Frances Scarlen Martinez was one of the first students to attend the first KIPP school in the Bronx. David Levin came knocking on her family’s door, recruiting students. Her family taught her that education was the key to success and she eagerly accepted the invitation, feeling fortunate to have been chosen. In the years since, she has a different view of her experience at KIPP. What she remembers most now was the strict control under which she lived.
She writes:
“I showed up for the first day of summer school feeling chosen and unique. What happened next blindsided me. I’d always loved school and learning. At my Bronx elementary I’d regularly made the honor roll. Suddenly adults were policing my every move, my every word. Suddenly I wasn’t good enough. The way I carried myself was no longer acceptable, the way I spoke was not proper. Still, being the high achiever I was, I took all of this as a challenge. I can be silent, keep my body straight and track speakers with my eyes. I can nod my head to show engagement and I can lose my Dominican accent. After all, this was my golden ticket, and my family was counting on it. I was willing to accept anything said to me in order to prove my worth.
“In my experience as a student, I was told how and when to speak, how to dress, where to look, how to nod, how to sit, and how to think from 7:25 am until 5 pm Monday through Friday and from 8-1 pm on Saturdays. Every aspect of our day was controlled, our compliance was routinely tested. At any given moment, the leader of our school would appear in our classroom, demanding to know, “What room is this?” To which we were expected to chant back in unison: “This is the room, that has the kids, that want to learn to read more books, to build a better tomorrow.” If one student did not comply, everyone else would have to repeat the chant again and again until they joined in or were taken away for an individual redirection. The point of this exercise was to keep us on our toes. Just like random cell checks in a prison keep the prisoners from ever feeling at ease, this power exercise was meant to remind us who was in control.”
On reflection, she realized she was part of a “culture of submission” that obliterated her own identity. For most of us, school is a place to explore who we are, what we believe, and what we hope to be. For Frances, school meant submit and obey.
This article is part of a series called “Public Voices for Public Schools,” posted by the Network for Public Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is a reason it is called KIPP/Kids In Prison Programs.
lol
And this is supposed to be one of the “miracle” charter so-called schools?! The miracle part is if you survive it with your self-worth intact. That Bronx KIPP school sounds like a genuine nightmare, something out of 1984. Maybe they should be renamed the General Patton Schools of Rigorous Discipline.
And there is a reason why they recruit kids from families where they think submissive or blindly obedient behavior is most likely. $$$$
a key recognition
My oldest daughter completed her student teaching at a wealthy suburban high school in Charlotte. The next spring she was hired to teach at a Title 1 school. The first thing that struck her was the difference in treatment. At the suburban school students were relatively free to move about the school between classes. At the urban school, students had to get in a line at the end of each class and be escorted to the next class. this actually made my daughter mad. I experienced this difference as a student when busing began in Chattanooga. Before Blacks were bused to our suburban, predominately white, school we had all sorts of freedom of movement including lunch outside. When inner city students began attending my school we had to sit with our teachers at lunch. we couldn’t understand why the black students weren’t given the same privileges we had while angry that we had lost ours. I have taught and led in a number of schools with significant diversity and poverty. What always struck me was the inalterable perspective that the first thing these students needed was “structure”, in movement throughout the building and instructional practice. Keep them busy was the ongoing mantra. Set up a block schedule to reduce movement in the halls. We have such low expectations for under privileged kids. We think they need to be compliant over learning to think. This is much of the basis for phonemic and basic math instruction. Many educators seem clueless about the challenges with motivation we find in many of our students. Too many of us think they aren’t that intelligent. My first encounter with Kipp showed me that this is what too many charters are about.
Interesting experience. The authoritarian model in school was perhaps the prevailing model in previous generations. The generation older than me was the one that wrote the words to the song: “reading and writing and ‘rithmatic, taught to the tune of the hickry stick.
My wife’s grandmother recalls a principal who came into the school at Flowertown and cleaned out all the bad boys, literally driving out the door of the school with a whip. Flowertown was a rough place in her day; poor folks lived there. There are still some poor folks there, but most became good employees at the variety of factories that sprung up after the second world war around our part of the country.
I visited a school for troubled youth in Atlanta one time. The handsome young black man ruling over the school was harsh in his management of the class. It seemed like an island of tension and hostility within a city celebrating St. Patrick’s day with a parade that day.
I do not pretend that it is easy teaching poor folks. Surely there is a way to teach people without hostility. If you have to be hostile to teach people, they will be hostile. What is the use?
I have seen many teachers be successful with students who struggle with discipline or academics. My experience is that the building of a genuine intellectual and personal relationship based on respect is critical in reaching and motivating any student. I have always believed that students in underprivileged circumstances value good teachers more than students of privilege. When they discover that the teacher is dedicated to them, they will do the work.
I agree. When I was first hired as an ESL teacher, I remember a comment by a former Marine and assistant principal. When I met him, his comment that was wrong on so many levels was,” So you’re the blonde that’s going to send me all your bad Haitians.” I never did because I never had any “bad Haitians.” All I had were struggling young people trying to find their way in a new world. I reached them through mutual respect and quality instruction that didn’t insult their intelligence.
“My experience is that the building of a genuine intellectual and personal relationship based on respect is critical in reaching and motivating any student. ”
Wisdom, Mr. Bonner. My experience exactly.
Yes Yes Yes to everything you have written here.
Thank you for saying it so eloquently and accurately.
Yes, that was an enjoyable, enlightening thread.
It’s so, so inspiring to read these comments from good teachers. Thank you Paul, Roy, RT!!!
Thank you. One more time to echo everyone else, yes.
A page at the Americans United for Separation of Church and State (the Christian Left writes at the site and advocates for its issues like support of public schools) provides some insight about the perspective that Paul described. The page, “Racial Justice and Religious Freedom” states- In the wake of racial desegregation, the denial of access to rights and services relied on the undermining of a strategic political notion of religious freedom which is synonymous with religious privilege. It is the view that white Christian Americans hold a more entitled place in our shared society.
The administrators at Paul’s school likely attended white churches.
A significant correlation between white rural areas voting GOP and
their greater religiosity exists.
Underpinning not undermining
Discipline problems in high-poverty schools will not be settled until there are no longer any high-poverty schools. If the root cause is not addressed, the problem will continue.
Fear of the impoverished is a profound driver of our institutional and residential practices. Yes, it would be nice if we could have economic diversity in our schools. Where this exists, all students benefit. The most practical approach to improving opportunities for under privileged students is to have a Marshall Plan sized investment in teacher preparation and support from pre-k-12. the federal government could fund this while avoiding stepping on the “states rights” toes of state assemblies. Alas, we would rather spend 1 trillion on fighter plans that don’t work.
Indeed, we need a Marshall Plan sized investment for public schools and for teacher preparation through their masters degrees. We don’t want funds to go to TFA or Relay or other fast-track programs.
Poor students do better in integrated schools because there is order, resources and expectation. I am sure I would have had a harder time with my poor students in an underfunded, chaotic school.
I don’t see the US willing to invest in public schools. Privatization has led to mass disinvestment in public schools in many states and communities. We saw how quickly repairing schools was cut from the infrastructure bill without so much as a whimper.
I can teach a class of 50 if the students are all focused. But I cannot force a class of 5 to be focused. But I can never connect with a class of 50, and most students come to love learning by respecting their instruction. Thus children from poverty need to be in schools where classes are small. And high poverty schools, which will always be with us in places, should always have small class size. That is rearely the case, however.
“No wonder you are “teacher of the year!” Roy, you do the job of two teachers. Another reason for my success in reaching very poor ELLs is that my district understood that these students required a class of 17 or less. My district invested in these students in order to get positive results. Smaller classes are more efficient as there is less time spent on transitions and management, and, of course, it is easier to connect with and reach students.
Beautifully, perfectly said, Roy!!!!
Roy speaks here the profound truth. Bravo!!!
I have never taught a class of 50. I was speaking hypothetically
“The public schools in the area were terrible, Levin told us, low-performing, riddled with gangs, and filled with teachers who didn’t care.”
“Filled with teachers who didn’t care”
That must be more of that “collaboration” and “cooperation” between public schools and charter schools we’re always hearing about.That they bash the public schools to market the charters is obvious, so why pretend it isn’t happening?
This is so important to hear this perspective. What a great idea for NPE to have this series.
I also believe that these kinds of “no excuses” charter schools created this supposed “culture” of control and compliance because it gave them a built in excuse to dump students they didn’t want to teach. Those (almost always) white folks who established the schools awarded themselves full credit for their students’ success, but this essay reveals a lot about whether the credit (and the generous financial rewards that came with it) really lies with the white adults who claim it absolutely does.
“Still, being the high achiever I was, I took all of this as a challenge. I can be silent, keep my body straight and track speakers with my eyes. … After all, this was my golden ticket, and my family was counting on it. I was willing to accept anything said to me in order to prove my worth.”
This student didn’t need that kind of discipline to thrive. But the school needed students who were already highly motivated enough to accept that kind of discipline.
Furthermore, I suspect if this student thought about it, she would realize that although she was incredibly well-behaved and motivated, it would be virtually impossible for any child to keep their body perfectly straight and track speakers with their eyes 100% of the time.
The most reprehensible purpose of this kind of control and compliance was also to target students who struggled academically so they could be publicly called out, humiliated and punished each time that they “failed” to comply. The “high achieving” student like this one isn’t going to be punished if her eyes looked away from the teacher for 5 seconds or her body slumps. But the ones who struggle academically are the targets. It may not even always be intentional. But teach a naive young teacher that this child struggling academically needs to be watched like a hawk and dealt with “appropriately” for any “infractions”, and you can turn that kid into a nervous wreck who acts out. That power is absolutely abused by these kinds of charter schools whose administration has no moral compass. They tell themselves they are doing it “for the kids” but they are doing it because it allows them to target the academically struggling kids they want to leave, to make the school look good.
It shouldn’t make the school look good. If this country didn’t have such truly lousy education reporters, these schools would have been identified immediately as places that want only high achieving students and use compliance and control not to turn those already high achieving students into better students, but to treat the others in such a humiliating and punitive manner that they leave.
And that’s where implicit racism comes in. This student would have done well in schools like the ones that middle class white students attend that treat students with kindness and don’t demand this kind of control. But the underlying assumption of many white education reporters was that she “needed” a school of compliance and control to succeed.
“school is a place to explore who we are, what we believe, and what we hope to be. ”
Nonsense. School is a place to be trained. Not saying KIPP goes about it in the best way, but it’s important to at least start with the proper objective.
Anyone that doesn’t understand that school is mostly about training shouldn’t be in the education field.
Trained?
Roll over. Sit up. Stay. Good boy.
Ridiculous.
Funny, but I remembering having a discussion with a student about a pizza party. He looked at me and said, “I need credits to graduate; I am not a dog and behave for treats.” Listen to the kids and they will tell you exactly what you need to know if you want to know. Build the relationship beyond the classroom walls. I have students who still text me to see how I am doing; they are in their 30s. Peace out.
Haaa!!! The kids know. As Neil Postman said long ago, “Kids have excellent crap detectors.”
Yes, very important that Prole children be “trained” in gritful attention to whatever mindless, alienating tasks are put before them by their superiors.
Will you be taking that latte on the verandah, Mr. Gates?
And this is why a single de facto national curriculum has been foisted on our schools via the Common [sic] Core [sic]?
An extraordinarily diverse, pluralistic economy doesn’t need students churned out like standardized widgets. We need cosmologists and cosmetologists.
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″
We need education as well as “training,” and we need the “training” to be far, far, far, far, far more diverse than in is.
Well said!
Ed reformers, working hard to “improve” public schools every day:
“Virginia Lt. Gov. WinsomeSears says GlennYoungkin may withold state education money from school districts that defy his Executive Order making masking optional. So far, Fairfax, Arlington and Richmond have said their mask mandates will stay in place.”
As you can see, they are laser-focused on working with public schools as partners.
Let’s review- so far the ed reform “focus” on public schools during covid has consisted of anti-CRT laws, ginning up huge fights over masks and vaccines IN public schools, and expanding charter schools and private school vouchers.
Once again there is no positive or productive or collaborative agenda for public schools at all. They’re the political opponents of public schools and that’s all they are.
Youngkin’s determination to remove mask mandates is dangerous and stupid. To think that this man is in charge of public health for an entire state! He joins DeSantis, Abbott, and other hard-hearted GOP governors, who risk the lives of their constituents to make a political point.
Not even to make a point. They don’t actually believe any of this. But, rather, they do what they do to feed the flames of the agitprop that has already been done with the base Trumpy base.
One of Youngkin’s sons, Thomas, attends Georgetown Prep School in Bethesda, MD and that school has its own mask mandate. https://www.newsweek.com/glenn-youngkin-mask-mandate-lifter-sends-child-school-requiring-masks-covid-19-1670207
And Prep has a vaccine mandate I believe, plus they get tested weekly. They had a small outbreak in December because some of the boarding students held a party. The school closed down and went virtual for a week. Parents may not like the protocols in place but they aren’t complaining about it. I know several families that have their boys enrolled there.
As I was reading about Martinez’s experiences as a student in a publicly funded, private sector charter KIPP school, I thought how similar that was to the reeducation camps during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China where millions were persecuted and millions committed suicided to escape.
I thought about what I have read about what happened to our troops that ended up as POWs in Chinese prison camps during the Korean War, how the Chinese forced them to do all of the same crap that KIPPS warden did to Martinez and the other children trapped in that charter school hell.
I thought about what happened to millions of Vietnamese who were our allies during the 19 years of the Vietnam War. Many ended up in reeducation camps, too, that used the same tactics KIPP uses today. Those that didn’t adjust were executed.
I think KIPP is a clone of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, of those reeducation POW prison camps in Korea and the reeducation camps for our Vietnam allies after 1975.
“Estimates put the number of inmates who passed through ‘re-education’ as high as 500,000 to 1 million. ‘Re-education’ as it was implemented in Vietnam was seen as both a means of revenge and a sophisticated technique of repression and indoctrination, which developed following the 1975 Fall of Saigon, and about165,00 died in those camps.”
Well said, Lloyd!
I immediately thought of the Chinese re-education of the Uyghur Muslims. Ghastly.
In other news, there was a conspiracy at the highest levels in the Trump maladministration to submit forged election documents. This is treason.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/is-doj-investigating-the-forged-documents-trump-used-in-his-coup-attempt/ar-AASWwCM?ocid=msedgntp
This might well be the most important news story that I have read this year. I highly recommend that readers of this blog have a look at it.
Where are the charges against the treasonous conspirators? Here, one of the wisest comments I’ve read in a long time, from GregB:
I am reminded of Kurt Tucholsky’s observation when he observed a similar scenario: “Never before had Democracy reacted so promptly as it did by doing nothing when it dealt with the prospect of dictatorship.”
Interesting. Likely, one of the lessers would fall on his sword than take down the orange menace.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fake-trump-elector-scheme-draws-the-attention-of-more-state-attorneys-general/vi-AASVb67?ocid=msedgntp
The Supreme Court just rejected the Trump bid to keep the Jan. 6th committee from receiving the Trump administration documents it has been seeking. I suspect that the conservatives on the court are aware that not moving on Trump and allowing him freedom to run for office in 2024 would be a disaster for the Republican Party.
Marion Wright Edelman (Childrens Defense Fund- $20 mil. in assets) knew her intent in praising her son’s organization, Stand for Children, at the CDF site on 6-4-2021. That son, Jonah Edelman, gave an infamous speech at an Aspen event. Wikipedia has a summary of what he said.
Marion Wright Edelman is on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation as is Roland Fryer.
Robin Hood operates a network of 17 charter schools.
Marion Wright Edelman’s husband, Peter Edelman, is on the board of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. CAP advocates for charter schools. A second son, Josh, worked for Gates in the Foundation’s education campaign and now works for Biden.
Thanks for this information, Linda. I was still under the impression that Jonah & Josh’s parents were still on the side of right, opposed to what their sins were doing.
What happened to them (& their previously good reputations)?
Discussion of discipline has become useless and sterile on this blog. Everyone has their entrenched positions. No one hears each other. This girl was oppressed. KIPP acts purely in bad faith. Running a high poverty school without strict discipline is fairly easy as long as you have caring, non-racist adults at the helm. The root of all school ills is poverty and the only cure for school ills is ending poverty and more funding. Repeat ad infinitum. The only thing that might shift the discourse is if Diane substitute teaches in a Bronx middle school for a week. Then she’d finally understand why KIPP was invented.
Ponderosa,
Do you really believe that Frances Scarlen Martinez – the woman who wrote this – would not have done just as well in the type of school that middle class white students are in?
Frances Scarlen Martinez came in as a student who loved school and learning and regularly made the honor roll in her elementary school.
Are you suggesting that she NEEDED a school where every aspect of her day was controlled and her compliance was routinely tested?
KIPP wasn’t “invented”. It got rewarded for presenting the kind of school for low-income non-white students that right wing billionaires think is what kids like Frances Scarlen Martinez need.
Did you ever go to a middle school serving middle class white students? You think those students track the teacher at all times and are all compliant and well behaved and never whisper to one another in class or get distracted and daydream or have students who act out?
Do you think middle class white students don’t need that control and compliance culture but Frances Scarlen Martinez did?
A school that serves affluent white students has plenty of resources to address the needs of those students whose behavior is problematic.
Those schools don’t “save money” by forcing the entire population of students to adhere to a “control and compliance” culture that simply dumps all the students whose behavior is problematic.
Those schools for middle class white students don’t claim that it is the “compliance and control” that turns white students into scholars. Instead of forcing all students into some control and compliance culture, those schools spend copious resources to address the needs of the students who act out.
There is a disgustingly racist false narrative that students like Frances Scarlen Martinez who are willing to comply have been “saved” from being abject failures because these wonderful white folks provided the control and compliance education that people who don’t see their own implicit racism actually believe that Frances Scarlen Martinez needed.
She didn’t need it. She would have been fine in any school with the resources to deal with students who are behavioral problems. She didn’t need a school that forced all students to experience this so they could identify the motivated and eager learners like Martinez who didn’t need it and have an excuse to dump the ones who needed a lot of resources to educate.
Honestly, I suspect there is a formal Rubric involved. A “scientific” profiling instrument that knows exactly the compliant composite number they are looking for in a student/family applicant.
Ms.Martinez really is their example of a smokescreen.
She, and thousands like her, serve their bottom $$$ line.
This is their method. A deceptive, falsely-constructed Potemkin Village and it is very profitable.
My district hired a former South Bronx teacher. She was like a drill sergeant. That’s not the main problem. She would call students demeaning names when they broke the rules. Kids were getting stomach aches. I once heard her call a student “retarded” in the hall, and parents complained. She eventually left to work in a group home. We had other South Bronx teachers and one NYC former police officer come to our school, and they maintained discipline without undermining students’ self esteem.
The reason that charter school organizations were created was to achieve, “brands on a large scale”, according to the founder of Gates-funded Aspen Pahara Institute. The founder also co-founded TFA.
The purpose of TFA is explained in a Truthout article, “30 years of TFA shows how reform movements can be co-opted.” The article references Stand for Children, Jonah Edelman’s group. His anti-union comments in a public speech are recorded at Wikipedia.
Five of the rationales for charter schools make no mention of students.
(1) to enable legalized theft of main street’s assets (2) to create a Christian nationalist state (3) to eliminate unions (4) to lower taxes for the rich (5) to achieve segregation- enacting the plan first proposed by racist Gov. Talmadge.
And just think, Dr. Michael Lomax, President and CEO of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), is a KIPP Foundation Board member.
https://www.kipp.org/kipp-foundation/kipp-board-of-directors/
Thanks for searching for Board members. The public can write to board members and express their anger. It is one of the few means that the public has.
Yesterday I wrote to the head of a SEIU local that sits on the Children’s Defense Fund Board. In June, the CDF site posted a letter praising Jonah Edleman’s group, Stand for Children.
Jonah’s dad is on the Center For American Progress Action Fund Board. CAP advocates for charter schools. I also wrote to CAP referencing the Edelman’s and Tom Daschle, a CAP board member whose lobbying firm has been paid by Strive aka K-12 Inc. for work.
A few years back, a staffer at CAP wrote a strong anti-voucher article. I wrote him and said, when are you going to write an expose about charters? He said it won’t happen. I took that to mean that company policy is pro- charter, which I already knew
Diane, thanks for describing what happened.
CAP is willing to lose elections so that they can be on the same side of an issue as GOP governors like Youngkin.
IMO, one of the darkest villains in American history is CAP’s founder, John Podesta. He gets away with being on the same side as racist Gov. Talmadge who first proposed privatization. He couldn’t get away with it without support from rich “liberals” who enjoy reputations for concern for people of poverty, or who are associated with early civil rights movements. I have infinite respect for you and for Nikole Hannah Jones. The enemy you are fighting isn’t just the moderate white, it is others who place their own interest above what is good for all, particularly minority populations.
MLK is turning in his grave. It’s a shame he can’t come back and visit those making book on the backs of others.
What may be worse is that the press will not expose it.
CAP has long been a leading organization in promoting a Washington consensus. CAP has a reputation for setting up conferences where Democrats and Republicans come together to collaborate on policies. I can recall CAP-Thomas B. Fordham alliances, also CAP and American Enterprise Institute. They all love charters, those founts of rigor and innovation. Not.
Respectfully and IMO, men like Frederick Hess and staff at Fordham are probably driven less by school innovation and student achievement, as evidenced by charter school failures, than they are by the opportunity for others to profit off of children and the legal theft of Main Street’s assets.
The reason for their support for voucher schools which have no accountabilty standards applied, is made evident by the Harvard Institute for faith and education created in 2017 with a former Gates’ K-12 deputy director at the helm, whose purpose aligns with Paul Weyrich’s. They want faith-based education so that religion can be used to control people similar to Ireland’s Great Hunger.
When they achieve their goals, I think it will play out in full horror. With justice, they and their families will be caught up in the vortex of violence.
Linda, what’s the full name of that Harvard Institute? Who runs it?
If Kivie Kaplan and Julius Rosenwald could rise from their graves and join MLK in visiting people associated with CAP, America might prove to be a better place.
Leadership Institute for Faith and Education
Harvard University’s administration lacks a moral compass.
Quotes from website, “There are two rivers (faith-inspired and secular human services organizations) running parallel and the separation is not to the benefit of progress.” “partnerships between faith-based organizations and public schools to address and elevate student success.”