and south africa and israel and chile and mexico i realized
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that the american dream is really a global dream it's hard it's hard to find
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parents who don't want their children to have a better life than them and they and parents
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deliberately realize or simply instinctively realize that education is the ticket for their kids to have a
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better life right i'm very fascinated by your overseas expansion can you tell me
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a little more uh about what were the challenges involved there sure uh for a bunch of years we've always had
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international educators knock on our door and ask for help and that traffic has increased in the
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last four or five years it's i think it's due to the the growth of of as teach for america has become teach
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for all and teach roles and i was in two dozen countries more and more of the alumni they finish their two years uh
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you know half of them want to go to grad school or goldman or mckinsey the other half
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want to stay in the classroom and stay in their schools and make a difference and they wind up knocking on our door
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and for a few years we when they first came and asked us for help and they would come and see what we were doing
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and say can you come to our country our answer was always sorry we haven't even
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fixed the state of arkansas yet we have a lot of work to do here um i like to give more hope so i told people look we
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can help you the way we help ourselves we focus on leadership training and if you have the skills or passion or you
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know someone in your country's got the skills and passion and there's resources
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to get them to united states come over here i'll sneak them in the side door of
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the fisher fellowship we'll train them in leadership with our fisher fellows
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have them stay in the u.s for a few months they can beg bro and steal all the great ideas
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because we we don't believe in intellectual property we give it away you know one one day all children um and
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then they'll go back to their country start a great school it won't be a kipp
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school but it'll be a kipp inspired school and they'll be part of our network and they'll have this cohort
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with the kipp school leaders and we'll learn and grow together um we didn't
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market it we just put the bait in the water and the israelis for the first country to take me up on it then then
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came the indians um then came the mexicans uh then the south africans and most lately the chileans um and where
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you know we we spun off a new nonprofit called the one world network of schools because there's such a growing line at
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the door so when people knock on kip's door we refer them to one world and the
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one world network of schools will help both do the do the training support on the back end help people
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start these schools and most importantly you know if we're this is going to grow
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when people first knock on our door they think they want to replicate kip what they really want to replicate is the
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kipp school leadership program i mean you know my indian friends don't talk about wanting to start
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with dozens or hundreds of schools they need thousands right there's a little
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bit of a scale issue in india right and so what they they don't have enough philanthropy and we don't have enough
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seats to train everyone in the united states so ultimately we have to replicate is the kipp school leadership
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program so there's an in-country place for teachers to get trained to start these breakthrough new transformative
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schools in country that's how you can scale this right it's fascinating how do you measure
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kip's success the ultimate outcome is did we deliver on our sacred promises to our children
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so have they did they get to and through college and now have the freedom to do this world what they want to do and so
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tracking from eighth grade which we do to be more transparent i could tell you 100 of my kids are going to college if i
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look at my class of 2013 but that's not those are not the same kids we started with so if i look at my
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eighth graders from a bunch of years ago and wherever they went to high school we tracked them all
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85 to 90 percent are going to college and so far depending on the region 45 to 48 percent have graduated from college
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and we think about that in two ways you know compared to eight percent of low-income
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kids who graduate from college where five to six times the national average we celebrate that compared to 31 of all
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adults in the united states have a college degree we're a lot higher than that we celebrate that
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compared to 82 percent of top quartile income kid to graduate from college we're still well below that number so we
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still have an achievement gap and we are hungry to get better every day so what what are the main obstacles to
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closing that achievement gap and how are you tackling them several things first off is just
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continued rigor in pre-k through 12th grade and getting the kids for academic success to
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be ready for for college work and not need any remediation uh those numbers i gave you were all
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kids that we started with in fifth grade in a lot of cases didn't even have a
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high school and ended after eighth grade we've since started primary schools
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those oldest kids are now in eighth grade so starting in 2018 we should see the benefits of starting kids even
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younger but that that's that's part of it so it's the academic rigor
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secondly it's there's certainly financial issues both both direct and indirect direct is the cost of higher
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education is going through the roof it's difficult to afford indirect how do you deal with that
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help our kids just apply to lots and lots of scholarships and maximize financial aid as much as possible and
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also deal with the families because the indirect challenges with with finances our parents
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are sometimes pushing their kids to stop school and come back home and take an 8
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hour job to help the family pay rent or that kid to make tuition payments is working 40 hours a week in the mall
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which means that's 40 hours a week they're not studying the library so their grades suffer so so their
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financial aid package goes down as a vicious circle that's the financial bucket there is there's horrible college
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counseling in this country if it exists at all in some schools where kids who should be staying close
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to home go far away kids who should go to a small school go to a big school kids that get into two schools
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they're not given the data this school this they're both equally hard to get
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into schools same financial aid package this school's got a 62 completion rate
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this school's got a 28 completion rate why won't you choose this school where
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you double your chances of finishing just by going with the flow right things like that
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fourth are just all the challenges of being a first-generation low-income kid you can't call home and you can't you
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have a lifeline to get advice on how to climb the mountain to and through college and lastly are the non-cognitive
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skills which are being pioneered and studied here at the university of pennsylvania by martin seligman and
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angela duckworth about you know people are not going to graduate from college only because they can read write
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and think critically they also need grit they need self-control they need optimism right they they need they need
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zest they need when no one's born with those things they developed them over
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the years and so those are all the big buckets we have to work on both on the k-12 side and on higher ed side because
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higher ed has a responsibility as well and it's fantastic to see the university
00:23:12
of pennsylvania be a leader on the higher ed sided community about making sure that we close the
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achievement gap and our first generation low-income kids in this country graduate
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at the exact same rate as all of our other kids well thank you for what you said about upenn
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but especially when it comes to funding their college education does your curriculum emphasize things
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like um awareness of personal uh finance or financial literacy or entrepreneurship
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or leadership to some degree or do you think that might help again be because we're focused on getting our kids to go
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to and through college and not just pass the state test our kipp through college
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team starts in middle school with teaching kids about what it's going to take to be
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prepared and set for success in college and life and so certainly leadership and personal finance and
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entrepreneurship are all part of that we need to develop in our kids you know with my favorite shirt in the kip team
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and family is kipp new york city has a shirt that shows the pie chart of the ingredients of kit and it says 49
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academics 51 character right and so uh and those numbers we're choosing very deliberately there's a lot
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beyond traditional tested subjects so we need to give our kids to set them up for
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success and i have one last question for you where would you like kip to be on its
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25th birthday and what can we do to help you get there uh by our 20 i would love to be able to say
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that we we are we are knocking on the door closing the achievement gap and we're not just trying to get up to 50 of
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our kids going to and through college but we've we've blown past 60 percent
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we're getting close to 70 percent and we are proving the possible and by us doing
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so we've inspired our friends to do as well and the and the the excuses are ending
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because the daily excuses end our days of solutions are going to start and as a result i would love to see that our 8
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000 kid wait list in houston shrink with without us without maintaining quality and has shrunk because the other schools
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have gotten better so the kids and parents stop want to come that's what i'm hoping to get to by 25th would be
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fantastic and anything we can do to help you get today yeah definitely you can a few things
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first off penn has been a leader on on the most competitive higher ed side and the ivy league side
00:25:32
of helping whether it's kipp kids and other kids from high performing schools
00:25:37
local neighborhoods come here and succeed here that proves it possible right then and there and having more and
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more kids come here and be successful helps get more believers to believe in the potential of all of our children and
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that's huge secondly uh the things that the university can can be doing to partner with k-12 and give
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feedback down to us of where the holes what still are our kids not doing well on day one that we could fix in 12th
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grade 10th grade 8th grade 4th grade pre-k to get themselves more success and lastly
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it's about great teaching and more of it so having the the terrific faculty here
00:26:13
at penn continues to help teachers sharpen the saw and develop the the teaching skills
00:26:20
and the content skills they need to be great teachers is also a fantastic resource the university
00:26:26
has been doing and i hope does more of in the future well mike good luck to you and thank you
00:26:32
very much for speaking with knowledge at wharton thank you for having me here go
00:26:35
quakers you