Julian Vasquez Heilig explains that he first started researching charter schools because of his encounter with KIPP Austin.
He planned to work with KIPP Austin on their problems with attrition of black male students. Then Oprah celebrated KIPP as just the right place for black students, and the collaboration and research project were dead.
Now he reviews Jim Horn’s book about KIPP from his perspective as a knowledgeable researcher. The new book is called “Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching.”
KIPP is the most celebrated charter chain in the nation. It has received hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts and grants from foundations, individuals, and government.
Horn and his collaborators write about the perspectives of some 30 disillusioned former KIPP teachers.
Heilig writes that screaming at students is common practice in KIPP charter schools:
Why does KIPP encourage and/or allow these practices? Horn writes, school leaders relayed that “because of cultural differences, black students are accustomed to being screamed at…because that’s how their parents speak to them.” A KIPP teacher characterized the worst offender at her school as a “screamer, swearer and humiliator…..”
KIPP might also argue that they are the beneficiaries of widespread support in communities across the nation. It is very clear that KIPP benefits from powerful influential and wealthy supporters in government, the media, and foundations. Their no excuses approach to educating poor children has resonated with the elites in society and they have showered the corporate charter chain with resources for decades. So it may be surprising to some to read the counternarrative from KIPP teachers that is quite different than what you typically read in the newspapers, see in documentaries like Waiting for Superman, and generally experience in the public discourse. I proffer that the KIPP teachers’ counternarratives in Journeys should be required reading for all of KIPPs influential supporters. Why? Mutua (2008) explained the importance of counternarratives in society:
In their broadest formulation, counternarratives are stories/narratives that splinter widely accepted truths about people, cultures, and institutions as well as the value of those institutions and the knowledge produced by and within those cultural institutions. The term counternarrative itself clearly highlights its essence in expressing skepticism of narratives that claim the authority of knowledge of human experience or narratives that make grand claims about what is to be taken as truth.
So what is the counternarrative that the current and former KIPP teachers? There is a saying that I often heard in Austin that if you visit a KIPP school you would become KIPPnotized— essentially very impressed by their approach. One of the KIPP teachers spoke to being initially impressed during her recruitment and then later discovering that KIPP was “hell.”
[A former teacher wrote:] There was so much about it that was so good and promising in the beginning, and I got hooked into that from the minute I saw the news piece on them… but the dirty little secrets are what you don’t know until you are in their trenches.
The KIPP teachers in Journeys detail a variety of working condition issues that created high levels of turnover specific to the KIPP model in their schools— too many to discuss here. One teacher compared her experience teaching in KIPP and a public school. She said she wouldn’t recommend teaching in KIPP and stated “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone who wanted to be a teacher for the long-term…It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing.” You might be wondering: If the working conditions are as bad as the current and former KIPP teachers say they were, how could the charter chain campuses stay open? Journeys explains,
Without a constant infusion of new teachers to replace all those who burn out… KIPP would have to shut its doors… The role of Teach For America and programs based on Teach For America’s hyper-abbreviated preparation are crucial, then, for the continued survival of… KIPP….
In summary, Journeys is shocking— but expected considering what is known about KIPP’s “no excuses” culture. What makes this piece unique is the unprecedented interviews with current and former KIPP teachers across many schools and years in the charter chain. While many claim that KIPP is beyond reproach and is the shining star of charter schools, I submit that we should instead be asking whether KIPP can actually reform their reform based on the counternarratives provided by the KIPP teachers, or whether their approach is simply a pathological and abusive approach that the elites would never prescribe or allow for their own kids— except of course if they sent them away to military school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Revealing the dark side of the KIPP Charter school chain.
Why does KIPP encourage and/or allow these practices? Horn writes, school leaders relayed that “because of cultural differences, black students are accustomed to being screamed at…because that’s how their parents speak to them.”
TWO WRONGS do not make it RIGHT!
How many of these kids will come out of high school as young adults with a serious case of PTSD (and serious anger issues) from being treated this way all the time and then treat their own children the same way creating a chain reaction for generations—for sure all black parents do NOT scream at their children. That wasn’t my experience as a teacher for thirty years and I always had black students in my classes.
When I was teaching, I knew black parents and they didn’t scream at their children. In fact, most if not all of them were almost always soft spoken.
The KIPP approach will lead to generations of abuse and a lot of emotionally distributed children who will grow up unchanged as adults. In 1975, I went through a full time urban residency in a master teacher’s 5th grade classroom in an elementary school where the childhood poverty rate was almost 100%, and she taught me to talk to my students softly and never in a loud voice, and I followed her advise for thirty years. The few (with an emphasis on few) times I lost control and raised my voice was when I lost control of my anger. If you scream and yell all of the time pretty soon the kids tune you out or are traumatized from the constant display of anger.
Lloyd Lofthouse: regarding your first paragraph, citing the words of the review referenced in the posting:
My honest written reactions to these rheephorm words & deeds would get me kicked off this blog for good reason.
Thank you for expressing some of what I, if I could, might have said.
Of course KIPP relies on Wendy’s constant revolving door of inexperienced, naive, underprepared, cult workers. And, TFA “corps members” aren’t allowed a true say in where they are sent. They may pick an area, they may pick a subject…but they are sent to charters where there is high need due to teacher attrition, and they are sent through 5 weeks of cult training, with a focus on discipline and self-loathing-if-they-don’t-succeed, and Kipp is off and running. It might be interesting, if I cared about TFA recruits, to see the true statistics of how many don’t complete 2 years; don’t complete a year; burn out or have a bout of conscience and leave in 6 months, 3 months, asap.
I would not train my dog using Kipp discipline policies, because I love my dog, like I love my child. True.
Kipp turns (perhaps compassionate) people into mean spirited disciplinarians. There is no pedagogy, there is no child development, there is no teacher training…what they get is a few kids in summer school, who lets face it are likely well-behaved to begin with, and hours and hours of koolaid drinking. Why anyone is even interested in TFA any longer escapes logic.
“It might be interesting, if I cared about TFA recruits, to see the true statistics of how many don’t complete 2 years; don’t complete a year; burn out or have a bout of conscience and leave in 6 months, 3 months, asap.”
Dana Goldstein in her book “The Teacher Wars” touches on this.
On page 254, in the bound galley not for sale paperback, it says, “A 2010 independent study found 60% of TFA corps members still teaching after three years … though only 36% were still teaching after four years, fewer than average … About 85% of TFA teachers who stay in the profession, however, leave their initial placements to work at more desirable schools, a level of turnover that the researchers described as ‘very problematic’ for those schools most struggling with low achievement.”
Do a little math and we soon discover a very small number stay in the schools that needed them most.
If we take 100 TFA recruits and are left with 36 who stay longer than four years but only 15% of those stay where they are most needed, that means about 5 TFA recruits, out of the original 100, stayed in those school most struggling with low achievement.
Interesting study. These numbers seem too high! An old TFA friend of mine rattled me off some statistics one day in the past, and they weren’t this high. In fact, my TFA friend said that TFA is good about finessing statistics to make the situation look “better than it really is”.
I taught with many TFAs, and I think I was lucky in that most of the TFAs I taught with were very caring, and very good teachers (but we all talked about pedagogy, sought help from VETERAN teachers, and realized our areas of improvement). I was not a TFA, but was a brand new traditionally-trained teacher (who happened to be the same age of all the TFAs).
However, I went to a party once with a bunch of the cult-like TFAs and I had to leave. It was frustrating because these people spoke only the word TFA drilled to them (thankfully, a few of my TFA friends did not). It’s like they weren’t people, and they were seriously delusional, a result of their being brainwashed. It was almost robotic. Most of the TFAs at this party didn’t understand the real world, different classes, how people lived in the different classes, and class values. I don’t think most people do at 22, but the difference is that they weren’t open to reality. They weren’t open to understanding the world and the people in it, implications of being born into a class system, and teaching these people. Perhaps their life experiences in upper-class homes (no disrespect) and attending the most selective universities had an effect. They only were open to what was preached to them by TFA: Testing, “high expectations”, data, data, data, and kids need to go to most SELECTIVE colleges, not state universities or trade schools.
This was not a hate rant, it was my take on a personal experience with the cult-like TFAs. I’m so happy to have met TFAs who didn’t fall into the practices and beliefs explained above. We all still talk and are friends today. What made these TFAs different than the cult-TFAs? After they accepted to be a TFA and taught, they realized how ridiculous the practices were. They even discussed the brainwashing techniques of TFA. Everyone speaks a script.
It’s coming back to me now.
The famous “Jonathan Alter Temper Tantrum” on live T.V.
“Don’t you diss (disrespect) KIPP schools!!!”
When Julian Vasquez Heilig calmly cites attrition statistics from a study of KIPP schools, Alter loses his sh#%.
He reacts like an peevish, insecure high school kid responding to a perceived insult of his first girlfriend, then tries to bully his way into taking over control of the whole show.
The host, Melissa Harris-Perry, reacts with incomprehension at Alter, then anger.
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/mhp/49138273#49138273
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(at 4:46)
VASQUEZ-HEILIG: (calmly) “Here’s why you (put a) cap (on opening new) charters. Because 83% of them do not perform better than our urban schools, our traditional urban schools… ”
— (to Alter)
“And you raised KIPP. One of the interesting things about KIPP. We published a study recently on them, and talking specifically about African-American students. About 40% of African-Americans left KIPP in Texas over the last ten years. That’s their dirty little secret- ”
JONATHAN ALTER: (livid) “You’re just cherry-picking bogus statistics!!! No offense, but don’t run down KIPP schools!! They’re enormously successful!”
VASQUEZ-HEILIG: (calmly) “Gee, I didn’t know this was- ”
JONATHAN ALTER: (livid) “I won’t let you diss KIPP schools on this program!”
——————————
Harris-Perry’s WTF reaction is priceless:
————————————-
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: (angrily to Alter) “I will (let Vasquez-Heilig present his evidence), and since it’s MY show- ”
JONATHAN ALTER: (angrily to Harris-Perry) ” (Let him) diss KIPP schools???!!”
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: (to Alter) “I’m not going to allow anyone to ‘diss’ ANYONE on this show. What I AM going to say is that we DO have to deal with data, and those data are not a easily demonstrative, Jonathan, as you suggest … I don’t think Julian is ‘dissing’ KIPP schools; he’s offering additional data … Coming back, a family that says school choice is no cure-all.”
What bothers me is the parents of these students accepting that type of abuse in charters but screaming and suing to high heaven in publics hooks. Isn’t it or shouldn’t it be unacceptable in both settings. Until someone records this abuse and puts it out there like they do in public schools, this will go on. Shame on the parents to allow this.
Sure, they’re just poor kids. Johnathan Swift taught us everything we need to know about how the wealthy deal with the poor.
Jay Mathews at The Post has been pimping for KIPP – and Advanced Placement – for years. He’s now doing the same for AVID.
In an interview a couple of years back Mathews said KIPP “is the marker for just about every education reform we can see now.” Go back several years more – when his KIPP book came out _ and Mathews was saying that at KIPP schools “over four years…a kid goes from, on average, from the 32nd to the 60th percentile in reading, and from the 40th to the 82nd percentile in math.”
Mathews went on to say that a “new generation of teachers, most of them, many of them coming out of Teach For America, have seen what you can do when you apply more time and encouragement to kids. And they are now on fire. They are rising to many places. They are principals, they are starting charter networks.”
Obviously, Mathews leaves out a lot.
The post is old, I understand. And I’m not advocating that anyone should “scream” at anyone else. I simply felt the desire to comment upon the necessity of socialising children and how it benefits them to learn to behave in socially appropriate ways. Perhaps I am alone in my experience of having been seated near disobedient children in public places. It appears that the child may be having a wonderful time, but that time is spent at the expense of the comfort, privacy and safety of those nearby. In such instances I often wonder why parents have such trouble telling the child “no” or putting some sort of restriction upon movement. Sometimes we help children by imposing boundaries and we also can help them to gain a sense of self control by providing disciplinary measures during occasions when the children themselves may have other ideas. None of this should come as any surprise to anyone. My sense is that KIPP applies these principles in their schools. As they, and other schools, should.
Who defines “socaily appropriate ways,” Besty DeVos, Eva Moskowitz, Michelle Rhee, all bullies, liars, and frauds? Do we hand our children over to the new gestapo to learn how to behave, or do we trust parents to do that job?
That is the role of parents, you know.
Did NCLB and RTTT mandate a standard for parents, and parents that didn’t meet that standard were branded failures just like teachers have been?