Lots of Money != Knowledge of Education

Your savior is a high-school dropout
funded by a bunch of companies
wanting to make a buck or billion.
Makes you feel good, doesn't it?.

Rick Hess:

Andre Agassi, the former tennis champ and high school dropout, and Canyon Capital Realty Advisors, recently announced the creation of a real estate fund that will spend $500 million to capitalize on and promote the movement for U.S. charter schools. The Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund plans to develop more than 75 urban campuses with space for about 40,000 students over three to four years, according to a statement from Canyon Capital and Agassi Ventures LLC. The partners already have drawn investments from Citigroup, Intel, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

So we have Agassi's money being dumped into charters. Impressive on first glance, but you have to wonder at the motives. Real estate companies don't usually give away things for free. Read a little closer and you find that the beneficiaries begin with KIPP, showing once again that KIPP can't operate like any public or private school in that it needs to have "a state‐of‐the‐art facility at an affordable lease rate." So he'll get his money back and he'll be happy to "help charter school operators obtain permanent financing to purchase their properties using New Market Tax Credits, tax‐exempt bond offerings or funding from the U.S. Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund." Gotta love the sanctimonious charters playing high and holy, "We don't siphon off the public like those evil public schools do."

So Agassi's in it for the money, not altruism. Fair enough. KIPP gets cheap, brand-new buildings. Okay. At least they're not parasites on the public school system, taking half a current school building for nothing.

But then I laughed.

I had the opportunity to meet Agassi a few months back in Vegas and was terrifically impressed. I found him smart, thoughtful, humble, and interested in listening; in truth, I found him a whole lot more impressive than any number of education officials, experts, consultants, and professors that I've encountered. Having a smart, wildly successful, internationally regarded tennis champ pouring his passion into launching great schools would seem a terrific thing--and a uniquely American way to tap our strengths and resources.

Impressive is good.  Andre is a great player, married to a great player. Has he ever taught anyone other than his own kid?  Most experts have never been in a classroom.  That's why they have the time to talk to Rick.

Anyway, Let's play Mad Libs ... "Having a smart, wildly successful, internationally regarded ___________ pouring his passion into launching great schools ...."

• would "real estate agent" fit? 
• "high school dropout" ?
• "carpet-bagger" ?
• "profiteer" ?
• "porno actor" (pouring his passion into education ... Sorry, couldn't help it.)  
•  I know! I know! I've got it ... "internationally regarded software company founder" !

Here we go again, me repeating myself. Just because you made a lot of money doesn't mean you know what's good for education. Especially if, like Agassi and Gates, you never completed your own.

Just sayin'.

Selection Bias at KIPP again

It's getting rather repetitive. Lots of people have said it, Jim Horn, for one. It seems as though the journalists aren't listening, or at least are swallowing the bait hook, line and sinker when it comes to the press releases from that grandfather of charter schools, KIPP.

Education News put out this blurb committing that journalistic sin: copy without critical thinking.

As of Fall 2010, 33 percent of students who completed 8th grade at a KIPP middle school ten or more years ago have graduated from a four-year-college. This rate is above the national average (30.6%) and four times the rate for students from low-income families.

It's never been about the money and it certainly isn't about the KIPP program. Socio-economic status is an indicator of educational success not because money is the key factor but because selection is.

What kids are likely to apply to KIPP, suffer through the selection process, stay in KIPP throughout the 8th grade, have the ability to maintain focus under pressure, put up with the incredible stresses and challenges demanded of them, and attend the mandatory summer and Saturday classes? These same traits are a damn good indicator of college success, too.

KIPP isn't the key to their success - it's merely the spotlight that shines on them, taking all the credit for their success while ruthlessly weeding out any child who isn't up to the standard, in much the same way that the average height would increase if you shot all the short people.

Education through academic eugenics.

Academic Xenophobia.

NPR is reporting on school districts who are cracking down on residency issues.

Why?

1. Those parents who are going to go out of their way to "work" the system and exert extra effort to get their kids into your school are statistically more likely to have better motivated students.That's the KIPP difference, the charter difference.  Why not use it? Helping your AYP is nice.
2. It's not like the kid is free-loading. You get the money for every kid who attends regularly and these kids are already going out of their way to get there, so they'll probably have better attendance.
3. The kids are more likely to behave because calling the parents would expose the scam. 
4. District lines are very often arbitrary at best. Gerrymandering the lines doesn't make the bus ride shorter, the school better or the environment safer.

In my mind, I think the best thing would be to make noise publicly. "We're cracking down in the best interests of our community" while making sure that only the troublemakers who try this get caught at it.

Besides, I never quite figured out why it was so important.  We have to educate every kid somewhere and isn't it a compliment that family after family wants to be at YOUR school? I'd be rolling out the red carpet for kids who wanted to come and bragging about it if I could, but maybe that's the private school experience coming out of me.

How do I square this with my stand against vouchers? Because it is a switch between public schools. Most often, vouchers are touted as a transfer of funds from the public school system to a private school and that's the part I don't like.

I can be a member of the local school board (actually have been). I can pick up the phone and directly effect what is going on at the public school in my town. Even as a private citizen, I can walk into the principal's office and ask a question directly - and get an answer (okay, yes, make an appointment and wait a little but you get what I mean). If I am calm, dispassionate, and right, the school will make a change to its policy because I am a taxpaying member of the town and the school is being run by the town for the benefit of any citizen who wishes to take advantage of it.

The Catholic Schools and the private schools won't do that. Why should they?

I do not have a problem with the public - public voucher system. It works well here in Vermont.  I really have a problem when money goes to private institutions which don't follow the same testing and accountability requirements that the rest of the schools do.

Thanks for the Help

Gee, thanks Bill.

Joanne Barkan, writing in Dissent, argues that three big nonprofit foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation), working together, exert a “decisive influence” on public-school education. ”Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making,” she writes.(h/t to the Freakonomics blog, Dubner and Leavitt.)

Unfortunately, this is not just about Bill, Eli and Sam wasting their own money.  It's about three foundations that are pushing an anti-public school agenda that aims to destroy the teachers' union and reduce the educational possibilities for the public. It's about the capitalization of an "industry" at all costs, using tactics that sound good on the face, but are mainly aimed at money.

But, Barkan warns, these market-based reforms are hardly a panacea: “[E]vidence is mounting that the reforms are not working. Stanford University’s 2009 study of charter schools—the most comprehensive ever done—concluded that 83 percent of them perform either worse or no better than traditional public schools; a 2010 Vanderbilt University study showed definitively that merit pay for teachers does not produce higher test scores for students; a National Research Council report confirmed multiple studies that show standardized test scores do not measure student learning adequately. Gates and Broad helped to shape and fund two of the nation’s most extensive and aggressive school reform programs—in Chicago and New York City—but neither has produced credible improvement in student performance after years of experimentation.”

Misguided reform coupled with tragically misguided legislation has left us with the same problems we had before coupled with many new ones.

• We have public schools in which the teachers at the top of their payscale (e.g., here in Vermont) with all the bells and whistles, degrees and seniority, still are earning less than the state median wage. 
• You have charter schools opening up on the cheap, closing down significant public options, simply so that Green Dot and other groups can make a profit. The principal of such can look super while pulling in $200k to $500k but apparently a teacher making more than $30k is the AntiChrist.
• You have organizations like Teach for America, set up solely to destroy teachers who want to make a career of teaching. How? By making it harder for serious candidates to get into places to establish themselves.  Why would a school want a career teacher when it can hire a fancy thoroughbred that will seem flashy and pretty and fast, but ultimately flame out in two years? Instant gratification writ cynical.
• You have reforms that are directly counter-productive, that "everyone knew were going to revolutionize education" but that really wound up wasting a significant portion of that budget that the pro-voucher, pro-private school advocates were pointing to as a problem in the public schools.
• Think: Small Schools Initiative. (Break big schools into smaller ones and then bitch that the smaller ones don't have economy of scale.)
• Think: Technology Uber Alles. Microsoft is the Education King! Every kid should have a laptop! Every kid should have a smartphone! iPod! iPad! Netbook!
• Think: Parochial, Private, Charter, KIPP! Profit is better.
• Think: Merit Pay!
• Testing, testing, testing. Test them in October, release the scores in May. And I'm supposed to do what in the last six weeks of school to change my curriculum to help this kid?

Like I said, Thanks. Now would you all please go somewhere and stop helping?

Chinese Mothers and KIPP

The other day, I posted an article by a Chinese-American Yale Professor describing the way she brought up her kids. In it, she speaks of no play dates, hours of practice at the piano and the violin, drills and drills on homework, an endless desire to get As and harsh language when the lone B arrives on a report card.

The commenters on the WSJ site were, as might be imagined, SHOCKED that such behavior wasn't considered child abuse, that the woman was mistreating her children and that there was something terribly wrong with her parenting skills. All of those commenters would be SHOCKED if their little darlings were subject to that regimen.

It occurred to me that this is pretty much what KIPP does. Drill, drill, and more drill, extremely high demands on time, teachers driven nearly crazy in their enthusiasm for success and the need to produce, more drill, Saturday classes, no sports, summer school, more drill, and lots of test preparation.

All of those commenters would be THRILLED if there were more KIPP schools.
All of those commenters would be SHOCKED if their little darlings were subject to that regimen.

Charter Bashing ... by mentioning the truth?

hmmmm.

The whole idea of a charter school is that you take off the blinders and the restrictions and let them thrive.  Giving them freedom from "Big Government" and all those repressive regulations, as the thinking goes, means that they can succeed in educating all students much better than the public schools.  The proof usually includes whichever KIPP school is doing well that year (ignoring those that are embroiled in a lawsuit, not making sufficient progress, etc.) and, of course, New Orleans which was liberated by Katrina. (or something like that.)

Then you read:

One of the most exhaustive studies of charter performance, from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, found 37 percent of charter schools “deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.” About half produced similar outcomes to public schools, with just 17 percent outperforming public schools (Extra!, 8/09).

If all charter schools have the advantage of running free, why aren't all of them out-performing public schools? If they can choose their students, skim off and keep the best performers and eliminate the troublemakers, teach in any way they choose, shouldn't the standard be "If a charter school doesn't beat the public school, it will be immediately closed?" 

The Charter Pendulum does a double-take.

One way from Pittsburgh, via Schools Matter:

Among charter school students, about 20 percent didn't meet basic academic standards in reading and math, compared with about 12 percent of district students, according to 2009 Pennsylvania System of Student Assessment test results ....
About 75 percent of Pennsylvania public school students scored advanced or proficient in reading and math, compared with about 59 percent of charter school students ...

and then back the other way from Reason TV, via Joanne Jacobs, :

Hurricane Katrina destroyed one of the worst public school systems in the U.S., says Reason TV. New Orleans started fresh with a system based on choice. Now, “60% of New Orleans students currently attend charter schools, test scores are up, and talented and passionate educators from around the country are flocking to New Orleans to be a part of the education revolution.”

all in the same day.

Makes you wonder how long it will take for them to notice that the gains by KIPP and other charters have more to do with selected students than with superior funding methods? That charter schools don't have the same SpecEd requirements? That charter and private schools are relieved of many regulations and have the flexibility of getting rid of problem students? (defined as students who cause trouble, or in the case of KIPP, don't want to work too hard or for 60 hours a week.)

And yes, it is still despicable to say that Katrina had a silver lining in that it "improved the public school system." Even if that caveat were true, and it's not, the statement assumes that death and massive destruction has a good side.

Success is in the Eye of the Beholder.

Through test scores, Arizona rates about 24 percent of charter schools as "excelling" or "highly performing." About 37 percent of regular public schools win those marks.

Thanks to George Orwell, you can define anything to fit your opinion. Long live Charter Schools.

Musings on the Charter Conversation

In this entry, practical theory asks,

How different would the current educational conversation be if the KIPP folks said, "Yes... in some of our schools, 25-40% of the families choose to leave KIPP, but KIPP isn't for everyone, and for the students who stay, we do right by them?" What if these schools admitted that it would be much harder to have the success they have if they didn't have the traditional schools to send kids back to when it didn't work out? What if these schools admitted they didn't have all the answers, and instead had to admit that, yes, they do amazing things for many students, but they haven't figured out how to get to a significant percentage of their population, despite Herculean efforts?

Go Read.

NBCNews slurps at the KIPP Koolaid.

Pretty silly display at the end of Nightly News... KIPP is wonderful, kids spend 10 hours a day drilling and practicing and singing songs from 7:30 to 5:30 plus weekends and lots of summer days.

Didn't mention that perhaps the same could have been had for a lot less time and effort. Didn't mention the drop-outs and push-outs and those who didn't apply. Sure didn't note the 12 hour days that the teachers put in -- don't any of these people have a life? In the clip I noticed them counting on their fingers and one of the songs had them practicing to count to one hundred. This is what, fifth or sixth grade?

Hope it's worth it.