Anyone who questions the slow–now rapid–advance of the charter school industry, anyone who wonders whether our nation is in process of developing (or re-creating) a dual school system, will sooner or later get the KIPP question: Doesn’t KIPP prove definitively that poverty doesn’t matter? Doesn’t KIPP prove that charter schools are superior to public schools? Doesn’t KIPP prove that any child, no matter what their circumstances, can excel?
I admit that I have not waded into this debate because I acknowledge that some charters get excellent results, some get abysmal results, but on average, charters do NOT get better results than public schools. (Results, in this case, meaning test scores, which seem to be the only thing that matters in these discussions.)
When I visited Houston in the fall of 2010 to lecture at Rice, KIPP and TFA were my hosts. Michael Feinberg gave me a tour of his leading school, which looked like any public school, and introduced me to his top staff at lunch. We had a down-home visit and I like Michael. When I gave my lecture, I chastised KIPP for encouraging the public perception that all charter schools are better than all public schools and for failing to denounce the growing numbers of incompetent, corrupt, and inept charter schools. I talked about the oft-heard complaint that KIPP cherry picks its students and has high attrition, which KIPP denies. I challenged KIPP to take over an entire inner city school district that was willing and show what it could do when no one was excluded.
Needless to say, KIPP has not taken my advice and continues to expand its brand from district to district, with only a few schools in each district.
A recent article by Gerald Coles reviews the research about KIPP and notes that KIPP has a rapid-response to any questioning of its accomplishments, which KIPP says are now well documented. Coles points out that the research KIPP relies on was funded by corporations and foundations that have previously given KIPP millions of dollars. He calls it the “KIPP-funders’ funded research.” And he asks this question:
Can there be any bias in research bankrolled by the corporate contributors of the very company whose product the researchers were expected to validate? We are all familiar with the long history of industry-supported research, such as that of tobacco, drug, auto, and coal companies, all conducted by credentialed researchers, all of whom invariably produced findings that supposedly confirmed the value and safety of the products they were paid to investigate. This research on KIPP schools can be described in various ways, but “independent” surely has to take at least second place to “KIPP-funders funded research.”
Coles’ review of the research–both that conducted by the funders’ funding and that of independent researchers–is worth reading.
Whenever anyone says that KIPP schools spend more than neighborhood public schools, KIPP adamantly denies it. Coles reasonably asks how the many tens of millions raised by KIPP were spent if not on its schools.
Behind the back and forth about the research is a larger question. What is KIPP really trying to prove? Do they want the world to believe that poverty, homelessness, disabilities, extreme family circumstances, squalid living conditions have no effect on children’s readiness to learn? Doesn’t KIPP imply that schools can achieve 100% proficiency if they act like KIPP?
If that is the lesson they want to teach, then I reiterate my challenge of two years ago: KIPP should find an impoverished district that is so desperate that it is willing to put all its students into KIPP’s care. Take them all: the children with disabilities, the children who don’t speak English, the children who are homeless, the children just released from the juvenile justice system, the children who are angry and apathetic, and everyone else. No dumping. No selection. No cherry picking.
Show us what you can do. Take them all.
I’m not sure what the hold-up is. KIPP should accept this challenge. They have the strategy and formula for success. They also have the funds and the experience. It shouldn’t be too difficult. It’s for the children. This would be an excellent way of silencing the critics and it’s the right thing to do. Unless of course, they’ve been lying and stretching the truth like a rubber band and are unwilling or incapable of doing this. Is that possible?
Hopefully that rubber band is about to break.
I followed Kipp closely in Gary, IN visiting each of their three locations. I was very impressed with the company and it’s promiotional materials. In the lower grades they were very impressive. Kipp had promised in their promotional materials that they would stay until the students they started had graduated high school and been accepted into colleges. I was very upset when KIPP left Gary and abandoned Gary students when they were entering the 10th grade. I questioned KIPP and wanted a reply. No reply was received. You can find my twitter inquiry and their non-reply #morethanjustus. My twitter account can also e accesed from my web site. http://www.barryrapoport.com
I wouldn’t mind seeing it in Chicago. Of course, this is utterly impossible from a political perspective. And this is why I think the challenge is kind of silly: it would be virtually impossible, anyway, and I suspect that Ms. Ravitch wouldn’t want it to happen in the first place.
Still, it raises interesting points about what would happen if charter schools, instead of being the interrupters, were suddenly the status quo. Would they experience the same problems that the public school system faces? Sure, schools could no longer cherry pick students, but charter schools would be more flexible to cater to their local communities in their mission, vision, guiding principles, and–perhaps most importantly–their curriculum and instruction. I suppose it’s the classic example of competition and local control vs. central planning. Each school of thought, when implemented in reality, has its advantages and disadvantages.
Is it possible to have sound–but not restrictive–central planning AND agile, culturally relevant schools and school networks, whether public, charter or otherwise? It’s clear to me that we have to come up with a solution that involves multiple schools of thought, so the often-purist dialogue we hear–while still meaningful–should give way to more reasonable discussion that involves actionable solutions.
I made the offer seriously.
KIPP should take over an entire low-performing district.
With so many Broad superintendents in place, it shouldn’t be that hard to find one.
They could always ask Chris Cerf in New Jersey to give them one.
Or John White in Louisiana.
I wonder if the debate would continue, relatively unchanged, since school districts aren’t closed systems. People could consciously move to the KIPP district, providing a new crop of motivated students and parents. The change wouldn’t be drastic, but could be statistically significant.
Another problem I see with this challenge, in practice, is that an organization of KIPP’s size would have great difficulty scaling up so quickly. That’s not to say that KIPP’s model isn’t scalable (I make no claim that it is or isn’t), but managing such growth is inherently difficult for any organization to handle. Sure, the HR is probably the largest issue, and, yes, a public school system can’t afford the luxury of selecting a small group from a gigantic pool of applicants, but you must also realize that the public school system wasn’t built overnight, and expecting a small organization to scale to a district level in a new city right away is hardly a meaningful exercise for the stated purposes.
Perhaps a gradual phasing in of KIPP schools in a district for an eventual takeover would make sense, at least for the purposes of running this experiment in the most productive way.
Duane, I am not arguing against unions in principle. I think all of us (including union leadership) are put in a difficult situation because of the way we have managed the teaching profession. All of these union vs. non-union arguments would be far less meaningful and contentious if teaching were a more viable profession for our nation’s best and brightest. For example, if the bar for becoming a teacher were set a bit higher (and not necessarily broader by adding course requirements) for high-quality teacher education programs free to those able to get in, people wouldn’t mind paying teachers higher across the board, which is something unions would like. But now we have a system in which educators often reach the classroom by vastly different means. Some schools of education are fairly selective, whereas others will accept pretty much anyone enrolled at a university (for which the selectivity also varies greatly). As a result, we have a teaching corps whose “market values” vary greatly. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but it does matter that many of the would-be teachers are deterred from entering the profession because of the gigantic opportunity costs. Before I digress too much, essentially, whether you have 100% union membership or 0%, with proper structuring you can create a system in which some of what we know as typical union demands are met, and would be met with far less political resistance. Essentially, I don’t care to go into a back-and-forth on who’s right about what. I’m not married to any particular ideology that’s out there. If it isn’t already clear, I’d like to scrap a lot of what we currently do and go back to the drawing board. And I’d also wish that in general we tone down some of the negative, adversarial dialogue in the field of education, which I also hear creeping into this comments section…not from you but from some recent arrivals.
Thomas,
“but charter schools would be more flexible to cater to their local communities in their mission, vision, guiding principles, and–perhaps most importantly–their curriculum and instruction.”
Proof or an explanation of just how you know that statement to be “true”.
Duane
For the statement to be true, one must only demonstrate that charter schools have more flexibility in the way they operate. The extent to which this is true varies from one district to another, but it is true nonetheless. I made no claim that they cater to their local communities any better than public schools, but with greater flexibility lies the possibility to perform better or worse than traditional public schools. Clearly, results vary.
do their results vary more than public schools?
Or, better, if it is flexibility that is needed, why not provide the same flexibility to public schools?
I don’t know if their results vary more than those of public schools. Maybe you can help me out with that. I would assume that with greater flexibility you get greater variance. That increase in risk, you would hope, would be rewarded with some shining examples of success to emulate, as well as some failures that you can also learn from. I don’t know if this is a good thing. That’s why we’re doing your KIPP experiment. Good idea! 🙂
And on the issue of offering greater flexibility to public school systems…it’s difficult with unions that are resistant to change and district- and state-level bureaucracies. I agree with the certain basic premises of teacher’s unions; in particular, teaching needs to be a stable career that offers respect, prestige, and a better paycheck to those who qualify. A better system would be one like Finland’s, in which only top students are accepted into teacher education programs, accepted students are given free tuition, and starting salaries rival those of other professions. Unfortunately, that’s not the landscape we navigate.
Thomas,
“it’s difficult with unions that are resistant to change and district- and state-level bureaucracies.”
I don’t believe that it is the unions that are resistant to change. They have, for the most part, been sucking up to the district and state level bureaucracies in pushing the deformers agenda of standards, standardized testing, VAM etc. . . . To me the unions are part of the problem in the sense that they have not challenged the NCLB/RATT for the last ten years and have been “going along to play along” and not cause any “waves”.
It’s not a “union” problem but the “leadership” issue within the unions. Without unions, the working stifsf in this country would be in even worse shape than now, and as it is, things aren’t good for the working stiffs which include teachers.
“A better system would be one like Finland’s. . . ” Yep with their close to 100% union membership for educators.
A few years ago I spent time as a student teacher observing both at the KIPP middle school in West Oakland, CA, and at West Oakland Middle School, the neighborhood public school–the two schools are co-located on the same campus but are worlds apart.
The children at both schools come from the same rough inner city neighborhood, but the KIPP students have involved parents who committed to volunteer at the school as a condition of enrollment, while the public school students are disproportionately from broken homes (foster kids, homeless kids, kids being raised by grandmothers/aunts etc.)
In the mornings most of the KIPP students were dropped off for school in their parents’ cars, while the public school students walked and took city buses to school. From observing their dress and behavior outside the classroom, it would be obvious to any casual observer that the students at the KIPP school have many advantages above and beyond the supposed superiority of the school’s teaching methods. Any academic comparison between the KIPP school and West Oakland Middle School would be gravely unfair.
Far from “closing the achievement gap,” (the mantra of inner-city school reformers), KIPP’s strategy to siphon off students from the most ambitious/supportive families and leave the rest of the students to the public schools adds to the unfairness of the system. I agree with Diane, KIPP’s “success” cannot be credited until they are willing to take on ALL the students in a neighborhood or district.
@formerteacher, I did the first known research (as an unpaid volunteer blogger) on KIPP attrition, and the attrition at that Oakland KIPP school when I did it was beyond astounding. Broken down by race and gender, it was scandalous — almost EVERY African-American boy “left” the school by the beginning of 8th grade. (I only had access to 10-day-count publicly available data, so who knows if any at all finished 8th grade.)
Great post. I say that because you were there. Thank you.
“Can there be any bias in research bankrolled by the corporate contributors of the very company whose product the researchers were expected to validate?”
A prime example would be Marzano’s “17%tile gains in student achievement on average in classes where the teacher used an interactive white board”-sponsored by Promethean Smart Boards. See J. Becker’s takedown of that study at: http://edinsanity.com/?s=marzano+research
I read the Marzano critique back in 2009. What a howler. Research. Yeah! That used to be a term that meant something; now it’s a press release or kit. I still like the Lewis Carroll quote: “What I tell you three times is true”. That might be more grounded in research than the Marzano or KIPP’s claims.
The “challenge” to KIPP to change its mission is puzzling. I respond to this post, and refute some inaccuracies: http://jonathanschorr.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/responding-to-diane-ravitch-on-kipp/
Will KIPP accept my challenge? Take over an entire impoverished district–a small one, if you want–and show what KIPP can do.
Read Mr. Schorr’s response and perhaps you’ll see why this doesn’t make sense.
I work at a KIPP school. Many of our students walk or ride the city bus to school, while some are driven by their family members or neighbors. Over 75% of the students we serve qualify for the free and reduced meals program. 25% of our students receive special education services, which is nearly 3 times the percentage at the average neighborhood school in our district. Students are admitted through a random lottery, not “picked.” And yet we consistently see extraordinary growth in both academics and character. Please take a moment to inform yourself by reading this response to Ms. Ravitch’s article: http://jonathanschorr.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/responding-to-diane-ravitch-on-kipp/
I love intellectual exchange and discourse and even views and opinions that contradict my own. However, your last line Shayna kinda reeks of youthful hubris. I’m willing to venture a guess that you consider Jonathan to be the last word. Well, if KIPP is so great then let them replicate their model for an entire district. They’ve been around how long? Close to 20 years and no major break-out or scaling up of the model. That should tell you something.
My point was simply that Ms. Ravitch should not have the last word. I believe that Mr. Schorr eloquently responded to her charges, and I feel that this is worth the time of anyone who reads this blog.
KIPP started with 47 students in 1994. Now there are 125 KIPP schools serving nearly 40,000 students in 20 states and D.C. KIPP has also inspired many similar charter school movements, and impacted countless neighborhood schools, even just in my city. Do these 40,000 students – and the thousands of KIPP alumni – not matter? But yes, the fact that KIPP has not taken over a district should tell you something: that that is not, and never was, the mission of KIPP. KIPP does not claim to be the only solution. KIPP provides a wonderful option for thousands of students who are able to achieve success that they did not see in previous schools. And that is huge.
My goal is not to have the last word. Make your own decision about KIPP. I’ve made mine.
Having taught a few former students of KIPP and speaking to a few former KIPP teachers….I’ve made up my mind.Your feel-good press release may convince a few people that KIPP is great, but I know otherwise. We’ll just have to disagree.
If KIPP has the answer to educating urban students, it will take over an entire district. It has collected $50 million from the US Department of Education and millions more from rigthwing Walton Foundation, as well as Gates, Broad, etc. The assumption being that it is a scalable model, not just a boutique operation. Take the challenge.
I think that what Diane Ravitch asks is more than reasonable. If KIPPs philosophy, pedagogy, leadership, teacher training and discipline practices are what makes KIPP great, then turnaround a failing school. I am sincere. Perhaps we public school folk will learn. Perhaps our state governments will change laws so that we can implement your discipline practices at KIPP and not get called on the carpet for high suspension rates. I do not think you cherry pick students, but the students who choose to go are different in motivation and peer effects do come in to play. The comments on Schorrs blog were helpful in revealing the KIPP mindset. I do hope that KIPP will take the challenge and turnaround a school and its teachers with their training. Kids might benefit and the world would have an open window into KIPP practices.
WordPress.com / Gravatar.com credentials can be used.
Shayna – KIPP can reasonably claim that educating everyone – taking on an entire district – is “not its mission.” If it does that, however, it must surrender its claim that it’s in the business of public education. (Public education takes as its CORE mission that it educates everyone.) Once KIPP acknowledges it is not in the business of public education, it becomes essential that we abandon any comparisons between businesses like KIPP and public schools. They run two entirely different – and even diametrically opposed – missions, so KIPP cannot then walk about publicizing data that shows them purportedly superior to public schools. They abandon their right to such claims the moment they say “That’s not our mission.”
And yet KIPP does indeed publicize such data as much as it can. This is what Ravitch is calling them out on, and her challenge is simple and fair: if you propose to compare yourselves favorably with public schools, you must operate with the same philosophy and under the same rules.
Finally, it’s worth noting that once KIPP abandons its claim to public education, we are well within our rights to ask if it should be funded with public dollars. (Naturally, this is why KIPP will always and vigorously defend the proposition that it is indeed an institution of public education … even though its SELF-stated mission stands opposed to that of public education.)
I’ve written a longer version of this on Mr. Schorr’s blog. I hope he publishes it and perhaps replies, so thank you for linking to his blog.
I want to know why Kipp left Gary after ten years of ‘success’?
KIPP should be REQUIRED to take over Camden and include every single student – with no shenanigans to cherry pick – as a condition of continuing to operate.
I totally agree. Take ALL of the students and then show whether you are really any better than public schools.
In a remarkably biased piece, Diane Ravitch criticizes research on KIPP charter schools, claiming that studies which have showed benefits of a KIPP education have been funded by institutions that support the schools and, therefore, are biased.
As others have pointed out, philanthropic foundations have begun to document the effects of their charities; this is part of accountability that has been mandated in the 21st century. They, therefore, do the research to show if their charitable activities are worthwhile. If they find it is not, they discontinue the funding. This is in no way analogous to research funded by the tobacco industry on the effects of cigarette smoke.
Despite her academic title, Ravitch has a long track record of selective referencing, and she tends to cite opinion pieces rather than data. Shown in the two figures and table below are results from a published study that had no corporate sponsors and that Ravitch will never cite (Musher KK, Musher DM, Graviss EA, Strudler RM. Can an Academically Intense Educational Experience for Self-selected Students Improve Academic Performance on Objective Tests? Results from One Charter School. The Educational Forum 69:352-66, 2005).
Students from the first two grades to enroll in KIPP Houston were tested at the time of enrollment (entering fifth grade), and again at the end of fifth, sixth and seventh grades. Four subtests of the Woodcock Johnson-Revised test were administerd to one group of children (upper graph) and six tests to another (lower graph). The data show that students began at or below grade level and, three years later, were at or well above grade level. The overall increase in achievement scores was about 5.3 years during three years of schooling. The differences were highly significant, as the reader can see by referring to the original paper.
The table that follows shows the passing rates on the standardized state examinations for KIPP students and compares them to passing rates for other students in the Houston Independent School District and in the state of Texas.
These results speak for themselves. They shows remarkable improvement when ordinary inner-city kids from a poor public school system were put into classes with extra hours of teaching by exciting and dedicated young teachers in a KIPP charter school.
Ravitch challenges Feinberg to take over an entire district and show the improvement. If Feinberg could rid us of the albatross around our collective neck – namely, of Ravitch, her entrenched cronies and the existing bureaucracy that she so blindly defends — I have no doubt that KIPP could produce this kind of improvement across an entire district. As it is, those who try to block the charter schools are the ones who are pulling down the existing public school network.
Daniel M. Musher, MD
Distinguished Service Professor
Baylor College of Medicine
THE GRAPHS DO NOT COME OUT IN THE BLOG. SORRY. THEY ARE IN THE PUBLICATION. YOU MAY WRITE ME FOR A COPY: DMUSHER@BCM.EDU
Proportion of students who achieved a passing grade on individual
components of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills,
first administration, 2003*
Grade level, Five All State of
Number of students KIPP (schools)† HISD Schools HISD Schools Texas
Fifth, n = 88 80.3 58.8 72.5 80
Sixth, n = 87 96.5 63.6 72.6 83
Seventh, n = 86 96.7 63.4 75.7 82
Eighth, n = 68 100 72.3 79.7 85
*Data shown indicate the mean percentage of students in each grade who achieved a passing grade on individual components of the Texas assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the first time the examination was given, Spring 2003. Percentages were calculated for each component test and then averaged. These students were not the same as those who were tested by the Woodcock-Johnson Revised Test (Tables 1 and 2).
† HISD = Houston Independent School District; five schools in underserved areas of Houston that draw on a population similar to that in KIPP Academy were selected for purposes of comparison.
I guess this means that KIPP won’t take the challenge. Not even in Camden, New Jersey. Too bad. Why not show what they can do in a district?
What a churlish and angry comment!
Dr. Musher,
I note that you are a specialist in infectious disease. Are you also an education researcher in your spare time? I am a historian of education. I have been engaged in the study of American education for more than 40 years. As I said in the original post, I like Mike Feinberg. I am a native Houstonian. I don’t expect KIPP to take over HISD. But I think it would be wonderful if KIPP took charge of an entire small district to show what they can do on behalf of many poor children, not just those who enter a lottery.
DR
Dr. Musher, I looked (quickly) at your study here:
Click to access EJ724885.pdf
The attrition rate of the first cohort taking the WJ-R was 37% between 5th and 7th grade. The second cohort’s attrition rate was 30%.
Yet you dismiss this quite casually in the paper. As you are not an education researcher, you may not know that attrition is one of the most important issues in determining the “success” of charters like KIPP. See:
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/truly-uncommon-in-newark/
Dr. Ravitch has commended KIPP many times for its fine schools; that’s not the issue at hand.
The real question is whether the KIPP model is replicable on a large scale. I’m sorry, but your paper does little to shed any light on this.
I think Dr. Ravitch’s concern over the bias of researchers who are appointed by companies to study their own products, such as the tobacco industry, etc. is not at all off the mark here.
Dr. Musher’s wife is listed as the principal investigator of the paper and she is on the Executive Board of KIPP Houston. (I don’t see that mentioned in her bio on the paper): http://kipphouston.org/community/our-board
Dr Musher’s wife is also a physician, specialty is ears, nose and throat.
No conflicts here. Now, maybe things have changed since I was in college, but can this really be called “research” and can they say it with a straight face?
Also, the bio for the last author listed, Ruth M. Strudler, says she is on the Board of Trustees of Teach for America. The paper mentions that TFA alums were “recruited” for the study.
Dr. Musher’s wife’s bio also says she is a speech and language pathologist. The paper says the Woodcock-Johnson R was used and that “All six subtests were individually administered and scored by a single, experienced speech-language pathologist.” You have to wonder who that was…
When I worked as a teacher coach in an education program in the public schools that the federal government wanted data on, to determine its efficacy, we hired outside evaluators. When a problem arose and the outside evaluators were short staffed, coaches administered the tests to the control group, but the outside evaluators administered all tests to our own students. You have to do what you can to prevent bias.
This effort to defend KIPP is — as my daughter might declare — an “epic fail.” What is not disclosed in Dr. Musher’s comment as well as in the 2005 article published by The Educational Forum is that coauthor Karol Musher has a long, long history with the sample school. She appears in Jay Mathews book as helping with KIPP’s Houston launch and has also been a board member for KIPP Inc. (the Houston branch) for many years. According to a 2008 Houston Chronicle profile, Mrs. Musher worked as a consultant for KIPP Academy from 1995-1997 (the first KIPP school in its Houston cluster), then served on the Houston KIPP board from 1997-2002. She also appears on KIPP Inc.’s 2005 & 2006 Form 990s as Emeritus Director, but is listed as an active director on 2008 & 2009 Form 990s (EIN 133875888; returns for 2010 & 2011 not yet publicly available). Mrs. Musher is currently listed on KIPP Houston’s website as a member of its executive board.
As far as I am concerned, the study cited by Dr. Musher biased and profoundly limited; it should permanently reside in the trash bin. The Educational Forum is called the “cornerstone publication of Kappa Delta Pi” but I am not impressed with the editor it had in 2005.
Kipp fail my oldest son
Kipp pass my middle son and he couldn’t even read i ask several report cards why he had a 90’s and was in 3rd grade still couldnt read the teacher was jus passing him mk it seem like she had taught him somethg tuhhhhh 3 yrs later my middle son is still struggling kipp act like they was really working wit him when really the principal had made it clear she wasn’t fundOFus letters was constantly sent home saying we better pay fees my lil girl came home cryn everytime they gv her a red letter…why she was only 9yrs old
I come from a long stream of educators in my family who have taught in under-served communities as well as in upper level class communities in the private and public sectors. Charters education system is better than MAJORITY of public schools and MOST private schools as well. It would be great of all schools (private and public) followed Charter system.
I don’t believe you. Why is that? What evidence do you offer?
I’d love to hear more – which schools, what was the difference, how did they perform better, what lessons we can learn. Some actual facts would be nice.
So, I’m guessing KIPP haven’t taken up the challenge yet? Go figure…
I had major issues with KiPP
They did my kindergarten so bad
My oldest sign was diagnosed with a learning disability after being at kipp for 3yrs well kipp tould me if i except &sign papers wit ssi my child couldnt no longer attend i dint tk my kid bk to doctors kipp promise they wiuld help him to succeed well tht fail they ran him raggedy the whole foot ball season 20 touchdowns coach was so hatful at the awards my son didnt receive a paper certificate a trophy or no kinda acknowledge ment of awesome season not to mention he wS a freshman running ball for varsity and track 3yrs later my son still feel depressed about athletic career tht kipp ruin broke his spirit Tiffany Predo demanded fees had my lil girl crying over $20 balanced left and would let her on the bus for the field trip tht also paid for tiffany predo purchased new
home gucci shoes bags during the school year