Q&A with new KIPP leader: A 'big risk, big reward' strategy for Memphis' oldest charter schools

A brand new teacher, Antonio Burt arrived from Alabama to Memphis for his first job. It was a new city, and he didn’t know anyone in town. He’d been assigned to Cypress Middle School in North Memphis, a school community he soon realized was burdened by a lack of resources, impacting the way his sixth-grade students showed up to learn.

The middle school building now houses middle and high school students in KIPP Memphis charter schools. Nearly two decades later and with several leadership experiences under his belt, Burt is returning to the building as the leader of the charter network.

Interviewing for the director role of the charter network, a role he began in November, Burt returned to his first school building. Looking around the classrooms, he thought back to what he was like as a teacher, a career path he was inspired to choose by his own middle school teacher.

"A lot of risks, but often the risk comes with a lot of reward," Burt said of his education career. "And the reward is on behalf of improving outcomes for kids that have oftentimes been marginalized and overlooked, and improving outcomes of communities that have in recent times and in historical times been those communities that are disenfranchised or underserved."

Burt began his leadership of the local network of the national charter school group after several years in leadership roles with Shelby County Schools, which most recently culminated with stints as the chief academic officer and the chief of schools. He was an early leader among the district's iZone turnaround district focused on quickly improving academic outcomes for students at struggling schools, and can rattle off how some of Florida's once worst-performing schools have improved through today, years after he was there to help turn them around.

Burt plans to bring a "big risk, big reward" strategy to KIPP Memphis, one of the longest operating charter networks in the city, by focusing on retaining great teachers and leaders to improve student success after a rocky entry to the pandemic.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CA: What is the education story you tell people about yourself?

AB: "The story is: With big risks come big rewards, right. Taking on the toughest challenges, where a lot of people oftentimes, feel that it's too risky to walk in and take those challenges...

"I think it was destiny that selected me for Cypress (Middle School), because I learned the highs and lows of public education. But more importantly, I got a fire ignited in me to be a part of the solution, not part of the problem. So that then ignited a fire that said, 'I want to go into administration to change what I had seen take place.' At my time in Cypress, I had a kid that would often want to resort to violence, and a lot of my teenaged middle school students gave birth in one year. It was just a lot that I said 'it had to be a better way.'

"So I left Cypress and had the pleasure of getting a different teaching experience at Ridgeway Middle School. And so I was like, 'Wait a second. Two middle schools in the same city, less than 12 miles apart, are two different worlds for students.' So I called it 'The Tale of the Two Halves.' One half over here had one experience. The other half over here had a different experience. The one thing that neither of the other two halves had was a similar experience. One had high expectations, the other had low expectations. One had consistency, the other had inconsistency. One had aligned staff, the other had a dysfunctional staff that wasn't aligned for the most part. So I set out to prove that that doesn't have to be the case."

CA: The name on the Cypress Middle School building has changed to KIPP's schools, but the kids that are going there are mostly North Memphis kids and families, right?

AB: "You think about KIPP, 20 years ago, coming to Memphis. There have been different iterations. So in the early years KIPP was kids that came from all over the city. They made a decision to come to KIPP. When you think about where we are today, you still have the choice, but you have predominantly neighborhood students. Within some of those classes may be kids of some of my former students, sitting in the classrooms. ..We had a saying in my recent...training: 'How do we prepare a different life for our students' kids and our students' kids' grandkids?' That's the energy and the focus of which I'm approaching this work in. And more importantly, how do I fulfill the promise that was made 20 years ago, around being the best neighborhood school option of choice for parents?

"That's my whole mission...how do I help fulfill the promise that we made to families over 20 years ago. There's definitely a road to transformation. ..this is like a year of alignment, year of stabilizing. Stabilize the network, stabilize the learning environments, stabilize the structural practices, and then really prepare to run really fast going forward with that. Because you truly have to fulfill that promise that was made 20 years ago...We have to promise and deliver the data that we made to students or families when we first set out this journey.”

CA: You talked a little bit about 'big risk, big reward.' Coming into KIPP, in the early pandemic, it was the two South Memphis schools that closed; your predecessor resigned after several years with KIPP; I understand there were principal and teacher turnovers in the mix. Do you find that is part of the risk of coming in? I’m curious how you plan to build back some of the employee and community support.

AB: "With any true challenge, you run the risk of low buy-in, you also run the risk of not fulfilling the initial goals. One of the things I think about what the South Memphis closure, sometimes within organizations you also have to take a hard look...You have to make sure that you're not sort of expanding at a rate that you're really not designed to support at that particular time. Not that you won't never get there, but are you truly ready to get to that particular number or that particular expansion at that particular time? So one of the things I'm cognizant of is your entire assessment of the network, to really look at what are those things that could be a barrier to our academic success or ensuring that we deliver on those promises, and what are the supports we need in place to help us achieve our goal? And how do we bring all the different people along in the process?

CA: Everybody experienced learning loss, and when you're talking about a community like North Memphis, there's all of the socioeconomic factors there, issues with internet stability in a lot of neighborhoods. As you're assessing the network, what is it going to look like starting to build back on the academic plan, for students and for teachers?

AB: "We're rolling out a plan, first of the year to really ramp up our after school and Saturday school...to really make sure we're gonna accelerate learning for our kids, and we're going to continue to build upon what's taking place inside the classroom. But it's also to make sure we have the best individuals in front of students delivering that instruction...Research will show you kids that may be in under-served communities, they need the best teachers in front of them to really offset any societal evils and norms...I've been looking at also making sure that we have programs and resources to meet the needs of the whole child, but also program resources to support community needs as well.”

CA: What about funding? What is your role there?

AB: "So my role would definitely be to help engage, to help leverage our outstanding local partners who want to continue with the work that they've been supporting over the course of the last 20 or so years around ensuring that kids have high-quality education. But I won't go to any partner with just an ask. I'm gonna go with a detailed plan, so they can see the areas that we want to really highlight and capitalize, what are the accountability metrics that we're putting in place for ourselves."

CA: Looking at schools that don’t have the academic achievement data points you’d want, oftentimes those are the same schools found in under-resourced communities. How elaborate and complex is the effort to turn things around?

AB: "It's a complex effort. Turnaround (designed for dramatic change in a quick period of time) is often confused with school improvement (which is making incremental change over a longer period of time). So a lot of my work has been in turnaround, tough settings. My actual dissertation is on the anatomy of school turnaround, leadership competencies that raise academic achievement. And so what all my experiences and what all that research shows, and from a statistically significant perspective, is that there are five key areas that you have to get right in those communities in order to see academic outcomes change for students.

"Two key drivers will be that there has to be strong, tightly aligned teaching and learning, meaning bell-to-bell instruction, no instructional time wasted. The reason why it's so important is because...you're fighting what I coined the 7-17 rule: You have 24 hours in a day. The seven hours that kids are in front of you have to be more impactful than the 17 hours they're away from you. If they're not, if they're at, or less than the 17, kids are not gonna move academically. The other key driver will be culture and climate. The culture and climate has to breed high expectations, there has to be consistency, and day 1 to day 180 there has to be tight alignment. All of those things have to produce a strong culture and climate.

"The other two drivers that undergird teaching and learning and culture and climate, would be an aligned staff, people saying and doing the same thing, walking, teaching, working in unison, and people staying there. Fourth key driver will be tight system operations. You have systems operating for arrival, dismissal, transition... What does it look like when a colleague is absent? All those things have to be in place.

"And then what undergirds or supports all of that and is the number one catalyst of the entire thing actually taking place is strong personal leadership from a leader that has the ability to drive for results and influence for results and have the confidence to lead...One leader in a building of 400 impacts 400 students... So you have to have a leader that impacts all the teachers, that impacts all the students.”

Laura Testino covers education and children's issues for the Commercial Appeal. Reach her at laura.testino@commercialappeal.com or 901-512-3763. Find her on Twitter: @LDTestino

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Q&A with new KIPP leader: His strategy for Memphis' oldest charter schools