Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools, Part 10
For previous posts in this series, google "Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools."
Chapter 10
“KIPP is grad school for TFA gluttons for punishment”
If you were in TFA and it wasn’t punishing enough for you, then KIPP is right up your alley.(KIPP teacher, 1166)You cannot teach someone to be a great teacher in twenty days. (KIPP teacher and TFA trainer, 1178)
Teach for America and KIPP Model schools maintain a mutually-supportive ideological bond and business relationship. Without the 30-40 percent of KIPP teachers who are presently or formerly TFA corps members, KIPP and its total compliance charter emulators would be hard-pressed to find enough teachers to maintain their operations. At the same time, TFA alums with aspirations for leadership benefit greatly from schools No Excuses charters. For without KIPP and the other No Excuses charter chains, TFA alumni, with their two years of teaching experience, would have few opportunities to move into school leader positions and without the requisite administrative and leadership training that is typically required of public school administrators.
Some KIPP Model schools prefer teachers who have matriculated from TFA, while others like to recruit first-year TFA teachers so that they “they don’t have to unlearn ‘bad’ teaching habits.” Another KIPP teacher noted that TFA alumni do particularly well at KIPP because they are naïve and have “the mindset of a missionary” who “believes that kids need to be broken before we can build them up.”
Seven of the former No Excuses interviewed were former TFA corps members, and all of them had received repeated solicitous emails about KIPP through their TFA email accounts. One teacher formed Schools Matter: Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools, Part 10: