Leader to Leader with Darryl Cobb
What Worked 30 Years Ago Won’t Work Today: Sehba Ali on Reinventing KIPP Texas
In Season 3, Episode 1 of Leader to Leader, Darryl Cobb, President of the Charter School Growth Fund, sits down with Sehba Ali, CEO of KIPP Texas Public Schools, a network of 47 schools serving nearly 30,000 students across Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Sehba reflects on growing up as the child of immigrants, the sacrifices her parents made to prioritize education, and how watching her mother teach helped shape her belief that schools should be places of community, belonging, and opportunity. She shares how a planned two-year stint in the classroom became a 25-year career with KIPP, taking her from teacher and school founder to leading one of the largest charter school networks in the country. Sehba also takes listeners inside the evolution of KIPP Texas, from merging four regional organizations into one network to confronting post-pandemic academic challenges and launching a transformation region for eight struggling schools. In their first year, those schools achieved gains nearly 3 times those of the rest of KIPP Texas, drastically improving performance in one year.
