New Teacher Jolts KIPP

I visited Suben's class in a poorly lit old church building, the sort of facility even the best D.C. charter schools have to put up with. She teaches 80 fifth-graders, a third of them at a time. The class I watched had 15 boys and 13 girls, all African American. She kept the lesson moving by asking questions. Many students would raise their hands, but in typical KIPP fashion she waited for the kids who were struggling to think for a moment, and then called on one of them, even if they had not raised their hands. The idea was to get every child involved in the lesson.

She mixed occasional warnings about inattention -- "I wish you could save your personal problem and fix it after class" -- with frequent praise -- "You're brilliant! I can't stand it."

I am always dubious about achievement gains as large and sudden as Suben's 16th to 77th percentile leap. I don't see any evidence of cheating. I have watched the KIPP people for five years and found they have the same very high standards of honesty I find in most educators.

The percentiles were calculated from the scores Suben's students got on the Stanford 10 standardized test when they arrived at KIPP in the summer of 2005 and the Stanford 10 scores they received last spring after a year with Suben. These are tests administered by the school, not the state. They are one-time assessments that only approximate what students know. Also, although Suben's students improved markedly on the nationally standardized test, that was not enough to meet the first-year federal target for No Child Left Behind when they took the new and unusually rigorous D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System test.

But there is no question of the importance of what Suben is doing, and what is happening in other schools, like KIPP, where teachers are convinced their disadvantaged students can learn a great deal if given the time and encouragement to do so.

Suben's efforts to encourage students to think about, discuss and write down their best strategies gave them confidence. They knew when they got the right answer, it was because of their intellectual ability, not because they memorized something.

Suben said when her class corrects homework, she hears little whispers of "YES!" from kids who got a hard one right and feel like giving themselves a quiet cheer.

"Basically, there's ownership," Suben said. "That's the key. It's not that my lessons are so dramatically better than anyone else's lessons. It's just that we, the students and I, own our lessons."