My Odyssey Teaching in New York City Schools, and What I’ve Learned From It.

In 2008, I accepted a position as head of history at KIPP New York City College Preparatory School. I was then teaching at the American School of São Paulo in Brazil. I was in my ninth year living abroad. I had left the U.S. when Bill Clinton was president, and would be returning to an America that had recently elected Barack Obama. During those years away from home, i always made a point of stopping in New York when I was visiting the U.S., and catching up with old friends. One of them worked for KIPP. We had taught together in the late 1990s at the High School for Environmental Studies on West 56th Street. He had left the school a year or two after I had to go work at KIPP Academy Middle School in the Bronx. His old classmate at Riverdale had opened the school in 1995, and he was drawn to its mission and impressed with its results. He gave up teaching and worked full-time as a guidance counselor, helping to place the school’s graduates in elite private schools in New England and the greater metropolitan area, and then mentoring the students’ progress throughout high school. He found this to be very fulfilling work, and he’d share this with me when we met during my visits to the city. In 2007, he mentioned that KIPP was thinking of starting a high school for its middle schools to feed into (the program had expanded to Harlem and Brooklyn). He asked if I’d be interested in coming home and helping to start the school. The pay was significantly higher than that of public school teachers, and the media was pushing charter schools as the progressive future of education in the U.S. Personally, I loved the idea of founding a history department with high academic standards and expectations for black and Latino inner city youth. So in June 2009, I came home.

Within a very short period of time, I recognized that the vision I had for KIPP NYC’s history department was not shared by the administration. Partly because of the benchmarks they had to meet to maintain their charter and partly because of their own orthodoxy, the administration was fixated on test prep for the regents exams. Their approach was a lock-step regimen centered on rote learning. The class period was strictly broken down into specific blocks of time for certain activities—none of which fostered critical thinking and most of which sucked any joy in learning the material that students may have had outside of the classroom. What struck me most was the absolute certainty with which the administration, and a core group of faculty members, wielded this orthodoxy like missionaries with Bibles. There was the KIPP way and that was it. I was fortunate in that my friend was the dean of academics by this time, which shielded me to a certain extent from the worst of it. The principal of the high school was not yet 30 years old, and had taught middle school English for a handful of years. How this qualified her to lead a high school is a question that any reasonable person would ask. My students were shocked when they learned that I was over 40 years old and a father. They had never been taught by experienced teachers. With its ranks primarily filled by well-meaning but underqualified Teach for America cadres handing out graphic organizers, KIPP touted its students’ test scores as a measure of their academic success. Whether they were actually getting a first-rate education or not is another matter. I left the school in June of 2010. Little did I realize then that my odyssey was just beginning.

Because I had left KIPP with no position waiting for me else- where, I had to really scramble. There was a hiring freeze at that point in the city’s public schools, so only schools that were considered to be the most distressed were eligible for waivers to get around the freeze. In the end (over Labor Day weekend, no less), University Neighborhood High School on the Lower East Side informed me that they had received a waiver to offer me a position. I was thrilled. It felt so good to be back in the New york City public school system where i had started my career. The school was located in a beautiful, if worn, old Beaux-Arts-style building built in 1903. Originally, it housed p.s. 31, which had educated the neighborhood’s elementary-age children for decades. In the 1960s, the nearby Seward Park High School annexed the building to house its overflow student population. This was the school that author Frank McCourt had taught at for a number of years before coming to teach at Stuyvesant. As it was in his day, UNHS (the successor school to Seward Park Annex) was a very diverse, low-performing school. Fights were common—between both male and female students—and there were days when I spent the entire class period just trying to get students to behave and be respectful of each other. There were other days when great things were happening in the classroom. In fact, one of my best memories as a teacher was an Athens/Sparta debate I held with a class full of students who had failed the Global History Regents exam and were preparing to take it again. The analytical thinking, the quick thinking, and the sheer joy of learning that were evident throughout the classroom made all the tough times worth it. The administration, headed by a veteran math teacher, was very supportive, and I was more than happy to help in any way I could. But slowly things changed. The external pressures placed on the school, because it was labelled “SINI” by the state, meant that the administration was running scared trying to stay one step ahead of ex-Mayor Bloomberg’s school closure “chopping block.” The same oppressive orthodoxy that had permeated KIPP began to be felt at UNHS. It was sad because even though it was a tough school, there was some good teaching going on there. By my second year, room for any kind of individuality or differences in approach to teaching was discouraged. My classroom was the last one to be altered, but altered it was. Based on my conception of what teaching is, by the end, I was actually teaching in only one of my classes (a single section of AP). In my other four classes, anyone could have handed out the worksheets that I was handing out and taken attendance. I had become superfluous. Maybe that was the intention of the “reformers.”

There’s one interesting anecdote that is worth reciting here, because I feel it sheds a clarifying light on what is wrong with the charter school model (whether it’s actual brick & mortar charter schools like KIPP or simply the charter approach that has been forced on low-performing public schools). In 2011, when I realized how UNHS was going to change, I interviewed for a position at the Dwight Englewood School in New Jersey. Dwight Englewood is an elite private school just across the George washington Bridge from New york. Its student body is drawn from well-to-do families on either side of the Judson River. it was clear at the end of my interview that I was close to being offered a position. And then they asked me about KIPP. I told them that i hadn’t been enamored with many of the ways that the school was operated or funded, but most importantly that the students were not encouraged to think critically, that this had been the deal-breaker for me. To my relief at the time, the high school principal said that this was exactly Dwight Englewood’s take on KIPP. Over the years, KIPP had tried to place its middle school graduates at the school, and they had all been turned down because in interviews, there was clearly something missing in their make up as students. He offered me the position. Ultimately, I turned it down because I felt that I was in the front line trenches of the new school wars in the city and that this was a chance to be part of history (maybe I should have had my head examined). So i stayed at UNHS. Interestingly, during the interview process, I was informed that Dwight Englewood was considering doing away with having their students take standardized exams altogether, that the courses they had were superior to any external curriculum and that the exams had a distorting effect. And parents were lining up to get their children into this school! What is it exactly that schools like Dwight Englewood know that charter school advocates don’t know? This is an important question.

How does the odyssey end? Well, Ms. Dunkel had a baby. A position opened here at Stuyvesant, and I jumped at the chance to come back to where it all started for me back in 1995. Teachers and students at this school are lucky. Real teaching and learning goes on in classrooms here. This isn’t the case in most charter schools and low-performing public schools, with their emphasis on test prep. I’m grateful every day I walk across the footbridge and through the doors of Stuyvesant. I have to admit though, that I wish all teachers teaching in the city’s public schools felt this way. They should. That so many don’t is a damning indictment of the obsession with test prep, “accountability,” and data that has permeated the system. It’s also an indictment of the demoralizing effect placing responsibility for larger societal ills on the shoulders of veteran teachers has had. NYU education historian, Diane Ravitch—once a supporter, and now a fierce opponent, of charter schools—quoted W.E.B. Du Bois in her latest book, “Reign of Error,” regarding this issue:

*“Knowledge is Power Program.” Founded in houston, Texas in 1994 by two Teach for America alumni.

*“School in need of improvement.”

*KIPP receives generous - nancial assistance from the wal- ton Foundation (the wal-mart fortune), the Gates Foundation, and the Broad Foundation: all of which use their great wealth to shape policy. in accepting fund- ing from such institutions, Kipp is in no way out of the ordinary for charter schools.