Case 9: KIPP Houston Public Schools C-107leadership. In addition to the Fisher Fellowship, KIPP
Houston encourages talented teachers to apply for the
Miles Fellowship, which is a two-year path to becoming
a school founder, the first year spent as a resident leader
in an established KIPP school and the second year as a
Fisher Fellow (if accepted). Teachers can also remain in
the classroom and attend KIPP Foundation—sponsored
leadership programs for grade-level chairs and depart-
ment chairs. In addition, KIPP Houston offers its own
leadership classes from central office leaders, which take
place after work hours.
Teachers who seek leadership positions are also signing
up for a demanding role but one that comes with excellent
support and the opportunity for high impact. One former
Fisher Fellow who founded a higher-performing KIPP
school reports that the Fellowship year prepared him well.
“The Fellowship was extremely flexible. I identified
that I needed to learn Spanish, so they sent me to Mexico
for a few weeks to learn it. There were a lot of things that
I was able to work on—from a framework for evaluating
teachers to mapping out curriculum—that set me up for
a solid start.”^47
He explained that KIPP Houston was also a good
place to found a school because of all the back office
logistical support (e.g., in transportation, food services,
and facilities) that allowed him to focus on curriculum
and instruction.
With the support also came a lot of responsibility:
“The workload was fairly intense—an average of eighty
hours a week, with some times of the year approaching
one hundred and others bottoming out at fifty....I think
most school leaders leave because of burn out.”^48
No comprehensive research has been done on the
employee attrition problem, so the issue of long hours
is just one of many guesses concerning what is driving
turnover. KIPP Houston plans to put together a commit-
tee to study the issue in the upcoming year.^49
With the current KIPP Houston expansion plans,
the region will need to fill about 40 new administrative
positions in five years, but Fimble worries that KIPP
Houston has lost its recruiting edge: “The talent exists.
The number of teachers and leaders exists in the city as
a whole. The problem is getting them to want to come
to KIPP. What is our niche in the recruiting war? We
used to be new, more entrepreneurial, and have better
pay. Now we’re not new, not as entrepreneurial, and the
pay isn’t much better, especially when looked at from a
dollar-per-hour-worked perspective.”^50
To fill teaching roles for the upcoming school year
the recruitment office has started new initiatives, includ-
ing a social media campaign, billboards on Houston’s
highly trafficked freeways, recruitment events around
the city, and the offer of a $1,000 referral bonus for any-
one who successfully recruits someone to fill an instruc-
tional position.^51The Curriculum Conundrum
At the heart of the work KIPP Houston does is the curric-
ulum: the learning standards that students are expected
to master. In Texas, the elected, 15-member State Board
of Education approves the curriculum for each subject
in each grade level and schools are required by law to
teach it.^52
However, this process is not straightforward. There
are so many learning standards—and many of them
are so broad—that teachers have significant flexibility
to decide what and how they teach, and most teachers
believe it is not possible to teach all of them with any
kind of depth and student understanding.
Sixth-grade social studies standard 6.2.B, for exam-
ple, states that for the subject of history students should
“evaluate the social, political, economic, and cultural
contributions of individuals and groups from various
societies, past and present.”^53 One teacher may believe
that learning about the Silk Road from China to Europe
would be an excellent way to achieve this goal while
another may teach it by studying the influence of the
Aztec culture on modern Mexico.
This inherent flexibility has led to wide variations in
curriculum, even among instructors teaching the same
grade level and subject. For example, some KIPP schools
used to focus on one section of the science standards
each year to create an emphasis on earth science one year
and life science the next, etc.; while other schools rotate
through all areas of science every year.
In subjects and years that have state achievement tests,
there tends to be less variation in curriculum because
teachers generally align their classroom goals with the
material that appears on the standardized assessment. To
help schools and teachers more closely align their curric-
ula and assess student learning, in the 2011–12 school year,
KIPP Houston began writing and administering its own
Common Assessments. These tests would be administered
three times per year in each core academic subject. The
effort has been led by both Heads of Schools and “Teacher
Leaders” from each grade level and subject. Most subjects
now have Common Assessments while other are yet to be
developed.
To further complicate the curriculum puzzle, Texas
is among the five states in the country that have cho-
sen not to adopt a set of national standards called the