Fatima Minor has been teaching for more than 20 years, but when she started a new job at KIPP University Park Elementary in Stockton, California, she told her principal that she wanted to learn everything there is to know about reading instruction.
She records herself teaching, seeks extra observations, and when something isn’t working, treats it like a puzzle. Her kindergarteners have absorbed that ethic, practicing letter sounds and blends, celebrating when they hit goals, and pushing to go further.
For two straight years, 100% of Minor’s students finished the year reading at or above grade-level benchmarks, well ahead of last year’s 67% national rate. Those results reflect deliberate decisions about instruction and culture that lead to stronger student outcomes.
And behind those decisions is an obvious truth: learning requires hard work—hard work from students who grapple with complex texts and challenging problems; hard work from educators who plan, teach, and refine their craft; and hard work from leaders who foster high expectations and the conditions to reach them.
Unfortunately, education is being pulled in the opposite direction. Over the past decade, technology has surged, promising to accelerate learning, but something isn’t adding up.
The latest national Education Scorecard shows students performing worse than a decade ago in much of the country, with reading scores down in 83% of districts and math scores down in 70%. Recent NAEP results are more mixed, but still sobering: progress is uneven, and achievement remains far too low.
It doesn’t have to be this way. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, achievement grew steadily, graduation rates rose, and college attainment increased, with the greatest gains among students who had historically been left behind.
Those earlier gains, and the progress still happening in schools that held the line, reflect a commitment to high standards, research-backed instruction, pairing rigorous expectations with genuine support, and accountability for results.
Supporting hard work
The past decade has brought countless innovations—new technologies, new frameworks, and now AI—each suggesting that building knowledge and skill could somehow be made faster. These tools have benefits, but their value lies in supporting hard work, not replacing it.
Real learning requires discipline: reading closely, solving problems step by step, and revising work based on feedback. It requires time and a willingness to struggle productively. These are not new insights. But they are easy to sideline in a system incentivized toward novelty.
The pandemic forced a moment of clarity for KIPP. When classrooms closed, we saw how essential school is as a community and a daily structure for rigorous learning. When students returned, we got serious about what that requires.
That started with an unprecedented network-wide alignment around approaches proven to deliver for students: the science of reading, evidence-based math instruction, strong attendance practices, and regular assessments that give educators data to act before students fall behind.
We also invested in teacher development and coaching and held all schools to the same high standards because what works in our strongest classrooms should reach every student we serve.
The results are encouraging.
In 2024-25, the first year the entire network implemented common math and literacy practices, our regions posted average gains of 4-7 points in ELA and math, the first post-pandemic gains of that magnitude.
This year, we piloted an attendance strategy that reduced chronic absenteeism by eight points in participating regions by midyear, driving network rates down to 23%, below the national average and well below rates for similar schools. Next year, every KIPP region will adopt those practices.
We are clear-eyed about how much further there is to go. But the direction is right.
Bold enough?
We also did the hard work of reflection, asking whether the convictions that have long defined us are showing up consistently in our classrooms.
When we saw that they weren’t, we took steps to change that, reasserting the commitments that bind us together: the rigor to deliver results, alongside the joy that makes children run to school; a genuine belief in every child’s brilliance not as a platitude, but a practice; and the character to do this work with integrity, because excellence without integrity is incomplete.
No single school has all the answers.
But the schools and districts getting this right are full of people willing to do hard things: Dedicated teachers who push students further than they thought they could go; leaders who demand accountability and support; teachers and students who embrace challenge because someone believed in them.
The work of building schools worthy of our students has always been hard, but we have done it before—in classrooms, schools, and communities that others had written off. The question before us now is whether the field is willing to be bold enough to do it again.
