Jim Manly | KIPP Foundation - Transcript
Jeremy Singer: [00:00:00] I’m Jeremy Singer, president of College Board, and this is the Education Equation. I’ve spent my career grappling with what truly drives student success. On this podcast, I’ll talk with people who are researching, building, and scaling solutions that matter. Every episode will go beyond the hype and focus on data and evidence to see what’s actually working.
Let’s stop guessing, and let’s figure out what works.
Today’s guest is Jim Manly, chief schools officer at the KIPP Foundation. Jim has been in K−12 education for over 30 years as a teacher, principal, and system leader, and he’s worked for a variety of well-known organizations, including Teach For America and Success Academy. We talk about the power of high expectations, why consistent systems matter, and [00:01:00] how KIPP uses data-driven instruction to help students succeed. Jim also shares why he believes AI can free teachers to spend time coaching and connecting with students. It’s a rich, insightful conversation with someone who’s seen it all. Let’s dive in.
Jim, welcome to the podcast.
Jim Manly: Thanks, Jeremy. It’s great to be here.
Jeremy Singer: So, you began your career as a classroom teacher, I believe as a seventh-grade English teacher in Harlem. How’d you originally get attracted into education?
Jim Manly: Yeah. I really was just kind of that graduate who really had not figured out what I wanted to do.
This was all the way back in 1988. Teach For America didn’t exist yet. I answered little memo in the college newsletter for career advising around the opportunity to teach in New York City public schools. Didn’t need a teaching license. Went to the meeting. This was a guy who evidently also went to Princeton and convinced, you know, Wendy, that this might be a good idea.
She since, a couple years later, started TFA, but this was a really, you know, all I did was just take the pamphlet and drive down to New York City Board of Ed and interview for the job from I think the [00:02:00] board of examiners or whatever it was called back then. They were their own licensing unit, and they started me in a career that I had very little training and even less aptitude for when I first arrived but stuck with it.
Jeremy Singer: That’s a great story. You refer to Wendy as Wendy, co-founder of Teach for America. You know, huge impact. Little side story. I was in 1990 … I applied the second year, I think, or ‘91. Yeah. For Teach For America.
I didn’t get in. Sadly, I didn’t pass the test, but it would’ve been interesting. I wonder how my career would’ve, veered differently.
Jim Manly: So, I was a recruiter in ‘91, so I might’ve interviewed you.
Jeremy Singer: You may have nixed me. I won’t hold that against you. Okay, good. Probably all for the better.
So you’re a successful teacher, and at some point you decide that you want to do more than just a teach a teach a class.
Take us through what went through your head and how you made that decision, and what you did.
Jim Manly: Yeah. First of all, you’re very kind to call me a successful teacher. I eventually got there, but it was after some fits and starts. But I taught for a number of years in New York City public schools. Then I founded [00:03:00] TFA and worked there for three years.
I founded the DC office of Teach For America and went to grad school. At that I point had convinced myself. I’d read the Paul Tough article that schools weren’t the answer, and I was going to do housing and urban development. And after doing that for about a week at the Kennedy School of Government, I decided: No. Education has got more answers than housing and urban development.
Then I tried from there to start my own thing because that was the small school movement that was happening back in New York City. I tried, unsuccessfully. I got an echoing green fellowship, but I tried to start my own thing. Dave Levin was doing the same thing with KIPP and was much more connected and successful than I was.
But I was really intrigued by this idea that if you could get a bunch of like-minded folks who wanted to shake up the system a little bit, you could create your own space. I eventually found a spot in a very mom and pop charter school in Teaneck, New Jersey, where I worked for about six years as the assistant director and then the director of the upper school. [00:04:00] I learned how hard it is but also that there’s a lot of opportunity and that there’s just so much that we assume about schools and the way they need to function that doesn't have to be the case. And that was really intriguing to me.
I found charters to be a real opportunity to put public policy to a test to see if we could do something different. For the most part, I found incredible opportunity and success in that life. But obviously, as we’ll about talk later, there are many challenges to the charter space as well.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, of course. And, a couple things about your journey. When I advise younger people about their careers, I explain that you can make sense of a career often in retrospect, but rarely does the career and rarely do people have a plan that works. And I love that you start a graduate program, and you realized it wasn’t for you.
You had your own … you started or tried to start a charter. It didn’t succeed. And again, I think also people learn from not just success, but tremendously from failure. Real quick: What happened with it? What did you do with the charter effort? Did you get it off [00:05:00] the ground? Or you couldn’t find enough interest?
What was the blocker?
Jim Manly: Yeah. Uh, so I was in. Back then, charters had not yet been approved, so you still had to do the small school movement. I found a job teaching in District 10, where they were interested in trying to start a smaller school. And I didn’t realize what I had signed on for.
I signed on for a school within a school of a failing school that was under registration review. And I didn’t get to pick my own staff. I didn’t really get to choose my own curriculum, and so I was managing a group of folks who answer to a principal loosely affiliated to me. They were calling it a school.
And I just quickly realized that this was not the opportunity I thought it was.
Jeremy Singer: That’s bad situation. And just for our listeners: District 10 people forget, but many years ago, New York City was divided into 32 community school districts that were different parts. So, they didn't want to be onemonolithic school.
I love to always challenge people to the fact that one in every 320 people in the United States is a student in the New York City system. Just to give some sense of the scale. [00:06:00] So, you eventually tell me how you eventually get to Success Academy.
Jim Manly: Yeah. So, I was then working in Teaneck and was in more of a suburban community.
It was an interesting community to work in, but my heart was always back in urban education, and I kind of kept my eye on what was happening. I had two small kids while I was in Teaneck as well. I was seeing some of my friends who had started charters were overwhelmed with the amount of time they were putting into it, and I was wondering whether I should do that with the two small kids.
But eventually I saw an opportunity with Success. Eva had some really long … Eva Moskowitz, the founder of Success Academies, had this wild introduction to what she was trying to do to, to get people to join, and a really complicated application and interview process.
And I know something about it grabbed me as very different and not typical in the space. I interviewed with her, and we really hit it off right from the jump. She told me about her plan to start 40 schools in about 10 years or 5 years. I can’t even remember what, but whatever it was, it just sounded outlandish that this could possibly happen. [00:07:00]
I signed on and joined at the very beginning of year two. So, she had run the school with a retired principal that they had brought over. And immediately Eva realized that this was not her vision for what she wanted to do. So, she kind of took over the first school.
Then I joined with about two other people who were targeted to start the next batch of schools in the quick succession that she had planned to grow her network.
Jeremy Singer: And that’s where you end up teaching leading a school in Harlem, is that correct?
Jim Manly: That’s right, that's right. So, the second year… It was three years before the first wave of her second group of charters started. Then I founded Success Academy Harlem 2 Elementary, which was located in District 5. We had all kinds of pushback. She made things difficult by immediately targeting the teachers’ union.
We had protests outside my building. They had ACORN in the teachers’ union, literally picketing in front of my school. It was a great story there of just, you know, New York City encapsulated. We have people protesting out front. These New York City cops roll up and see [00:08:00] kindergartners being prevented from coming into school.
They immediately just walk up to these guys. They’re like, “You’re going to get lost right now.” The cops scattered the protesters. All my parents cheered, and we came to start teaching and learning. But it was that kind of environment right from the get-go with how charters were received.
Because we were co-located. We were in a public school building. So, you can imagine some of the tensions that exist, unnecessarily, but that existed.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. Back then. We’ll get later into some of the controversies around charters. And as you said, Eva is in her own a bit of a lightning rod. So, that makes it even more complex. But you’re principal of the school, and tell us ... I think it was recognized as a top-performing school in the district. Is that correct? Tell us how you got there. What’d you do?
Jim Manly: I spent the previous year working with Eva, and I think we were a great mix of experience: My being in public schools for a long time and understanding the kids and the communities and how we needed to position ourselves [00:09:00] and some good practices in education that I had learned over that time. This was coupled with her determination to be successful and an unwillingness to listen to old conceits of what necessarily had to happen in public schools or how they had to operate. And she was willing to challenge me constantly about whether or not I was being rigorous enough.
I was often saying, “Well, I’m not sure kids could handle that. That seems like a lot to do in first grade.” And she would just constantly push and say, “Let’s give it a try. Let’s see how it goes.” The more that we gave kids, and the more rigorous we were, the kids just responded as you’d think they would. They’re curious. They’re really eager to take on new opportunities.
And what I learned was that it was all the adults who were holding back the students from achieving at a high level. And we really took that seriously as I founded the next school. Success Harlem 2. We were clear with parents that we were going to go. From the very first day, we were going to begin teaching and learning.
We used Success for All in phonics. We were ahead of the game and doing the Science of Reading. We had kids reading [00:10:00] … This was the old F and P (Fountas & Pinnell) test, which wasn’t super accurate … but by the end of kindergarten, we had something like 96% or 97% of our kids on grade level. So right from the get-go, we were rigorous. We were following a little bit of the old school methodology that was in schools that had been pushed aside by Lucy Calkins and other people.
We were doing it the old way and really experiencing great results. In the very first year that the kids took the test in District 5, we were the top-performing school in District 5, including some of the gifted and talented programs they had started there. So, it was a shake-up to the whole system right away.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, it’s funny because the whole language, I don’t know what we call it, debacle, comes up in almost every conversation. It’s so funny. So, if you were going to summarize the Success Academy, at least early on, you know, theory of action, it’s clearly about setting very high expectations for every student.
Yep. What else? What are the other one or two things you’d say that was a key part of it, either in Eva’s vision or your vision?
Jim Manly: I think two things. [00:11:00] One was from Eva, and one was from me. I think just her level of excellence in every single facet of the operation from the school uniforms to the way that we ran orientation to the degree to which we communicated with parents. Just the aesthetics of the place looked incredible.
That sent a message to our staff right away that this was different. It was going to look different. It was going to feel different. We were going to operate with excellence. It felt much more like a tech start-up feel where people just experienced: “Oh. I better be prepared for this lesson. I’m going to be responsible to drive great results. The person next to me is working super hard.”
Our recruiting and application process was super rigorous to even attract teachers. We were small enough then to really be super selective with whom we brought on. So that, I think it was just commitment and spirit of excellence made a huge impact on my staff and the way that they approached the whole thing. And then I think the piece that I brought was just a real attention to kid curiosity. Eva, as I said, pushed me in that direction, but I just realized and remembered how [00:12:00 eager kids are to learn.
We really] transformed the space into a … everywhere you went was a learning opportunity. We put stickers on the floor with all the numbers and the sight words. The walls were decorated with student work and these 3D bulletin boards demonstrating what our kids were capable of.
Parents would come into this building and say, “I didn’t even know my kid could do this sort of thing.” I think just that attention to everybody’s learning from the moment you get there till the moment you leave. I used to shake kids’ hands in the morning, and I’d ask them questions in order to get in, and parents loved it.
At first, my staff was like, “Really? You’re going to do that?”
Jeremy Singer: What was the biggest stumper of a question you'd ask?
Jim Manly: Well, as they got a little older, I realized my kids had zero understanding of geography. So, it would be things like, “What are the five boroughs in New York City?” And I would get “New Jersey, New York, California.” Parents were just miffed, right? They could not believe it. They said, “You don’t know the five boroughs in New York City?” So, just things like that just really inspired them. [00:13:00] I would take questions from my staff. They would tell me, “You know, we’re learning this week similes or metaphors.” I’d ask those at the door. I’d ask chess moves. Success has a really strong chess program. So, it really became a whole tradition. And parents got really excited when their kids got in. Of course, I always had a couple … If you got stumped, there was an easy one to let you in the door so that people didn’t have to freeze to death.
But it made for that whole experience that everybody was learning every day.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, I was worried you were going to say your question would be: “What’s the capital of North Dakota?” Which is probably not as important a piece. More local makes sense. I also went to public schools in Tarrytown, New York. And Sleepy Hollow.
It was in the seventies. There was a GM factory there, and there were kids from different backgrounds[KB2] . What was interesting was my first- and second-grade teacher was the same teacher, Tom Cataldo. He taught all the kids how to play chess. And everyone's always asking, “What are you trying to do?” And we all learned chess. I would go back every year to play Tom and all kids from very different backgrounds. I think there's something there.
So, tell me, you gave us data about reading levels at first grade and and really [00:14:00] impressive stuff of over 90% meeting some benchmarks. Give me another. I love data. You love data. What are some data that demonstrate the success you had there?
Jim Manly: Yeah. The first year in District 5 and third grade, and I won't get it exactly right, but we were in the sixties, in terms of percent of kids passing. The co-located school we were at was in the teens.
So right away, you know, just kind of the level of differentiation that was happening, this is school that was actually fairly well regarded. When we tried to move in, people were saying, “You shouldn’t mess with this school. It’s one of the better schools in District 5. Which also gave you a sense that that was an argument, and they were producing passing rates in the teens.
I think right from what Eva had started was an eye-opener to folks. I mean, that was happening. It wasn’t just at my school. She had started three additional schools. Two additional schools and HSA1 at that point. And they were all in the sixties. I think one school was even in the seventies.
And that was just unheard of passage rates in New York City. And that was reading and math. So, this was just a [00:15:00] wholesale different look for what had gone on in New York City. I had taught in really failing schools in my entire career, where I was happy to get maybe a quarter of my kids at grade level.
You realize the degree to which that becomes baked into how you start to view what’s possible.
Jeremy Singer: Let me challenge you. I'll wear a critic's hat. You know, there’d be an argument that you cherry-picked the top-performing students, so it’s not as impressive.
How would you answer that challenge?
Jim Manly: Yeah, I think, for me, there are absolutely credible arguments to the idea that parents are a little bit more involved with charters. They obviously seek it out. The application is very simple. It’s just putting your name and address down to get in.
And then it’s a picking from a lottery. So, it isn’t that restrictive, but it does require a parent to be aware that it’s happening. Yet I think that the level of differentiation might explain 5 percentage points, 10 percentage points, but we were [00:16:00] double and triple outperforming the local district.
And so, for me, that that was really the central piece of it. You’re talking about things at the margins that maybe would explain an 8% great gain or something like that. But this is just a completely different set of outcomes. Not to mention as we started to bring in kids from other schools and Eva, with my school in particular, tried to do something pretty controversial, this was when Bloomberg and Joel Klein were there- to make my school a district school. So they were going to close down an unsuccessful school and bring all the students over to be zoned for the charter. That had never happened before.
At the end of the day, she lost that. But we still brought in a whole bunch of those kids because we had started the process. Within two years, those kids were all performing at that 70, 80 percentage points. So, this was an even stronger argument to say these kids hadn't been cherry-picked at all.
They’ve been brought from an unsuccessful school and were outperforming.
Jeremy Singer: Those are great examples. I think in some instances, if you look at all the students in the geography that were in the public schools that go, [00:17:00] there weren’t that many performing well, so even if you were able to cherry-pick, you wouldn’t have that volume. I think that is a great explanation. One of the things that I see, it’s not breaking big news, but there are great teachers, and many great teachers don’t make great instructional leaders, principals, etc. This is not specific to education.
There are many great software developers who are phenomenal software developers, and we try to sometimes say, “Oh, you’re great at software. Now you’re going to manage a software team.” And that often is the worst thing because they were great at developing software, but they’re terrible at managing and leading a team.
Yeah. So, you made that transition. How do you see that and when you’re looking at potential like great teachers, how do you determine when, hey, this person not only is a great teacher, but I think could be a great instructional leader?
Jim Manly: Yeah. I think it’s a restlessness in the right way.
I think a great teacher who’s truly a great teacher doesn’t look beyond the classroom walls and say, “You know, I want to change this policy, or we shouldn’t have lunch at this time.”
Yet I was constantly looking at what was … and part of that was born and bred out of being in really dysfunctional spaces for a long time and feeling like, and maybe a little bit of going to [00:18:00] public policy school, this could be done at a larger scale and getting frustrated with the degree to which …. You know, when I was teaching, and I finally got decent at it, you would pass kids on to the next grade level and see kids who had made all these gains seem to go nowhere the following year.
Jeremy Singer: So that’s your motivation, but what were the things that made you successful?
Jim Manly: I think number one, I’m a strong communicator. I’ve always been good at talking to a lot of different … you have to be really good at talking to a number of different constituencies from your board members to the district leadership but then also parents and students as well.
And I think being able to calibrate and find the right way to communicate where you want to be and what you want to do effectively makes a big, big difference. I think you really have to have a hunger to do things that make [00:19:00] people a little uncomfortable. Teaching isn’t always that, right?
Teaching is often trying to make sure that your kids are comfortable so that they can learn. But certainly, what I saw from Eva and what she got from me was a willingness to say, “That’s the best you can do. That’s not good enough.” And I hadn’t really heard talk like that in education before. No one ever said that to me. I was doing great. No matter what I did, I was doing great.
Jeremy Singer: I really like that because I think the difference, and I’ve never thought of it this way, is what makes you create a culture in a classroom. Is it the same set of skills that you need to be a leader?
We all struggle or most people struggle with giving direct feedback. You know all of that. I can’t tell you how much training we do at College Board to try to help people be more honest with each other and direct because we know at the end that’s valuable, but it’s still just for a myriad of reasons blocked.
So, yep. That’s really interesting. I want to jump into KIPP because that is also … you’ve had many very interesting [00:20:00] segments of your career. Going into KIPP, tell the listeners: What sets KIPP apart from other charter schools? What is it that, you know, theory of action …? How does KIPP operate differently?
Jim Manly: I watched KIPP because it was a Teach For America product. Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg were Teach for America recruits. And I was certainly aware of it. As it grew, I would hear Eva make side comments like “They had a great idea to start, but they got misled. Down the wrong path. They’re not rigorous enough.” So that was a little bit of my mindset of keeping an eye on KIPP.
A funny, quick, funny story, is that I met Dave on a school tour because Success was having such outsized results. They had an accelerator tour and were bringing in different charter authorizers. I met Dave, and of course he hung back. When we first met, he said, “You got to come work for me. This school’s great. This is what I want it to be like.”
But KIPP’s all-operating ethos was much more than one power to lead. They wanted to find great people, and they could just do their own thing. If you were interested in capoeira and liked [00:21:00] Brazilian martial arts, you could start a school. So that worked very well for those founders. But as soon as they passed it on, it became much more difficult, which we'll talk about in a second.
But what was powerful about KIPP was it was really original. It was like the OG of charter schools, right? It was this deep commitment to communities and families and this idea that once you are a KIPPster, you’re a KIPPster for life. We’re going to follow you through middle school and get you into a private school and high school and get you into college.
That real sense of partnership. They were going to do home visits. “We’re going to be right by your side to and through college.” Which I found very appealing. It went back to a little bit of my roots in the classroom. I often joked when I arrived that I was the most left-wing person at Success.
And then as soon as I took the job at KIPP, I was the most right-wing person there. I think that’s what Dave wanted from me at that point. But they did have a very different view of how to operate with students. I think I was able to, with Dave, find a little bit of a re-correction I think for [00:22:00] KIPP to say rigor was always part of the equation, which didn’t translate as we got a little older. But that’s certainly been my take as I’ve arrived back at KIPP. In none of this, did we ever want to communicate that we didn’t believe kids could achieve at the highest possible level.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. So, I see the thread of the commonality of being all-in with the student and family and being there, you know, saying this is a commitment. And it’s interesting because I think that's one of the many, many virtues of TFA. The TFA mafia is probably the strongest group I’ve ever seen.
So much talent has come through there. I’m still trying to imagine a capoeira school. One of the things that I constantly am trying to find are educational interventions, tools, whatever, that have impact and then scale. It’s really, really hard. A big part of that … one of the reasons is so much of the initial success is based on the individual, and that is [00:23:00] hard to scale because there’s only so many individuals.
And you mentioned that. I’d like to go a little deeper. So, you know, KIPP tried to find, really early on at least, dynamic game-changing leaders who could have a vision and deliver on that vision. That’s great, but it’s not easy to find. Maybe you find 2, 3, 5, maybe even 10. But to find 200 is, yeah, I would argue next to impossible. So, they hit that wall. When did they realize that do you think? And what did they do to shift, saying “We’re not always going to find this, you know, 101% type leader.”
Jim Manly: I think that DA Dave started to realize it. I mean, I came over in 2015. I think that was the first point where Dave was starting to see that the results were not growing at a good rate, and Success was starting to really outperform. Uncommon Schools had come over into New York City. Another group was outperforming, and I think the board became aware they were …. They had been used to being the top-performing charter in the neighborhood, and suddenly they were not. Then my set of [00:24:00] results came in.
We quickly made some changes and saw almost double-digit, well, no, not almost, we saw double-digit gains in math and reading even in the first year I was superintendent. I think that moved Dave and KIPP nationally to think that there was something that needed to be changed in the model.
And just about that time, the pandemic hit. That really shook things up at KIPP because as you were talking about, if you don’t have strong systems, if you're reliant on individual people and you have a disruption at the level of the pandemic, and people leave and you come back to school and there’s new folks, and you don’t have those systems to back it up, and that’s really what we experienced. So, we were plateauing as a national organization before the pandemic, but certainly coming back from the pandemic, our scores were not where they needed to be. And we’ve had a really difficult time getting them caught back up. It’s part of my charge in my current role is to figure that out.
I think that’s been an ongoing conversation, but the pandemic certainly more than anything really highlighted the need to have stronger systems. Because if you don't have it, you’re asking brand-new people to know what to do. And that’s a big ask.
Jeremy Singer: [00:25:00] Give an example of a system element that you think is fundamental to … that you’re trying to implement or have implemented.
Jim Manly: I’m glad you asked that. I mean, our whole strategy is based on Shavar Jeffries is our CEO of the KIPP Foundation who used to work for Democrats for Education Reform. He brings to it a determination to get us back on top. He asked me, “What worked for you in New York City?” I listed a number of systems and habits that we developed at KIPP NYC. We’ve really tried to just use those as the … we’ve changed the curriculum to make it a national curriculum in ELA and in math.
But from my vantage point, that’s just setting the table. I don’t really believe that curriculum drives student learning nearly as much as having great systems, but it’s easier if everybody is using the same songbook. So, we’ve really this year, and going forward, dialed down on two really crucial systems.
The first is what we call academic progress meetings. That at least every other week you’re gathering your data, you’re looking at [00:26:00] formative data, and you’re developing action plans to specifically target what’s lagging behind. You check on that on a very regular basis and have really clear reporting mechanisms.
The second is a coaching model, which sounds kind of standard, like everybody gets teacher coaching. But what we’ve tried to do is define that as three specific actions. One is just intellectual prep. Do you really understand the purpose of this lesson and what it’s trying to do? Have you written the exemplar for it? Can you model what kids need to do? Two is you have to be open to getting coached right in the moment that we call real-time coaching. And we’re going to give you our comments as you’re teaching.
The third is we’re going to gather the student work. After it’s done, we’re going to look at it with you, and we’re going to determine whether or not, despite what we practiced or what we went over, the ultimate determinant of whether you’re successful is not me checking a box on a rubric. It’s how many kids got the point of it. And to me it seems so obvious, and I’m sure your listeners are like, really? That’s a breakthrough? But so much of my whole rating throughout my [00:27:00] years of teaching was nobody ever grabbed the student work. No one ever said, “The kid said that was a great lesson.” It was just based on an adult sitting and watching it thinking, “Oh, I really enjoyed that lesson,” regardless of what kids got out of it.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, and I agree. While it sounds obvious, the devil’s in the detail: how you implement it, how you implement it well, how you stick to it. We have at College Board meeting norms, and they’re the obvious things, yet people fall off and don't follow. It’s really hard to get that.
It’s very funny. You probably saw me smiling.
I ran for a brief time a wonderful organization called Partners in School Innovation in the Bay Area. We worked in San Francisco Unified School District, Oakland, and San Jose. At the time, we started a little after Teach For America, but the idea was to embed AmeriCorps teams with an experienced structural leader in schools for 5−7 years. Not that AmeriCorps would change every couple of years, but long term. And our three pillars of our theory of action: you hit on all three.
One was high-fidelity implementation of whatever curriculum program. So, we didn't take a stand, although in [00:28:00] certain places, maybe we should have. We were in California primarily. So one would say, “Hey, let’s not quibble on the instructional pedagogy. Let’s look. Let’s make sure it’s implemented well because often that’s where there’s some failure.” Two was peer coaching and creating an environment where teachers could help teachers or instructional leaders could. Three was using data to drive instruction. So, it all sounds very simple. I could tell you a million stories of why that isn’t simple and often fails.
Let’s go back to the data. So, make your case. It was fun to hear how you said KIPP is very aware of the other charter programs and impact, as well as the public. But what will be the case for KIPP as far as data? And I know some studies that have come out demonstrating that, but share with our listeners.
Jim Manly: Yeah, KIPP has two stories at the same time, right? There’s the story I just told you about the results plateauing, and then post-pandemic not being where they need to be. Yet if you look at some of the Credo study, which was this multi-year study where they looked at, and this goes back to an earlier question, parents who applied and didn’t get into charter schools and parents who applied and did get into [00:29:00] KIPP. And then they followed those longitudinally all the way out into their college outcomes. We were something like two and a half times more likely to graduate kids from college.
So, these are really profound impacts, which perhaps we’ll talk about a little bit later because I think from a public policy perspective, you don’t see innovations like that delivering at that scale and then not get adopted much more widely.
Jeremy Singer: That’s an outside impact … Yeah, it’s hard target.
Jim Manly: It’s really remarkable. That aspect continues to be such a source of strength for KIPP, the degree to which, once we get kids into college, we do counseling with them, we stay in touch. We do many different things to make sure they’re engaged and go all the way to and through college.
Those results continue to be a really strong point of what KIPP does, and my theory is just imagine how much more successful we would be if more of our kids were at grade level in the same way that Success Academies and now KIPP NYC, where our goal is something like having 75% of kids entering ninth grade at grade level.
Because then high school [00:30:00] becomes a very different experience where you’re not remediating skills and where you’re not still teaching kids how to read. Obviously high school just presupposes a number of basic assumptions around what kids can do that we’re trying to get there. So that’s what we're trying to get back to.
But I think of KIPP’s reputation in terms of what we’ve … we like to judge ourselves in what we call the estimated college completion, so we look at where our kids match to schools and their likelihood of graduating a first-generation student of color. We’ve done a really good job of finding those schools that do a good job of graduating our students, matching them really closely, and then supporting them throughout, but also making sure that our high school experience really prepares them for some of the rigors of college, but also some of the … We can talk about just the transition to going to college. Because these are students who haven’t had experience like that before. I think KIPP does a really good job of thinking we need to prepare kids for what it’s going to be like to be in a predominantly white institution. We have to do a whole [00:31:00] bunch of stuff that’s not necessarily part of the high school equation that we’re trying to make sure we prepare kids for.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, that’s great that you do that, and there’s so many programs that have that as a mission. We’d be remiss if we didn't discuss AI. It’s obviously having an impact. Has KIPP started to figure out how to leverage AI?
Jim Manly: I think we have. We’ve started certainly, and I’m old enough to be a little skeptical of any kind of educational innovation. We could probably list about 15 of them that we’ve heard over the time.
Individual learning and Chromebooks, whiteboard, flip classroom. All the things. AI does feel different in certain respects, but in some ways also not. There’s been times where I saw the whiteboard. It was like, oh my gosh, it's so much better than the chalkboard I was on.
But AI for me is not one of those things that initially I’m really excited about. I see all the potential for students to be disengaged and to wonder why this is relevant anymore. If a computer can write this essay that I'm supposed to write and with three prompts, [00:32:00] why am I doing it?
So that part concerns me. I certainly with the addition of cell phones and watching kids being completely disengaged in school, I'm nervous about it. I do see on the teaching side of the equation and the degree to which we can create productivity tools for teachers. I see tremendous potential, and I think our teachers are rightly saying that just because when you are a generation X guy and willing to stay till 10 o’clock at night to finish your lesson plans, that’s not a model that I necessarily want to subscribe to. I’m not sure it was ever a healthy model. Right?
I think we’re seeing potential for AI to like grade students’ papers and get them back feedback immediately. That’s incredibly helpful. I just was in a sales pitch around doing teacher observations and writing a really pretty accurate observation input on what they saw in the classroom. I think those aspects are really exciting because it allows feedback to happen that much more quickly. I think kids benefit [00:33:00] from feedback. The part that I worry about is our kids still need this basis of rigor that doesn’t seem to be enhanced by AI. At least what I have seen only seems to make kids’ lives easier, which isn’t really what I want. I mean, I love kids to have easy lives.
Jeremy Singer: Right, right. You don’t want to make it necessarily hard, but part of learning is you need some level of friction. It’s interesting because I do see, the College Board and our members, we are seeing already the benefit at a minimum is allowing teachers, professors, and instructional leaders to be much more efficient and taking some of the tasks that frankly they viewed as more laborious and time-consuming. If that is grading, it can speed up the grading or replace the grading. It can set up actual lessons and plans. There’s a million things that can either accelerate or replace tasks that teachers do.
What would you say… Hey, we’ve figured out teachers have 40% more time as 40% of what they were doing gets [00:34:00] done by AI. What would you want the teachers to replace that 40% with?
Jim Manly: I feel like when I was a successful teacher and I stopped talking all the time and sat side by side with students as they wrote, that was some of the best kind of back and forth, and kids saying, “Slow down.”
Those are great ideas. Give a chance to go try and put some of those in place, right? That is the opportunity that it feels like AI could grant us. Right? So, I don’t have to sit at the front of the room marking up everybody’s comma mistakes and instead to can really sit side by side through the idea generation piece and the revision piece but also make sure you’re not using AI because I think so much of the work now has to be done in class. I think there's obviously room for doing homework assignments. And you’ll probably recognize when your kids, I mean, one of the pieces is …. Our kids are getting so sophisticated, they even now put in errors.
Jeremy Singer: There’s actually AI can do that for you to like make it less recognizable. Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Manly: So, but to me that just frees the teacher not working productively with kids in the room is [00:35:00] a loss at this point. So, if AI can just make sure that the vast majority of the time you’re instructing, you're letting students do work, and you’re observing them do the work, and you're giving them those kind of real-time coaching and feedback pieces, to me that’s, that's really the game that feels old school but is really where kids learn. And I think some of the gains that you’ve seen from kids using AI, some of the studies have shown that a few weeks out, it all dissipates. And so, there is something about the human relationship and getting feedback and the back and forth that happens in any conversation. I would hope that AI could really get us back to when I walk into a classroom, and I can’t find the teacher. I know that I’m in a good classroom. It’s a good thing.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that’s great. And I don’t think anyone would argue. I like the vision. I think that will manifest. I also think the risk is real. We don’t have time to go into it now, but we’re spending a lot of time at College Board, for example, in the writing process. There are parts that early on the writing process, if a student is using AI or mostly relying on AI, [00:36:00] they don’t develop certain skills. Later in the writing process, it’s actually quite useful and efficient, and it doesn’t stunt their writing growth.
So we’re trying to come up with models and technology that allows students to still build the core skills that they may be losing. So, stay tuned on that.
You mentioned some of the policy angle. If you’re stepping back at the policy level, what do you think needs to change? Is it relevant to charter more broadly toward AI? Or if it can be toward AI but more generally? Do you have a great perspective on that?
Jim Manly: Right now it feels like: Is there any policy that’s happening right now in education? It feels like a space where we’re walking away. What’s frustrating to me is that so many answers have become clear in the last 10 or 15 years. The Science of Reading, even the work we’re doing now with our middle schoolers to get them caught back up on, lagging skills. We’re DIBELS testing, which is an old school foundation.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah, of course.
Jim Manly: But we’re doing it up for our [00:37:00] eighth graders. There’s more like choral reading and having them read out loud. All those things we’re told not to do are actually really helpful to kids who have lagging skills. That to me is an encouraging aspect of public policy. I do see, here, red states are ahead of blue states, saying, “We need to do more with foundational literacy.”
We need to have it expand into upper grades. I think that movement, if we can continue, would be a strong one to make sure teachers are all trained in the Science of Reading. That to me is exciting. I think on the other side, the movement toward private school vouchers are concerning to me.
It feels like we’ve lost the lessons of what was happening in schools where … what I think works about charters is you still have to meet the rigors of the public school experience. Kids need special needs, need to be attended to, you have to make sure this is for all students. You can’t kick kids out.
You have to have rigorous measurement systems of the public. That concerns me on all of those levels. Charters have demonstrated that if you give people … you put the net up, you say you got to, [00:38:00] these are the rules of the game. Operate by public school standards, but within that, we want to innovate and allow kids to be challenged and to do work that’s really meaningful to them. And then you get these results. Success and KIPP and Uncommon and Achievement and First Idea really changed the policy game. If you had this level of outsized response in a cancer trial, you would immediately take people off the placebo and say, “Do it.”
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Manly: We’re not doing that. So, to me, that’s such a loss of the conversation that we’ve got to get back to. We actually know a lot more answers than we think, and we need to bring it to parents to say “Your kids don't have to get these kinds of results. They could be doing so much better.”
But we’ve got to be serious about it.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. Regarding what you said about private vouchers … I just want to underscore your point, which is a lot of success… You know that if you don’t measure things, it’s very hard, if not impossible to demonstrate success. Your fear is also my fear, not just with schools, but [00:39:00] more broadly in education, that we’re losing some common metrics, and if each school or district or state has their own measures of success and they don’t sink, we’re not going to know what’s working, and that's a bit terrifying.
I'm going to, with my guests, do a rapid-fire round. So, these are very short answers., I have four questions for you. First: What’s one educational buzzword you wish we could retire?
Jim Manly: Developmentally appropriate.
Jeremy Singer: Okay. Tell, tell. That’s great. I love it. I won’t go more. I think people will understand what that is. Two: What’s your favorite book about education or one that has deeply shaped your thinking?
Jim Manly: Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham.
Jeremy Singer: That's mine. That was my favorite too. It’s so good. So good. It’s so good.
And for those who don’t know, I think it’s the best example. There’s a big gap between, and we’ll talk…. I’m hoping to have Daniel at some point, but there’s a big gap between … There’s all this cognitive and behavioral science research about how people learn, but the application is quite difficult to apply in a classroom, [00:40:00] and it’s the best illustration of ways you can turn it.
So, I love that we love the same book. Three: Name one thing that you’re bullish on around the future for learners.
Jim Manly: I think giving teachers more time. I do think AI could give teachers more time and that if, as long as they focus on the right things on student inputs, I mean student outputs, could be great.
Jeremy Singer: Last one: One class you wish all students, whether high school class, college class, whatever, had to take.
Jim Manly: I think I’m going to go back to geography. I think the kids’ appreciation of just how big the world is and how much there is that we could still learn about. …. I’m shocked by the level of even some of my most outstanding kids in senior high school who still can’t tell me more than about three foreign countries in the world.
So, I feel like we’ve not done a great job there.
Jeremy Singer: Great. So, Jim, thanks so much for everything. One last question for our listeners. Any parting thoughts, any one big message you’d like to send [00:47:00] when you have this opportunity?
Jim Manly: Well, thanks for that. The piece that I am constantly … and it came out in the interview today … [00:41:00] is we know so many of the answers of how to create great schools and how to reach kids and let them maximize their incredible potential. The fact that we don’t do that at scale as a country just feels like such a missed opportunity for us.
We talk all the time about things that we’re not tapping into as a country, but for me, just the potential of our kids, and the degree to which we write it off every year, is just … that’s the way it goes. Out NAEP scores don’t increase. And all these other things that are telling us blinking red. Be concerned.
We know the answers. We’ve got schools that are just performing at incredible levels, delivering results for all kinds of students with different backgrounds. You can point to so many places where in medicine and other places, we don’t know the answer. We don’t know the answer.
Here we do. We’re not doing enough about it. And that part is hopeful. I’m hopeful that somebody can pick up that banner in the future and demonstrate that’s a giant win for our country and for our kids. If we could, if we could put that all together.
Jeremy Singer: Yeah. I’ll say the whole premise of this [00:42:00] podcast is there’s very few things that have been proven.
So it’s even more imperative when there is a success that has scaled that we continue to scale it as, as you said. And it’s even more important because there are so few within education that have shown success, continued success. Keep up the wonderful work. You’ve devoted your career to it.
You’re having a real impact, and you’re really inspiring. So, thank you so much for the time, Jim.
Jim Manly: My pleasure. Thank you.
Jeremy Singer: Thanks for tuning in today. Join the conversation by following the Education Equation wherever you listen to podcast.