The NY Times Sunday Magazine from 11/26/06 featured a powerful essay by Paul Tough on the educational achievement gap. Central to the piece was Tough's contention that NCLB could work:
Although the failure of No Child Left Behind now seems more likely than not, it is not too late for it to succeed. We know now, in a way that we did not when the law was passed, what it would take to make it work. And if the law does, in the end, fail — if in 2014 only 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the country’s poor and minority students are proficient, then we will need to accept that its failure was not an accident and was not inevitable, but was the outcome we chose.
Tough comes to this conclusion by looking at the "success" of schools like KIPP. But as keen as he is to support schools like KIPP, he recognizes one of their key paradoxes: the extent to which they attract and enroll already-successful students:
The leaders of this informal network are now wrestling with an unintended consequence of their schools’ positive results and high profiles: their incoming students are sometimes too good. At some schools, students arrive scoring better than typical children in their neighborhoods, presumably because the school’s reputation is attracting more-engaged parents with better-prepared kids to its admission lottery. Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, for example, is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city. At most schools, well-prepared incoming students would be seen as good news. But at these charter schools, they can be a mixed blessing. Although the schools have demonstrated an impressive and consistent ability to turn below-average poor minority students into above-average students, another part of their mission is to show that even the most academically challenged students can succeed using their methods. But if not enough of those students are attending their schools, it’s hard to make that point.
Curiously, Tough acknowledges that teachers at schools like KIPP often work 15 to 16 hours per day, yet he glosses over the implications of this fact. How many teachers with families can work 15 to 16 hours per day? How can we possibly tout this model as a "success" when it is clearly impossible to scale it? Even more curiously, Tough recognizes this strange double logic in another part of the essay:
(W)hen the conservative education movement adopted “No Excuses” as a slogan, the phrase was used much more broadly: if that rural Arkansas public school isn’t achieving the success of a KIPP school, those responsible for its underachievement must simply be making excuses. The slogan came to suggest that what is going wrong in the schools is simply some sort of failure of will — that teachers don’t want to work hard, or don’t believe in their students, or are succumbing to what the president calls “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — while the reality is that even the best, most motivated educator, given just six hours a day and 10 months a year and nothing more than the typical resources provided to a public-school teacher, would find it near impossible to educate an average classroom of poor minority students up to the level of their middle-class peers.
What's missing in his analysis is a connection between this latter insight and his enthusiastic support of schools like KIPP.
As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, KIPP's apparent success is tentative at best, misleading at worst.
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