Fifth-grader Aaron Ward spent last school year at Kirkpatrick Elementary School, where the principal and teachers are constantly challenged by the sheer numbers of needy kids, many of whom have behavioral problems, lead woefully imperfect home lives or arrive at the school testing below their grade level. At Kirkpatrick, Aaron got into fights, was a near constant troublemaker and was generally a nightmare who couldn't seem to be reined in. When word got out that there'd be a new East Nashville charter school coming, where school days were significantly longer—7:25 a.m. to 5 p.m.—where Saturday and summer classes were required and where teachers were given the freedom and latitude to use more creative pedagogical methods, Aaron's mother Mable signed him up.
Which is no easy process, by the way. Last spring, KIPP Academy's founding principal, Randy Dowell, beat the bushes, looking for student and parent recruits to fill his incoming fifth-grade class. He met Mable and Aaron, who live in Cayce Homes, and began to tell them about KIPP (which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). To qualify, students had to have been previously enrolled in schools that the state regards as failing to meet minimum achievement requirements, which Kirkpatrick was. Both kids and guardians were required to sign contracts, consenting to a host of commitments dealing with dress code, homework and significant parental involvement.
Asked now—just six months into a new life at a radically different school—whether he fights, a polite Aaron says simply, "No." Asked why, he offers an unintentionally comic response: "If you want to fight, you go to Kirkpatrick, Dalewood or Bailey," he explains, before going on to say of his teachers and fellow students at KIPP, "We're a team and we're a family.
"I learned my lesson that fighting will not get me nowhere but all locked up or on the streets somewhere," he continues. "When I started coming to KIPP, Mr. Dowell told me I didn't need to fight, that it won't get me nowhere.... I have changed, because I'm getting ready to go to college." Look for him, sometime in, say, 2014 to be the starting quarterback at Vanderbilt University, where he says he hopes to study.
Such behavioral metamorphoses aren't unique to Aaron at this unassuming little school of 60 students on Douglas Avenue, which will grow one grade each year until enrolling eighth-graders. KIPP Academy characterizes itself as a rigorous, college-preparatory middle school where students are taught to "work hard, be nice and be honest." Just as significantly as behavioral sea changes, achievement among these children, more than 90 percent of whom qualify for free and reduced meals, has soared. During the summer, median class scores showed students were performing at the second-grade level in reading and math. Now students are performing at the fifth- and sixth-grade levels in math. Reading scores have seen similarly dramatic improvements. As recently as October, 10 students were still reading at the second-grade level; now only three do. And, in October, 12 students were reading above grade level; now 23 of the students are.
Students and teachers here share what seems like an utterly unordinary kind of relationship. Teachers are tough with their students, but they're also generous. Workdays for staff run more than 10 hours, and school days for kids are nearly 10 hours, too, two to three hours more than for most public school students. Those children who don't live on the bus routes are often picked up by staff members for school and ferried home as well. (Dowell jokingly calls this the "KIPP taxi program.") Teachers are available by cell phone in the evenings for homework help, and kids must attend school every other Saturday and for three weeks during the summer. Most impressively, everyone there—adult and kid alike—wants to be there. Essentially, KIPP has achieved what most of us may have once thought impossible: it has 10- and 11-year-olds buying into the notion that learning is fun—and a privilege.
So, for that reason and many others, the Nashville Scene has chosen the students and staff at KIPP Academy as the newspaper's 2005 Nashvillians of the Year.
It's about 10:30 a.m., and 20-something math teacher Adam Nadeau is standing on top of his desk waving a hair dryer around in the air. It's clear that this is no ordinary classroom. Hanging from the ceiling are streamers that he's using in conjunction with the hair dryer to teach the kids the law of gravity.
Eventually, he stands down and begins his instruction at the front of the class, before he starts walking among the students, offering praise, the occasional back pat, discreet sidebars with students who seem tired or are having trouble paying attention, and, at times, some tough love. "Are you talking right now?" he gruffs at one point to a particularly hyper student. She bows her head in regret and answers a simple "yes," at which point Nadeau says something you'd probably never hear in a traditional public school classroom. "Thanks for being honest," he says, without the faintest hint of sarcasm.
Students here are strictly disciplined, required to sit still and straight, to look directly at their teachers, to be respectful and to try to complete every assignment, even if they're not sure how. Eye rolling, head shaking, leaving an answer blank or wearing an untucked shirt will all get kids chastised here—made to stand in a corner, exiled from watching Polar Express on the last full day of school before the Christmas holiday, or even banished from a group shot being taken by a Scene photographer. But being honest and being thoughtful will earn a student points. And teachers will bend over backward to make their kids feel special. (Nadeau, ever the math geek, may even have a furry four-legged companion named Fraction with whom he'll surprise the students when they return in January. It's possible she's pregnant, in which case her name will be Multiplication.)
"Ninety percent of what we teach here is culture," says a clearly tireless Dowell, a young, bearded teaching alumnus of such school districts as Charlotte, N.C., and Boston, Mass., who seems to have the energy of a college kid. "We're teaching both character and academics. We wear uniforms"—KIPP T-shirts and jeans—"because this is not a beauty pageant."
Even the uniforms have a story. All KIPP students (also known as "KIPPsters") had to earn their T-shirts—by working hard, by being respectful to their teachers, by being good teammates to their fellow students. Back in October, only one kid hadn't earned his shirt: 11-year-old T.J. Goodrum. "He wants it really bad," Dowell told the Scene during the fall, when the principal took to throwing the unearned T-shirt over his shoulder while he taught. (Yes, the principal at KIPP actually teaches.) Kids would arrive in the morning—they get there starting at about 6:45 a.m.—asking Dowell whether this would be the day T.J. would officially be recognized as part of the team.
"They would come to us," a proud Dowell said then, smiling. "When T.J. earns his shirt, it will be a big celebration. He doesn't have to be perfect—he can make mistakes—but he has to acknowledge when he makes them."
"I thought it was never going to come," says T.J.'s mother, Tameika Bomani. "Every week, we were anticipating, is this the week he's going to get his shirt?" The moment finally came later that month. "The whole school was crying, everybody had a ball," Bomani says. "He finally started accepting that when he does something wrong, he needs to say, 'OK, I'm sorry,' and move on."
Nashville's KIPP Academy is one of more than 40 schools like it across the country whose origins began in 1994, when two Houston teachers became disillusioned about the lack of achievement among their fifth-graders. They convinced Rod Paige, then the Houston school superintendent who later became secretary of education, to let them try something new—namely, to offer more rigorous academics, longer school hours and strict discipline in schools run by principals with the authority to hire and fire teachers as they saw fit. Paige gave the green light, and something remarkable happened: 98 percent of their students passed the state's standardized tests, relative to just 50 percent the year before.
The results from KIPP schools have been consistent and dramatic. Earlier this year, the Educational Policy Institute released a report saying that 27 KIPP charter schools have seen "large and significant gains" beyond what is customary for urban schools. From fall 2003 to fall 2004, fifth-graders at those schools registered average gains of 7.5 points in reading, 9.1 points in language and 11.6 in math on a 99-point scale.
The Washington Post recently reported that the KIPP middle school in D.C. has the highest math scores in the city, "though more than 80 percent of its students come from black families poor enough to qualify for federal lunch subsidies." (Nashville's KIPP Academy has fewer than five white students.)
Statistics show that 80 percent of KIPP graduates go to college, a goal to which students aspire starting in the fifth grade. Here in Nashville, it's nothing for a student to announce confidently that he or she plans to attend Georgetown University, Howard, TSU or Yale. Ask the kids at Green Hills' Julia Green where they plan to go to college—and what year—and see what kind of answer you get.
Fifth-grader Shelda Gedeus says she and her mom chose to enroll her at KIPP because "they said I would go to college." This sweet-faced young girl, who sits politely with her hands one atop the other in front of her, says that some teachers at Kirkpatrick Elementary—where, like many of her classmates, she spent the fourth grade—would give up on students. "Here, they don't give up on you," she says. "I'm learning more here." And, she says, "My mom really wants me to go to college. So I came here."
Dante Barcous says he was making D's and even some F's at Chadwell Elementary last year, but he has risen to become a leader at Nashville's KIPP Academy, where he earns A's and B's. Teachers call on him and other students look up to him. "The difference is that at this school they give you time enough to think and get the brain pumping. The teachers are really different here," he says.
Indeed they are. Dowell's own training as a principal included a stint in the national KIPP organization's highly selective leadership program, known as the Fisher Fellowship. "It's harder to be a Fisher Fellow than to get into an Ivy League school," KIPP board member John Danner notes.
As for Dowell's tiny staff of four teachers and two administrators, they were selected from more than 100 applicants. So we're dealing with the cream of the crop here.
Teachers and principals across KIPP schools communicate about what methods work, though individual schools are given the freedom to implement creative teaching that works for them. "There are a lot of things we do that are totally autonomous and organic, but we're constantly sharing ideas," Dowell says.
Every morning at KIPP, while students are eating their breakfast, they're asked to complete what's called a "freewrite," which is simply a daily exercise in which kids put their thoughts to paper. On Dec. 14, just two days before school let out for the Christmas holiday, Aaron Ward more than completed the 10 lines or so of writing required. This student—once troubled, remember—wrote about a star and its magic:
I will name my star twinkle twinkle little star because if someone looks at my star they will be very luck. You will be able to make ten wishes about anything you want to wish about. If I can look at my star, I will wish for ten wishes. My first wish will be for the people who live in Cornelia House to find a home and someone comes and gives them some presents and says Merry Christmas and happy new year. My next wish will be for my team and my family at KIPP/2013/Nashville, Tennessee. The wish is when all of us grow up that we get to go to a nice job and don't go on the streets and sell drugs. After that, my wish will be if any at Dalewood, Stratford, J.B. or Maplewood can hear the Kippsters bell of going to college in 2013 because all of the Kippsters can hear the bell. We believe.... Another wish is the Kippsters don't fall down because we are going to college in 2013. If a person fall of the clif they will pick theyself back up and keep climbing and till they get were we at... Back in summer school, I keep rolling off the clif with J.J., T.J., James and Vincent. But now, look at us. T.J., James and I earned our shirts by working hard, being nice and being honest. We are not falling no more, but James is falling a little bit. I fell off the clif a little too.
Part of the KIPP promise is that it's possible for every student to "climb that mountain to college." Ten-year-old kids can be expected to fall down every so often, but at KIPP, there's always someone to help them pick themselves back up again.
Go to www.kippacademynashville.org or call Randy Dowell at 406-8239 for more information.
