Rhee’s StudentsFirst Airs Prime-Time Ad for NYC Teacher Evaluations

Posted on December 14, 2012 by aagabor

Yesterday evening, when I turned on the TV for my very occasional Jeopardy fix, I thought I had time-traveled back to before the presidential election. There in prime time was a slick campaign commercial. But, instead of a Sheldon Adelson-funded Romney ad, what I saw was a Michelle Rhee-backed StudentsFirst commercial warning dire consequences for New York City kids if the union and the city do not come to an agreement on teacher evaluations.

“A good teacher evaluation can help a teacher understand where they’re weak, and help them grow stronger,” says a teacher named Heather in the opening seconds of the ad. The spot closes with a stark warning that schools risk losing $300 million if the union and the city do not come to a deal.

StudentsFirst, an education advocacy organization founded by Rhee, the former Washington D.C. schools chancellor, aims to raise $1 billion to support candidates and policies that share her pro-charter, anti-union views. The group has already influenced state and local school-board elections from Michigan to California.

The new ad spotlights the latest standoff between the teachers’ union and the Bloomberg administration about implementation of a new teacher-evaluation system. According to the New York Daily News, the two sides are at odds over when and how principals can give teachers poor ratings.

Governor Cuomo has threatened to withhold funding if the city and the union cannot come to an agreement by January. And Mayor Bloomberg has said that he would rather lose the money than compromise on the evaluations.

The StudentsFirst ad and the mayor’s tough talk highlight one of several problems with the teacher-evaluation debate. While employee evaluations work when they are part of a system-wide effort at continuous improvement, they are often counterproductive when used as a cudgel against employees.

The cheerful-sounding teachers in the StudentsFirst ad not withstanding, everything about the teacher-evaluation debate has been framed in punitive terms. Mayor Bloomberg, for example, wants to continue to publish teacher ratings—despite the brouhaha over the disclosure of teacher ratings earlier this year and the New York State Legislature’s decision to limit future public disclosures.  “It seems like we’ve got the torches and the pitchforks and we’re coming after the teaching profession,” New York State assemblyman Steven F. McLaughlin told the New York Times, referring to how easy it is to find teacher ratings on line.

Both Bill Gates and Wendy Kopp have said that “shaming” and “humiliating”  teachers by publishing their ratings is counterproductive. As Gates puts it: “(S)haming poorly performing teachers doesn’t fix the problem because it doesn’t give them specific feedback.”

Meanwhile, charter schools refuse to turn in their teacher ratings.

At the same time, Gates and Kopp and other education reformers continue to advocate evaluations based on highly controversial “value-added measures”, which are intended to gauge student improvement on state tests–they account for 20 percent of teacher evaluations in New York public schools (another 20 percent is based on other “objective” measures, and 60 percent on subjective measures, such as observations.) However, VAM is not only methodologically flawed, it has no value in terms of showing teachers how they might improve. Even Anthony Lombardi, the principal of P.S. 49, a K-8 school in Queens, who has locked horns with the teachers’ union (he told Steven Brill that union leader Randi Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom”) calls VAM a “failure.”  If a whole class were to go down 40 points, from one year to the next, he says,“I never understood what that means. No one has been able to explain it to me.”

Numerous studies, including ones by the Rand Corp. and Economic Policy Institute, have enumerated the methodological flaws with VAM.  A National Academy of Science’s Board on Testing and Assessment warns:

…VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.…

 The new evaluations will take effect even as teachers and schools are under pressure to align their courses to the new common core standards and what Shael Polakow Suransky, Chief Academic Officer of the New York City Department of Education, has characterized as “significantly more challenging,” tests.  In a letter to schools last month, Suransky wrote: “At least initially, students’ scores may go down.” The decline will undoubtedly impact teacher evaluations.

With so much riding on the common core—and a great many questions and challenges relating to its implementation–this would seem to be an ideal moment for teachers, administrators, politicians and union leaders to do some collaborative problem solving.

But that kind of cooperation takes trust and leadership, both of which are in short supply. Punitive evaluations—and divisive advertising—are only likely to make things worse.

Posted in Education | 2 Comments

Is Louisiana Getting Ready to Test Toddlers?

Posted on November 11, 2012 by aagabor

Louisiana, which has become the national laboratory for bringing business-minded accountability to education—an effort that has come to full flower in New Orleans where charter schools educate close to 90 percent of its students—is turning its accountability lens onto publicly funded preschools and the education of its youngest children.

In a move that worries some early childhood experts, Louisiana’s new Early Childhood Education Act is set to make major changes in the way publicly funded preschool programs are managed and evaluated. The aim of the law, also known as Act 3, is to improve the quality of early childhood education, which educators agree is key to ensuring later academic success; currently, close to 50 percent of children entering kindergarten in Louisiana are unprepared.

To do so, the Louisiana Department of Education is developing an outcomes-based rating system, including letter grades–much like the grading system it uses for K-12 schools–which will reward high-performing programs and “intervene” in under-performing ones.

Is this child ready to be tested?

While Louisiana’s preschool grading system includes the accountability components of the federal government’s Race-to-the-Top contest, Louisiana did not apply for the latest round of funding. Part of the reason Act 3 has early childhood experts worried is that it omits what they consider the best elements of RTTT, including requirements related to process improvement and raising the qualifications of early childhood educators. These requirements, the state said, were too onerous.

Indeed, at a time when standards-and-testing regimes are coming to kindergarten classrooms, and even some programs for four year olds, around the country, education experts fear that Louisiana’s Act 3 marks an escalation of the trend. They say the law could lead to developmentally inappropriate efforts to teach children below age four how to read, standardized tests for toddlers, as well as a test-prep approach to preschool curriculum.

In Louisiana, which provides one of the nation’s lowest levels of support for educating poor and low-income children under age four, education experts also are concerned that the law will undermine an established five-year effort to improve preschool education for low-income children. They say the law, which does not provide additional funding for early childhood education, may raise costs for providers, driving some of them out of business.

“When the governor decided he would focus on early childhood, we were excited,” says Melanie Bronfin, Director of The Policy Institute of the Louisiana Partnership for Children and Families, which has made a number of recommendations for implementing Act 3. “But if you look at how the law is written, it’s as though they’re talking about a ten-year-old child; it doesn’t show an understanding of early childhood.” (This is, in fact, the first time the LDOE will have jurisdiction over programs for children under the age of 4, although the state says it is seeking input from early childhood experts and “stakeholders.”)

Some researchers worry that the accountability measures will judge preschools based only on how well they teach literacy and numeracy. Equally important predictors of academic success are social and behavioral skills, such as following directions, working with others and maintaining the focus needed to follow a task through to completion.

“My fear is they will relegate play to the back burner,” says a leading Louisiana education expert. “This would be outrageous in a middle class environment; this is strictly for poor children and families.”

One key concern is that Act 3 will undermine the quality improvement program for preschools that was introduced in 2007. The so-called Quality Start process evaluates schools and childcare centers that nurture the state’s youngest children, from infants to four-year-olds, based on a fine-grained web of environmental and curricular factors: Does the program provide a rich array of activities, including books, building blocks, and areas for art and dramatic play? Are the toys at a height that children can easily reach? What are the qualifications and experience of the staff? How many children per staff member?

Under Quality Start, preschools earn one-to-five stars—one star is equivalent to meeting basic licensing requirements, while five stars connote the highest-quality programming. Tax credits provide the incentives for preschools to accumulate stars by improving the services and activities they provide for children, as well as the qualifications of their staff. Parents also earn tax credits by enrolling their children in higher-quality programs—the more stars, the higher the tax credit, which in turn provides another incentive for the preschool providers to improve their services.

In just five years, 53 percent of childcare centers in Louisiana have participated in Quality Start.  Of these centers, the number of childcare programs qualifying for three-to-five stars has soared from just 3.1 percent in 2009 to 22.6 percent in 2012, according to the Louisiana Partnership for Children and families.

Over 700 early childcare providers, most of them small businesses, have invested in Quality Start, often borrowing money to improve their programs. If Act 3 imposes an entirely new accountability system on these providers, it could force some of them out of business, diminishing an already scarce resource for low-income families—there are currently close to three low-income preschoolers for every publicly funded slot.

In its recommendations for implementing Act 3, The Louisiana Partnership for Children and Families has appealed to the state authorities to “maintain and build on the current successful Louisiana accountability system, Quality Start.”

Another major concern is that Act 3’s accountability system will expand standardized testing to include children as young as three years old. The annual ritual of testing children to assess their knowledge and, by proxy, the quality of the schools they have attended, is fundamentally ill-suited to evaluating very young children and preschool programs, according to early childhood research. A new study by the Rand Corporation cites some of the problems with testing preschool-aged children: “Even with children close to entering kindergarten, attention spans are limited, skills are unevenly developed, and there is discomfort with strangers and strange situations.”

“Child development at this age is very different than it is for school-aged children,” says Bronfin. “You cannot do a single assessment in time and have any meaning as an accountability tool. Preschool age children can’t read, they can’t fill in a bubble” on a test sheet.

Experts in child development argue that the only meaningful assessments are observational, overtime and with someone who is experienced in assessing very young children. And that, says Bronfin, “is extremely expensive.”

Those who worry that the accountability system will lead to testing toddlers without improving preschools may not get much comfort from seeing the way the state’s test-oriented K-12 grading system works. Many charter providers in New Orleans, for example, insist that their students have made substantial academic gains since 2005, when the state effectively shut down the public school system, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and replaced it with independently run charter schools. But they say that the state’s grading system doesn’t adequately reflect those improvements. Indeed, seven years post-Katrina, the vast majority of schools still receive grades of D or F from the state, a sign that either the charter school system or the accountability system may be broken.

Meanwhile, kindergarten teachers in New Orleans describe a testing regime in which kindergarteners are subjected to computerized tests that they are not developmentally equipped to handle.  “I’m not sure whether they are capable of multiple choice,” says one kindergarten teacher at a New Orleans charter school. “They need some facility with computers. The linguistic content is confusing.” Then too, she adds: “A lot of kids think it’s a game” and randomly fill in answers.

That game cost the teacher her annual bonus, which also depends largely on how her students perform on standardized tests.

The implementation plan for Act 3 isn’t expected to be finalized until early next year. The one thing everyone can agree on is that much rides on getting it right.

Posted in Business, Education | 6 Comments

Will Brockton High’s Principal Succeed Where Mayor Bloomberg Failed?

Posted on October 29, 2012 by aagabor

Succession planning poses some of the toughest challenges for both organizations and leaders. Family run businesses usually make a hash of it—sometimes destroying family relationships, as well as putting the companies they built in jeopardy. Major corporations, such as Hewlett Packard, which has had six CEOs during the past decade, aren’t very good at it. And whatever you may think of the efforts of Joel Klein, New York City’s former schools chancellor, to decentralize (and, in many cases, privatize) decision-making in the New York City school system, the opportunity to solidify those changes was probably lost when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the disastrous—and short-lived–decision to appoint a publishing executive with no experience in public education as Klein’s successor

Susan Szachowicz, the principal of Brockton High, the largest public high school in Massachusetts, is determined to do better. Brockton High, as readers of this blog may recall, is one of the most enduring turnaround stories in public education; under Szachowicz, Brockton went from being one of the lowest performing schools in the state to one of the highest, and was featured in a recent Harvard University report on exemplary schools that have narrowed the minority achievement gap. And, now, Szachowicz has announced that she is retiring at the end of this calendar year. The city has named an interim principal, but Szachowicz is hoping that her permanent successor, who will be chosen by the superintendent, will be one of her long-time colleagues. (The interim principal, Michael Thomas, who was a long-time administrator at Brockton High and, most recently, executive director of operations for the Brockton public schools will not be a candidate.)

Susan Szachowicz leading a restructuring committee meeting at Brockton High

“Brockton’s success has come from an administrative team that has worked together, and I would like to see that consistency of leadership continue,” says Szachowicz, a Brockton High graduate who understands that succession planning represents the final test of her leadership: Whether the school’s culture and its record of steady improvement over the course of more than a decade—on the latest state assessments, 96 percent of Brockton students passed English Language Arts–will survive the transition to a new principal.

Szachowicz seems to have planned her retirement with the same care and shrewdness that enabled her, when she was still a history teacher, to persuade her colleagues to band together behind what became a years-long commitment to improving literacy across every department at the school. In her letter to students, Szachowicz explained that she was leaving after the fall semester because she didn’t want the graduating class of 2013 to be “diverted by talk of the principal’s retirement.” In a separate letter to faculty, she also emphasized the values that characterized the school’s improvement strategy, including teamwork and school-wide leadership.

Leadership is about teamwork, and I have said often that I have been the most fortunate principal in the world because of the fabulous leadership team at Brockton High.  The superb leadership of our Associate Principal, Sharon Wolder, and the entire Administrative Team will continue the success of Brockton High.

Brockton launched its literacy strategy in the late 1990s, when Brockton, which once cared more about football than academics, faced the possibility that the majority of its students wouldn’t graduate. At the time, a new education-department policy threatened to withhold diplomas from any student who didn’t pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test.  In response, Szachowicz and a colleague, Paul Larino, who retired years ago, drafted teachers to join a “restructuring committee” that came up with a school-wide multi-disciplinary literacy strategy. As a unionized school, Szachowicz and Larino had to rely on the power of persuasion and on getting teachers not only to share their vision, but to refine it and execute it—and all within union guidelines. Along the way, some teachers who chaffed at the changes left, but the majority stayed.

At the heart of the Brockton culture is not only an obsessive focus on improving literacy across the school, from English and history to math and science. Equally important was the decisions to make teachers equal partners in the improvement effort. At the restructuring committee meetings, a largely middle-aged cadre of teachers, many of them with decades of experience, continue to hash out the latest iteration of the literacy strategy. Last year, the school worked on developing teaching modules to improve how kids read and analyze visuals, such as graphs and charts. Last year, also, the school marked another milestone in student achievement: 82 percent of students scored in the top two levels—proficient or advanced—in ELA, and 70 percent tested in the top two levels in math.

Szachowicz may be leaving in December, but the schedule for the restructuring committee meetings has been set through the following spring. This year, in addition to analyzing visuals, the school is zeroing in on non-fiction reading and writing, as well as “word attack strategies” for vocabulary.

Meanwhile, back in New York, as the 2013 mayoral election and the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s final term looms, many school leaders who, for a time, enjoyed the decision-making power made possible by Klein’s decentralization efforts, are once again feeling the centrifugal force of bureaucracy and new limitations on their autonomy. “You need to be able to build a culture that can last beyond the departure of a charismatic leader,” says Eric Nadelstern, who served as deputy chancellor under Klein, and whom many expected to be his successor. (After a few short months as chancellor, Cathleen Black, the publishing executive, was replaced by Dennis Walcott, a long-time education official.) Without enough time to embed a new culture, the old “roles, rules and relationships” reassert themselves, adds Nadelstern who now teaches at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

A few years ago, Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard Business School expert in leadership development, wrote about the irrational market for CEOs in his book “Searching for a Corporate Savior,” and how corporate boards frequently search for outside “stars,” rather than selecting knowledgeable insiders, to succeed an outgoing chief executive, often to the detriment of the organization. Mayor Bloomberg, it should be noted, called Black “a superstar manager” when he appointed her.

At Brockton, Szachowicz is betting that a knowledgeable insider is best positioned to ensure that the school’s culture of literacy and teamwork will endure.

Posted in Education | 3 Comments

The (Management) Education of a Charter School Leader

Posted on October 17, 2012 by aagabor

This week, Deborah Kenny, the founder of the Harlem Village Academies charter schools in New York City, wrote an impassioned argument against government-mandated individual teacher evaluations. Kenny, who draws at least some of her inspiration from management gurus such as Peter F. Drucker, and ideas such as kaizen, the Japanese business improvement philosophy, describes the culture of trust that is necessary for schools to be effective:

Principals need to create a culture of trust, teamwork and candid feedback that is essential to running an excellent school. Leadership is about hiring great people and empowering them, and requires a delicate balance of evaluation and encouragement.

Where Kenny errs is in the assumptions she makes about what schools can, and cannot learn, from the way businesses use employee evaluation and ratings systems. The problem with “new government proposals for evaluating teachers, with their checklists, rankings and ratings,” writes Kenny, is that “successful companies do not publicly rate thousands of employees from a central office database; they don’t use systems to take the place of human judgment. They trust their managers to nurture and build great teams, then hold the managers accountable for results.”

In this, Kenny couldn’t be more mistaken both on the details of how many leading companies evaluate their employees or on the lessons that schools can learn from businesses. Indeed, Kenny’s assumption is that if only schools would follow the lead of “successful companies” they too would succeed. She couldn’t be further from the truth.

The truth is that successful companies often succeed despite awful employee evaluation systems. Moreover, companies, which define their primary mission as making money for shareholders by tailoring products to select customers, have very different cultures from schools, which aim—or should aim—to nurture and educate all young people who come through their doors. And culture is key to managing employees.

Several years ago, one of the best companies, IBM, developed a dreadful evaluation system—one that highlights the problem with many employee rating schemes that seek to reward high-performers and to punish laggards. At the time, IBM instituted a forced-ranking scheme that required all supervisors to identify and reward the “top” 10 percent of its employees and to give the “bottom” 10 percent a failing grade and just three months to improve their performance or be fired. It was no coincidence that the system was instituted during an economic downturn, and was widely seen as a way to get rid of employees without violating the company’s no-layoff pledge. (IBM’s bell curve violated—as it usually does—basic statistical rules: Bell curves only work when they are applied to large random samples—not to relatively small, carefully selected groups of employees.) Some IBM supervisors got around the problem by creating a “designated dummy” system, by which employees took turns getting a low ranking during performance reviews. Following an employee revolt, Big Blue eventually modified its forced-ranking system, but remained wedded to individualized pay and rankings.

The absurdity of IBM’s ranking scheme was made only starker by the fact that it was instituted even as the company was marketing its employee-hiring and -training expertise to outside companies.

The push for fine-grained rankings derives from a misguided belief that the path to organizational success is in identifying star performers with high ratings (and more pay) and punishing laggards with low ratings (and less pay or dismissal). The biggest problem with this approach is that rating schemes frequently undermine efforts to help employees improve. They are often perceived as unfair. And pitting employees against each other erodes teamwork.

Of course, the quest for the perfect employee evaluation system, has been fueled a multi-billion dollar consulting industry. Even Peter Drucker, the respected management guru, may have been too close to the CEOs he consulted with, especially GE’s Jack Welch who embraced forced rankings a la IBM, to ever distance himself from the practice.

Jack Welch, GE’s former CEO, was also known as Neutron Jack

The most misguided consequence of such rating schemes—in both business and education—is that they focus attention on weeding out “poor performers,” a very small minority of employees, rather than on improving the vast majority of at-least competent employees. Ask even the most hawkish education reformers what percentage of their employees are “poor performers,” and the estimates range from 2 to 8 percent. Paul Vallas, Bridgeport’s controversial superintendent,  in a recent interview conceded that “The vast majority” of teachers “are excellent when provided with the curriculum, instructional models and supports.”

A small, but influential group of companies and management thinkers have long recognized the limitations of focusing on individual performance, in lieu of team work and system-wide improvement. Kenny herself, in her new book Born to Rise, pays tribute to the influence of David Kearns at Xerox, who appreciated the importance of teams and systems, and to the concept of kaizen, which was developed by Toyota Motor Co. as a holistic bottoms-up way to continuously improve production systems.

Both Toyota and Xerox under Kearns were highly influenced by the work of W. Edwards Deming, a leading proponent of a systems approach to management, who argued that in the best organizations—and presumably IBM was one—the average performance of employees will be high, and there will be much fewer outliers on the high and low ends than at most companies. If management does its job right, Deming argued, most employees will be relatively high performers. Or, as Deming also aptly put it: The only reason for having deadwood is if management hired dead wood or if it hired live wood and killed it.

Deming also warned against an over reliance on end-of-the-line inspections, the factory equivalent of the testing regimes imposed by NCLB and Race-to-the-Top.

Kenny quite rightly argues that education must be a system for developing people—both students and teachers. “Teachers who were underperforming in their old schools become rock stars in a positive culture,” she writes in another article in the Wall Street Journal, and suggests that “teachers stuck in schools that don’t have the right to hire by performance” are doomed.

But she is mistaken in implying that the hard work of systems improvement and cultural transformation can only happen in nonunionized environments. Indeed, the concepts of kaizen were quite successfully implemented at leading U.S. automakers, including Ford, in the early 1980s, as an answer to the industry’s competitiveness crisis; when those efforts unraveled after a few short years, it had more to do with the top-down bottom-line driven policies of CEOs like Ford’s Jacques Nasser than it did with resistance from union workers who had been thrilled by the opportunity to make substantive contributions to product improvement.

In schools, as in the auto industry, the best principals know that improving the system and the performance of all employees is the key to better outcomes for kids. And achieving continuous improvement is more a function of leadership and culture than the influence of union contracts.

Indeed, one of the most proven, and enduring, examples of continuous improvement is at Brockton High, the largest public high school in Massachusetts, where teamwork and a decade-old teacher-led literacy strategy have once again improved academic achievement. On the latest Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test scores, for spring 2012, 88 percent of Brockton’s students scored in the top two of four categories–proficient or advanced—in ELA (up 10 points from last year), while 77 percent scored in the top two categories–proficient or advanced–in math (up 13 points from 2011. Only 2 percent of Brockton students—18 kids—failed.

Susan Szachowicz, the principal of Brockton High, at a Saturday morning literacy strategy session with her teachers

Like Kinny, Brockton’s long-time principal, Susan Szachowicz, a one-time social studies teacher, knows how important teachers are to Brockton’s success. Back in the 1990s, when Brockton was a failing school, it was Szachowicz and a grass-roots teacher-led effort to turn around the school that finally made the difference.

Kinny and Szachowicz each make a compelling case for strong leadership and a culture of teacher-led system-wide improvement. But the case has little to do with whether schools are charters or traditional publics.

Posted in Business, Education, Quality Management | 2 Comments

Non-participation is Not An Option at KIPP Infinity in Harlem

Posted on September 30, 2012 by aagabor

Last week, I visited KIPP Infinity Middle School, my first day-long visit to a charter school. I picked the school because I was told that KIPP Infinity, which is located opposite the M.T.A.’s Manhattanville bus depot on 133rd Street in Harlem, had solved one of the thorniest problems dogging charter schools—high turnover among teachers.

One of many criticisms leveled at charter schools, most of which are not unionized, is that teachers suffer burnout because of the tough workloads. Indeed, most charter schools keep much longer hours than do traditional public schools. KIPP-affiliated schools, for example, typically start at 7:30 and don’t end until 5 p.m., at which point teachers still need to grade homework and finish preparing for the following day. Saturday school adds another half-day to the work week. And charter schools, typically, have a longer school year with some mandatory summer classes.

Joseph Negron, the founding principal of KIPP Infinity, which opened its doors in 2005, addressed the burnout problem head on. Negron, who recently resigned as principal to return to teaching–also at KIPP Infinity– shortened the school day by an hour, moving dismissal to 4 p.m from 5 p.m. He juggled the Saturday schedule so teachers would only have to teach three or four Saturdays per semester.  And he allowed teachers to come in late one morning per week. “The most important thing is hiring and retaining great staff,” says Negron.

Joe Negron, founding principal and math teacher at KIPP Infinity in Harlem, ends class with the chant: “One, two, three: K.I.P.P. Three, two, one: P.P.I.K”

            On the day of my visit, I arrive at 7:25, in time for morning meeting in the school auditorium, and am met by Peter Croncota, the director of operations, who hands me a schedule of classes and invites me to drop in on any class I wish to see. I begin with Negron’s fifth grade computation class—all fifth graders get two periods of math each day, one to bolster their computation skills and the other to work on problem-solving. There are 40 students in each computation class—by far the largest class at KIPP Infinity.

The class is starting to study estimation. Negron writes a problem on the board: 289 + 433=

“Raise your hand if you have the actual answer,” says Negron. “Now in unison.”

Most of the class calls out loudly: 722

Negron then asks the class to estimate the answer by rounding each number to the nearest 100. Then to the nearest ten. One child offers: 290 plus 440.

Negron puts both numbers on the board. “Which number is more accurate? Point to the one you think is more accurate.”

A few hands point to 440. Most kids point to 290.

He gives the students a more complicated estimation problem to work out on their own. After walking around the room for a few minutes as the students work silently, Negron says: “Brandon just asked me a brilliant question. Brandon tell us your question.”

“Since the two numbers are in the thousands, can we round to the nearest thousand?” asks the boy.

Negron pauses. “You totally can,” says Negron, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “DONT be a robot. Everyone do a robot.”

The entire class moves its arms in jerky motions. Giggles break the silence.

“Just ‘cause I had 10s and 100s in the earlier problem, if you have a number that goes out to the thousands, check out how easy that is. BAM: 2000, BAM: 5,000. That’s the point of estimating.

CLAP CLAP, clap, clap, clap. Negron beats out a rhythm.

CLAP CLAP, clap, clap clap, responds the class.

“I try to get them through the most passive parts of the lesson,” explains Negron who uses a whole repertoire of clapping and chanting rituals in his class.

“Research shows that kids’ attention span is their age plus two; in fifth grade that’s 12 minutes. But you have a 65 minute class.”

Negron once had every teacher follow the schedule of a child from the time he woke up at home until he left the school in the late afternoon. It was “much harder” being a kid and sitting through a typical KIPP day than the teachers had thought, explains Negron. The upshot was more time for movement, socializing and more frequent bathroom breaks.

Back in his computation class, virtually every student appears to be on task. A dozen hands pop up every time Negron asks a question. “Sit up,” Negron admonishes one child when he starts to slouch.

Only one boy sits hunched over, his head bowed, not participating. He doesn’t respond to questions. He doesn’t clap.

Negron slips him a note: “Is everything o.k.?”

The boy snaps his pencil in two.

“I am super frustrated Manuel*,” Negron finally says to the boy in front of the class. “You are too old for this. I’m just being honest.

“You’re going to choose not to be part of this team and family? Do me a favor, go outside. Take off your KIPP shirt. ‘Cause if you’re not going to be part of KIPP… How dare you come in here and wear a KIPP shirt and not act like a KIPPster. I got people in here who haven’t earned their shirts yet, who act more like a KIPPSter.”

At KIPP there is no tolerance for defiance. Students attend summer classes to learn the rules, which include—sitting up straight, responding politely to both teachers and students, handing homework in promptly. KIPP uses a paycheck system to reward and punish students. To earn privileges, including the right to wear a shirt with the KIPP logo as well as year-end trips to New England and Utah, kids need to maintain a $40 average in their paycheck accounts; each student starts the week with $70 in his paycheck. Small infractions, like calling out when it’s not your turn, get deductions of $3. Missing homework gets bigger deductions. Manuel’s act of rebellion, I later learn, zeroed out his account for the week.

I wander down the hall and drop in on a writing class taught by Frances Olajide, a three-year KIPP Infinity veteran. Unlike the rows of desks in Negron’s classroom, the desks in Olajide’s class are arranged in a “U”, around a navy rug. After giving students a few minutes to write in their journals, Olajide asks the class to sit on the rug and to look at images of sunflowers, which she projects on her white board; the sunflower photos are meant to serve as an inspiration for a creative writing assignment. “We move to the mat silently so we can do it quickly,” says Olajide softly, adding: “The most successful people in the world sit in the front where they can see and participate.”

Olajide is an African-American woman dressed this day in a trim black skirt and fucsia sweater. There is no clapping or chanting in Olajide’s class. But the class of 27-or-so students do as they are told. Later, when one boy has trouble starting a writing assignment, Olajide prods him gently: “Try to write just two sentences.”

In the eighth grade hall, Jeff Li and Gerard Griffith, share a classroom with a basketball hoop in one corner. Li, who is Asian and served as co-principal of KIPP AMP, a charter school in Brooklyn, is teaching math. At the end of class, he gives his students a few minutes to shoot hoops.

Allison Willis Holley, the new principal and Gerard Griffith, both long-time KIPP Infinity teachers, chat at Holley’s desk, which is located in a school hallway

After math, Griffith, who is also a KIPP Infinity veteran and African American, begins a history lesson, starting with key vocabulary words and phrases. The class discusses civil disobedience, desegregation, popular sovereignty.

Eventually they get to “secession”.

Griffith loads a Youtube video onto the whiteboard. The screen shows the rapper and professional wrestler R. Truth (aka Ron Killings) wearing a grey confederate uniform, wielding a sword and marching down one aisle of a crowded arena. Inside the ring are a wrestler and Vince McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).

“I did my homework,” declares the rapper.  “I be in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the confederacy. This is where Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and a bunch of other inbred rednecks just like you…”

The on-screen crowd boos loudly. The KIPP kids chuckle.

“Nothing good ever came out of the South,” continues R. Truth adding emphasis to key words. “The Confederacy, they did have one good idea: Secession. The confederacy seceded from the US. So tonight R. Truth is seceding from the WWE universe.”

“What’s ironic about the uniform that R. Truth is wearing,” Griffith asks his class.

No one responds.

“You can say it,” encourages Griffith.

“Because he’s black, and that’s a confederate uniform,” calls out one student.

R. Truth’s performance will not be his last on WWE. Nor are the KIPP Infinity students likely to forget the definition of secession.

The teaching styles of KIPP Infinity teachers are as diverse as the faculty itself. “We want to make sure that as much as possible that the teachers reflect the background of our kids,” says Negron. Virtually all KIPP Infinity students are black and Latino. About 90 percent are poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

The vast majority of teachers hired at KIPP Infinity already have several years experience under their belts. Once they get here, few of them leave. The turnover rate for teachers with fewer than five years of experience was just 14 percent in 2009/10 school year, the last year for which statistics are available, down from 27 percent two years earlier. A glance through an old yearbook shows that many of the current teachers also appeared in the 2009 edition. But many have taken on new duties.

Indeed, in addition to holding on to its teachers, KIPP Infinity seems to have tackled another key management challenge—succession planning. When Negron decided to return to his first love—teaching–he identified Allison Willis Holley, a long-time non-fiction studies teacher at the school to succeed him.

“It’s not really a change at all,” says one long-time KIPP parent. “We’ve known Ms. Holley forever.”

Holley has continued to tweak the teacher schedule, still with a view to avoiding teacher burnout. She has extended the school day to 5 p.m. for kids who need extra help with reading, and is introducing a new reading enrichment program that she hopes will bolster literacy as the school where math scores consistently outpace student performance on ELA. In exchange, she has eliminated Saturday school entirely.

In 2011, 41 percent of KIPP Infinity students received 3s or 4s, the top two scores, in the state English tests while close to 84 percent scored 3s and 4s in math. Roughly 10 percent of KIPP students are held back each year.

I wondered what would happen to a defiant child like Manuel, who is new at the school this year and who is having trouble adapting.

Negron assures me that Manuel is back on track. He spent the rest of the day “cooling off”, but is now back in class. Negron asked one of the other teachers to talk to Manuel who, the teachers believe, is suffering from separation anxiety.  Negron and the boy then had a discussion about what they both wish they had done differently. “He said he wished he hadn’t thrown his KIPP t-shirt,” says Negron. “I told him I wished I hadn’t raised my voice.”

But Negron also tells me that he had to draw a line. “I had to make a decision,” he explains. “Every kid is seeing him not participate.”

After my first day at KIPP, the one conclusion I could draw was that KIPP Inifinity non-participation is not an option.

*I have changed the name of the student to protect his identity.

Please stay tuned for an upcoming conversation with a KIPP Infinity parent on KIPP curriculum, discipline and raising kids in Harlem.

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