Ryan Hill is Co-Founder and Principal of TEAM Academy a public charter school for grades 5 through 8 in Newark, New Jersey, based on the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) model for underserved children in predominantly urban areas across the US. Students attending TEAM typically enter two years below grade level in math and three years below grade level in reading. However, within four years, the first class of TEAM students had reversed the achievement gap, outperformed their peers in Newark, the state of New Jersey, and the nation, and earned over $600,000 in scholarships to some of the finest high schools in the country, including Phillips Exeter Academy, Loomis Chaffee and Deerfield Academy. Students typically attend classes from 7 am to 7 pm and 6 days per week.
At TEAM Academy, we often talk about sustainability in terms of human sustainability. By human sustainability, what we mean is that we can’t be an organization staffed completely by 25 year-olds with no social life and no kids. But we’re starting to mature as an organization, so that our veteran teachers, if they want to, can leave a lot earlier than they could before because they’ve got their lesson plans now, they don’t have to spend as much time figuring out curriculum, so there’s that sustainability built in – sort of as a natural evolution.
We’re also taking intentional steps towards sustainability: we’ve hired a “Director of Sharing.” We have three schools, and for a long-time, the practice was that if a teacher left, we felt like we were reinventing the wheel with the new teacher. The Director of Sharing’s job is to make sure that not only do teachers document everything they’re doing, but that they save everything on our shared server. So the goal is that if you’re a new 5th grade math teacher, and you’re teaching fractions, you type in “5th grade math fractions” in our searchable database, and all the lessons on fractions, all the worksheets come up, as well as videos on how teachers have taught it before. That’s a lot better than having to conceptualize and invent everything by yourself.
Organizationally, our next step is to open elementary schools, which is another big step towards sustainability because right now our 5th graders come in on a 2nd grade level. In the KIPP Houston elementary school (the first KIPP elementary school) their 2nd graders are performing on a 5th grade level. As the students continue to perform well in subsequent years, KIPP Houston’s middle school teachers don’t need to tutor until 10:00 at night (like we still do), and that, in turn, makes the whole system more sustainable.
We weren’t thinking about these things in the beginning, but we’ve learned over time that we need to think about sustainability more. We are also starting to think green for our buildings as we expand; we intend for all of our buildings to be green, eventually.
At TEAM, we say, “Work Hard, Be Nice” which comes from Rafe Esquith, a phenomenal teacher in Los Angeles. In his classroom, he says, “There are two rules in this class: one is to be nice and the other is to work hard.” There’s nothing else, there’s no, “You can’t chew gum” – nothing like that. Just be nice, and work hard, and do all the things associated with that. His class is not unique for its teaching methods; he teaches out of the same sort of standard textbooks that most schools do; there’s nothing “sexy” about his approach to instruction, but the culture of his class is so incredibly strong that his kids just learn incredible amounts, and more importantly, they become incredibly good people, self-sustaining people who are going to go off and do great things. When his class performs Shakespeare - that’s kind of what he’s known for - he takes his alumni, the alumni of his 5th grade class to the Shakespeare Festival in Oregon every year and gives them credit cards and tells them he’ll see them in a week and that they’re on their own. And so this is 5th through 12th graders, and they just are self-sustaining, even at that point. His class is incredible, and we take our teachers out there every year and tiptoe in; it’s the best staff development we do.
At TEAM, the first thing students see when they come in on the first day of school is the year that they are going to graduate college. Actually the first thing they see is the word “YET,” which we also stole from Rafe. We tell them the word “yet” means there are a lot of things you don’t know yet. There are a lot of things you haven’t learned yet: many of you haven’t learned how to react appropriately when someone bumps into you, or when someone says something mean to you; there are some of you who can’t read yet, and none of you are ready for college yet; and none of you has earned the end of the year trip yet; none of you has earned your TEAM Academy shirt yet.
But the word “yet” implies inevitability, and we don’t use the word inevitability with new 5th graders, but we explain it, and that’s the beginning of building the culture, and then we talk about college. We tell them that they can grow up and drive a cab, they can grow up and be a lawyer, they can grow up and do whatever it is they want to do IF they go to college. If they don’t go to college, then their options are much more limited, and so we present college as a road to many more options, and not as something that increases your inherent worth.
As they progress, we teach them that we really don’t define success by how much money they make, or even how many opportunities they have; the way we really define success is whether they want to and are able to change their world. If you look at all our alumni’s Facebook pages, the quote at the bottom, on almost every one of them is, “Be the change” from the Gandhi quote. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” That’s because they know that - the language is kind of ubiquitous here - growing up, becoming successful, making a ton of money, and then being a jerk and a bad father is NOT success, by our definition. Growing up, going to college, or even if they don’t go to college, but being a great parent, a great friend and someone’s who’s hellbent on changing the world, THAT’s what we value.
Photograph by Barbara Beirne
