When we talk about educating all, we usually mean educating all. But as Caleb Rossiter points out, educating all is a mighty challenge when so many children are so woefully unprepared and unmotivated. Caleb quit his job in a charter school because he was asked to raise scores that were undeserved. But now he has a habit of speaking with candor about kids who have no interest in what is happening in the classroom.

In this post, he writes about his experience with KIPP, and he has much to say about the misuse of standardized testing and gaming the system.

But what bothers him most is that our society has no real plans for the kids who don’t do homework, don’t do classwork, and don’t care much about learning in school.

KIPP is part of the national turning away from vocational high schools and a boosting of watered-down college prep for students who lack the interest or skills to be successful.  From presidents down to principals there is a silly insistence that college is the holy grail in a country with probably a 75 percent true high school graduation rate, 50 percent drop-out rates in poor areas, and most poor students so far behind by 9th grade that success in college is extremely unlikely until later in their lives.  Many kids would benefit from having a real choice for a high school education, like the one we provide in upstate New York through the BOCES vocational half-day schools, that graduated them to be successful electricians, plumbers, cosmetologists, computer technicians, nurse’s aides, and carpenters.        

KIPP also is part of the bleeding of the public schools of money and talent by charters, which Diane Ravitch points out, en bloc, at the macro level of system change, have no better record than public schools when properly compared on the education of the same families and kids.  But I know that charters, good and bad, fraudulent and purposeful, are here to stay, and more are coming all the time.  

Reading Jay’s book right after Diane’s new book on the Privatization movement was unsettling.  She focuses on showing how income and education level of parents is still the primary driver of outcomes in schools — and for me, she still misses the special challenges of Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome and Currently-traumatized Segregation Syndrome that are peculiar to the progeny of the peculiar institution.  Jay focuses on how better achievement can be coaxed out of the situation.  I’d like to see the two of them get together to make some joint proposals!

I am not so sure about the “Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome and Currently-traumatized Segregation Syndrome.” But maybe Caleb knows more than I do from his experiences in the schools of D.C.

I share Caleb’s distrust of standardized testing; it has become part of the problem, rather than an answer or even a reliable measure. Somehow I think that if we expect to solve our biggest social problems, we have to come up with better answers for those kids who don’t care. They are the kids who fail and fail and fail. Kicking them out of charter schools and magnet schools may feel right to the schools that exclude them, but it doesn’t answer the larger questions. What will happen to them? What will happen to our society if we continue to ignore their fate? What kind of society are we if we think we can forget them?