I am going to separate my comments into three sections: curriculum, culture, and micromanagement. Curriculum: I walked into a KIPP school with six years of experience in different districts. My experience was disregarded, and I was asked to teach from an extremely dry, scripted curriculum. If you thought this curriculum might include any projects or experiential learning, think again. Every day was rote test prep, over and over again, with no room for projects. Teaching outside the curriculum was not allowed. Students at my school were far below the state average on the standardized tests we studied for, and they were completely apathetic toward the curriculum. The curriculum calls for chunking, sentence stems, and visual cues that don’t give any room for student thought. Students rely on these as a crutch, and the majority of my seniors could barely write a sentence without them. The instruction is timed on a minute-by-minute basis, with, again, no room for student exploration or independent thought. “Take ten seconds to underline the verb.” “Take ten seconds to circle the period.” Some students follow the steps the teachers lay out, and leave the class learning nothing. Other students ignore the directions entirely, feeling disengaged, unmotivated, and infantilized. Culture: My seniors were incredibly disengaged with the content they were learning, and also did not have much respect for the school rules. Students were expected to have phones put away, to arrive on time, and to be in their seats working within 30 seconds of the bell. Every day was a battle. Students ignored the phone rule, and teachers were powerless to take away phones. Behavioral Interventionists were supposed to come to your room and take the student’s phone, but they were so busy taking care of more serious issues that they rarely arrived, and when they did, they often had a short conversation with the student rather than taking the phone. Then, the student came back in the class and started using their phone again. I often had a large chunk of my class arrive significantly after the bell, and they would often stand in the back rather than go to their seats. Sometimes, they would stand in the back, open the window, and vape, completely ignoring me as I asked them to go their seats. I reported these incidents but when investigated, administration “found nothing,” so the incidents continued. Micromanagement: Someone observed my class almost every day. Sometimes they were strangers, who walked in, glared, typed on their computers for 50 minutes, and left. More often, it was my assistant principal and/or principal. The principal, obsessed with “the first five” would stand in the back and watch me struggle through trying to simply get students in their seats. The assistant principal would actually walk up to me and give me feedback as I tried to get class started. Students walked in late while they did this, and I scrambled to add them to attendance, asking the AP which students had come in and hoping he could help, but he said he didn’t know. He went on lecturing me about how I should “stand and deliver,” then “circulate” while I tried to take attendance (which is mandatory in the first five) of the students in my class, 10 of whom had come in late. This specific incident was the catalyst for my quitting, on top of everything else.
