[2025 - 2026] KIPP Durham Middle Refounding ELA Lead Teacher Grades 6 - 8 (Starting salary $70K)

Company Description

Teaching is the absolute hardest profession in the world and it is going to take incredible leadership to successfully turn around KIPP Durham Middle School to realize our students’ limitless potential.  We are assembling a dream team of 14 exceptional educators with extraordinary skill, and the passion to make change in the lives of students and their communities.   With salaries ranging from $70k - $100k   KIPP Durham Middle School staff will be the highest paid educators in the state of North Carolina.  If you have what it takes and are ready for the challenge, we want to recognize the expertise and commitment to excellence you bring to the table.

Through “refounding” KIPP Durham Middle School, our dream team will gain unique professional experiences and career advancement in building a school from the ground up - preparing them for leadership in the education industry and beyond.  

The exceptional educators we’re looking to join the KIPP Durham Middle School team will be master educators who have track records of affecting rapid, dramatic student learning improvements for students. While we founded the school in 2015, we are treating 2024-25 as a re-founding school year, an endeavor that requires a staff with a founder’s mentality around doing what it takes, making it happen, sweating the small stuff, and creating a reimagined reality for our students.

CRUCIAL COMPETENCIES

Our “re-founding” classroom teachers will blow the following four crucial competencies* out of the water:

Driving for Results: Our teachers will have personal accountability to achieve outstanding  academic results and the task-oriented actions required for success. Our teachers will set high goals for themselves and their students, making persistent, well-planned efforts to achieve these goals despite barriers and resistance; holding others accountable for doing their part to achieve results; and putting in all the extra effort necessary to ensure success. 

Influencing for Results: Our teachers will motivate others—students, colleagues, and families—and influence their thinking and behavior to obtain outstanding  academic results and classroom culture. Our teachers will understand that they cannot accomplish change alone, but instead must influence the work of others. They will use a variety of influencing moves—inspiring students, nurturing ridiculously joyful AND rigorous classroom and schoolwide cultures, responding to unspoken student needs and motivations, and simultaneously supporting and inspiring colleagues to collaborate on the path to schoolwide success—as the situation requires. 

Problem-Solving: Our teachers will be LASER FOCUSED on planning, organizing, and delivering high quality Tier 1 instruction, and they will continually analyze data to determine student learning needs and next steps for intervention blocks during the day.

Personal Effectiveness: Our teachers will exhibit flexibility and optimism when faced with stressful, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar situations; maintain confidence in themselves and a willingness to keep improving despite the many challenges of their role; actively embrace the constant changes needed to ensure student learning in high-challenge situations; and hold and maintain a strong belief in the human potential for learning and improvement, despite significant societal pressures to settle for less. Our teachers will see themselves as not just a classroom teacher, but a SCHOOLWIDE teacher oriented around solutions and being proactive in their engagements.