In the Bronx KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools, a greater proportion of entering fourth graders passed the New York state reading test than was the case for nearby public elementary schools. (One comparison found a 42%-25% difference, respectively.) This advantage is significant because it has been asserted that KIPP students enter with the same preparation as public school students but still manage much higher test scores.More fuel for the fire that KIPP students are more advantaged than their regular school peers.
Source - The Charter School Dustup
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Beating the Dead KIPP Horse
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
More On the Scripted Prescription
In the context of the educational assessments that children like my five-year-old daughter are subject to, we see a diagnostic model that specializes in both quantifying educational deficiencies in very young children and providing an antidote that meets the needs of the diagnosis. We see the emergence of large publishing companies that are allowed to control the definition of the symptoms as well as prescribe and furnish the cure – for a hefty price. We see the emergence of the scripted curriculum, where “scripted” means an explicit formula to cure what ails them, as in “prescription.”
At my daughter's school, the prescription comes in the form of Scott Foresman’s Reading Street. Scott Foresman is a division of publishing giant Pearson Education. My daughter's school enrolls about half white children and half children of color and qualifies for Title 1 funds, so it might be logical to infer that this prescription is aimed at “those kids,” i.e., low-income minority children. But the same kind of prescription is being handed out everywhere in the district, not just at my daughter’s school. And it’s being handed out all across the country. The prescription goes by various names, but they all have this in common: invent, identify, and remediate deficiencies, all in one slick package.
In the context of the psychiatric medication that children like my five-year-old daughter are subject to, we see a diagnostic model that specializes in both quantifying behavioral abnormalities in very young children and providing an antidote that meets the needs of the diagnosis. We see the emergence of large drug companies that are allowed to control the definition of the symptoms as well as prescribe and furnish the cure – for a hefty price. We see the emergence of the prescription as the cure for childhood.
Here's a nice passage from Thomas Armstrong, “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Children: One Consequence of the Rise of Technologies and the Demise of Play,” in Sharna Olfman (ed.) All Work and No Play…How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Preschoolers. Westport Ct.: Praeger, 2003, pp. 161-176. . Online at: www.thomasarmstrong.com/articles.
Research studies have demonstrated that children's ADHD symp toms decrease under a variety of environmental conditions, including when they are engaged in one-on-one learning experiences, when they're being paid to do tasks, when they have access to novel or highly stimulating activities, when they're in control of the pace of learning experiences, and when they're interacting with male authority figures (Barkley, 1990; McGuinness, 1985; Zentall, 1980; Sykes, Douglas, & Morgenstern, 1973; Sleator & Ullman, 1981). From this we can infer that symptoms of ADHD in children might increase when the oppo site environmental conditions pertain, such as when they're perform ing in boring or low-stimulation environments, when they're not receiving a meaningful reward for their efforts, and when they're powerless to control the pace of learning tasks. Indeed, if these con ditions are present in a child's home environment from birth, it is rea sonable to suspect that they could lay the groundwork for the disorder itself.
and another
In a survey of ADHD-diagnosed and "normal" children aged six to seventeen, the odds of a child being diagnosed with ADHD increased in proportion to the extent that they came from a family characterized by adversity, including severe marital discord, low social class, large family size, paternal criminality, maternal mental disorder, and foster care placement (Biederman et al., 1995). Other studies have demon strated that the quality of caregiving in early childhood predicts dis tractibility (a key symptom of ADHD) better than early biological markers or temperament, and that a strong overlap exists between symptoms of ADHD and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in children, suggesting that early sexual, physical, and/ or emotional abuse may play an important role in the origin of ADHD symptoms for some children (Carlson, Jacobvitz, & Sroufe, 1995; Weinstein, Staffelbach, & Biaggio, 2000).
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The KIPP Virus Spreads
The chilling piece from this week's EdWeek makes it clear that the KIPP model has taken hold and is spreading. KIPP'sters are now collaborating with others, e.g., Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, to grow the model, including Hunter College's teacher ed program:
Note this, too: "although they have grown rapidly, all of the high-performing networks still face the challenge of achieving quality at larger scale. Traditionally, quality and scale in education have been inversely related: As initiatives get larger, fidelity to the elements that made them effective in the first place is compromised."
Prediction: as KIPP gets bigger, it will lose the only things that make it worth taking seriously, i.e., a lack of a top-down, standardized approach to education. As it expands, look for it to become more standardized, more cookie-cutter.
---
Published Online: February 11, 2008
Published in Print: February 13, 2008
Commentary
A Defining Moment for Charter Schools?
How Networking Best Practices May Revolutionize the Movement, and Reshape Urban Education
By Richard Whitmire & Andrew J. Rotherham
Many who bought early personal computers fired them up, wrote a few paragraphs, played some Tetris, and then asked: What’s the big deal?
Then came the Internet.
You might want to think of the charter school movement in a similar way. Since the first charter opened in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., they have grown quickly, passing the 4,000-school mark. Now there are some outstanding ones and some lemons, but charter schools overall are not proving to be radically dissimilar to other public schools. So what’s the big deal?
Call it the “New York effect.”
It started four years ago, when New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein attracted a few of the most successful charter networks (the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP; Achievement First; and Uncommon Schools) with dollar-a-year rent offers. All three accepted, but they did more than that: Rather than compete, they engaged in what could be called “coopetition,” often holding hands as they expanded in the city.
“Instead of fighting each other for resources, we ended up trying to figure out how we can deepen the pool and work together to make resources available for all to grow,” says John King from Uncommon Schools. “Each of us visited each other’s schools when we were starting up and learned tremendously important lessons.”
The intermingling, which began with shared “lessons learned” and expanded into shared training and more, could yield the “Internet” era of charters, a time when the real impact of the idea manifests itself, as the best schools get even better and the low-performing charters (and low-performing public schools and districts) face increasing pressure to improve or close. Powerful, yes. And also a long way from the early vision of charter schools, championed by many on the left as a way to launch more authentic and mom-and-pop public schools, and by many on the right as a way to introduce the relentless pressure of competition into ossified public school systems.
Consider Jabali Sawicki, the principal of the 4-year-old Excellence Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Sawicki began his career in charters teaching at Boston’s strikingly successful Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. He was tapped by leaders at Uncommon Schools (the Roxbury charter’s founders) to run the new Bedford-Stuyvesant school. Then, he received training from KIPP’s widely admired school leadership program.
As the elite networks create an even bigger footprint on the urban education landscape, some hard conversations about race and class are inevitable.
Now several of the teachers in Sawicki’s school are earning their master’s degrees from a new program at Hunter College, where the founders of all three charter groups, famous names in the charter movement and proven educators such as David Levin of KIPP and Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, serve as instructors. And when Sawicki’s students reach high school age, many will attend one of the two new high schools now under design for students from these three charter groups. Quarterbacking the new high schools, expected to open in 2010, is the Robin Hood Foundation, the hedge-fund-fueled financial muscle behind this intermingling experiment.
The significance of the cooperation is seen in Excellence Charter’s first test scores. Here is a startup school in a poor neighborhood with an all-minority student population, and it is hitting home runs in math and reading. That often doesn’t happen with new schools, and yet it is happening, not only with Excellence but with the other startup charter schools being spawned by these groups.
Perhaps the most striking payoff from the cooperation is the two-year master’s-degree program at Hunter College, which got off the ground when the charter founders discovered their ideal education school dean in the maverick education school reformer David M. Steiner. Led by Steiner, the Hunter faculty embraced the charter founders and this past summer launched a trial version of a program expected to expand rapidly to include not only teachers from other charter schools, but also hundreds of teachers bound for traditional New York City public schools. ("College and Charter Groups Team Up to Train Teachers," Feb. 6, 2008.)
The goal was to teach the strategies that make these schools effective. As Uncommon Schools’ Atkins explains, planners wanted to “find the best people to teach content, and model and present the methodologies we use most successfully in our own schools.” As a result, a class led by this hybrid team looks nothing like a traditional education class. Here, the teachers and students bore in on the little things that define the tenor of the highly structured school day and intensive instruction that mark all three of these schools.
KIPP’s co-founder Levin says the goal is to have the expanded Hunter College program replicated in education schools across the country. “This is not about the success of one organization,” he says. “It’s about sharing what works for kids.”
That’s a critical goal, but one that in the past has proven elusive in education, where isolated successes rather than systemic improvement is the norm. Meanwhile, the challenges facing these elite schools and their leaders remain as substantial as the opportunity they have to reshape urban education.
For starters, all these initiatives remain heavily dependent on philanthropic dollars. Right now, a core group of funders is committed to the ventures, helping them leverage public spending. But philanthropic priorities can change, so the new elites must build durable avenues of support within the public sector.
The challenges facing these elite schools and their leaders remain as substantial as the opportunity they have to reshape urban education.
In addition, although they have grown rapidly, all of the high-performing networks still face the challenge of achieving quality at larger scale. Traditionally, quality and scale in education have been inversely related: As initiatives get larger, fidelity to the elements that made them effective in the first place is compromised. Yet it’s not an iron rule. Teach For America, for instance, bucked this trend by growing and maintaining (if not improving) its effectiveness and supplying hundreds of teachers and leaders for the elite networks. KIPP, the largest of these, has expanded and maintained high quality as well. But despite deliberate attention to the key elements of quality, as the networks try to move from impacting thousands of students to millions, the quality-scale challenge will be a test.
The strategy of addressing human capital internally, rather than expecting traditional avenues for teacher and school leadership preparation to do the job, will help. It’s also a model that can be replicated elsewhere by reform-oriented superintendents or other networks of high-performing charter schools. And if the elites can help close the gap between teacher preparation and effective practice, that will move the field forward. But David Steiners are in short supply, and it seems unlikely that teacher preparation will dramatically change without a fight.
And, as it often does in education, race is apt to play a role, too. The leadership of many elite initiatives does not look like the students being served. So far, the desperation for better schooling options in many communities has papered this over. But as the elite networks create an even bigger footprint on the urban education landscape, some hard conversations about race and class are inevitable. To their credit, the elites are trying to broaden the pipeline of diverse talent for leadership roles. Still, despite their efforts, an uncomfortable reality lurks just below the surface today.
Finally, and most importantly, these initiatives must show that they, and by extension charter schooling, can substantially move the needle on student achievement overall. As Matt Candler, the chief executive officer of New Schools for New Orleans, has remarked, no one wants to be part of a movement whose claim to legitimacy is that it “sucks less” than the other schooling options out there. But if they can get it right, the elites have the potential not just to substantially change the facts on the ground about urban education, but also to earn standing to set the standard for quality overall within public education.
That’s a long way from what was launched in Minnesota in 1992, and it could revolutionize American public education.
Richard Whitmire is an editorial writer for USA Today and the president of the Education Writers Association. Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia state board of education. He writes the blog Eduwonk.com.
"Now several of the teachers . . . are earning their master’s degrees from a new program at Hunter College, where . . . David Levin of KIPP and Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, serve as instructors."Note the acknowledgment of the fact that these ventures are dependent on private funding and cannot grow, "so the new elites must build durable avenues of support within the public sector." Translation: take dollars away from regular public schools and funnel them towards McCharters like KIPP.
Note this, too: "although they have grown rapidly, all of the high-performing networks still face the challenge of achieving quality at larger scale. Traditionally, quality and scale in education have been inversely related: As initiatives get larger, fidelity to the elements that made them effective in the first place is compromised."
Prediction: as KIPP gets bigger, it will lose the only things that make it worth taking seriously, i.e., a lack of a top-down, standardized approach to education. As it expands, look for it to become more standardized, more cookie-cutter.
---
Published Online: February 11, 2008
Published in Print: February 13, 2008
Commentary
A Defining Moment for Charter Schools?
How Networking Best Practices May Revolutionize the Movement, and Reshape Urban Education
By Richard Whitmire & Andrew J. Rotherham
Many who bought early personal computers fired them up, wrote a few paragraphs, played some Tetris, and then asked: What’s the big deal?
Then came the Internet.
You might want to think of the charter school movement in a similar way. Since the first charter opened in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., they have grown quickly, passing the 4,000-school mark. Now there are some outstanding ones and some lemons, but charter schools overall are not proving to be radically dissimilar to other public schools. So what’s the big deal?
Call it the “New York effect.”
It started four years ago, when New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein attracted a few of the most successful charter networks (the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP; Achievement First; and Uncommon Schools) with dollar-a-year rent offers. All three accepted, but they did more than that: Rather than compete, they engaged in what could be called “coopetition,” often holding hands as they expanded in the city.
“Instead of fighting each other for resources, we ended up trying to figure out how we can deepen the pool and work together to make resources available for all to grow,” says John King from Uncommon Schools. “Each of us visited each other’s schools when we were starting up and learned tremendously important lessons.”
The intermingling, which began with shared “lessons learned” and expanded into shared training and more, could yield the “Internet” era of charters, a time when the real impact of the idea manifests itself, as the best schools get even better and the low-performing charters (and low-performing public schools and districts) face increasing pressure to improve or close. Powerful, yes. And also a long way from the early vision of charter schools, championed by many on the left as a way to launch more authentic and mom-and-pop public schools, and by many on the right as a way to introduce the relentless pressure of competition into ossified public school systems.
Consider Jabali Sawicki, the principal of the 4-year-old Excellence Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Sawicki began his career in charters teaching at Boston’s strikingly successful Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. He was tapped by leaders at Uncommon Schools (the Roxbury charter’s founders) to run the new Bedford-Stuyvesant school. Then, he received training from KIPP’s widely admired school leadership program.
As the elite networks create an even bigger footprint on the urban education landscape, some hard conversations about race and class are inevitable.
Now several of the teachers in Sawicki’s school are earning their master’s degrees from a new program at Hunter College, where the founders of all three charter groups, famous names in the charter movement and proven educators such as David Levin of KIPP and Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, serve as instructors. And when Sawicki’s students reach high school age, many will attend one of the two new high schools now under design for students from these three charter groups. Quarterbacking the new high schools, expected to open in 2010, is the Robin Hood Foundation, the hedge-fund-fueled financial muscle behind this intermingling experiment.
The significance of the cooperation is seen in Excellence Charter’s first test scores. Here is a startup school in a poor neighborhood with an all-minority student population, and it is hitting home runs in math and reading. That often doesn’t happen with new schools, and yet it is happening, not only with Excellence but with the other startup charter schools being spawned by these groups.
Perhaps the most striking payoff from the cooperation is the two-year master’s-degree program at Hunter College, which got off the ground when the charter founders discovered their ideal education school dean in the maverick education school reformer David M. Steiner. Led by Steiner, the Hunter faculty embraced the charter founders and this past summer launched a trial version of a program expected to expand rapidly to include not only teachers from other charter schools, but also hundreds of teachers bound for traditional New York City public schools. ("College and Charter Groups Team Up to Train Teachers," Feb. 6, 2008.)
The goal was to teach the strategies that make these schools effective. As Uncommon Schools’ Atkins explains, planners wanted to “find the best people to teach content, and model and present the methodologies we use most successfully in our own schools.” As a result, a class led by this hybrid team looks nothing like a traditional education class. Here, the teachers and students bore in on the little things that define the tenor of the highly structured school day and intensive instruction that mark all three of these schools.
KIPP’s co-founder Levin says the goal is to have the expanded Hunter College program replicated in education schools across the country. “This is not about the success of one organization,” he says. “It’s about sharing what works for kids.”
That’s a critical goal, but one that in the past has proven elusive in education, where isolated successes rather than systemic improvement is the norm. Meanwhile, the challenges facing these elite schools and their leaders remain as substantial as the opportunity they have to reshape urban education.
For starters, all these initiatives remain heavily dependent on philanthropic dollars. Right now, a core group of funders is committed to the ventures, helping them leverage public spending. But philanthropic priorities can change, so the new elites must build durable avenues of support within the public sector.
The challenges facing these elite schools and their leaders remain as substantial as the opportunity they have to reshape urban education.
In addition, although they have grown rapidly, all of the high-performing networks still face the challenge of achieving quality at larger scale. Traditionally, quality and scale in education have been inversely related: As initiatives get larger, fidelity to the elements that made them effective in the first place is compromised. Yet it’s not an iron rule. Teach For America, for instance, bucked this trend by growing and maintaining (if not improving) its effectiveness and supplying hundreds of teachers and leaders for the elite networks. KIPP, the largest of these, has expanded and maintained high quality as well. But despite deliberate attention to the key elements of quality, as the networks try to move from impacting thousands of students to millions, the quality-scale challenge will be a test.
The strategy of addressing human capital internally, rather than expecting traditional avenues for teacher and school leadership preparation to do the job, will help. It’s also a model that can be replicated elsewhere by reform-oriented superintendents or other networks of high-performing charter schools. And if the elites can help close the gap between teacher preparation and effective practice, that will move the field forward. But David Steiners are in short supply, and it seems unlikely that teacher preparation will dramatically change without a fight.
And, as it often does in education, race is apt to play a role, too. The leadership of many elite initiatives does not look like the students being served. So far, the desperation for better schooling options in many communities has papered this over. But as the elite networks create an even bigger footprint on the urban education landscape, some hard conversations about race and class are inevitable. To their credit, the elites are trying to broaden the pipeline of diverse talent for leadership roles. Still, despite their efforts, an uncomfortable reality lurks just below the surface today.
Finally, and most importantly, these initiatives must show that they, and by extension charter schooling, can substantially move the needle on student achievement overall. As Matt Candler, the chief executive officer of New Schools for New Orleans, has remarked, no one wants to be part of a movement whose claim to legitimacy is that it “sucks less” than the other schooling options out there. But if they can get it right, the elites have the potential not just to substantially change the facts on the ground about urban education, but also to earn standing to set the standard for quality overall within public education.
That’s a long way from what was launched in Minnesota in 1992, and it could revolutionize American public education.
Richard Whitmire is an editorial writer for USA Today and the president of the Education Writers Association. Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia state board of education. He writes the blog Eduwonk.com.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
The Definitive Response to KIPP Hype
At some point in your life, you're probably going to encounter a KIPP'ster -- someone who went to school at or teaches at one of the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools -- who will tell you some rather amazing things about KIPP. Or you may read about KIPP in the newspaper or see something on TV. The best way to counter support for KIPP is to point out the following obvious points:
But KIPP enjoys ALL SIX.
In other words, if you have a small school with highly motivated teachers, students and parents that enjoys the benefits of private financial support and the accolades of the local and national press, you will be a great success.
Ergo, if all schools were small, had highly motivated teachers, students and parents, enjoyed the benefits of private financial support and the accolades of the local and national press, they would all be a great success.
But not all schools can do this. It simply is not possible, given the current paucity of funding and the current mindset that blames low-income people for their own dire straits. So why can't every school repeat KIPP's success?
If we can look at these factors -- (1) student, teacher, and parent motivation, (2) private financial support, (3) small class size, and (4) media celebration -- as goals and try to increase the likelihood of their occurring elsewhere with greater regularity, we might have a worthwhile project on our hands. But to consider KIPP a scalable, reproducible model is silly. Worse, because it attracts the conservative "if they can do it, anyone can" types, KIPP effectively derails substantive dialogue about how the factors that most contribute to its success can be reproduced in other schools.
For example, what policies can be created to increase student, parent, and teacher motivation? What factors decrease motivation? For low-income families without adequate healthcare, living in squalid conditions does not a motivated person make.
What policies can be created to decrease class size? What can be done to provide ongoing high-quality professional development and support to teachers so their desire and ability to teach is lifted up, not smashed down?
Let's have serious discussions about these questions. Let's not be distracted by talk of KIPP and its "magical solution," its hyped stats about its college matriculation rate, and its extraordinarily misleading claim that it helps ALL children learn. KIPP is not the cause of its success. Small class sizes, motivated teachers, motivated students, motivated parents, and tons of private financial support are.
- All KIPP schools are very small. According to Steve Mancini, public affairs director for KIPP schools, the average student-to-teacher ratio at KIPP is 16 to 1.
- All KIPP teachers are highly motivated and really want to teach at the schools where they work.
- KIPP students -- well, those that are not forced to repeat a grade or who are not "counseled out," i.e., encouraged to drop out of KIPP -- are all highly motivated and want to go to school.
- KIPP parents are all highly motivated and go to great lengths to support their kids at KIPP.
- KIPP enjoys lots of private financial support, including support from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart).
- KIPP is widely celebrated in the media.
But KIPP enjoys ALL SIX.
In other words, if you have a small school with highly motivated teachers, students and parents that enjoys the benefits of private financial support and the accolades of the local and national press, you will be a great success.
Ergo, if all schools were small, had highly motivated teachers, students and parents, enjoyed the benefits of private financial support and the accolades of the local and national press, they would all be a great success.
But not all schools can do this. It simply is not possible, given the current paucity of funding and the current mindset that blames low-income people for their own dire straits. So why can't every school repeat KIPP's success?
If we can look at these factors -- (1) student, teacher, and parent motivation, (2) private financial support, (3) small class size, and (4) media celebration -- as goals and try to increase the likelihood of their occurring elsewhere with greater regularity, we might have a worthwhile project on our hands. But to consider KIPP a scalable, reproducible model is silly. Worse, because it attracts the conservative "if they can do it, anyone can" types, KIPP effectively derails substantive dialogue about how the factors that most contribute to its success can be reproduced in other schools.
For example, what policies can be created to increase student, parent, and teacher motivation? What factors decrease motivation? For low-income families without adequate healthcare, living in squalid conditions does not a motivated person make.
What policies can be created to decrease class size? What can be done to provide ongoing high-quality professional development and support to teachers so their desire and ability to teach is lifted up, not smashed down?
Let's have serious discussions about these questions. Let's not be distracted by talk of KIPP and its "magical solution," its hyped stats about its college matriculation rate, and its extraordinarily misleading claim that it helps ALL children learn. KIPP is not the cause of its success. Small class sizes, motivated teachers, motivated students, motivated parents, and tons of private financial support are.
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