Young Principals as Rock Stars

One warm morning in May of 1997, a veteran New York City school administrator named Susan Winston, then 48, walked into Public School 156 in South Bronx to check out an unusual elementary school program. Dave Levin, the tall, curly-haired 27-year-old supervising the four classrooms of fifth and sixth graders, had introduced himself to her at an earlier meeting. He seemed nice, but her first impression was that his little school-within-a-school was going nowhere unless it got some help.

There was no sign in front of the school or in front of his classrooms saying anything about what Levin and his friend Mike Feinberg called the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP for short. A casual visitor, Winston thought, would have noticed little difference between what Levin and his four teachers were doing and all the other things going on in the fortress-like inner city school. Levin had only five years of teaching experience and was much too young, some people in the district thought, to be taken seriously as a school leader.

But Winston had run a program in Newark, N.J., with 180 students when she was 28, and she was less concerned about his age. The minute she stepped into one of his classrooms, she realized this particular young man had something to offer. The students were alert and interested in the lesson. They responded quickly to frequent and friendly teacher questions. The classes seemed almost completely devoid of the chatter, inattention and mischief that characterized many of the schools Winston visited.

Levin and Feinberg started KIPP as an experimental fifth grade in 1994 when Levin was 24 and Feinberg 25. Each started his own KIPP school the next year, Feinberg remaining in Houston and native New Yorker Levin going to the Bronx. Eight years later, there are 47 KIPP schools in 15 states and the District, nearly every one of them run by principals in their twenties and thirties who often get astonished looks when they tell strangers what they do.

This surge of young principals is not only at KIPP. New Leaders for New Schools, a non-profit group, is training mostly young principals (average age 35) in the District, Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Memphis and Oakland, Calif. I watched D.C. school officials celebrate principalships for three of the group's brand-new graduates as their classmates cheered at a ceremony last spring. Hundreds of charter schools -- public schools that run independently of the school districts they are in -- have installed principals under 40. Educational philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates are creating hundreds of smaller high schools run by bright and ambitious young people who would otherwise have to spend a decade or so as assistant principals before they got a chance to run their own schools. They also are among the founders of New Leaders for New Schools.

This youth movement is too new and too small to inspire any useful research on how many there are or how they are doing. But as I watched the principals of what are now four KIPP fifth-to-eighth-grade middle schools in New York City last week -- all of them younger than my oldest child -- it occurred to me the energy and optimism of that age group might be just what our schools need.

The source of KIPP's success -- its test scores are often far above those of neighboring schools with similarly disadvantaged children -- is not a mystery. The students arrive at about 7:30 a.m. and don't leave until 5 p.m. There are two or three Saturday sessions each month. A three-week summer school is mandatory. Consistent punishments (usually loss of privileges) and attractive rewards (such as a trip to the movies) have proved to be powerful motivators.

But the key to the transformation of the learning experience in those schools has been the quality of the teaching -- and it's here that the sharply focused and hard-working young principals have had the most important influence. They are continually emphasizing, monitoring and reinforcing a classroom style in which teachers are enthusiastic, clear, personal and full of games and stunts and chants that make learning fun. They are all successful young teachers who hire people with their same traits, and make sure that in every lesson, every child, even the frightened little girl in the corner or the sullen boy in the back, is brought into the discussion of the topic at hand.

During an earlier visit to the KIPP Academy New York, the school Levin started in the Bronx, I watched Quinton Vance, Levin's 30-year-old successor as principal, teach a fifth-grade reading class in just this way.

"Who wants to give us a quick review of what happened the last time we read?" said Vance, a 6-foot-3-inch University of Oregon graduate who often hugs his students. "A real quick one. Wesley, let's hear a nice, strong voice."

Wesley could not be heard, so Vance encouraged him. "A nice, STRONG voice," the principal said.

The book was "Maniac Magee" by Jerry Spinelli. After students read a few sentences, Vance insisted that they analyze what was happening. "Why is that significant in this story?" he asked at one point. "Why is that so amazing that Mars Bar would come to the McNab's house? Why is that so amazing, Jasmine?"