Gary Rubinstein began his career as a Teach for America recruit in 1991 and got to know many of the key figures in the corporate reform movement. He is currently a career high school teacher of mathematics in a New York City public school. Over time, he became disillusioned with the phony promises of TFA and charter schools and became one of the most tenacious critics of their hypocrisy.

KIPP, he notes, is considered the gold standard of charter schools. The organization has about 250 charter schools across the nation. It benefited from being featured in the nefarious film “Waiting for ‘Superman'” as a school that was able to “save” kids who were allegedly trapped in failing public schools. The implication of the film was that charter schools had some magic knowledge that enabled them to transform children who had been faring poorly in school. Mostly, that claim is a hoax, but it is good marketing for recruitment of students.

In this post, he reports on the crisis of KIPP in Tennessee. KIPP had seven schools. But in 2020, two were closed because of low test scores and low growth scores. Now two more are on the chopping block due to poor performance.

He writes:

In the cities of Memphis and Nashville, TN there are a lot of charter schools fueled, in part, by the Race To The Top money they received while Teach For America alumni were in leadership positions at the Tennessee Education Department. By 2019, they had grown to seven KIPP schools in Tennessee. In 2020 the network announced that they were shutting down two of those seven schools. The headline from the Chalkbeat, TN article contains the quote from the network ‘‘We’ve been unable to fulfill our academic promise’. So as of 2020 they were down to five schools in Tennessee.

According to a new article in Chalkbeat, TN, this coming Tuesday, January 25th, the Shelby County school system will vote on whether or not to shut down two of the remaining KIPPs: KIPP Memphis Academy Middle School and KIPP Memphis Collegiate Elementary.

Rubinstein researched the remaining five KIPP schools [including the two at risk of closure] in Tennessee and discovered that none of them is successful.

The fact that the schools are even at risk of getting shut down for poor performance definitely should convince anyone that the ‘Waiting For Superman’ narrative that if you give charters flexibility in exchange for accountability, they will outperform the ‘failing’ public schools. But there might be some people who say “There’s bound to be a few bad apples in any bunch so maybe these are just some outliers and the ‘average’ KIPP is still very good.’

To see if that was true in Tennessee I went to the state web portal and looked up the test scores and the growth scores for all five of the remaining KIPP schools there. What I found was that not only did those schools have very low test scores, but all of them had the lowest possible ‘growth’ score (a 1 out of 5). Now I know that sometimes this ‘growth’ score is not the most accurate calculation but if reformers are going to use them to label some public schools as failing, then they would have to label all the KIPPs in Tennessee as failing too.

The Chalkbeat article says:

Three-year TN Ready test averages from the 2016-17 to 2018-19 school years show only about 6% of KIPP Memphis Academy Middle students reached or approached mastery in math, according to district records. During the same time period, about 10% of students reached or approached mastery in English. 

At KIPP Memphis Collegiate Elementary, about 10% of students reached or approached mastery in English and 18% in math, during the same period.

The CEO of KIPP Memphis defends the low test scores and low growth scores by pointing to the students’ disadvantaged backgrounds.

Rubinstein points out the irony of a charter school using this excuse:

The response from KIPP comes from the CEO of KIPP Memphis schools, Antonio Burt. According to the article “Antonio Burt, CEO of KIPP Memphis Schools, said he’s not satisfied with the two schools’ academic performance, but said many KIPP students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and often face greater learning challenges.” This is striking to me. The whole narrative of charter schools was that unionized teachers believe ‘poverty is destiny’ and use the economic status of students as an ‘excuse’ for low expectations and for low performance but that charters are ‘no excuses’ and will certainly not say that the students underperformed because of these ‘greater learning challenges.’ But Antonio Burt is saying what he can since he has to give the school board some reason to vote to not close these two schools.

The article in Chalkbeat noted that some board members were inclined to give Antonio Burt more time because he “received national acclaim for his work turning two low-performing Memphis schools into models of student achievement.”

That line was an invitation to Rubinstein to discover Antonio Burt’s prowess as a turnaround specialist who had received “national acclaim for his work.”

Rubinstein goes to the record and checks the data for the schools that Burt led in Memphis. Both of them were and remain among the lowest performing schools in the state.

Gary traces Burt’s career path and can’t find any schools that have been turned around by Burt.

So I see Antonio Burt as someone who has spent 2 years at one school, 3 years at another, then a year and a half overseeing eight schools. He hasn’t turned around any of those schools in any kind of lasting way yet he is hailed as a turnaround guru who will likely use that inaccurate title as a way to save the two KIPP schools from being shut down because they now finally have an expert to improve them.

On Tuesday, January 25, the Shelby County School board will decide whether to close the two failing KIPP schools or to leave them open.

You may recall that charter schools are supposed to be more accountable than public schools. When public schools post low scores, they are closed. When charters fail, they too are supposed to close. Let’s see whether that happens in Memphis. Or are charter schools–especially KIPP charter schools–held to a different (and lower) standard than public schools?