Director, Student Development

KIPP

2d • Remote

About The Position

The Director, Student Development is a newly envisioned role responsible for designing, piloting, and scaling a coherent student development strategy that builds students’ knowledge, skills, and beliefs for college success across the secondary continuum. This role centers on purpose development—helping students understand who they are, why they are pursuing specific postsecondary pathways, and how to persist toward their long-term goals. Reporting to the Chief, College Advancement and Partnerships, the Director will lead the research, design, and implementation of developmentally aligned assessments, interventions, and programming, with an initial focus on the junior year and a clear multi-year vision for expansion into grades 9–12. This role blends research, curriculum design, assessment, and implementation leadership, working closely with regional and school-based partners to ensure student development practices are high-quality, evidence-informed, and feasible at scale.

Requirements

• Mission and Student Focus: Demonstrates passion and commitment to KIPP’s mission and possesses the desire and ability to uphold KIPP’s core values (Focus on Excellent Results, Collective Impact, and Courageous Action)
• Strategic Decision Making & Problem Solving: Efficiently defines the right metrics to evaluate work and ensures critical team actions, decisions, and recommendations are driven by data; effectively works with team to resolve issues around data to ensure sound data-informed decisions. Effectively identifies and addresses root causes to the most important problem.
• Effective Work Management: Sets a clear vision for new or complex bodies of work. Develops and implements agile project plans, navigating difficult situations or conflicts while maintaining effective relationships with all stakeholders; creates and ensures systems are in place for knowledge management.
• Self Management: Demonstrated record of setting ambitious goals and achieving them with consistency. Invests in developing teammates’ skills and mindsets to address gaps in achieving team growth; determines what quantitative and qualitative data are most relevant to their goals and supports the team in creating and monitoring systems for collecting, reviewing, and acting upon data to drive outcomes; able to monitor progress, communicating status to the right stakeholders and adjusting plans and use of time to ensure systems are yielding desired outcomes.
• Process Management: Able to build and align goals and project plans with organization priorities; leverages relevant organizational processes and systems to execute work; can build and maintain knowledge management systems; effectively develops and codifies cross-team processes relevant to their team’s work that improve work quality and efficiency; uses data to drive process improvements in support of organizational priorities.
• Collaboration: Has the interpersonal, diplomatic, relationship building, and communications skills needed to develop successful working relationships with diverse constituents to deliver results. Evolves and adapts plans and approach with diverse stakeholders to drive results. Possesses excellent communication skills with aptitude for translating complex information into a clear and persuasive narratives that convince others by identifying benefits for all.
• Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree preferred.
• 8+ years of relevant experience in high school and/or postsecondary education counseling, advising, student development, curriculum, or related fields.
• Experience designing or implementing student development, advising, or instructional programming at the school, district, or national level.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with or supporting high school leaders and educators preferred.
• Experience with charter or charter-like schools, nonprofits, higher education, and/or serving first-generation students from historically underserved backgrounds.
• Strong Excel and PowerPoint skills preferred
• Strong research skills preferred

Responsibilities

• Student Development Strategy & Assessment
• Conduct research and synthesize best practices related to student development, purpose, identity, and college readiness.
• Design a senior-year 360° student development assessment to measure students’ knowledge, skills, and beliefs related to college success.
• Establish clear mastery benchmarks and assessment processes to evaluate student growth over time.
• Lead end-of-year analyses to assess student mastery and inform continuous improvement of programming and interventions.
• Program Design, Piloting, and Scaling
• Design and pilot first-year junior interventions focused on strengthening student purpose through targeted development practices.
• Execute and refine junior-year interventions, incorporating data, feedback, and implementation learnings.
• Expand student development interventions across grade levels, including:
• Planning and implementing purpose-focused programming for seniors, sophomores, and freshmen
• Applying student development strategies to senior-year college application and transition supports
• Ensure interventions are developmentally appropriate, culturally responsive, and aligned to postsecondary outcomes.
• Curriculum, Resources, and Professional Learning
• Create approaches, resources, tools, and guidance to support high-quality implementation of student development practices in schools.
• Design and deliver content-based professional development for regional and school-based staff.
• Partner with instructional leaders to integrate student development strategies into existing structures (e.g., seminars, advising.).
• Cross-Team Collaboration and Implementation Support
• Partner closely with other KIPP national and regional teams to ensure alignment between student development programming and broader postsecondary success strategies.
• Collaborate with regional teams to support implementation, gather feedback, and address implementation challenges.
• Use qualitative and quantitative data to provide targeted feedback to regions and schools to improve student outcomes.
• Continuous Improvement and Impact Measurement
• Design evaluation approaches to assess short- and long-term outcomes of student development programming.
• Monitor implementation fidelity and effectiveness across regions.
• Use data and insights to iterate on program design, tools, and professional learning.

Benefits

• 25 holidays for + 18 days additional flexible PTO days (flexible PTO increases to 23 days for years 3 and 4 and to 28 days for years 5+).
• 100% paid parental leave
• 100% coverage of the premium for employee and 75% for employee + family’s medical/dental/vision plans.
• Wellness benefits such as fitness reimbursements, discounted tickets to theme parks/attractions, backup care support for children and adults/elders, and our employee assistance program
• Finance Security benefits include such as a 401K retirement plan with 4% match, employer-sponsored legal plans, life/disability insurance, and flexible spending accounts

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees