KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy (5-8), a Charter School

San Francisco Unified, San Francisco County

• 2006-07 Enrollment: 257

• Percent Free/Reduced-price Meals: 78%

• Percent African American Students: 40%

• Schoolwide Growth API (2007): 866

• African American Growth API (2007): 834

(Note: All data are current as of February 1, 2008.)

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Principal: Lydia Glassie
Length of time as principal at KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy: 5 years

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"We use our extended day pretty creatively….We have built time into our schedule when we work with students who are struggling with given skills….Our staff is also available by phone until 8 p.m. to help with homework."

Q: In your estimation, what are the greatest challenges facing African American students at the middle school level in general?

A: I'd say that first and foremost is an overall lowering of expectations for students--certainly not intentionally--based on their background. I also think that in middle schools particularly, there's a lot of peer pressure. And I don't know that always the peer pressure is to perform well. And then I think that many of our students of color--in particular, low-income students of color--are in schools where staff is overwhelmed with just the day to day and don't always have the resources that they need to best serve students.

Q: From your perspective, what are the three most important things that your middle school has done to support African American student achievement?

A: First are the expectations we have of our students at the school. When our 5th graders come into our school, we expect that they will end up going to the best high schools in San Francisco and go on to college. So getting them to that place when most of our students come to us very far below grade level means that there are no excuses for the work that they turn in, there are no excuses for poor conduct, there are no excuses for not being in uniform, there are no excuses for being late for school. If a student turns in a piece of work that we know the student could do much better, we have the student redo it.

Second, we have an incredible staff who works tirelessly to make sure that our students are prepared for excellent high schools and then for college.

And third, we have an extended day and we use that time carefully and creatively to best meet students' needs. In 5th and 6th grade, students are put in small reading groups that are on their level. We also have built time into our schedule when we work with small groups of students who are struggling with given skills. We have 90-minute class periods, so students can do independent work while we work with small groups of kids who are struggling. Teachers pull small groups of kids during study hall when kids will be getting a head start on their homework. Sometimes teachers pull kids during lunch time. It happens at various points during the day, whenever we can figure out a time to work with a small group of kids who are struggling in a certain area. And then we do a really good job of tracking which kids are struggling with which standards so that we can provide extra support for them.

Our staff is also available by phone until 8 p.m. to help with homework. So if students go home and are struggling with how to do the math homework, they can't come to school the next day and say, "I didn't understand." They should have called their teacher and had a conversation about it.

Q: From your perspective, what instructional and curricular priorities in particular have been most important for supporting the achievement of African American students in your school?

A: I don't think that we're doing anything specifically different for African American students or Latino students or English language learners. It's just that we have great teachers who are always prepared for class who work tirelessly with students. Everybody is hired at this school because they have an interest in working with our student population and supporting our mission to get our kids into great high schools so they will go to college.

We don't have instructional practices geared toward certain kinds of kids. But we do a lot of assessment and then working with small groups of kids when they're not getting the objectives. We hope we are teaching well, figuring out what kids know and don't know, supporting them when they don't know material so they get it, so they can move forward. I think that having longer periods and a longer school day makes a difference. We're also pretty careful about the texts we choose because we want them to be relevant for the students. When people are hired here, they already have a mindset about the kinds of books and those kinds of things that we want to expose our kids to. Our school is really mixed and so we read a lot of books by Latino and African American authors about African American and Latino life, both current day and past. We have career days where speakers come in and talk to our kids about the choices they made, the colleges they went to, and now the options they have.

Q: What role does data disaggregated by student subgroups play in your middle school's efforts to support student achievement, including among African American students?

A: We use data all the time in lots of ways. We use daily assessments to determine if the students understood the objective for that day. In addition to daily assessments and then weekly assessments, the teachers give and then benchmark assessments that are created by a bank of objective questions. We use these in-depth benchmark exams to assess what students know and don't know, given a set of standards that they've learned. From there we figure out how we can group small groups of kids who don't understand a certain objective so that we can work with them.

We also use standardized test data to determine our priorities for the coming year. Say we notice that test scores show our students are struggling with their vocabulary, then the next year one of our initiatives is to really work on vocabulary. We look around and try to figure out how to integrate vocabulary into the school. So we use assessment on every level at the school.

Q: What are some of the resources, whether inside or outside the school, that have been most important?

A: We have some counselors who come from the YMCA, and that has been really good for individual students. I definitely would not say that it's a strength of the school that we use outside resources very well. We're only five years old and have not taken advantage of outside resources as much as we could and should. But we do lots of internal professional development, and sometimes that includes visiting and observing other schools and having conversations about what we saw there. Sometimes it includes having other people come to the school. Mostly it is just us talking about teaching and learning, our students and the kind of culture we're creating at the school, lifelong success, and those kinds of things.

Q: In what ways does the demographic mix of your middle school student population pose challenges or opportunities for supporting African American achievement in your school?

A: Our school is pretty mixed. We're actually more Latino now than African American by a little bit. I think that presents lots of opportunities for our kids around just understanding diversity. Part of our mission is to prepare our students with the character traits needed to succeed in life. Going to a school with different kinds of kids is really helpful in that regard. Our kids are exposed to each other and each other's lifestyles, and that brings a lot of richness to the culture of the school.

The only challenge is teaching kids to understand each other. We have lots of conversations about prejudice and integrity and homophobia--lots of those kinds of conversations with our kids. We have a small class that we have those conversations in, but mostly they're just threaded into the day. We're with our kids a lot, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Those kinds of conversations are just part of what we do with our kids daily.

Q: Algebra I has been an intense focus of attention in recent years in California. How has your middle school responded to the idea that all students take Algebra I in grade 8, and what sorts of credentials do the teachers who provide these courses hold?

A: All our 8th graders take Algebra I. We have only one 8th grade math teacher, and she came from high school where she had taught Algebra I previously. A lot of our kids have also started in geometry and upper-level geometry.

Now there are some kids who, when they get to high school, have to take Algebra I again. So it's not that taking Algebra I in 8th grade has meant that they've all been able to start in geometry as freshmen, but many of them have.

Q: What electives does your middle school offer and why? Do these courses support student engagement or other academic coursework?

A: We have an orchestra that every student participates in. That's brand new this year. We have our students take physical education. And then we also have a pretty extensive sports program after school. We have a volleyball team, an indoor soccer team, and basketball teams. We play other local charter and private schools. We also offer a lot of different kinds of electives during Saturday School, which is from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. about once a month and is taught by teachers and volunteers. So that also is something that our kids love and take advantage of, but we don't have a lot of electives during the school day; it's much more instruction-based.

Q: What support or guidance counseling do students receive at your middle school to help them make decisions about which courses to take and about the directions they might take in high school, such as career-technical education, a traditional college-prep curriculum, and so forth?

A: We have a director of high school preparation and placement who works with all of our kids on applications to high school and SSAT [Secondary School Admission Test] prep and that kind of thing. Our goal is to have all of our students go to college-prep high schools. That's the guidance that we give them. But she does all of the application process with the families, financial aid with the families, all of that work.

Q: What kind of support and leadership does your district provide?

A: I would say that it's more oversight than support. They just make sure we're doing what we said we would do in our charter.

Q: What would you hope that California policymakers, educators, and the public understand about the academic achievement of California's African American students?

A: I think first and foremost that it's really hard to run a school in California because of the financial constraints, which makes it difficult for schools to provide the kind of support that they want to provide to students. It's really easy to blame families and kids coming into schools for lack of success when what we need to do is look at ourselves as educators and at schools and what we are doing to provide students with the education they deserve. I think it's much easier to say, "How can we reach this child who is from this kind of background and has this kind of baggage and blah blah blah." Schools have kids for a lot of hours a day, and we need to do what we need to do to get them prepared for what I think is what they need, which is college. What our students need is college.

But I also believe that schools should have more autonomy than they have. Schools should be allowed to hire their own staff, not be assigned staff by a district. There is no way that you can create an organization where everybody's on the same page and everybody has the same mission if you are not able to figure out who comes to that organization. There are many systemic problems, but people want a quick fix. People want to say, "Well, if you use this program, then English language learners will do well, or African American students will do better." It's not about a program; it's about a system that has been created. And until principals have more freedom to hire staff and fire staff, and until principals and staff have more freedom to create the kind of community that they want to create on site, it's going to be a hard battle.

Q: Is there anything that we have not talked about that you think is important for us to know about your school or your students?

A: In addition to having a rigorous academic program where we support students with the extended day, we also have a very strict discipline policy. You go into many middle schools and there's a lack of structure. And I think what middle school students need is a lot of structure, even more than elementary school kids. So I would say that's one of the things that has led to our success as well, that our school is very, very structured. Students transition from class to class in lines. In the classroom, they are expected to behave as scholars. The learning environment is a sacred place. When you go into a classroom, that's your opportunity to prepare yourself for bigger and better things in life, and the knowledge that is being given to you is what you need to get to college. Little tiny things are important. Kids can't chew gum in our school. They have to have their shirts tucked in. Even small things like that, if from the very first day when students come in, you are clear--"this is our culture; this is who we are as a school"--students will respond to that. We're an open-enrollment school--any student can come to our school. So it's not that we have different kids from anyone else. It's just that we have really clear expectations from the moment they walk in the school. Our expectations never waver.

We have a lot of contact with families as well. Before a family even joins our school, we sit down and meet with them. So myself or someone else on the administrative team has a conversation with the family about what we are promising for the child--that we're promising that we will do everything we can do to get them prepared for the best high school and college--and what we expect from them. And they sign a commitment. It's not binding; it's just that we are committing to them certain things, and they are committing to us. And that starts the relationship really differently from most schools. Usually you're assigned to a school, you show up on the first day, you don't know where your class is. Here we [the school and the parents] are on the same page. Then if we call with a problem, parents are, nine times out of 10, wanting to help us deal with the child to make it a better situation. We also have ongoing communication. We have a newsletter every week, we send grades home every two weeks, and we meet with parents regularly.

We don't have volunteer hours or anything like that that we've instituted, but we expect that our parents will get their kids to school on time and that they will look at every piece of homework and sign every piece of homework every night. And when we call and say that we need their help, we expect that they will support us.

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This article is a transcript of an interview conducted by EdSource staff in May 2008.
The opinions in this interview are those of the principal, and not necessarily those of EdSource, its staff, its funders, or its Board.