I was a social scientist before I became a teacher so I was excited to read that Mathematica had analyzed "late arrivals" who attended KIPP. That seemed to be an inspired methodology for determining whether KIPP "creams" by excluding the most difficult-to-educate kids. I thought that KIPP did not admit students after the year began, but if they had a big enough sample to compare the characteristics of KIPP students who arrive in October, for instance, with students who first enter neighboring schools at that time, we would have real evidence!
Reading the study and its definitions, I learned that Mathematica attempted no such thing. Sure enough, KIPP does not admit students in the middle of the year.
As with their previous research, Mathematica was impeccable in fulfilling the purpose of their study. Their methodology showed that 22 KIPP schools have demonstrated remarkable fidelity in implementing their model, while reducing "creaming" as much as is possible for a system where poor families must apply, and volunteer to meet much higher standards. The highly-respected Princeton think tank showed that the numbers of KIPP's new students entering at the beginning of their sixth through eighth grade years, as well as the numbers leaving before graduating from middle school, are comparable to schools that are located near their sample of KIPP schools.
Mathematica showed that KIPP has great success with improving the performance of children who are just as poor, and who have not experienced greater academic success, than students in neighboring schools. But we must remember that the type of middle schools in neighborhoods served by KIPP are among the most dysfunctional institutions in America. Saying that KIPP's attrition rate is a little better than some of the nation's worst middle schools' rate is not a ringing proclamation of success.
Mathematica simply confirms that KIPP succeeds greatly with the kids where it succeeds, while indicating that its failure rate with their more difficult-to-educate students seems comparable to the failure rate of the toughest neighborhood schools. Its research tells us nothing about whether the KIPP system of 99 schools could be scaled up.
To do that, we need studies that act like "race track monitors" to make sure that no interest groups get "an unfair advantage" in promoting their preferred agendas. One such study, by Gary Miron of Western Michigan, found a 40 percent attrition rate for black males in his larger sample of KIPP schools. And to my knowledge, it has never been claimed that KIPP has been more successful with IEP students diagnosed with conduct disorders or serious emotional disturbances.
It is hard to see how any quantitative study could assess the issue of KIPP's attrition rate. Economics and race, as I would hope any educator would understand, are not the key factors for educational success, and elementary test scores might not mean much more as children enter their tumultuous teenage years. Even some of my gangbangers in the lowest-performing school in the state still read at college levels, even though their circumstances, and behavior, had changed dramatically since entering middle school. I suspect that a qualitative study would confirm Jay Mathews' observation that many KIPP students leave for less challenging schools "in spite of pleas to stay from KIPP teachers." I suspect that KIPP teachers issue their pleas with the same sincerity that we in neighborhood schools do, as we try to save our kids from the streets.
I notice that Oklahoma City's KIPP was one of the 22 schools studied, but its attrition data was excluded due to the way the numbers were kept. Our KIPP does a great job, but you simply can not compare a charter which had a decade to build up to serving 285 students, with 8.5 percent being on special education IEPs, with its neighboring school. KIPP replaced Moon Middle School which had served 792 students, with 26 percent on IEPs. Last year, KIPP recommended 21 percent of students for retention, while the old Moon had recommended 3 precent of students for retention. The old Moon was cited in Harpers Index for a lunch room riot. KIPP's neighboring school had a one year middle school dropout rate of 11.5 percent. At Moon, latecomers sometimes arrived in a deputy's car, in handcuffs, as they reentered a school with no transition services. One of their forms of attrition was 30 expulsions; the old school had 808 total suspensions.
As I have explained, Arne Duncan came to Oklahoma City and gave our KIPP the praise it deserved, but he was factually incorrect in claiming that the charter served the "same kids in the same building." Ironically, I had been bloodied that day breaking up a vicious assault which badly injured a student. The assailant had previously sent a teacher to the hospital. I had former KIPP students in my honors class, and they said that KIPP would never have tolerated the routine physical assaults that our neighborhood school allowed to be committed on students and teachers.
I have never doubted the abilities of kids at Moon or KIPP to succeed in a system that celebrated their full humanity. Many students who attended the old Moon used to ride on my back as I swam the width of the pool until I was too exhausted to climb out of the water without a ladder. When I visited the crack houses where some lived, I negotiated with their guard dogs. Several students visited my house, crying, after witnessing a murder. I learned about the demons that haunted their toughest gang-banger when I held him all night as he endured a migraine headache. He repaid me a decade later, intervening as I confronted his homeboys, presumably armed, as carloads of gang-bangers descended on our school's parking lot.
I will never begrudge KIPP the praise that it deserves for the good it does for some students. Neither do I begrudge the extra resources that KIPP gets from private donors.
The problem is the claim that neighborhood schools could replicate those successes if we had higher expectations. Every day in my last two years in the classroom, I had a student transfer in or transfer out. I doubt anyone would claim that families chose my school in order to improve their life's prospects. If a student transferred to my school, obviously, it was because his or her family was not able to take advantage of the wide array of educational choices in our metropolitan area. At best, their only transition services were a handshake while being greeted or being told "good bye." Too many times, teachers were too overwhelmed to even offer those basic courtesies.
By pretending that KIPP serves our most vulnerable students, society is given an excuse for starving alternative services for our most traumatized kids. For the life of me, I can not understand why people of good will can not agree on the obvious. KIPP is the answer for some students. But our toughest secondary schools need far more investments for our most damaged children if we hope to provide educational futures for them and their classmates. Why not give our neighborhood schools the same chances to help poor kids that we give to KIPP?
Follow John Thompson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drjohnthompson
Sarah Garland: New Study of KIPP Says the Charter Chain Pulls in More Cash Than Other Schools
Tom Vander Ark: Charter Schools Finding Niches
Alexander Russo: How A Charter School Turns Union
KIPP: Knowledge Is Power Program | Charter Schools
KIPP Charter Schools Have Funding Edge, Study Says : The Two-Way : NPR
Backlash Forces Change to KIPP Charter School in Washington Heights
We (successful charters + public schools) should be combining resources instead of scrutinizing those that work effectively. What ARE KIPP's methods- HOW should a school work with children who are in gangs, abused, miseducated, etc.? To assume that KIPP turns away students with severe emotional/behavioral problem is erronous, at best.
The bottom line is there are dedicated (and very talented) teachers everywhere who realize that change must come from the TOP first. KIPP, other public charters, and dedicated educators in low socio-economic neighborhoods will continue making a difference in the lives of children who have been written off by a society who doesn't "see" them on a regular basis.
Write about it or be about it. The "choice" is yours.
All districts should also have an alternative schools program for those students who thrive in an unstructured environment--and there are some who do.
That's what I've been doing today, drafting a post on the need for alternative school for the reason you cite.
Thanks for the link. It sounds like our situations are similar. Our school should not be the bottom of the state, but the neighborhood has access to around twenty school systems and over thirty charters and magnets and parents take advantage of their choices.
Tuitican, I said economics and other externals aren't the key. It is the complex combination of race, generational poverty, trauma, and concentrations of the most challenging kids left behind in isolated neighborhood schools, made worse by kids knowing they've been left behind.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-charter-schools/Content?oid=3595045
It sounds like your KIPP School is consuming resources that could be spent on a continuation school for violent and disruptive children. Violence just cannot be tolerated and your school system needs policies in place to effectively deal with it.
Secondly, I'm really focusing on something that is closer to a sort of reverse creaming. And its even harder to talk about. We need high-quality services for the 5 to10% of kids who have been through too much trauma to be able to function in neighborhood schools. In my experience, school leaders say they spend 85% of their time on that small group, and still they see little success. I don't say those alternative services must be in separate facilties, but they must be intensive and comprehensive. The problem is that we refuse to fund those program because, in part, it is cheap and easy to say that neighborhood schools should just adopt KIPP's expectations.
I for one would love to see more charters dedicated to the 5-10% of highest-need students - any innovative solution would be welcome, charter or otherwise. As a former principal I can attest that I spent a great deal of time on those students with only sporadic success. We need to start thinking about schooling in totality as opposed to each school as an individual entity - some schools are going to be successful for some students some of the time. Within all schools, though, every student should be able to be successful - that takes options.
P.S. While I think KIPP is doing some great things, I am not a huge fan of their approach.
You wrote, "Its research tells us nothing about whether the KIPP system of 99 schools could be scaled up." I know you are giving KIPP its due, but I think you are being too kind. As you noted in various ways throughout the post, KIPP and other charter schools can behave in ways that public schools cannot. From preselection bias, to student retention, to student discipline, it is obvious that these systems cannot scale. How can I say this with certainty?
You also wrote, "while indicating that its failure rate with their more difficult-to-educate students seems comparable to the failure rate of the toughest neighborhood schools." If KIPP can only produce similar results for the most difficult to educate, they are simply incapable of scaling. With all their advantages, including a smaller student body, they could only match the results for the most difficult to educate. WOW! That is a startling bit of data.
Thanks for the excellent post. I agree with you on KIPP. I'm just sad to see that they get all the praise and adoration, while public schools and public school teachers, like you, are ridiculed and professionally degraded.
I see no possibility of KIPP scaling up much. If they did, they would have to deal with the burnout factor. Especially if their more difficult to educate kids were joined by the most difficult to educate kids in the neighborhood schools, there is no way that teachers could keep up those hours.
As destroying unions gains traction, I suspect we will see, throughout our nation, a giant step backward in terms of the rights and working conditions average Americans can expect. 10 hour mandatory workdays, for lower (prorated) wages, are being touted as desirable in "good" charter schools. KIPP and its knockoffs are leading the charge.
What is the shelf life of a teacher under these circumstances?
Even so, I won't criticize KIPP or others who tithe by taking as many of the toughest kids as possible without damaging their program. But no, KIPP can't be compared and all of that choice has made our jobs in neighborhood schools tougher.
You cannot expect students to respect teachers if you do not respect them.
The number one way you can improve schools is to eliminate childhood poverty.
After that, try treating teachers as the professionals they are.
Charters are charters because they are exempted from the rules and restrictions that limit public schools. Public schools cannot pick and choose their students. Public schools cannot simply expel a student.
I'm also dubious about that report that "the highly-respected Princeton think tank showed that the numbers of KIPP's new students entering at the beginning of their sixth through eighth grade years, as well as the numbers leaving before graduating from middle school, are comparable to schools that are located near their sample of KIPP schools." Other articles I've read on the subject have suggested otherwise, and said that KIPP's attrition rate is several times that of nearby schools, suggesting two levels of creaming: they take the most motivated kids from neighborhood schools and send back the ones that aren't performing well. As always, I'm sure it depends on which schools are being looked at, and who's doing the looking. But I'd be very surprised if schools with much higher expectations and standards failed to have higher rates of attrition.
And somewhat off-topic: KIPP doesn't accept mid-year enrollment? Just imagine how much better traditional public schools could be if they had the same power.
How much better would your school look, and how much more secure would your job be, if you could turn them away, though? I don't think you should. I'm just asking how things would change if you were to do so.
You hit it. Aren't yor students human beings? Why continue to fight the blame game of data-driven accountability rather than help those kids?
If, however, KIPP and other niche programs could show that we just need quick and easy solutions, like blaming neigborhood schools for low expectations, then our consciences can be clear. The feds can coerce districts to send out memos to teachers to work harder, or else, and the problem is solved!
“Across the descriptive analyses presented in this chapter, there is little evidence that KIPP middle schools are systematically enrolling more advantaged or higher achieving students from their districts.”
They thus are talking about external factors that aren't the key. They say nothing about the much more important issues of motivation, and other socio-emotional advantages and disadvantages.
As I recall, the attrition data comes from 19, not 22, of their 99 schools, and two excluded schools are illustrative. They are studying the success stories. Give the other schools you and I have heard about a decade to implement their vision, they may reduce their attrition rate - or they may not.
I am not criticizing what the Mathematica authors did in their study. I do criticize the lead author's criticism of Miron et al in Ed Week. He was making statements beyond what his evidence could support, and he should not have done that.
The NEA supposedly thought about doing a movie on teachers but didn't do it. What can I say? Someone certainly needs to show the public the real world of the public schools.
While it is always nice to be reasonable, I worry that educators are bending over backwards to be
fair and tolerant. The WP had a great editioral today about the progressives getting creamed allowing the raiders of our social institutions to set the message and agenda. The editorial said that tolerance and high mindedness plays right into the hands of the raiders. The deformers never play fair or stray from their message. The privateers, charter operators, and test manufacturers are ruthless and never miss a chance to demonize and be destructive towards public education.
Hopefully teachers will continue to show the reality of our lives and our students but will not allow the deformers to get off the hook and control the message.
One of the lessons I draw, by the way, is that "all is politics." Rather than seeking technocratic solutions and driving politcs out of schooling, we should embrace an educational politics of inclusion. We should be happy political warriors. After all, teaching is leadership, and leadership is politics.