I challenged KIPP to take over an impoverished district and to show how their methods could work for all children–the ELLs, the special ed, all kids–not just those whose parents entered a lottery. Jonathan Schorr responded by saying that would be abandoning their original mission. His snarky (and insulting) response appears as a comment on the original post. Schorr works for the billionaire-funded NewSchools Venture Fund.
This is a comment from Parents Across America activist Caroline Grannan in San Francisco, who has written extensively about the parent trigger:
As the blogger who did the first known research exposing KIPP’s eye-popping attrition, I think Linda has it right. It’s not an inherently bad way to operate, providing a setting for motivated and compliant young people from supportive families without the pull of what sociologist Elijah Anderson calls “the street.” What’s bad is the pretense, and KIPP’s constant touting of itself as superior to the public schools on which it dumps its rejects, and reaping of vast amounts of private funding from sources that are undoubtedly sold on the belief that KIPP is working miracles with all segments of low-income communities.
What is it with the offspring of principled people like Daniel Schorr and Marian Wright Edelman? I’ll never be famous or revered, but dammit, my kids are never going to sell their souls.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They tried that here in Denver at Cole MS. They failed and gave up. They are still allowed to open schools here though. On an interesting front here. Some of charters were forced to take kids in every grade and mid year. A couple of these schools experienced massive drops after years of being miracle schools. KIPP and others will not try this again with a normal school.
Kipp had a charter school in Buffalo, NY that was awful (Kipp Sankofa). They pulled the Kipp name from the school and a year or two after that the state revoked the charter.
I posted a longer version on Jonathan Schorr’s website, which is waiting for moderator approval — we shall see:
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I did the first known research on KIPP attrition in 2007 as an unpaid amateur blogger. I looked at attrition in all the then-nine California KIPP schools based on California Department of Education data. KIPP’s Oakland school had even more astronomical attrition than the other KIPP schools, and when broken down by demographics, the Oakland attrition was even more startling. By the beginning of 8th grade (which was the publicly available figure), almost every African-American boy who has been there in grades 5 or 6 had left the school.
The Oakland Tribune should have been doing this research, but hmm … its education reporter left to take a job with KIPP. Funny how that happens.
KIPP’s usual response to the attrition issue is that comparable public schools have comparable attrition. But that’s a lie. I checked a number of comparable Oakland middle schools, and they have no pattern of attrition at all. They have turnover, as low-income families tend to have unstable housing and move a lot, but students cycle in to replace those who cycle out. KIPP, on the other hand, doesn’t replace the students who leave. A study by SRI International that was released the following year (coincidentally) confirmed my findings, showing that the Bay Area KIPP schools “lost” 60% of their students and didn’t replace them. The SRI study added the information that the students who leave are consistently the less successful ones.
After a happy KIPP parent posted on our local San Francisco Schools listserve that his daughter had “tested into” KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy, I also started the application process at that school for my then-7th-grader, to confirm whether it required a test, which it did.
KIPP says the test is used to determine the applicant’s academic grade level, not to determine who gets in. But even if that’s true, the test requirement clearly selects for students who are compliant enough to sit for a test (at grades 5 and up, kids are quite capable of refusing); for families and students who aren’t traumatized by tests and feel capable enough to take one; and for families who are motivated enough to go through that multi-step application process. And, of course, the happy KIPP parent clearly felt that his child was admitted based on her test results.
By the way, when an organization pays a research firm to study it, there is a negotiation process regarding how the results will be reported. (When RAND did a much-ballyhooed study of Edison Schools in the early 2000s, the results were released more than two years behind schedule for that reason.) The client has a fair amount of leverage as the research firm struggles to maintain its integrity. We have no way of knowing what those negotiations between KIPP and Mathematica looked like, but I would bet they got interesting.
I teach in Lincoln Heights in Los Angeles and years ago, when they were a block away, KIPP used to send BACK certain (low performing) students right before testing…..hmmmmmm I wonder why?? What a joke – They are a total fraud that cherry picked students where I teach.
A couple of prominent charter schools in Newark, TEAM Academy (part of a “KIPP region,” whatever that means) and North Star, have recently claimed at School Advisory Board meetings that they in fact enroll students from impoverished families at rates that many times exceed those of traditional public and magnetic schools. State-appointed Superintendent Cami Anderson, for her part, has touted these charters as exemplars for their high-performance in increasing those struggling students standardized test scores. In early July, this reasoning served as one of the major rationales, in addition to the ”need” for corporate money to plug budget shortfalls, for leasing recently closed public schools to both TEAM and North Star against the wishes of Advisory Board members, many parents, and several grassroots organizations in the district. Junius Williams, veteran of the civil rights movement and director of the Abbott Leadership Institute at Rutgers-Newark, wrote a solid op-ed on NJ Spotlight on the problems with this lease scheme for those interested in learning more: http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/12/0704/2143/.
As a social justice educator and union activist in the district who opposes the expansion of charter schools at the expense of traditional public and magnetic schools in need of resources and staff, I have yet to fact check TEAM and North Star’s claims, but I realize it needs to be done, if someone hasn’t started to do so already. More important for right now, though, I am concerned that some charters have started to take on these kind of challenges, Diane, and in their short-term success with those students, have been able to use those successes to take advantage of Anderson’s commitment to close ”failing” schools and replace them with high-performing charters. I raise this concern not as a criticism of your challenge to KIPP, trust me, I love that you boldly and publicly issued it, but rather I raise this as a local example of how such a challenge has the possibility of backfiring in the short-term.
TEAM and North Star charter leaders are very sophisticated in their approach to expanding their hold over the hearts and minds of students, parents, and community members worried about the quality of education in Newark. They are then able to mobilize those won to the charter movement to publicly attest for the greatness of charters and, in turn, for the need to expand those charters throughout the city so other parents and students can have access to these wonderful schools. They have a relatively powerful supporter on the board by the name of Shavar Jeffries (a founding member of TEAM in Newark and an aspiring Democrat pol eying the mayoralty, especially if Booker runs for governor) and a local Democrat political boss, Stephen Adubato, who are able to mobilize large numbers in support of charters and whatever education reform they might believe is best for NPS and NJ (the latter, to be sure, had a large influence on the recent tenure legislation in NJ; the writer of the bill, Senator Ruiz, started her short teaching career in one of Adubato’s charter schools years before she decided to run for the legislature).
Those determined to save and fix existing public schools in Newark are in a difficult position. If these charters continue to take on students from impoverished families, if they indeed are doing so, and they are successful in improving student achievement and helping those students get into college, my worst fear is that NPS will be vulnerable to increased charterization and a dystopian future where no public schools exist in the district and non-unionized corporate charters, be they for-profit or non-profit, have private control over a democracy’s most precious public property, schools and education–a scenario that I think has a low likelihood of actually happening, but one that appears possible given the aggressiveness of these charter operators, the powerful political bosses who support them (and the politicians who blindly follow them), and the city’s continuing loss of population. So a word of warning, on one hand, but also a cry for advice on how to combat a local charter movement here in Newark that claims to have already taken up your challenge and believes it is currently showing signs of success.
Bruce Baker has written a lot about Newark charters.
Here is one of his posts.
This is about TEAM in Newark: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/misinformed-charter-punditry-doesn’t-help-anyone-especially-charters/
Baker’s work is excellent. It’s a measure of the quality of his work that Chris Christie has, by name, singled Baker out for attack. Bookmark. Bookmark. Bookmark.
What we should all be concerned about is the huge shift away in our nation’s belief that all children are worthy and have an absolute right to an education whether their parents are supportive or not, whether the child her/himself is cooperative or not.
Here is what I left on his post:
I am sick of hearing the same old KIPP talking points. The issue about KIPP, as well as other “no excuses” charter schools, is that regardless of incoming scores, the kids with the toughest behaviors and often lowest scores are getting pushed out. And peer effects matter. As the “tough kids”, even a handful of them, are pushed out through inappropriate expectations and ridiculous zero tolerance codes of conduct, the class culture changes as the higher-performing students are left behind. And as for attrition rates, it matters whether or not or with whom the outgoing students are replaced. (And please don’t get me started on those disgusting “zero tolerance” policies. I do not understand how it is OK for any school to treat children like inmates in prison. I can’t even imagine the KIPP behavior system being implemented in an affluent school for the children of the elite. I do not understand how it is acceptable for low-income children of color. But that’s another long conversation.)
I work as a teacher at a psychiatric hospital in Chicago and before that I worked in a Chicago Public School. KIPP hides behind statistics about the kids which do not describe the realities of the school. For example, it is disingenuous to simply quote percentage numbers of students with special needs but rather you need to acknowledge the types of disabilities. My experience with students from the charters (I’ve worked with many) is that in the two years I’ve taught at the hospital, not one-NOT ONE-of the current charter school students had a disruptive behavior problem or a serious cognitive disability. The charter kids were the ones with mild learning difficulties or suffered from inward-focused anxiety or depression. They were the kids who needed just a little push to improve academically. On the other hand, I met plenty of kids with behavioral disabilities who were kicked out of the charters. And the toughest kids of all—such as the kids in foster care with truly debilitating disabilities and trauma—they were always at the neighborhood school. Only a small number made it to the limited spaces at the therapeutic day schools. Too many neighborhood schools are overwhelmed with the toughest kids with insufficient resources to help them.
The schools which do take in the toughest kids, those who suffer from the worst effects of poverty, are concentrated in the schools with the least resources. I worked in one of those schools and the lack of staff, supplies, access to books or even a library was criminal. And we had really tough kids thrown into classes of 32-37 kids with no books, science labs, and only enough money for one aide for the entire K-8 school. The neighborhood high schools in Chicago have only one counselor for up to 1,200 children. There are a total of 200 social workers for the entire 400,000 Chicago public school students (see more statistics here: http://www.ctunet.com/blog/text/SCSD_Report-02-16-2012-1.pdf) Meanwhile, in the last budget, neighborhood school budgets were cut even further while charters all received more funding than ever before. Compared to neighborhood schools, KIPP schools have so much more money available especially if you include real estate deals, tax exemptions, philanthropic giving, the Gates Compact, plus whatever else you raise. (See more here: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/no-excuses-really-another-look-at-our-nepc-charter-spending-figures/ ) And still you take fewer of the toughest kids. Stop lying about having more funding, just be up front and honest. Why is that so hard??
KIPP schools further the very un-American idea that only the deserving should get quality education. The answer cannot be to just give better-funded schools to the kids who “want to learn” because all kids want to learn. But too many of our children living in poverty are suffering from major mental health and subsequent learning and behavioral difficulties as a result of the conditions into which they were born. This is what we mean when we say poverty matters. (See Anthony Cody’s excellent overview: http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/Can-Schools-Defeat-Poverty-by-Ignoring-It ) And then, to add insult to injury, kids are being punished for having the mental health issues that come from growing up in unabated poverty (what we now call the school-to-prison-pipeline). KIPP and other “no excuses” charters place the full burden of not living up to the codes of conduct on the child and the family. KIPP is not the answer. It is part of the problem. It diverts money away from REAL equitable solutions we should be investing in. We need inclusive integrated fully-funded schools where every child is welcome while simultaneously seriously combating poverty to prevent the mental health and health conditions holding too many kids back.
The call from Diane Ravitch to take over a district or even one struggling school is to call KIPP on its bluff. KIPP is not impressive. And there is nothing miraculous about teaching an easier group of kids. Nothing. And the real damage of KIPP is that policy makers listen to your miracle rhetoric and then punish the struggling, underfunded, over-burdened neighborhood schools. Stop it. Your schools, and the charter movement as a whole, are seriously hurting my students with significant behavioral and mental health needs. Tell the truth about the kids you work with and then let’s have a real conversation minus your marketing talking points.
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