John Thompson, teacher and historian, writes here about KIPP in Oklahoma City. Will Oklahoma City surrender its public school to corporate charter chains?
Thompson writes:
A deeply emotional battle has erupted in Oklahoma City after its KIPP Reach Middle School attempted to take over the Martin Luther King Elementary School building, while promising to serve the entire neighborhood. OKC’s KIPP has no experience with pre-school through 4th grade instruction, but it promised to send its school leaders to Success Academy for guidance!?!? The charter not only has a much lower percentage of low-income students than OKC’s neighborhood middle schools, (76% vs 90+%) but it serves about 40% as many special education students as MLK. It co-locates with Moon Elementary where 21% of the students are homeless, and it would take over MLK where 17.2% are homeless. Only 1% of KIPP’s students are homeless.
After 15 years, KIPP has not been able to expand its student population beyond 300, but it now wants to quadruple its student body to 1200. It cites its 2012 Blue Ribbon School award as evidence that the No Excuses middle school could become a neighborhood pre-k to 8th grade school without pushing out excessive numbers of high-challenge students. Ironically, KIPP’s Blue Ribbon School application offers an overwhelming case against their attempt to take over an entire feed group.
2014-2015 STATISTICAL PROFILE 1-28-16 (2).pdf
Click to access 2011-2012%20STATISTICAL%20PROFILE%20pdf.pdf
Click to access ok2-kipp-reach-college-preparatory-school.pdf
In August, 2010, 285 students enrolled in KIPP. In October, 81% of its students were low-income, and 11.6% were on special education IEPs. By the spring, however, only 226 remained to be tested, which represented the loss of 1/5th of the students. Ten students, or 10% of the tested students, were alternatively assessed, meaning that they were on special education IEPs. So, at first glance, KIPP’s claim to accept the “same” students would seem to be an exaggeration, but it could not be seen as irrational. But, what did the other grades look like?
By 8th grade in 2011, however only 32 students were tested, and only 22 of them were eligible for free and reduced lunch! Only three special education students remained to be tested. And this was not an unusual year. The Blue Ribbon application provides data for 2006 through 2011, and it reveals a clear pattern. During those years, on average of nine 5th graders were on IEPs. By 8th grade the average number of tested IEP students was 1.4%! From FY2007 to FY2011, KIPP did not report a single 7th or 8th grade student on an IEP who passed an end-of-the-year math or reading test.
The next year, however, this attrition story got even worse. Using data from the Office of Civil Rights on FY 2011-2012, the Center for Civil Rights Remedies’ “Charter Schools, Civil Rights, and School Discipline” listed OKC’s KIPP as the charter school with the nation’s 3rd highest percentage of black suspensions. KIPP now claims that it made a reporting error, and that it actually suspended 45%, not 71% of its black students. However, KIPP has not questioned the OCR’s report that 100% of KIPP’s special education students were suspended that year (for a 126% suspension rate), as six of that small cohort was expelled; half of the students who were arrested were on IEPs.
Charter Schools, Civil Rights and School Discipline: A Comprehensive Review — The Civil Rights Project at UCLA
http://ocrdata.ed.gov/Page?t=s&eid=246435&syk=6&pid=2000
By the way, there is an interesting epilogue to those two years. In 2012, KIPP’s normative attrition rate of 15% to 18% rose to 26%. Given the secrecy of KIPP’s effort to expand dramatically and to participate in a mass charterization campaign in Oklahoma City, the chronology is confusing, but at some point KIPP set a goal of reducing its black suspension rate to 25%. So, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that KIPP changed from a school which typically had a low-income rate exceeding 80%, which reported that 9% to 13% of incoming students were on IEPs, to one that starts the year as a 70% to 77% low-income school where as few as 5.6% of students are on IEPs. I guess that KIPP decided that if it couldn’t be so free to push out higher-challenge students that it should avoid enrolling them at the beginning.
Click to access KIPP_2015_ReportCard_KIPP_Reach_College_Preparatory.pdf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Some charter chains have a branding agreement with their operators. If a school fails to meet requirements for tests, attrition rates, etc. the school may continue to operate but no longer promote itself with the halo effect that may have accrued to it via the brand. Keeping the reputation of the brand is a the key to expansion. Keeping track of closed charter schools is often complicated by this practice. The schools seem to “vanish” from databases.
Like a franchise, then. Can Kipp National transfer funds collected in one state to Kipp’s Oklahoma franchise?
Laura H. Chapman: your comments on charter chains providing or denying the halo effect…
Chiara: your comments here and below re using funding collected locally to expand nationally…
Thank you both for shining a light in the dark spaces of rheephorm.
😎
Excellent post
Can national charter chains use funds collected locally to expand nationally?
Because if they can that’s a clear competitive disadvantage for public schools. My son’s school can’t expand into Michigan or Indiana of Florida, but White Hat charters can.
I know a lot of the money transfers aren’t at all transparent but that seems like a very basic question a lawmaker could ask, if we had any who were actually interested in asking questions instead of the charter cheerleader choir in DC and statehouses we now have.
I can’t speak to other charter operators but that does not happen in our Oklahoma Kipp schools. Or anywhere else in KIPP that I am aware of.
Lawmakers in Ohio spent all of last session “reforming” charter schools, and now they’re back at it “reforming” cybercharters. That will presumably consume their entire workday until January, just like last year.
I’m hoping we can hire some people at the state level who have some interest in the 93% of schools that are not charter schools. I’m getting pretty tired of subsidizing a laser-like focus on the privatization movement, while every other school in the state is completely ignored other than incessant and ever-changing demands for “data” and budget cuts.
I didn’t sign up to provide “data” for the ed reform movement. I’m not a member of the exclusive club that is the ed reform “movement” and either are 99.9% of the other citizens in this state. This love affair between elected reps and national ed reform lobbies has to stop. I didn’t hire 50CAN to write state legislation and I don’t want them doing it. I want the people I’m paying to do their own work.
I understand your frustration. All taxpayers know they have to fund public schools. With the hybrid entity of a charter, taxpayers have to fund a pet project that may or may not work, and they have little to no say in where the money goes. Why would taxpayers want to fund speculative educational practice that automatically weakens the schools their own children attend?
Ohio is holding a charter schools forum put on by the auditor, because of course they are. God forbid any of the thousands of people we’re paying in Columbus ever discussed public schools, right?
Dr. Steve Perry is the keynote. I’m now paying for charter school promoters to come into this state and attack the local public schools.
Do we even get a rebuttal? I suspect Dr. Steve Perry doesn’t know the first thing about Ohio public schools. Why is the state paying for this anti-public school marketing campaign?
Click to access Summit_Schedule.pdf
Why did OSU’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs host a charter school panel with 3 proponents and no one to describe the consequences?
The Wohlstetter paper, funded by the Waltons and John Arnold, provides the answer. Political support is the first criteria for charter school expansion and quality is last. The exclusion of campaign money from charter supporters, as a criteria, seems to me, disingenuous.
It is clear Kipp wants to expand to see if their “magic” is scalable. The problem is there is not a lot of magic to scale. Cherry picking students. protecting the brand at all costs, and voodoo statistics are common tools of many selective charters. What is the “secret sauce” they want to share with more students? Perhaps it is earning a desk rather than having children sit on the floor.http://www.alternet.org/education/kipp-forces-5th-graders-earn-desks-sitting-floor-week
Would someone notify the educational experts at Gates and the Obama Administration (but I repeat myself- they’re the same people) that Sweden’s privatization experiment is an “embarrassing failure” that they can’t undo?
“Sweden, once regarded as a byword for high-quality education – free preschool, formal school at seven, no fee-paying private schools, no selection – has seen its scores in Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) assessments plummet in recent years.
Fridolin acknowledges the sense of shame and embarrassment felt in Sweden. “The problem is that this embarrassment is carried by the teachers. But this embarrassment should be carried by us politicians. We were the ones who created the system. It’s a political failure,” he says.
Observers in the UK may well be vexed upon reading about Sweden’s problems, since its friskolor policy – privately run schools funded by public money – was one of the key inspirations behind the introduction of free schools in England under the coalition government.”
Why would they do this in the UK and the US? I’m baffled why such data-driven scientific types are replicating a massive failure. It’s not “equity” because privatization failed at that too:
“Fridolin, who has a degree in teaching, says not only have scores in international tests gone down, inequality in the Swedish system has gone up. “This used to be the great success story of the Swedish system,” he said. “We could offer every child, regardless of their background, a really good education. The parents’ educational background is showing more and more in their grades.
“Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-crisis-political-failure-education
Privatization was a disaster in Chile too. You would think Great Britain and the US would learn from the mistakes of other countries. In both England and the US, hedge funds are behind a lot of the impetus for charters. These vulture capitalists will pursue anything to make money. The are not patriots, and they don’t care about our future. They will cannibalize our schools for ROI. If our irresponsible leaders create a climate in which hedge funds can extract profit from poor, minority students, they will continue their relentless assault.
PRWatch recently published an elucidating investigation of KIPP and the captured US Dept. of Ed.
” OKC’s KIPP has no experience with pre-school through 4th grade instruction, but it promised to send its school leaders to Success Academy for guidance!?!? ”
That is a promise that KIPP most certainly kept!
Their attrition rate is most likely similar to Success Academy’s. It actually speaks well of Colorado that the people who oversee the charter schools have not successfully managed to HIDE the attrition rate!
KIPP is following Success Academy’s “guidance” but the difference is that in NYC – there is truly terrible reporting by WNYC education reporter Beth Fertig, and the even worse oversight by the SUNY Charter Institute.
SUNY: “Attrition? we laugh at attrition and empty seats – who cares?? Those 5 year old children who won the lottery are violent because they are poor and minority and who are we to question the word of a charter school CEO we are supposed to be overseeing! LOL – those kids are NOT deserving of their spot!” is the attitude that the Charter Institute has.
Beth Fertig: “I compared the attrition rate for a limited number of months for ALL grades at Success Academy in total and compared that to a group of the most underfunded failing public schools serving a far more disadvantaged population and found that Success Academy lost fewer students during that limited 9 month period. Did they lose half the children who won the K lottery by 3rd grade? Who cares? Did they lose 70% of the kids who won the K lottery? Who cares? I am only interested in looking at a group of children that includes the new Kindergarten kids and five higher grades of children where most of the children have already been weeded out, and averaging a total attrition rate based on that because that way their attrition looks more normal. Unless I compare Success Academy with other CHARTER schools — then I would have to point out that they are losing as many as 5 times as many kids as some, but why would I question that — it might make Success Academy look bad and I want it to look GOOD!”
At least we KNOW what the KIPP attrition rate is and obviously they took Success Academy’s advice to heart. Too bad we have no idea what the true attrition rate is at Success Academy.
Reading this the same day there is an article in my newspaper in NYS about KIPP opening an elementary school in our city because kids come to the KIPP middle school “unprepared.” So looks like this is a nationwide strategy for them.
“… without pushing out excessive numbers of high-challenge students.”