After reading about the KIPP Academies nationwide, and watching the “60 minutes” segment about the program, I couldn’t help but wonder “why would anyone want to be a teacher at a KIPP Academy?”. Sure, the job, to an extent, is rewarding. This program takes “at-risk” children and works them so that they have no choice but to be successful in school. But at what cost does this rewarding career come?
Scott Ellison’s article “It’s in the Name: A Synthetic Inquiry of the Knowledge Is Power Program” notes the long hours that teachers sign onto when they sign the “KIPP contract”. Not only do they work longer hours during the week, Saturdays, and summer hours, but they are also expected to be available by phone 24/7. With these longer hours and higher expectations, one would expect compensation that reflected these high demands. However, the salaries of the KIPP teachers are no different than any other public school teachers. The 60-minute segment mentioned that KIPP teachers can work up to 80 hour weeks, and with a reasonable salary of $35,000 a year, that means KIPP teachers are only making $8.41 an hour; which is lower than minimum wage in some states!
It seems as though this relatively low pay and high expectations for KIPP teachers creates a system that is not sustainable. Ellison noted the low retention rate for KIPP teachers. I also noticed, from the in-class video, that all of the KIPP teachers featured seemed to be on the younger side. Could this be a sign of the fact that one cannot afford to make being a KIPP teacher a lifelong career? Can people sustain a lifetime of long hours for relatively low pay? Is having a rewarding career worth all of the sacrifice these teachers are expected to make?
Not only are KIPP teachers sacrificing their time and their salaries, but they are sacrificing their creativity as well. Ellison highlights the common criticism of the KIPP program that speak to the way in which the students are instructed. He notes that KIPP programs rely heavily on memorization, drilling and mnemonic devices. This method of pushing information onto students so that they can memorize it for standardized tests hinders a teacher from exploring teaching methods and creating students who are critical thinkers. Can a teacher sustain a career of simply drilling their students?
Between a huge time commitment, a relatively low salary and a job that limits a teacher’s creativity, why would a teacher want to work at a KIPP academy? Is the reward of watching your students succeed enough to keep a teacher going for a lifetime?
Comments
11 responses to “Teaching at a KIPP Academy: Is It Worth It?”
Dana- When you put it that way, I have no idea how KIPP schools have been able to recruit teachers in the first place. The entire system seems unfair. Teachers should be compensated for the hard work and long hours they put in. Furthermore, teachers should be given some freedom to decide how they want to teach or decide on what’s their “craft”. Beyond this, I wonder what makes the KIPP program and its curriculum the “best”. Perhaps, there is a teacher, new or old, that could add something to the KIPP curriculum that would truly benefit a student with a different learning style. Why are teachers not given this opportunity?
As I have spoke out about before, I really feel that the way teachers are treated and viewed in society is attributing to the profession’s low retention rate. Personally, I will graduate my teacher certification, but wouldn’t consider working at a school like KIPP. I’m looking for a career that would value my skills and my time. KIPP appears as though it values neither, asking teachers to follow strict guidelines for many overtime hours. Why is the teaching profession allowed to be mistreated in ways that other professions would never stand for?
I would advocate that a balance can be found. Teachers can want to teach solely to make a difference in students’ lives. However, regardless of their motive, their salary should reflect the work they are putting in.
It is easy to take advantage of young college graduates. The KIPP program is a great way for new grads to get their foot out into the career world, and the KIPP program does a wonderful job at setting up these young adults to take on professions that should require multiple years of experience. Most people right out of college don’t really have defined values and they are not looking at the KIPP program from the same critical angle as the students in our EDU 332 class. Think about it: if you were not an education major or if you did not take EDU 332, why would you assume that KIPP is a horrible program? I don’t think any of us really could have attached a negative quality to the program until after experiencing it as employees of KIPP or learning about it in school before hand.
I too wonder about the sustainability of the KIPP model. Setting aside some of the other issues that Ellison raises about the focus on control in these schools, I still think it is asking an awful lot of teachers to invest so much with so little financial reward. Granted, the job may be rewarding in other ways, but being a teacher should not be like becoming a priest — in other words, I don’t think teachers should have to a vow of poverty to enter the profession. It would be interesting to hear the voices of KIPP teachers with respect to this issue. There may be a study out there focused on those voices, but I haven’t found it yet.
KIPP is basically perpetuating the idea that teaching isn’t a profession. With the seemingly scripted ways of instruction, teachers at KIPP do not have autonomy, they have to put in non-compensated overtime, and they are focused on rote memorization.How can teaching be considered a profession when they’re making essentially below minimum wage, and aren’t able to determine how to best teach their kids? Doctors work absurdly long hours, it’s a public service kind of profession, they’re given autonomy, and they get paid a ton. Why can’t we do the same for teachers?
Also, kids going to these schools do not need to know random memorizable facts. They need to know how to think, how to problem-solve, and how to make educated decisions. How is this even possible within the KIPP model of learning? They learn songs and use mnemonic devices, which aren’t bad starting blocks. However, if this consists of the majority of their instruction, they’re not actually learning the material. They’re not making connections between the material. They don’t know the subject, they know the songs, which they can recite to get the answer, but they may not know how to adequately extrapolate from that song.
If the KIPP teachers are paid more, I do see how KIPP can survive just like any other business. Not everyone has the desire to be work short hours and be home with their families a lot. There are many business people who work long days and even weekends. They devote their life to their work, but they are compensated better than teachers are. Are we only questioning KIPP’s future because the educators aren’t paid enough? To some teachers this may not be all that important. If the teachers feel like they are doing something worthy of their time, they may not want to leave even if they could be paid more. I just think we need to think twice before we question why someone would want to teach at KIPP with long hours and little pay; most of our Bucknell peers will go on to be top business executives and work crazy hours. They will get paid more, but at the end of the day, money isn’t everything.
I agree with you, Hannah. I’m sure these teachers did their research and understood what was required of them before they took the position. They knew the pay and the hours they were required to teach and the fact that they had to be available by phone 24/7 and still took the job. KIPP teachers almost have to be people who not only really enjoy teaching but also get more out of it than just the money. It’s true that money isn’t everything and the value of teaching in this sort of environment might bring a level of satisfaction that acts as some sort of compensation in and of itself.
This being said, the current KIPP model and teacher agreement would definitely not work in a much larger scale than it currently is. Most people are not like KIPP teachers and thus employing a teaching staff that meets KIPP standards would be very difficult to find if there were many KIPP schools. The current KIPP model is undoubtedly a temporary solution to a problem that is too big for KIPP to solve.
During the in-class video, I had the same feeling–why devote 80 hours per week to a difficult, under-appreciated, and underpaid profession? After reading your blog post, I decided to look up some information about KIPP teachers. I used the website “glassdoor,” which is a career website where people can tell others about their experiences in interviews, working for a company, etc. I skimmed the first two pages of reviews and noticed a mixed reaction from employees. Many commented that the pay was too low for the hours, that they had a hard time balancing work with other aspects of their lives, and that leadership in the schools was poor. Several reviewers went as far as to say that the reputation of the KIPP name was more important than the students to administrators (to be fair, some others wrote that the students always came first). Another thing that I noticed was that the majority of the reviewers (mostly former–not current–employees) had only worked at KIPP for less than 5 years. While this is probably partly due to the demographic using this website, it also suggests that this is a job that wears teachers out.
I really enjoyed your comment Hannah, as well as Bryson’s response to you. I think you raise this issue in a different lens that I failed to see when initially reading this blog post. KIPP teachers seem to have it rather difficult due to the long hours that they have to attribute to their school and students, but they did in fact agree upon that before accepting the position. It simply was not something they were forced to shape themselves around after the fact. I also think it is interesting to think how KIPP schools can be successful on a low-scale idea, but whenever we think about KIPP schools on a larger scale, I cannot help but think how in the world would we get so many teachers to come to these sort of schools and commit the long hours and structure that they must. We live in a society where to some individuals it is all about work and no play, but there comes a point where that stops as well. Many others want that life outside of their work, so how could we possibly make KIPP be successful on a large-scale with a society where sometimes work falls behind our desire for a social life?
While I think that any profession that you are interested in can be rewarding, especially as a teacher watching your students succeed who may have never had the potential to otherwise before being introduced to the KIPP system, when does it become too much? I think that teaching in general has never gotten enough credit, and it can become a tiring profession. In a normal educational system, teachers put in so much time planning, teaching, and exercising different areas with their students, that it is exhausting. KIPP teachers though put in 10x’s that amount of work it seems. The longer school days, the 24 hour on-call, the summer and weekend time commitments…. it can only result in a tired teacher. It becomes rather unappetizing to continue to do something when you just are plain out tired. I think that the KIPP system seems like a temporary thing. I know that we mentioned before it may be good for students upon graduation, but it does not seem like a long-term position. How can it be when you are required to do so much, all of the time?
I agree with you completely. The teachers that are agreeing to be KIPP teachers clearly are not people that are only driven by money. Because of the general low pay of teachers, I would say that the majority of teachers are not driven by money. These KIPP teachers are people who are focused on the greater solution of educating our nation’s children and are working as hard as they can to achieve this success.
However I think the greater problem is finding more and more of these kinds of people to be KIPP teachers. Yes KIPP is working on a smaller scale right now but in order to expand it will be necessary to find more people who are willing to work these hours for this low pay. According to Brill and Rhee we are still looking for better quality teachers in our public schools so how are we going to convince these same teachers to work in KIPP schools when the hours and work required are even longer?
I would say I have to disagree with the majority of post here. I say this because even after reading so much about the KIPP academies I would still like to work at one.
As an education major who looks to go into teaching I see KIPP as a great first step out of college. Many of you see the planned out course material and teaching methods as a bad thing but I do not. As a new teacher I would feel more reassured that I had guidelines on how to direct my classroom that have been proven to work. This would be a great way for me to get my feet wet as a new teacher. Even if there is not as much wiggle room to put my own spin on the classes as in a traditional public school. I would feel worse leaving a public school knowing that I was not getting through to my students. I feel the KIPP program could give new teachers a great deal of confidence as they start out.
Second, many of you have criticized the long hours that KIPP teachers must devote to their job. I do not see a problem with this at all, as a young college senior I am hungry to get into the classroom and give it all I got. Though I agree Dana that this may not be doable in the long run and I could see myself getting burnout after three to five years teaching at a KIPP school. But is this really a problem to have young teachers at KIPP schools? After all they do have the drive and energy to get this hard job done. After writing this and thinking about Teach For America, I could see working in a KIPP school as a civil service for young teachers that I would be honored to have the chance at.