Rachel Cohen wrote in The Intercept that Kipp Adelante, a charter in San Diego, offered cash awards and prizes to parents and teachers who recruit new students for the school. What, no waiting list?
KIPP is not the only charter school that is paying bonuses to help fill their enrollment.
The promotion read:
If you know a 5th grader at another school and you get them to come to school here, you will receive a premium of $500 to offset your child’s educational expenses. In addition, the family you bring to KIPP Adelante will receive a premium of $100 (also for educational expenses) for enrolling their child here. Bring two 5th Graders to the school – get $1000! These students have to attend our school for at least 2 weeks before you can collect your premium
A former KIPP Adelante teacher shared the newsletter with The Intercept, troubled by the ad targeting a school where 99 percent of students enrolled are children of color, and 98 percent qualify for free-and-reduced-price lunch.
That same year, the school offered a smaller cash incentive program to KIPP Adelante employees to help recruit fifth graders. The specific drive to recruit those students can be explained by the school’s unique makeup. In San Diego, elementary schools tend to go through the fifth grade, with middle schools covering the next three grades. But KIPP Adelante enrolls students from grades five to eight, which means enrolling fifth graders typically requires students to leave their elementary schools early.
The KIPP organization denied that such practices were common, but…
KIPP leaders in southern California, though, told The Intercept it is relatively common in their region. “I know that other charter schools do similar things,” said McKeown, the KIPP Adelante principal. “I can’t speak to exactly what they do because I don’t know, but I can say that I know for a fact that other charters in the area do the same thing.”
Allison Ohle, executive director of KIPP San Diego, told The Intercept that “it’s not an uncommon practice” for charter schools to offer these sorts of stipends. Ohle declined to name other schools that offer cash bonuses, but emphasized that the practice is legal.
Too bad that public schools don’t have the money to buy their students back. KIPP has 209 schools and 90,000 students, and the organization is the favorite of the Walton Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and dozens more. They are rolling in dough. They can afford to pay for enrollment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Indeed, WAITING FOR SUPERMAN said that KIPP schools — and charter schools in general — all had waiting lists of hordes of students desperate to get in, but unable to do due to a lack of classroom seats.
Why would you need such inducements to get parents to choose to attend?
That is, unless they’re lying.
LikeLike
Everything the so-called reformers say is a lie, including “and” & “the.”
(Apologies to Mary McCarthy)
LikeLike
“The bloom is off the roses” in school “reform.” Charters have failed to deliver on all their lofty promises, and the public is not so willing to turn their children over to a failed experiment. Charters are sounding more and more like Scamway every day.
LikeLike
The waiting lists were always suspect, in my opinion. They’re self-reported, right? And then they;’re used to justify opening new charters or to increase funding for charters?
The Massachusetts “wait lists” fell apart the moment anyone did the slightest bit of due diligence. Ed reformers had been reciting those numbers for years and it turns out none of them had any idea if they were accurate.
If no one is vetting any of these claims it’s anyone’s guess if they’re valid.
There is so much promotion and cheerleading of charters by ed reformers in government and all the lobbying groups I’m amazed they have to offer these enrollment incentives at all.
Go look at any speeches that come out of the US Department of Education or their social media accounts.
You will not find a single positive mention of a public school. DeVos goes even further. She regularly portrays all public schools as dangerous places full of low performing students. It’s deliberate. They’re willing to bash every public school kid in the country if it means they reach their ideological and political goals. It’s shameful and brutally unfair to public school students, who are being smeared by their own government’s employees.
LikeLike
There’s no consistent way to vet the “long waiting list” claims. You can always call the school to ask if they have room for your kindergartner/5th-grader/whatever.
The charter chain Envision, based here in the Bay Area, used to post PDFs of its board meeting minutes online, and the minutes described their struggles to fill their seats — even as Envision was putting out the word to the trusting world that they had “long waiting lists.” Envision stopped posting the minutes when I blogged about that. That’s just one little example. (Envision is a small chain, maybe 3-4 schools, that once had grand ambitions involving sweeping lies, but…)
LikeLike
If oversight agencies were more interested in learning the truth instead of covering up the truth because their job is actually to be a cheerleader and not an oversight agency, we would easily know things like real wait list numbers and attrition rates.
That information would not be carefully hidden as if it were a state secret.
That kind of information is very easy to get. IF you want to know. If you are almost positive that it will make charters look bad and your goal is to make them look good, you would scream that attrition and suspension and waitlists must remain hidden and as an oversight agency is absolutely none of your business to know.
LikeLike
Some students are on multiple waiting lists. When they get accepted at a charter, their names remain even though they are no longer “waiting”
LikeLike
I learned that as a board member at a parent-run co-op preschool — you THINK you have a waiting list, but when you have an opening, you find out no one on it is actually still waiting. And that’s when the school is sincere and has no motivation or tendency to lie — unlike charter schools.
Friends of ours toured one of the Envision charter schools in SF (it’s now defunct), and they said they had no interest in it but learned that they were still put on the waiting list. Plus of course the waiting list could be entirely made up — it’s not like the “miracle” charters are showing anyone an actual list of names.
LikeLike
KIPP can’t even get people to take bribes to attend their sweatshop schools. Telling.
LikeLike
Why anyone would want to send their children to KIPP is beyond me.
I support this:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2014/06/authentic-reforms-from-dr-krashen.html
LikeLike
Here;s a typical anti-public school propaganda piece put out by your federal employees with your tax dollars:
https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-secretary-devos-alfred-e-smith-foundation
They’re all like this speech. It’s story after story about dangerous public schools full of thugs and bullies until children “escape” to a miraculous charter or private school and immediately all become honor students.
This is what your federal employees believe about your children IF they attend a public school- they believe public school students are violent and dangerous and stupid, and they travel the country on YOUR dime spreading that message.
They don’t lift a finger for kids in public schools- in fact, they spend a good part of each work week bashing them. And you get the privilege of paying them for it.
LikeLike
If DeVos hates the federal government so much, why does she work for it? Like so many other cabinet members, she wants to blow it up from the inside out.
LikeLike
And parents buy the propaganda. I can’t tell you how many parents have said that charters will, “fix” their kid, only to have the kid reappear at my public school several months later, now further academically behind and more behaviorally struggling, than they were when they left us.
Too many people falling for the propaganda. And how are they supposed to even know it’s propaganda when it’s coming out of the DOE, who people are “supposed” to trust?
LikeLike
KIPP employees were given a cash incentive to recruit students?!!
Get yourself some students or you are out of work. What? What happened to the huge market for KIPP?
LikeLike
Hey, lawyers have to bring in their own business, why shouldn’t other professionals?
/s
LikeLike
Not employees, or not JUST employees, but students’ parents/guardians/families.
LikeLike
KIPP has been doing something like this for years. (If not for its entire existence.) Back in fall 2006, I heard that KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy gave tests to its applicants, something KIPP has always denied. I took my then-7th-grader to visit the school and put in an application for her to say she needed to take a test (they did!). There were posters in the halls advertising the rewards for families who brought in prospective applicants, bigger rewards if they applied, bigger rewards if they enrolled. Those rewards were gift cards for the Gap and other stores (maybe just Old Navy) — owned by the Fisher family of San Francisco, who are huge benefactors of KIPP.
KIPP, like practically all charter schools, claims to have “long waiting lists,” so you wonder why they have to do this.
(Those claims are unverifiable and often made by charter schools that are actually struggling to fill their seats.)
LikeLike
Sorry, typo — I put in an application for my daughter to SEE if they’d say she needed to take a test. They contacted us to schedule her test. (We didn’t follow through — that was the purpose of the application.)
LikeLike
Eva Moskowitz always boasts of the tens of thousands of students on waiting lists to get into her Success Academy boot camp charters. But when she opened a charter near me, there were recruiting posters in the supermarket and on city buses. What happened to that waiting list?
LikeLike
Those waiting lists must have evaporated with the morning mist.
LikeLike
The charter school waiting lists?
They were as real and truthful as the statement that so-called education reform was “the civil rights movement of our time.”
LikeLike
Marketing/advertising doesn’t cost, it pays. . .
In the case of charter school marketing it pays the owners quite well.
LikeLike
How do charter schools report disciplinary actions taken against teachers?
I ask because ed reformers are launching a new anti-union campaign where the claim is unions keep disciplinary records from the public.
But charters don’t have any reporting system at all, do they?
Why aren’t they demanding records on charter teachers?
They didn’t even know the LEADER of KIPP had allegations against him. How can they know if there are/were allegations against any charter teacher? Who collects that information and how would one get it?
LikeLike
Public schools are crazy if they take advice on school safety from the feds. They’re anti-public school. They’ll happily turn our schools into grim, joyless locked-down compounds because none of them support our schools anyway.
Charter leaders would never take advice from a public school lobbying group, yet public schools are supposed to take advice from people who spend entire careers bashing public schools? That’s just dumb. Don’t do it.
Find someone who supports your school to tell you how to prevent gun violence. Don’t go the charter/voucher lobby at the Us Dept of Ed- that won’t end well for your students and families. This is a no-brainer. Reject. Look for someone outside the ed reform echo chamber . Public school supporters exist. They just don’t exist in the federal government anymore. There are plenty of solid local “experts” and local experts aren’t trying to destroy your schools.
LikeLike
The tricks they use to destroy the public sector and profit from it never stop coming.
LikeLike
What educational expenses?
LikeLike