The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

YES Prep adds a radical ingredient to special sauce: new way to promote and compensate teachers

January 06, 2011 by Jennifer Hines

YES Prep gets a lot of visitors. Some are non-educators: business people, potential board members, politicians. They come, spend a little time in our classrooms, are greeted by eager groups of sixth grade students with outstretched hands, and come away with the impression that YES Prep is a great school system. We also host a fair number of foundation officers and leaders from other schools. These folks generally spend longer times in our classrooms, talk to our teachers and school leaders, sometimes even browse the artifacts of a school – lesson plans, class schedules, lists of college acceptances – and because they are on campus longer get mobbed by even more sixth graders eager to welcome them to their school and proudly declare where they are planning to go to college. Most of the time, these people also walk away with a favorable impression of YES Prep and frequently follow up with requests for materials, advice, or pleas to open up YES Prep schools in other parts of the country.

Whether visitors have done a quick tour of the school or a day-long visit, though, we almost always hear the same question: “So how is it that you’ve been so successful?”  Sometimes we hear variations on that question: “What’s the curriculum that you’ve used that has led to such high student achievement?” or “Tell me how you’ve integrated technology to improve instruction” or “What’s the philosophy behind how you organize your schedule to maximize learning time?”

Invariably, what visitors to the school are looking for is a neat explanation for what has led to our success: If we could just use the same curriculum as YES Prep, we’d get similar results. Let’s get our hands on that.  The answer to this question, unfortunately, is not conducive to tidy packages or quick solutions.

• How do you change the mindset of middle school students who don’t have the first idea what college is or why they should aspire to go?
• How do you create a culture of achievement and have students willingly do two or three hours of homework a night for seven years while their neighborhood peers spend their afternoons, at best, in front of the television or playing Grand Theft Auto?
• How do you create an academic program that catches students up who are grade levels behind and prepares them for the rigors of college-level work?
• How do you reach out to students once they’ve graduated from high school and provide the right combination of support and prodding so that over 80% of alums have either graduated from college or are still enrolled (while national numbers for low-income kids hover around 25%)?

The reason for our success is not a curricular model that we can pull off the shelf and hand to someone else – even though we’ve developed a rigorous curriculum and challenging assessments we use to mark students’ progress toward college-level work.

The reason for our success is not a top-notch technology solution – though we have a first-rate tech team, solid resources available to teachers and students, and a rapidly-developing intranet and set of dashboards to get information more quickly into people’s hands and measure progress.

The reason for our success is not solely our schedule and longer school day and year – though admittedly a longer school day and extended school year are foundational to our program and allow us to provide a variety of core academic, intervention, and extra-curricular experiences for our students.

So what’s the secret sauce?

We have really great people.

None of these other aspects of our program, important as they are, is the reason students from YES Prep perform well on the TAKS or other measures of our effectiveness as a school system. The curriculum by itself does not ensure minds that can handle college-level work. Technology does not create drive or grit. None of these “solutions” taken individually or even combined would yield the kind of outcomes that our students have been able to achieve unless the right people were running the show, implementing the curriculum, using the data thoughtfully, and squeezing success out of every single minute of every week, planning, teaching, assessing, holding tutorials, talking with parents, planning service trips, mentoring, coaching.

YES Prep has spent the last few years focused on great people in a number of crucial ways: we’ve refined our teacher selection model, developed and grown Teaching Excellence, our training and certification program for first year teachers, and launched Leading Excellence, a training and fellowship program for potential YES Prep leaders. Because of that focus, we have an insanely talented, aligned, and hard-working staff of teachers, school leaders, and counselors. If you visit YES Prep, we hope the overwhelming feeling you have when you leave is, “Wow, everyone I met was amazing.”

Now, YES Prep is about to embark on our newest and possibly most radical endeavor related to our people. We will change the way in which teachers are compensated and promoted as we move away from the traditional tenure-based pay scale and one-size-fits-all teacher job description and toward a system based on performance, with opportunities for teachers to progress through various stages of growth. Our intended outcomes are many, but let’s start with this: create a place where high-performing individuals can grow, develop, and be well-compensated while remaining in the classroom. Encourage more of our strongest teachers to stay in the classroom just a little bit longer – not forever necessarily, but maybe another year or two – and have everyone around them, including students, teachers, and administrators, benefit from their leadership.

We’re going to be changing up the recipe for the secret sauce just a little bit in the coming months at YES Prep and as we tinker with it, we’ll be sharing our thoughts, plans, and progress. One of our ultimate goals is to be the best place in the country to develop as an educational leader – as we grow to serve 10,000 students in the next few years the opportunity for our teachers to develop leadership in a number of capacities both inside and outside the classroom will be crucial to providing each of those 10,000 students with the best possible shot at knocking it out of the ballpark in college and changing the possibilities for their lives.
 

Jen Hines is the Vice President for People and Program at YES Prep Public Schools.  She is a Teach For America Alumna, a former YES Prep teacher and School Director and a proud mother of two beautiful daughters.  Read more from Jen by following our Teacher Talent blog and Facebook pages.   

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