Harmful fads 1A: Edison and KIPP
A reporter contacted me wanting information Edison Schools and KIPP. Edison is the formerly high-profile, for-profit school management company that has lapsed into obscurity. KIPP, a nonprofit, is still being hailed as the "it's a miracle!" fad of the day.
The reporter was starting from square one and needed the basics on both Edison and KIPP. I thought I'd post the information here too, for the benefit of anyone interested.
I co-founded a website and research-and-information project in 2001, initially to address Edison issues. The material from our Edison page gives a pretty complete summary.
And here's some material on KIPP (the Knowledge is Power Program), which is based in San Francisco but gets little attention as a local enterprise. It's easy to get the basics from Google, but you have to wade through the media gushing.
KIPP is not overtly run by the right-wing forces who are really behind the charter school movement, but it has some connections with them. Its CEO, Richard Barth, used to be a high-level Edison exec. Here's an enthusiastic piece on KIPP from Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews, a committed, hardworking and excessively gullible journalist.
And below is some information on KIPP from a book called "The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement" by four wonks (Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel and Rothstein), Economic Policy Institute/Teachers' College Press, 2005. I'm summarizing the findings in my own words except for the parts indicated as quotes.
KIPP runs middle schools, grades 5-8, aimed at improving achievement for disadvantaged students of color. I believe the reports that KIPP schools generally perform well. Skeptics claim that's largely because it skims the creme du disadvantaged students, leaving the losers in public schools, to which it then proclaims itself superior. KIPP, like all of the charter movement, claims that's not true and that it teaches "the disadvantaged of the disadvantaged." KIPP, and the charter movement, have the massive PR firepower of the right-wing think tanks behind them, so the press largely eats up those claims.
The researchers who wrote "Dust-Up" emphatically conclude (based on lots of wonkish research) that KIPP does indeed skim the top performers, albeit probably not intentionally.
KIPP vigorously disputes this (despite the fact that it's obvious on its face, because unmotivated and messed-up families can't or won't make the commitment). The fact that KIPP continues to make the dishonest claim that it teaches "the disadvantaged of the disadvantaged" casts a lot of doubt on its integrity, which seems like a big red flag.
What about the outcomes for those kids who do enter KIPP schools? I think they can indeed benefit from being in an atmosphere without the more-troubled and -challenged students. My own kids are in honors classes in public middle and high school and benefit from the same effect. Families with kids in private school see the same effect. However — KIPP is clearly not the solution to the challenges facing public education if it meets them by not teaching the kids who pose the most serious challenges. A traditional public school would have the same effect if it cherry-picked the higher achievers with the more-motivated parents. And then KIPP denies reality, and this is all used to bash public education, so it's a harmful force overall.
KIPP benefits a select, narrow, specific group of students — low-income students of color, but those who are predisposed to achieve and come from motivated, supportive, education-focused families — while being used as a weapon against traditional public schools. That's not a solution to the challenges facing public education. It's just an additional challenge.
— Caroline
The reporter was starting from square one and needed the basics on both Edison and KIPP. I thought I'd post the information here too, for the benefit of anyone interested.
I co-founded a website and research-and-information project in 2001, initially to address Edison issues. The material from our Edison page gives a pretty complete summary.
Controversial, for-profit Edison Schools, once hailed as the salvation of public education, has fallen from glory as what seemed like visionary ideas turned out to be just a sales pitch. In its heyday, Edison claimed that it could run public schools for less money than school districts could. The company dropped that claim as dismayed clients complained about its extra costs.
Edison's boasts that it could improve student achievement while making a profit fell just as flat.
Edison's student achievement has been mixed at best, and its claims about academic improvement never held up to scrutiny. A July 2002 New York Times analysis of Edison's claims found that the troubled Cleveland, Ohio, school system achieved higher gains than Edison's schools when analyzed with the methodology Edison applied to its own schools' achievement.
The notion of making a profit collapsed too. Edison Schools lost millions of dollars every year, showing a profit in just one quarter of the 10 years it made its finances public.
Edison's stock was publicly traded on the NASDAQ for four years. After reaching a high of close to $40 per share in early 2001, the share value tumbled to a low of 14 cents. In November 2003, the company was taken private in a buyout which paid only $1.75 per share. It was shortly after the buyout that Edison posted its lone profitable quarter, and then immediately ceased providing any public disclosure of its finances. The company has never indicated that it was able to maintain profitability for more than the one quarter.
After losing many contracts — along with its media luster — Edison quietly began moving away from its original mission of "revolutionizing" public education, and into marketing conventional supplemental services such as testing, summer school and tutoring. Almost all of its new business involves providing such services rather than trying to manage schools.
Edison attracted ideological support from backers of privatization and school vouchers, and from such powerful conservative bastions as the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Hoover Institution. But its name is no longer mentioned when "school reform" supporters talk about solutions for public education.
And here's some material on KIPP (the Knowledge is Power Program), which is based in San Francisco but gets little attention as a local enterprise. It's easy to get the basics from Google, but you have to wade through the media gushing.
KIPP is not overtly run by the right-wing forces who are really behind the charter school movement, but it has some connections with them. Its CEO, Richard Barth, used to be a high-level Edison exec. Here's an enthusiastic piece on KIPP from Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews, a committed, hardworking and excessively gullible journalist.
And below is some information on KIPP from a book called "The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement" by four wonks (Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel and Rothstein), Economic Policy Institute/Teachers' College Press, 2005. I'm summarizing the findings in my own words except for the parts indicated as quotes.
KIPP runs middle schools, grades 5-8, aimed at improving achievement for disadvantaged students of color. I believe the reports that KIPP schools generally perform well. Skeptics claim that's largely because it skims the creme du disadvantaged students, leaving the losers in public schools, to which it then proclaims itself superior. KIPP, like all of the charter movement, claims that's not true and that it teaches "the disadvantaged of the disadvantaged." KIPP, and the charter movement, have the massive PR firepower of the right-wing think tanks behind them, so the press largely eats up those claims.
The researchers who wrote "Dust-Up" emphatically conclude (based on lots of wonkish research) that KIPP does indeed skim the top performers, albeit probably not intentionally.
KIPP students, as a group, enter KIPP with substantially higher achievement than the typical achievement of schools from which they came.As middle schools — though they begin at 5th rather than 6th grade — KIPP gets students incoming from elementary schools, generally referred by their teachers. Again, KIPP insists that it gets the lowest performers, kids whose teachers sent them because they were so desperately in need of help. But "Dust-Up" forcefully debunks that and demonstrates that the opposite is true: Actually, teachers largely refer their top performers to KIPP. The "Dust-Up" authors interviewed teachers in schools around the nation that feed kids into KIPP schools.
[T]eachers told us either that they referred students who were more able than their peers, or that the most motivated and educationally sophisticated parents were those likely to take the initiative to pull children out of the public school and enroll in KIPP at the end of fourth grade. A clear pattern to emerge from these interviews was that almost always it was students with unsually supportive parents or intact families who were referred to KIPP and completed the enrollment process.KIPP requires a significant commitment of time and effort by the parents/guardians, which clearly screens out kids from less motivated families.
KIPP vigorously disputes this (despite the fact that it's obvious on its face, because unmotivated and messed-up families can't or won't make the commitment). The fact that KIPP continues to make the dishonest claim that it teaches "the disadvantaged of the disadvantaged" casts a lot of doubt on its integrity, which seems like a big red flag.
What about the outcomes for those kids who do enter KIPP schools? I think they can indeed benefit from being in an atmosphere without the more-troubled and -challenged students. My own kids are in honors classes in public middle and high school and benefit from the same effect. Families with kids in private school see the same effect. However — KIPP is clearly not the solution to the challenges facing public education if it meets them by not teaching the kids who pose the most serious challenges. A traditional public school would have the same effect if it cherry-picked the higher achievers with the more-motivated parents. And then KIPP denies reality, and this is all used to bash public education, so it's a harmful force overall.
KIPP benefits a select, narrow, specific group of students — low-income students of color, but those who are predisposed to achieve and come from motivated, supportive, education-focused families — while being used as a weapon against traditional public schools. That's not a solution to the challenges facing public education. It's just an additional challenge.
— Caroline
Labels: Charters
1 Comments:
Teaching at a KIPP school for several years, I can honestly say that everything you said is true. The KIPP kids are not necessarily the smartest kids in the area, but for sure they are extremely dedicated and focused. The KIPP system self screens itself.
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