Senior Director of ELA Achievement (9-12)

Company Description

KIPP — the largest nonprofit network of college-preparatory, public charter schools in the nation—has demonstrated, at scale, that all children have the potential to excel academically regardless of race or zip code. KIPP currently serves over 120,000 students in 270 schools nationwide, including Indianapolis. KIPP Indy Public Schools (KIPP Indy) was founded in 2004 with one class of fifth-grade students and has grown to serve 1,400 students across three schools. Of the students that attend KIPP Indy, 93% qualify for free and reduced lunch, 95% are African American or LatinX, 16% receive special education services, and 15% are designated as Multilingual Learners. As we continue to grow, our mission remains the same: to create joyful, academically excellent schools in which teachers, students, and families are all united around the same goal of preparing students with the skills and confidence to pursue the paths they choose —college, career, and beyond— so they can lead fulfilling lives and create a more just world.

Job Description

KIPP Indy Public School’s Senior Director of English Language Arts Achievement (Grades 9-12) works intensively with fellow Senior Directors and Directors of English Language Arts Achievement, School Leaders, Assistant School Leaders, academic team leaders, teachers, and students to support students in strengthening their academic skills, intellectual habits, and character traits needed to succeed in the nation’s most competitive colleges, universities, post-secondary programs, and careers.

Develop and uphold literacy vision and strategy

• Support the development and/or revisions of KIPP Indy’s regional vision for excellent literacy instruction across the assigned grade band continuum and larger K-12 space.

• Create a plan for each academic year to increase the number of students who perform at or above grade level, including diverse and multilingual learners.
• Partner with the regional academic team to build and drive a regional academic strategy that ensures KIPP Indy students are college-ready by high school graduation, as measured by SAT benchmark and AP exams.
• Communicate the vision and strategy across KIPP Indy schools to ensure that all instructional staff, students, families, and other stakeholders know and understand the vision for excellent literacy instruction and the regional academic strategy.

Manage and build capacity in direct reports

• Coach, develop, and manage direct reports and/or teaching staff through training, professional development, ongoing one-on-ones, collaborative work, real-time feedback, and performance evaluation structures.
• Support any direct reports with the execution of the strategic vision, stakeholder engagement, professional development execution, progress monitoring and response to data, planning and communication, performance and change management, and other responsibilities as necessary.
• Cascade all curriculum, alignment, implementation, development, and strategy components as needed through direct reports to school and academic teams.

Manage curriculum strategy, alignment, and implementation

• Partner with School Leaders to ensure block fidelity through a variety of systems and structures (classroom observations, meeting facilitation observation, PD, etc.)
• Ensure that the region implements the clearly defined assessment strategy aligned with our One KIPP priority, which clarifies what assessments must be administered, when those assessments must be administered, and where data for those assessments must be entered.
• Provide professional development before each school year to School Leaders and other instructional support and teaching staff regarding the region's curriculum and assessment strategy for the upcoming school year.
• Provide ongoing leadership to ensure valid administration of assessments, including by providing expert support of related systems, assessments, and data platforms.
• Facilitate collaborative scoring meetings where teachers grade student work against a clear standard for excellence designed to ensure that teachers internalize what college-ready work looks like for students at a given grade level.
• Partner with school teams to ensure that KIPP Indy can provide increasingly effective assessment resources to teachers each year. This will involve working independently to create and revise assessments, working with outside consultants, and analyzing the extent to which current internal assessments are predictive of external measures.

Manage the delivery of professional development aligned with the region's instructional approach

• Co-lead the development and execution of an annual professional development strateg