Just one graph from School Finance 101 tells most of the story, which you should go read now.

If you're not sure what the graph is showing, it is showing that the neediest kids, described by how many free and reduced lunches are served, are under-represented at KIPP schools in the zip-code in the title of the graph.

This means that when charters claim they are doing better than the other schools around them they also need to mention that the population in the KIPP school is very different than the populations of the comparison schools, making the comparison moot, or useless, or spin. You can decide which it is.

KIPP Should Change Its Name To CIPP: Updated

This is a re-post from September

KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program.  I think it should be CIPP, Compliance Is Power Program.

I mostly work with young students not yet in high school. All my classroom experience is k-3 with some subbing in high and middle school thrown in before I was credentialed.  I now work with all ages in a private practice.

My experience in a Title 1 district taught me much. I learned how poverty can stifle a child's ability to learn.

I watched many of my students interact with their parents and the negative interactions I have seen show me KIPP style indoctrination is a no-good and rather blunt instrument.

For you teachers, this will come as nothing new or even interesting.

Many students are parented in a way that I can only call "be seen but not heard." It is a typical family dynamic I see constantly. Young kids are told to shut up by their parents. They are manhandled and insulted.  They are often being raised by an exhausted grandparent. They are sometimes homeless, almost always car-less, and in need of dental care.  They are not fed well at home and need to come to school to eat. They live in Section 8 housing in a crappy part of town.  Homework is hard because there isn't a place to do it, or time to do it, or anyone to help do it.  Many parents/caregivers expect the school and teacher to educate their child--entirely. Why?

Let me stereotype:

Because these families, mostly impoverished, don't raise their kids the way I raise mine or you raise yours. We hug our children, listen to them, enrich them, read to them, feed them, show them they are important to us, and love them and show them they are wanted. We have books in our houses and we talk with (as opposed to to or at) our children. It's what privilege and good role models allows us. It's also, probably, how we were raised. Our curiosity was encouraged and engaged. Our parents were role models. School was an adjunct to an education, not the be-all and end-all.

For those students who don't get that kind of parenting, schools are the only place left to provide it. And that's how my classroom operated. I was a fantastic dad/teacher in the classroom. It was my job to teach BIG ideas, along with the standards, of course. But standards were almost beside the point. Standards are easy to learn when you are exposed to big ideas and connections. That's why school for me and my son, and most of you and your children, was not a struggle. We were ready.

My classroom was a community and everyone in that community was respected for who they were and what they could do.  I encouraged my kids to seek each other out for help--classrooms are filled with talent and all one needs to do is learn about each other to find out.  My job is to help each student find out what they are good at and use that as a means to an education--academic as well as social.  I must validate each child's skills and abilities.  Everyone needs validation.  It is a form of respect.  It also builds confidence, something poverty tends to quash.

My classroom was fun because learning is fun.  Our brains, kid's brains especially, are wired for learning.  It's what brains do--brains are pattern-seeking devices.  When I provide/expose/clarify patterns for my students, they flourish and their brains hum along.  This can't be done without spontaneity.  KIPP is the opposite of spontaneous.

KIPP chooses compliance over connections. KIPP chooses behavior over knowledge.

My most ignorant, unworldly students needed parenting and exposure to things not presented in the home. School is where they got attention, concern, validation, and love. I gave them time to explore and become interested and curious. I answered every single question anyone had.  I stopped reading out loud when the story brought up something worth talking about.  Then I taught them all I could about what interested them. It's called authentic learning, and it is what parents do when they watch their child focus on something, like a flower or a bug, without interrupting or analyzing, but rather going along and facilitating.

Everyday I had students who wanted to come to school because they knew I was there to help them, not scold them, not to get them to comply "because I said so" but because we are happier when we cooperate.  My classroom was a place where kids learned how to be people first, not robots.

People learn by seeking out patterns.  Poverty precludes unobstructed curiosity.  KIPP reinforces the obstructions.

Good teachers don't drill and kill (well, sometimes it's actually okay). Good teachers don't stifle, they amplify and validate, redirect and focus, excite and explain.

KIPP schools intimidate, single out, and make rigid all the things that should not be rigid. Respect and concern work better than fear and intimidation.

If we want young people to do well in school they need a family that has the luxury of being able to provide stability. America just hasn't figured out what to do about it yet.

Well, here's a start:

1. Universal health care
2. Free high quality early childhood education

Update:  I need to add how the name KIPP came to be.  Harriet Ball, who heard god and left teaching to teach teachers, had a chant she used (chants are for poor, black kids) that went like this:

You gotta read, baby, read.
You gotta read, baby, read.
The more you read, the more you know,
Cause knowledge is power,
Power is money, and
I want it.

The KIPP founders heard the chant at a conference and liked it.  I don't.

TFA, KIPP Unsustainable According To Rick Hess

The eduformers like Gates and Broad as well as the edupreneurs like Tom Vander Ark, along with their puppet Arne Duncan, devised RTTT and in so doing made more than a couple states change their laws to get into the contest. Those laws made it easier for charter schools to get into the game, as they are supposedly the biggest part of the education solution.

Yesterday, Rick Hess admitted we can't count on TFA or charters to do the job. No shit, Sherlock.

...as much as I love TFA and KIPP, their models have an enormous appetite for hard-working, talented, passionate youth--the problem is, there's only so much of that to go around. This tends to create natural limits to their rates of growth....

Bill (Microsoft) Gates Lies And Gets Away With It

Jim Horn catches Bill Gates in a common lie the oligarchs like to spread about KIPP and graduation rates. Is there any reason to listen to Gates? Not that I can tell.

So Gates has upped the ante on the lie that Jonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek in 2008 about 80 percent of 16,000 KIPP students going to college. What Caroline Grannan found out from KIPP, Inc.'s home office at that time is that only 447 KIPPsters had entered college when Alter wrote that lie. And now Gates's figure of 95% going to college. Pure fabrication. Does the Harvard Gazette bother to fact check public education's greatest philanthropic enemy? With such a wad of money stolen from the American treasury ready to shape the world in a perfectly white dweeby image, who can doubt him?

More at the link.

KIPP Study Makes A Dubious Claim

KIPP Works

It’s relatively obvious to anyone who looks that the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the nation’s largest charter management organization, produces results. Just by seeing its classrooms you start to figure this out: the students are in matching uniforms, they chant and seem energized about learning, and, other than the chants, they’re orderly and respectful. To prove that KIPP works mathematically, up until now we’ve had to rely on pretty low-level analyses that show very high numbers of their students pass state accountability exams.

A new, rigorous analysis for the National Bureau of Economic Research changes that. Using a quasi-experimental research design that capitalizes on the large number of students applying to get into but ultimately rejected from one KIPP school in Lynn, Massachusetts, the researchers were able to compare students who entered the school with those who wanted to attend but were rejected due to space restrictions. This design helps the researchers isolate KIPP attendance from motivation, parental education, environmental factors, or any other variable that might be difficult to detect.

After these controls, KIPP attendees gained .35 of a standard deviation every year in math and .12 standard deviations each year in English. Results were even more positive for Limited English Proficiency and special education students (the demographics of KIPP Lynn lottery winners matched lottery losers and the district as a whole)...

Is it so obvious KIPP works?  The study claims to deal with "creaming"--the effect that self-selection creates a superior student body--so a comparison can be made between those who got into KIPP and those who didn't.  What the study doesn't deal with is the environment at the two different schools students ended up in.  On one hand you have the students who got into KIPP along with all the other self-selected students who got in.  Great learning environment there, I assume.  Then there are the kids who ended up in non-KIPP schools with all the other students whose parents couldn't or wouldn't attempt to get them into KIPP.  Not as great a learning environment there, I assume.

The study is flawed due to this rather blatant omission of reality.  A KIPP school demands proper behavior from its students, as well as high parental participation among other things.  A non-KIPP school takes all comers, regardless their motivation.  That makes for a less ideal learning environment.

So, it's not that KIPP works; it's that KIPP has "better" (creamed) students as we have been saying forever.

Corporate Culture At School

Jim Horn exposes the corporate mindset of charters like KIPP, programs like TFA, and also every staff meeting I've ever attended:

. . . . The driving ideology of corporate culture is a blind faith in the power and virtue of the corporate collective. All quotas can be met. All things are possible. Profits can always be raised. It is only a question of the right attitude. The highest form of personal happiness, we are told, is when the corporation thrives. Corporate retreats are built around this idea of merging the self with the corporate collective. They often have the feel of a religious revival. They are designed to whip up emotions. Office managers and sales staffs are given inspirational talks by sports stars, retired military commanders, billionaires and self-help specialists like Tony Robbins who tell them, in essence, the impossible is always possible. And when this proves not to be true it is we who are the problem. We simply have to try harder.

The belief that by thinking about things, by visualizing them, by wanting them, we can make them happen is magical thinking. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporation can never be questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. We can always make more money, meet new quotas and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking is largely responsible for our economic collapse since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as "negative." This childish belief discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. And it has perverted the way we think about the nation and ourselves...

Now go read the rest at Schools Matter.

The End Is Near For Public Education

I am afraid we are witnessing the privatization of public schools. I thought for sure, when I voted for Obama, this kind of thing would not happen, but instead we would address poverty, the only correlate of student achievement. But, as Schools Matter keeps pointing out, Obama's Duncan would rather toss up bricks.

Philanthrocapitalists Speak, Duncan Listens

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently announced his hope to see 5,000 schools turned around during the next five years. Increases in federal spending directly tied to school restructuring (firing entire staff; closing the school; turning the school over to charter operators; or new curriculum materials) will drive this intended reform. Duncan's plan for school turnarounds should not be a surprise given his tenure in Chicago, the current DOE's connections to various philanthrocapitalists, and the political climate in Washington.

Take, for example, this recent document put out by the Coalition for Student Achievement, a group funded by (among others): Business Roundtable, Center for American Progress, Democrats for Education Reform, NewSchools Venture Fund, Stupski Foundation, Gates Foundation, Business Coalition for Education Excellence, Commission on No Child Left Behind, Broad Foundation, Fordham Institute, and Center on Reinventing Public Education. The reform agenda pushed in "Smart Options: Investing the Recovery Funds in Student Success," was constructed during an early 2009 meeting in Washington, D.C (p. 2). Many notable education entrepreneurs, philanthropic foundations, think tanks representatives, and a number of the most noteworthy education reformers attended the meeting: TFA representatives, NewSchools Venture Fund CEO and California State Board of Education President Ted Mitchell, NewSchools Venture Fund partner Jonathan Schorr, Green Dot CEO Steve Barr, and New Teacher Project CEO Timothy Daly; four Gates Foundation representatives, two Broad representatives (although Andrew J. Rotherham is not listed as representing the Broad Foundation even though he serves on their board); Thomas B. Fordham's Chester Finn, and Education Sector's Chad Alderman and Rotherham; Michelle Rhee, NYC Chancellor Joel Klein and the NYC COO, and the Louisiana Superintendent Paul Pastorek. And don't forget to throw in two McKinsey & Co. representatives for a touch of global management flavor. Their cumulative thoughts were summarized in "Smart Options" and proposed as a blueprint for education reform.

There's more at the link.

It's A Basketcabal

The Perimeter Primate lays it out, as usual. Go to her blog for the remaining links (I didn't copy them all...).

Linda Darling-Hammond Didn’t Play Basketball

The latest to come out is an article in The New Yorker about Green Dot Public Schools and its founder and chairman, Steve Barr. The piece was written by Douglas McGray of the New America Foundation, a D.C. based policy institute which includes education reform as one of its key issues. Green Dot was founded in 1999. In 2006, billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad gave Green Dot $10.5 million to open up 20 more schools. It currently operates 18 high schools, mostly in L.A.

Years ago, Barr became friends with Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix. Hastings funded Green Dot’s launch. Hastings also helped to start the New Schools Venture Fund, an organization which additionally received $22 million from the Gates Foundation in 2003 to “create systems of charter schools through nonprofit charter management organizations.”

Hastings and Don Shalvey are the co-authors of the California Charter School Initiative introduced to the legislature by Assemblyman Ted Lempert and signed into law in 1998. This repealed the 100-school limit of California’s 1992 charter school legislation. With the cap raised for the number of charter schools in California, Hastings and Shalvey then co-founded Aspire Public Schools and started engaging in even more pro-charter activities.

Steve Barr calls Shalvey one of his “Most Influential People,” along with former California Governor Pat Brown. Incidentally, Barr named one of his dogs “Jerry Brown.” Other connections are that Broad and Hastings donated generously to State Superintendent Jack O’Connell’s campaign, and that Jerry Brown set up two charter schools in Oakland early during his tenure as mayor, Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute. He continues to aggressively advocate for these two schools and keeps them pumped up with extras. I’ve heard enough at Brown's public appearances to know that he despises the form of Oakland's traditional public schools.

According to the McGray article, this past March,

… Barr got a call from the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. He [Barr] flew to Washington, D.C., at the end of March, for what he expected to be a social visit. At the meeting, Duncan revealed that he was interested in committing several billion dollars of the education stimulus package to a Locke-style takeover and transformation of the lowest-performing one per cent of schools across the country, at least four thousand of them, in the next several years. The Department of Education would favor districts that agreed to partner with an outside group, like Green Dot. "You seem to have cracked the code," Duncan told Barr.

And according to the New Yorker’s abstract

This month, Barr expects to meet with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (A.F.T.), and her staff and outline plans for a Green Dot America, a national school-turnaround partnership between Green Dot and the A.F.T. Their first city would most likely be Washington, D.C.

But now let’s turn to basketball.

Luckily for him, Steve Barr played basketball in high school and playing hoops is still one of his main hobbies. He’s read The Last Season, a book by Laker Coach Phil Jackson, at least twice. Barr says, "Basketball is the perfect metaphor for anything.” This history and outlook sets him up nicely for being accepted by Arne Duncan and President Obama.

Secretary of Education, Call-Me-Arne,” Duncan (see photo caption) is a former private-school attending Chicago native who graduated from Harvard in 1987 with a B.A. in Sociology. He was on the college’s basketball team, and after graduating, played professional basketball in Australia for four years.

After his oversees basketball adventure, Duncan returned to Chicago and was immediately given a job by John Rogers, a longtime friend and former Hyde Park basketball buddy who had also attended the Chicago Lab School. At that point, Rogers had become the CEO of the largest US minority-run mutual fund firm, Ariel Capital Management. Rogers is the son of the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School who then became a prominent Republican lawyer. It was she who nominated Richard Nixon.

So in 1991, Rogers placed Duncan in charge of running the Ariel Education Initiative, a non-profit set up by Rogers' firm to advance "...educational opportunities in economically disadvantaged areas.” It seemed like a good fit for Duncan, after all, he had tutored a lot at his mother’s inner-city after school program when he was a kid, he had an unused bachelor's degree in sociology, and he was Rogers' friend and a basketball player.

The rest is history. In 1998, after running Rogers’ local non-profit for several years, Duncan went to work for Chicago Public Schools, becoming Deputy Chief of Staff for former CEO Paul Vallas. In 2001, he was appointed CEO of Chicago Public Schools by Mayor Daley. At the press conference when Obama announced his appointment of Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education, Rogers was right there to praise him. Duncan was sure to thank Rogers, his "mentor" and close friend of 35 years.

Basketball happens to be a HUGE part of Rogers’ life. For years he has played in three-on-three tournaments basketball where Arne Duncan has been a regular member of his team. Rogers also recently attended a Michael Jordan basketball fantasy camp where his playing caused quite a stir; he is interviewed here. By the way, an upcoming three day camp in Las Vegas with Jordan is priced at $17,500.

Another of Rogers' regular basketball teammates for many years is Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother. Both men attended Princeton and played on the school's basketball team. After graduating from college, Robinson became a wealthy businessman but gave up that work in 1999 to become a college basketball coach.

Knowing Rogers via her brother, Michelle introduced Obama to him when she started dating Obama seriously, around 1990. This would have been about the time Arne Duncan returned to Chicago and was starting to work for Rogers' non-profit, as well as playing basketball with him again. Connections made on the court, rather than on the green.

So now the relationship between Rogers, Robinson, Duncan, and Obama is explained. By the way, Rogers' ex-wife, Desirée Glapion Rogers, is the new White House social secretary. Read more about Obama's basketball life here.

This is a world where basketball means a lot, and where it is believed that important qualifications for a person are borne out on the courts. From The Audacity of Hoops:

But before matters between Barack and Michelle could advance too far, she had a test to administer. Having grown up listening to her father and her brother, a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton, insist that a man’s character gets laid bare on the court, she hatched a plan. Craig Robinson rounded up a quorum of friends of varied abilities. “I didn’t want the game to be too intimidating,” he says, because it would’ve been painful to tell Michelle the prospect with the odd name hadn’t made the grade. He needn’t have worried. Obama found that sweet spot between not shooting every time and not always passing to Craig. In campaign appearances Robinson would retell the story with a kicker: “If I could trust him with my sister, you can trust him with your vote.”

It's a cute story, but after figuring things out, it's a little scary to think that this type of thinking may have been a factor in why Arne Duncan was ultimately selected.
So let's not be surprised to imagine that Barr has also passed some sort of basketball-character test. I'd bet 20 bucks that, as of late, he's been heading for the courts to get himself back into shape a bit more.

Then Get Off Your Ass And Do Something About It!

Jim Horn pulls no punches. Here he gently responds to a parent who is concerned (rightly) about her child's KIPP-like school experience.

Dear Anonymous Parents

I received this letter from a parent who wishes to remain anonymous. Below [it] is my response.


On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 9:33 PM, __________ wrote:

Dr. Horn,
Have you seen the study commissioned by our school CEO? Try here. Some of our existing school inventory is being "given" to charter school operators (not clear on the terms, if they rent,etc.) Our newspaper, what's left of it (Baltimore Sun) doesn't seem to care, and the edu-blogger at The Sun is clearly biased toward charters (like Jay Matthews). I enrolled my son at one of the most prominent charters in town (run by a team of hucksters, in my opinion) and rue the day I did. I am opposed now on philosophical grounds, but there doesn't seem to be much organized opposition to the "charter school movement" as they call themselves.

I also recently saw C-Span's Book TV panel featuring the Jay Matthew's book about KIPP with the KIPP CEO in which they constantly talked about how many schools they had and that they were basically unstoppable. I saw your review of that book and am encouraged a few people must be seeing things clearly.

My family's experience with a charter (a KIPP wannabee) was more in line with your interpretation. My son was enrolled at that charter for two years. The CEO wrote letters to the parents asking them to be "faithful". We were lied to, manipulated, even pressured to write supportive letters about the school to get their contract renewed (I declined). These people are professional school jockeys, intent on taking over the Baltimore City Public Schools (I heard the CEO of the charter say just that) How do citizens stand up to that kind of onslaught, especially in a city like Baltimore?

Please don't publish my name on your blog, this is a small town, I have school-age kids and the shadow of the charters is growing! I do have the sense that much of what they do is smoke and mirrors, but I've seen families pushed out of them (I guess mine was...) and it was very upsetting. Maybe that's part of the problem - the people who care have kids that could be hurt by the chaos caused by charters, and people who don't have kids don't have an opinion.

thanks
anonymous
__________________

Dear Anonymous Parent,

Thank you for your letter and sharing of the charter news from Baltimore. You are right, of course, that public education is under attack from an anti-democratic band of corporate welfare capitalists comprised of big spending vulture philanthropists and testing corporations, the professional parasites running the social capital investment funds and foundations, corrupt politicians looking to build their own political capital, and, finally, parents like you whose unfortunate cowardice makes you complicit and victim at the same time. Most of all, you are victim of your own excuses about trying to protect your children as a legitimate reason for not getting involved in the battle to make your child's education better.

When I hear the fear expressed in letters like yours, I always think back to the black parents in the the 1950s and 1960s who wanted to protect their children, too. They wanted to protect them from a second-rate education, second-class citizenship, third-rate jobs, and first-rate patronizing bigotry. In order to protect those children's futures, however, they had to make the conscious choice to send them through the throngs of ugly, screaming white racists carry clubs and guns, only to be turned away from white schoolhouse doors.

In case you've forgotten or have never been taught (history has never been on the Test), President Eisenhower called out the 101st Airborne Division in defiance of Gov. Faubus of Arkansas, who had activated the National Guard to make sure the black children of Little Rock would not be allowed to go to school with whites. Still, parents sent their children, tip-toeing through broken glass and absorbing the insults of wild-eyed haters. And for the first year after integration of Little Rock High, the black children who had the courage and whose parents had the courage to demand better, absorbed the hatred of peers as individual children had their own individual 101st Airborne guard to go with them to classes. These were parents interested in their own children's futures, and the children of the generations to come.

So please don't tell me about your fear for your child. You are simply caught up in the pandemic of cowardice that has made sheeple of the American electorate, sheeple who refuse to stand out from the crowd or to move off the path of least resistance. And in supporting the pillaging of public schools by the corporate goons, you have turned your back on those who made the sacrifice 40 and 50 years ago, just as you have turned your back on your own children's future that you would, otherwise, protect.

Get off your ass and get involved if you really care about your children. When parents (voters) like you band together and demand something better than the cheap, segregated charter chain gangs and KIPP knockoffs, the conversation in Washington and in Baltimore will change very quickly. But not until then.

You and other parents have the power to change schools. Your children are their only customers.

Sincerely,
Jim Horn

KIPP Apartheid: The Fresno Lesson

Jim Horn is on a KIPP inspired rampage. Here is my favorite part of his most recent takedown:

Now defenders of KIPP say, well, these kids are so far behind that this is what it takes to bring them up to speed. And, of course, the effects of poverty, which are the reasons that these children are so far behind, remains the elephant in the room that we refuse to acknowledge, allowing us, rather, to fixate on fixing the children rather than fixing the problem of poverty, which Bill Gates or the Fishers or the Dells are not interested in fixing as long as they are allowed to assuage their liberal white guilt by subjecting children to behavioral regimens that they would not impose upon their dogs-- and all in the name of helping the children.

Read the whole thing here or after the jump....

Interview: The KULT of KIPP and the Abuses in Fresno
Question -- What are your main objections to KIPP, and what brought you to those conclusions?

Answer -- Let me count the ways I object to KIPP. Some of my objections are related specifically to KIPP, and others become exacerbated by the organization and "principles" of KIPP when combined with their charter status.

Take some of the KIPP violations, for instance, in the Fresno Report (pdf). In a regular public school, you would not find principals sending children home in cabs or making capricious and arbitrary decisions to expel or suspend students, or using the kind of lax system for test security. The system of regular public school oversight just does not allow for these things to happen on a continuing basis as they did in the Fresno KIPP instance. Nor would you have a toothless and ignorant "Board" such as you had at KIPP that would would allow the abuse against children to continue for years without acting to stop it. Without oversight and accountability for policies and behavior, these KIPP principals in their self-imposed (and KIPP home office imposed) pressure cookers to raise test scores easily lapse into behaviors that resemble prison wardens and cult leaders more than school principals.

So governance is a huge issue that will only be improved by public oversight of the kind that is provided public schools. Just look at our economy as the most recent reminder of what happens with a world of CEOs gone wild. Is that the kind of power run amok that we want for our most precious assets, our children for god's sake.

The bigger issue, however, has to do with the KIPP program, the people it is supposed to serve, and the way it does that. First thing you will notice about KIPP is that there is no leafy suburban school that would even contemplate this kind of "educational" intervention for white middle class children. 10 hour days, 2 hours of homework, and school on Saturday, an extra month in the summer, labeling of children as "miscreants" for minor infractions of the rules, the viewing of recess as an unwelcome intrusion. No way, it just would not be accepted.

Now defenders of KIPP say, well, these kids are so far behind that this is what it takes to bring them up to speed. And, of course, the effects of poverty, which are the reasons that these children are so far behind, remains the elephant in the room that we refuse to acknowledge, allowing us, rather, to fixate on fixing the children rather than fixing the problem of poverty, which Bill Gates or the Fishers or the Dells are not interested in fixing as long as they are allowed to assuage their liberal white guilt by subjecting children to behavioral regimens that they would not impose upon their dogs-- and all in the name of helping the children.

And as long as the focus remains on fixing the insides of children's heads while ignoring the conditions these kids must return to after their 10 hour days of working hard and being nice in their apartheid schools, all sorts of indoctrination and extraordinary educational renditions become necessary to achieve KIPP goals. As a media person, you should ask David Levin what his connection and fascination is with Martin Seligman--the Seligman of positive pscyhology fame, who we find out recently has inspired CIA interrogators, who use his methods of "learned helplessness" to control terrorists.

KIPP, at its unacknowledged core, remains an intervention aimed at cognitive and behavioral control that occurs when we use whatever means to turn poor minority children into the white Ivy League teachers' version of middle class children. In the meantime, children are taught to grow up and escape their communities, rather than to change them by challenging the system of privilege that now proclaims their liberation through a renewed form of segregated confinement--which is KIPP. Any system that demands of children that they give up their childhood as a condition for success, which KIPP does, should not be entertained as a viable education intervention. KIPP is social and education reform on the cheap, where economy is more important than the children who are sacrificed through the unethical excesss that we turn our backs to.

There are humane ways to run schools and increase academic achievement at the same time. KIPP is not one of them. In fact, it represents the antithesis of responsible caring, and thus offers us an institutionalized version of social justice in blackface.

What brought me to these conclusions? Most of it has to do with my own experience as a researcher in an urban elementary school in Louisiana at the outset of high-stakes testing in 2000. What happened there, very ugly, is recounted in this article (pdf). And now I see a steroidal version of that with a corporate twist at KIPP. To me it is as if the nation has lost its collective mind on educating the most vulnerable of our children, all because we refuse to acknowledge the malignant poverty and segregation that no school or school system can change by itself and that we as a society continue to ignore. The KIPP/TFA phenomenon represents a corporate colonization of urban America, with all the zeal that we might expect from missionaries looking to collect human capital that has been rendered of its soul.

Some KIPP Truth

h/t Jim Horn

Update: More here.

KIPP Teachers: We'll Unionize, Thanks.

What Are They So Afraid Of?"

To read the tabloid press and the right wing edu-blogosphere these days, one would think that the decision of the KIPP AMP teachers to organize with the UFT was something akin to the four horsemen of the Apocalypse riding into town.
Anti-unionist image of teachers organizing

What is extraordinary is the violent tone and tenor of much of this commentary, and the violence done to the most simple and straightforward of facts.

The Fordham Foundation’s Flypaper blog announced that the teachers at KIPP AMP had decided NOT to organize, in the latest iteration of its well-established practice of mangling story after story about teacher unions beyond recognition. This was followed by the usual mealy-mouthed update announcing that the truth was, well, the opposite of what it had just reported. For good measure, Fordham blogger Palmieri expressed her outrage over the fact that under New York State public employee labor law, employees have an unambiguous right to organize with a union — regardless of whether their employer approves of their choice. And she helpfully provides a link to the anti-teacher union organizing manual of the Atlantic Legal Foundation, the not for profit arm of the law firm Jackson, Lewis, the most notorious anti-union law firm in the US.

At the blog of Jay Greene and the United Cherry Pickers, Matthew Ladner suggests that what Rome is reputed to have done to Carthage is the right approach for an unionized charter school: “KIPP should pull the plug on these schools at the end of the school year, burn down the buildings and plow salt into the ground upon which they once stood.” Does the resort to ancient campaigns of annihilation and extermination sound a bit extreme? Might observers reasonably conclude that this sturm and drang is about nothing but a desire to eliminate unions? For Ladner, Vice President of the Goldwater Institute, extremism in the pursuit of anti-unionism is no vice, and facts are no obstacle on that road. He simply invents out of whole cloth a set of extreme fictions — imaginary KIPP AMP teachers set on destroying the educational program of the school and mythical 1000 page contracts — to justify his position.

Not to be outdone by its right-wing bethren in the edu-blogosphere, the New York Post weighs in with an editorial denouncing the KIPP AMP organizing.

What is it about teacher voice that so frightens the denizens of the far right, that even the prospect of democratic teacher input into decision-making in the educational workplace should be met with such rhetorical ferocity?

TFA And KIPP: $$$$$

A great piece by Jim Horn:

TFA and KIPP: Ivy League Temps and Corporate Missionaries Part I

In just a few years, TFA has established itself as one of the smart-people-who-just-graduated-with-liberal-arts-degrees-and-now-have-no-idea-what-they-want-to-do-with-their-lives-but-are-pretty-sure-it-isn’t-remain-in-the-spin-cycle-of-academia-or-move-on-to-the-next-preset-hierarchy-in-the-finance-world demographic. Used to be those poor souls could only go to law school or move to New York and “go into, like, publishing or something.” But TFA positioned itself in such a way that it gets the lost souls who have an impulse to do something to help the world immediately upon graduating.

It’s like the Peace Corps. But, you know, creepier.
-–David Chernicoff, Yale Daily News, 10-27-06

In 1990 Teach for America, the wildly profitable non-profit that skeptics often refer to as Teach For Awhile, received an initial grant from Exxon Mobil and, thus, began an organization whose avowed mission remains to place as many Ivy League would-be teacher recruits in poor public schools as possible. This year TFA has an operating budget in excess of $100 million, net assets of over $120 million, and a work force of over 6,000 bright, energetic, and, yes, clueless recruits engaged in on-the-job training in some of America’s most desperately-poor, low-achieving schools, where children, by the way, need most of all (beyond the need to end their poverty) the most highly qualified, experienced teachers with deep knowledge of the subjects they teach and knowledge of how to teach those subjects.

Despite what the grim reality calls out for, TFA, in contrast, places teacher trainees with zero years teaching experience and without qualifications from any accredited training program in schools with the least resources and the greatest need. Beyond a five-week pre-service basic training course and four visits during the first year, TFA leaves their primarily white, middle-class recruits (1 in 10 is African-American) to their own devices in providing poor, minority students with what these recruits quickly find out they do not have. And with the TFA public relations machine that is able to instigate media wars and think tank assaults against legitimate research that shows the advantages of certificated teachers when compared to TFA and other uncertified recruits, there is little to stand in the way of the new definition of teaching as, not a calling or even a profession, but as a job that the service oriented do for a few years before moving on. Sort of like the TFA model.

But nothing about this grandiose do-gooderism exercised at the expense of poor children in poor schools seems to matter to the growing network of individual, foundation, and corporate donors eager to write checks in support of this growing mission. TFA now includes groupings of contributors for the 5 and 10 million dollar categories. The Dells, the Fishers, and Eli Broad are listed among several others in the $10 million “Expansion Fund” list.

Nor does there seem to be any moral reservation or element of doubt expressed by these idealistic recent grads who would seem equally eager to sign up. Last May TFA announced that the new class of 3,700 recruits was drawn from a pool of 24,718 applicants. The air of exclusivity comes at a price, however, for despite the impression that top-performing Ivy Leaguers are beating a path to the recruitment office, TFA spent $2 million more in 2007 on recruiting and selection ($18.5 million) than it did on candidate training ($16.5 million). But then, Madison Avenue never came cheap.

And yet for all the sunny assuaging of white middle class guilt and the successful beefing up of law school resumes skimpy on service that TFA has enabled for its thousands of past and present recruits and donors, there are some dark elements of TFA that are incubated and grown by this movement.

First and foremost, TFA leaves unchallenged the urban reality of schools that are largely or entirely segregated by income and race, preferring instead to focus on interventions that do not challenge the poverty that is the root of test score gaps to begin with. Not unlike the vast majority of education reforms of the past century that have been divorced from social forces that are at work in perpetuating poverty, TFA focuses narrowly on changing instruction and on altering the organization and content of the child’s mind as the ready remedy for poor schools. In so doing, TFA barricades itself from the root cause of weak test scores, which is poverty, while necessitating, it would seem, a draconian kind of pedagogical treatment that we might expect of 19th Century missionaries in a heathen land. Ira Socol, in fact, refers to TFA as a colonial missionary project.

The most highly publicized of the prescriptive regimens for changing the poor, rather than changing poverty, has been developed, in fact, by two celebrated TFA alums, Mike Feinberg and David Levin, the founders of the KIPP Schools (Knowledge Is Power Program). Based on highly-scripted lessons, iron-fisted discipline, memorization, recitation and drill techniques, longer school days, longer school weeks that include Saturdays, and longer school years, this type of teaching is suited, if for anyone, for the young, energetic, single, and temporary social missionaries of TFA. As John Derbyshire noted,

I am sure there are some people who enter the teaching profession with the desire to crunch their way daily across the crack-vial-littered streets of crime-wrecked inner-city neighborhoods in order to put in 15-hour working days, but I doubt there are many such.

KIPP and TFA have formed, then, a marriage that is mutually supportive and sustaining, and both organizations are now fed by the same deep institutional revenue streams that flow toward social manipulation, privatization of public spaces, and limitless tax credits. Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of TFA, is married, you see, to KIPP’s CEO, Richard Barth.