Gary Rubinstein writes that Texas has started the process of awarding single letter grades to schools, based mainly on standardized test scores. This is an exceptionally asinine way of evaluating schools, invented by Jeb Bush.
Whenever “reformers” talk about expanding high-quality charters, they use KIPP as their example. It turns out that the failure rate for KIPP is higher than for public schools.
“I thought that maybe this was one of those things where a lot of schools got an F in this domain so I looked at the 280 Houston Independent School District schools and found that only 34, or about 12.5%, got an F in ‘Student Progress.’ So the percent of ‘failing’ KIPP schools is double the number of ‘failing’ schools in the biggest district in Texas.”
Since charters are are supposed to be the remedy for “failing public schools,” what is the remedy for failing charter schools?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Failure only counts if the school is a community based, democratic, transparent, traditional public school with unionized, professional teachers who were trained to teach critical thinking and problem solving, and not teach to the test.
Failure in corporate charters is ignored by the corporate publicly funded but private sector education industry revealing their actual goal, to make money, lots of money, to increase the wealth and power of the already wealthy, and the fact that to them, children are a commodity, a product for them to profit from or to religiously influence to think one way with closed and biased minds.
But the apparent success of the early KIPP schools seduced even many liberals. I bet what we’re seeing is proof that skimming was the key to that early success. KIPP had the creme de la ghetto. Once KIPP schools started expanding, they had to draw from the less motivated, less prepared and less bright strata, and their “secret sauce” mysteriously stopped working. That’s because the main ingredient in their “secret sauce” was skimming. (I do credit KIPP for rehabilitating the outrageous notion that kids need to stop talking and pay attention, and that negative consequences are the most effective response to those who don’t.)
But some children do not respond to punishment. They rebel, and then the suspension and expulsion rate climbs leading to more complaints from both ends of the political spectrum for different reasons. On the right the justification for privatization is the reason while ignoring the fact that the private sector corporate K-12 education industry has a much higher suspension and expulsion rate than the traditional public schools. On the left, it is because they don’t want to children punished for anything, just reason with them as if talking nice and offering reason is a magic brew, one I call BS.
What does KIPP and Success Academy do with these repeatedly difficult to control children? They get rid of them by making life miserable for them when in school, and if that doesn’t work to get them to leave on their own, they kick them out, expulsion.
At the traditional public HS where I taught for the last 16 years of the 30 I was a public school teacher, we called him Mr. D; he ran the in-house period-by-period suspension center, another classroom, where teachers sent their unruly students to remove them from the classroom so the teacher could teach instead of being embroiled in battles with children who refused to cooperate with the education process. This way, the HS managed to keep down the official suspension rate where kids were sent home for the rest of the day or maybe several days at a time.
Mr. D. kept track of the data and reported each year that 95% of the 20k average referrals to his BIC center (that was the acronym for it, can’t remember what it meant; maybe Behavior Improvement Center) was earned by 5-percent of our students. He said he saw the same children repeatedly one class after the other.
Before anyone suggests that once we knew who these children were we could provide humane counseling to remedy what caused them to repeatedly disrupt the classes they were in, I want to point out that this high school had a 70-percent child poverty rate, an established multi-generational violent and dangers street gang culture, and about 3,000 students and one counselor for each grade level, (or an average of 750 students for each counselor to deal with), and those counselors had other duties, like scheduling classes for all the students they were responsible for and contacting parents when children weren’t doing well in more than one academic class, etc. Their job wasn’t just being a therapist for children. In fact, there wasn’t much time for individual therapy with everything else they had to deal with and do.
Lloyd, you describe exactly the kind of programs that I think public schools need. An in-house room — or multiple rooms — where unruly students are sent so teachers can teach.
In my idealized dream school, it is made clear to every single student who is sent to that room that they can return to their regular classroom as long as they agree to act in a way that doesn’t disturb other students’ learning. That’s the only requirement. They don’t have to answer questions. They don’t have to do homework. They don’t have to go to the rug with hands folded. They are welcome to remain in the classroom as long as they can act in a way that doesn’t disturb the learning and teaching process.
In my idealized dream school, there would also be classrooms for the students who cannot stop disturbing others. Classrooms with very few students. Classrooms that might offer computer based learning of concepts or one on one tutorials. And maybe we’d learn that Joe acted out because he couldn’t read and was embarrassed. And Lisa acted out because she didn’t want to admit she was entirely lost in math. And Tommy acted out because he never gets breakfast or is being hit by a relative. And Mary acted out because she is a sociopath who likes to hurt others and perhaps needs a special placement to address what are far more severe issues than a public school can deal with.
In my idealized dream school, there would be options for the students who can sit in the back of the room quietly but aren’t learning. Staff members whose specialty is looking at students who have stopped making progress academically to figure out why. Bad teacher match? Just need a bit of extra tutoring for one concept?
And finally, in my dream school, there is a small team who addresses teacher issues. If there is a teacher who is so burnt out he is just phoning it in — who spends the class reading the newspaper while kids work on meaningless worksheets — the team documents it and either the teacher immediately shapes up or is fired. None of that lazy administrator excuse “my hands are tied because of the union.” But the small team also understands that there is a difference between an incompetent and lazy teacher and one who just crosses the wrong parent or whose personality is a bad match for some students but an excellent match for others.
That pretty much describes my dream school. It’s sad that it’s only a dream.
^^I should add that I know my dream school would be costly, but I’d far prefer to spend my money on that than to see faux “reformers” getting rich by taking billions out of the system and wasting it on marketing, advertising, and overpaid CEOs and administrators.
NYC Parent:
Brilliant comment. This one sensible, elegant plan for reform is worth a million pounds of the Reformers’ ideas. I hope you don’t mind if I copy it and send it to my school board members (and maybe a bunch of education school professors).
If all of our highly-lauded charter school chains became the subject of good journalism, two realities might be fully exposed: 1) for any “successful” school placed into a cooperating neighborhood, more often than not there are “failing” schools forced into neighborhoods where they are not wanted and are not supported and 2) children pushed out of charter-chain schools, especially those children who are neither wealthy nor members of the dominant culture, typically do not find easy lives once these schools have pushed them out, blithely washing their hands of them.
Using data from the Census, I figured out that in New Orleans, where few if any traditional public schools exist, as many as 10,000 (or more) school age children have been forced out of the corporate charters that dominate that city. Without a traditional public school CHOICE, the only classroom for these children is the streets.
When asked what happened to those children, the corporate charters said they didn’t keep track of them after they left, because the law doesn’t require them to do that like the law does for traditional pubic schools.
In time, this probably will translate into a much higher crime/murder rate that will dramatically increase the poverty to prison punishment pipeline to for-profit prisons. As I wrote that last sentence, I was thinking of Chicago where the corrupt mayor has and probably still is closing public schools in mass creating a similar environment to the one in New Orleans. That might help, in pat, to explain why the crime/murder rate in Chicago has exploded.
So very necessarily — if heartrendingly — said. Why can we find so few willing to point this out? The Prison Industrial Complex now viciously preys upon these kids…kids our own government’s education policies so very nonchalantly push out.
ciedie aech: As an aside, the prison industry is part of the investments portfolio of Koch Brothers.
KIPP is always one of the favored charters when “reformers” express a need for “high seat charters.” The Houston Public Schools are getting better results so why does public money need to go to KIPP? I would like to know what percent of KIPP students are minority. With a high minority enrollment perhaps the real goal of KIPP is to segregate minorities into separate and unequal schools. Moreover, if a large network of schools serves minorities, the Houston Public Schools will serve a greater number of white students by default.
retired teacher: this is a good thread but I like your nod to Ionesco, i.e., “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question”—
Why, indeed, do they send students and money to KIPP when, by one of the numbers so beloved by rheephormsters everywhere, it is only half as good as HSP?
😎
Diane writes: “Since charters are are supposed to be the remedy for ‘failing public schools,’ what is the remedy for failing charter schools?”
Don’t you know you are not supposed to ask such questions?
Using the bell curve, only a few schools should be highly rated and alternatively only a few school should get an F. Most should be in the C range.
Unfortunately, what is really being rated is the homelike of the student population – education, income, social status, neighborhood environment, access to resources, etc. – and not the quality of the staff. Add in things beyond an individual schools control such as the tax base and student to teacher ratio (including support services such as a library program, music, art, gym, social services,etc). Don’t forget that the proportion of ESL and special ed students also affect outcomes.
So tell me again – Exactly what is being graded?
Do various KIPP schools enroll significantly different populations? Perhaps some KIPP schools are for middle class students while others are mostly poor students? We would have to see the demographic information to know for sure.
There was a KIPP school in Buffalo which took in the most challenging students. The young principal had minimal experience as a teacher and created a lot of controversy when the public discovered she used corporal punishment as a disciplinary measure.
This was one of the first charters schools in the city in a rundown neighborhood mall (which was ultimately torn down) servicing the black community. I was actually sorry to see it fail. I’m sure it would have been rated F, but that student population wouldn’t have gotten high scores even if they were in the suburbs – the needs were too great and KIPP wasn’t the miracle cure.
Those ratings and who gets what mean absolutely nothing. Crap in crap out, a total waste of time, energy and monies that could actually be going to help all students. Why, Why, do we waste our time on this mental masturbation? Oh, yeah, its the coin of the realm, it’s what’s good for the gander and goose. Horse manure!
All this serves to do is to reinforce the “we can measure” student achievement, and by extension teacher, school and district “effectiveness”. Again, Horse Manure! Every time we play along with this false game and narrative we reinforce it.
“So the second domain is called ‘Student Progress’ and this is the mythical one that tries to isolate the school’s impact on the students. I think that this isn’t a bad idea to try to find a way to calculate this accurately. I’m not convinced, though, that they have found a reliable way to do this. Still, reformers often say that though these measures are not perfect, we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or something like that, and they have been using these metrics to shut down schools and fire teachers with abandon.”
So Rubenstein doesn’t think “calculating accurately ‘Student Progress'” is a bad thing. Really?? What kind of nonsensical thought is that? And it all goes back to the “we can measure student achievement” meme which is a completely invalid concept-totally onto-epistemologically (conceptual foundation-wise) bankrupt. But hey, let’s go ahead and play that false, error filled game.
Folks, we have got to quit playing those false language games, damned be the coin of the realm, good for the goose/gander retort, they’re logically bankrupt too.
Duane E Swacker: hang in there.
It takes a very long time to get a handle on not just mathematical intimidation but its partners in crime mathematical obfuscation and mathematical subservience.
I should know. It took me years and years to work my way out from under just a little of it…
And I’m still, painfully, inching my way out.
You express things in a way that no one else does. I do not fault your passion or arguments but the fight for a “better education for all” is the real never-ending story and there are a lot more folks out there that need to hear what you say.
To reach them in these increasingly tone-deaf times, I humbly remind you to stay the course with a steady hand and clear head.
Because when it comes to skewering phony numbers & stats standards, well, I am going to shamelessly repurpose beyond reasonable limits a verse from a golden oldie:
[start]
And nobody does it better
Though sometimes I wish someone could
Nobody does it quite the way you do
Why’d you have to be so good?
[end]
{NOBODY DOES IT BETTER, Carly Simon}
¡Palante!/Forward!
Humbly yours, your local neighborhood KrazyTA…
😎
P.S. I am not SomeDam Poet, so I have to shamelessly borrow (scavenge?) as best I can…
I’m humbled, KTA, muchas gracias.
KIPP schools started “failing” because the CEO decided to re-think the philosophy of suspending and punishing every child who “acted out” after being humiliated and targeted for not being a good enough student. He realized that wasn’t real reform at all and could never be a model for better public schools. When a supposedly high performing charter has more parents “voluntarily” pulling their children from it than a mediocre one, the charter can either double down on the lies that those students were so violent that they deserved it or they can acknowledge what everyone knows which is that those charters aren’t interested in reform but only interested in offering an education to the worthy at-risk kids (who coincidentally don’t cost as much money to teach) and the rest can rot for all they care.
Some charter operators are Trump-like in their ability to blithely lie and claim that they are there to help every child in public schools and that it’s their “secret sauce” of newly minted non-union teachers and overpaid CEOs and co-opted administrators that turns all the students from failing public schools into scholars. They deny that their so-called “success” has any connection to their willingness to throw young children under the bus — publicly out them as violent horrors if they have to — to keep up the lie that they are offering something for all at-risk kids and the only ones who leave after constant punishment are violent felons who can be identified as such at age 6. These dishonest charter operators would embrace Trump if they didn’t think the families at their schools would be turned off and no longer provide their kids as handy props for them anymore. Their ethical compass is broken as they tell themselves they are working for the good of a few poor kids instead of blatantly lying for their own career. The truth is that they could run charter schools ethically but they would not achieve the same results. The results bring riches and fame. That is more important to them than the lives of all the children they sacrifice. The children they sacrifice for their own advancement, all the while telling themselves they are sacrificing those children to help the “good” ones who remain. As if the only way to help the good kids is to sacrifice all the other ones. They don’t dare admit to what they believe — deep down they know how disgusting it is that they mark a child of 5 or 6 or 7 as worthless — so they pretend that they teach every child and their enablers make sure NEVER — never ever ever — to look at how many at-risk kids who win the first lottery for Kindergarten remain in the highest achieving charters and graduate with their appropriate class. The essence of whether their program really works must be kept hidden and the enablers at the state oversight agencies and Arne Duncan’s DOE spent the last 8 years allowing them to get away with it.
It is truly shocking that no one has looked closely at every high achieving charter chain to insure that the vast majority of student who won the lottery for the first entry year are the same ones graduating. Every single college publishes their graduation rate which makes it clear what percentage of the entering freshmen graduate in 4 years or 5 years. If you did that for some of the high performing charter school chains, the graduation rate of the entering Kindergarten class would be 40% or 50%. High for affluent kids and abysmal for at-risk kids. And when colleges publish their graduation rate for entering freshmen, they don’t fake it or they get into trouble. They don’t get to say “we had 1000 entering freshman and 900 seniors graduated 4 years later so that’s a 90% graduation rate.” They’d get in big trouble if it turned out that 300 of those freshmen left with another 200 transfer students coming in later to replace them but they tried to mislead the public by still claiming a 90% graduation rate. But when it comes to charter accountability, well, you’re allowed to fudge that data all you want.
One reason KIPP schools are now “failing” is because they were the subject of a real attrition study — not the kind of fake ones done that are cited by unethical charter operators that refuse to look at more than one year of data at a time. It showed that KIPP lost too many students and they tried to change those practices and focus on teaching instead of culling their students. That is admirable. But it also resulted in “failure”.
The question is, will KIPP’s CEO remain ethical or not? Is he is very upset that his charter schools’ “failures” are coming to light? Will he return to the “cull and reward” methods where the unwanted kids leave and the best kids fawned over and rewarded so they stay?
Twelve-year-old KIPP promo video (about a Houston, Texas KIPP school) –
Note the KIPP principal’s open admission that he regularly does and says something to a student that a teacher or administrator CANNOT do at a public school when kids defy or disobey:
( 04:00 – )
” ‘If you don’t want to be here, find the door.’ ”
( 04:00 – )
“” ‘If you don’t want to be here, find the door.’ ”
Heard that often growing up in Catholic K-12 schooling. Heaven forbid that we would be sent to a godless public school. Needless to say rejected that stuff even before I completed it. Just learned how to comply and/or subvert to survive. Sometimes made things interesting watching the administration and some teachers (others pretty much knew who it was-ha ha-I’ll still deny, when confronted deny any knowledge) trying to figure out who was doing the oh so dastardly deeds to interrupt that highly controlled Catholic education environment. There was good and bad with the good outweighing the bad but we still made a game out of it back then.
Listening to LZIV, one of our “anthems” from senior year, while typing this-thanks to Steve B’s reference in the DeVos post a couple after this for the reminder of that great album.
Just wait til you hear KIPP say that it’s because of “those kids”.