A response from KIPP, and related observations
I sent a list of questions to KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini, and he e-mailed me that he has posted the answers on KIPP's website. KIPP, the Knowledge is Power Program, is a nationwide chain of charter schools touted as a miracle solution for low-income students. KIPP is nominally based in San Francisco, reportedly to be close to major funder Don Fisher. Aside from the Fisher funding, it also gets lots more money from the usual billionaire education-reform benefactors.
KIPP schools require students and parents to sign agreements to comply with many rules. They require extra-long hours and extra days in school, including Saturdays. They teach students a set of anti-"ghetto" mannerisms and use a decibel meter in class to keep things calm. They rely on strict discipline systems based on shunning miscreants, plus a reward system paying "KIPP dollars" to spend at a "KIPP store."
The questions and answers about KIPP are more than most people want to know, but click to read them if you're curious. Steve Mancini has invited me to meet with him, which I will try to do soon.
I've been researching KIPP, as a hobby, ever since a happy KIPP parent posted proudly on the sfschools listserve a couple years ago that his daughter had "tested into" KIPP S.F. Bay Academy. Students are not supposed to have to "test into" KIPP schools.
In another incident that piqued my interest, the mother of a child with autism decided that KIPP, with its firmly structured program, was an ideal setting for her son. She applied to KIPP Bayview and was troubled that her son was given what she understood to be the entrance test in a busy setting with lots of distractions — a particular problem for an child with autism. She tells me that she complained to an administrator and was ordered off the property.
What's with the apparent entrance tests? Well, when KIPP schools (which are almost all grade 5-8 middle schools) get applicants who have completed 5th or 6th grade at other schools — who intend to apply for grades 6 or 7 — they're tested to determine their academic grade level before KIPP accepts them. Then apparently they may find out that they're in 5th grade again even though they thought they were in 6th (or 6th rather than 7th) if they want to start the KIPP school. (KIPP doesn't accept incoming 8th-graders.)
Here are some observations about KIPP schools.
1. KIPP targets low-income students of color. Its application process and program inherently self-selects for high-functioning, motivated, compliant students from high-functioning, motivated compliant families. A child from a family that's deeply entrenched in the oppositional, alienated street culture described by sociologist Elijah Anderson in "Code of the Streets" is extremely unlikely to apply to a KIPP school, or to comply with its requirements in the unlikely event that he/she does apply and get in. KIPP and schools like it attract the "decent" families (Anderson's term) — the higher-functioning families seeking a better life for their children, trying to get them away from the street culture.
If the traditional public school down the street also implemented admissions procedures and other processes that self-screened for such families, and if that schools were not automatically assigned students, would that school succeed as well as the KIPP school? We have no way of knowing.
Of course it's a good thing that KIPP schools are elevating disadvantaged students to a high academic level. My concern is the widespread belief and publicity promoting them as doing something they're not — taking the full spectrum of disadvantaged students and elevating them to that high level. That misleading portrayal is then used to compare KIPP schools unfairly to traditional public school down the street — the one that actually is accepting the full spectrum of disadvantaged students. That causes the traditional public school to lose approval and support, harming the children in that school.
2. Beyond the processes and systems that self-select for motivated families and students, which aspects of KIPP contribute most to the successes? Can different aspects of the KIPP culture be disaggregated and studied? How would these students perform without the substantial private funding KIPP gets? It appears that KIPP schools require students to repeat a grade at a higher rate than the traditional public school down the street. How much higher a rate? How does that impact the success of KIPP students? Does requiring a student to repeat a grade work more effectively with those higher-functioning, motivated, compliant students than with a disengaged, resistant, oppositional student? That's the kind of thing we don't know. It would be valuable to have that information, so that all schools could implement the best practices. It appears that because this aspect of KIPP is not illuminated or discussed, it's also not being studied. It's not even clear if it's on the radar of the various entities that study KIPP schools. (There's also the fact that being required to repeat a grade is likely to discourage less-compliant students and families from enrolling in or remaining at KIPP schools.)
3. I have already blogged about the high (in some cases astounding) attrition rate at some KIPP schools. When I researched it, six of California's then-nine KIPP schools showed high attrition overall, and very, very high attrition of the most academically challenged subgroup — either African-American or Latino boys, depending on the school. Why some KIPP schools and not others? Is this true at KIPP schools elsewhere (California's data is unusually accessible, or maybe it's just that I know how to find it)? Once again, if the students who are leaving KIPP schools are the least successful, how is that impacting the schools' success? If the traditional public school down the street had as many students leave — and, a key point, go unreplaced — what would the impact be?
4. Much of the publicity surrounding KIPP exaggerates and oversimplifies its successes. There's the pervasive implication that KIPP enrolls a full cross-section of disadvantaged inner-city kids — that those barely parented children of the street who disrupt class, roam the halls, get combative with teachers and intimidate other kids at some schools have been transformed into diligent, engaged, middle-class-behaving students at KIPP schools.
No. Those kids do not enroll at KIPP schools. Only someone fully out of touch, who has no contact with urban youth, would believe that myth — but a lot of commentators are that out of touch. KIPP enrolls the high-functioning, motivated and compliant among low-income students. Why does this matter? Because again, these claims are used to make KIPP schools look superior to the traditional public school down the street, causing that school to lose approval and support, hurting its students and all of public education.
I asked Steve Mancini about KIPP's claims about how many alumni have gone to college. Here's the way this is typically described, including on KIPP's website: KIPP runs 57 schools serving over 14,000 students. ... 80% of its graduates go on to college. Wow! KIPP has sent 11,200 students to college! But no, actually: KIPP schools are grades 5-8. The only KIPP students old enough to have reached college age attended KIPP schools that existed before 2003 — and KIPP ran only two schools at that time. Steve Mancini didn't give hard numbers, but they're not big schools. It may well be that 80% of those 14,000 current KIPP students will go on to college, after four years in high school, but at this point that implication is not accurate.
Same with the claim that "all KIPP schools have waiting lists," which is not true. Everyone pins the blame on New York Times writer Paul Tough, who made that claim without attribution or backup in a long article last year. Now it's repeated everywhere. Paul! Do-over on Journalism 1A!
5. KIPP depends on these exaggerated claims and on the positive press coverage it routinely gets to win the huge amount of private funding it attracts from the usual roster of billionaire benefactors. That also, in my opinion, leads KIPP to downplay issues such as its rate of requiring students to repeat a grade, and its schools' attrition. And this all makes it much more difficult to know what are the keys to KIPP's success and what can be emulated throughout our schools. But KIPP, being heavily dependent on that private funding, has no choice but to depend on the exaggerated claims and oversimplification, and to downplay the details and nuances that might actually illuminate how KIPP achieves its successes.
I'm not blasting KIPP schools overall. I'm saying that it's all but impossible to learn from them, to find out which parts of their program are best practices that can be emulated, because there's so much misleading publicity about them and so little illumination of the details. They could be beneficial for our entire public school system, but instead they're doing harm.
KIPP schools require students and parents to sign agreements to comply with many rules. They require extra-long hours and extra days in school, including Saturdays. They teach students a set of anti-"ghetto" mannerisms and use a decibel meter in class to keep things calm. They rely on strict discipline systems based on shunning miscreants, plus a reward system paying "KIPP dollars" to spend at a "KIPP store."
The questions and answers about KIPP are more than most people want to know, but click to read them if you're curious. Steve Mancini has invited me to meet with him, which I will try to do soon.
I've been researching KIPP, as a hobby, ever since a happy KIPP parent posted proudly on the sfschools listserve a couple years ago that his daughter had "tested into" KIPP S.F. Bay Academy. Students are not supposed to have to "test into" KIPP schools.
In another incident that piqued my interest, the mother of a child with autism decided that KIPP, with its firmly structured program, was an ideal setting for her son. She applied to KIPP Bayview and was troubled that her son was given what she understood to be the entrance test in a busy setting with lots of distractions — a particular problem for an child with autism. She tells me that she complained to an administrator and was ordered off the property.
What's with the apparent entrance tests? Well, when KIPP schools (which are almost all grade 5-8 middle schools) get applicants who have completed 5th or 6th grade at other schools — who intend to apply for grades 6 or 7 — they're tested to determine their academic grade level before KIPP accepts them. Then apparently they may find out that they're in 5th grade again even though they thought they were in 6th (or 6th rather than 7th) if they want to start the KIPP school. (KIPP doesn't accept incoming 8th-graders.)
Here are some observations about KIPP schools.
1. KIPP targets low-income students of color. Its application process and program inherently self-selects for high-functioning, motivated, compliant students from high-functioning, motivated compliant families. A child from a family that's deeply entrenched in the oppositional, alienated street culture described by sociologist Elijah Anderson in "Code of the Streets" is extremely unlikely to apply to a KIPP school, or to comply with its requirements in the unlikely event that he/she does apply and get in. KIPP and schools like it attract the "decent" families (Anderson's term) — the higher-functioning families seeking a better life for their children, trying to get them away from the street culture.
If the traditional public school down the street also implemented admissions procedures and other processes that self-screened for such families, and if that schools were not automatically assigned students, would that school succeed as well as the KIPP school? We have no way of knowing.
Of course it's a good thing that KIPP schools are elevating disadvantaged students to a high academic level. My concern is the widespread belief and publicity promoting them as doing something they're not — taking the full spectrum of disadvantaged students and elevating them to that high level. That misleading portrayal is then used to compare KIPP schools unfairly to traditional public school down the street — the one that actually is accepting the full spectrum of disadvantaged students. That causes the traditional public school to lose approval and support, harming the children in that school.
2. Beyond the processes and systems that self-select for motivated families and students, which aspects of KIPP contribute most to the successes? Can different aspects of the KIPP culture be disaggregated and studied? How would these students perform without the substantial private funding KIPP gets? It appears that KIPP schools require students to repeat a grade at a higher rate than the traditional public school down the street. How much higher a rate? How does that impact the success of KIPP students? Does requiring a student to repeat a grade work more effectively with those higher-functioning, motivated, compliant students than with a disengaged, resistant, oppositional student? That's the kind of thing we don't know. It would be valuable to have that information, so that all schools could implement the best practices. It appears that because this aspect of KIPP is not illuminated or discussed, it's also not being studied. It's not even clear if it's on the radar of the various entities that study KIPP schools. (There's also the fact that being required to repeat a grade is likely to discourage less-compliant students and families from enrolling in or remaining at KIPP schools.)
3. I have already blogged about the high (in some cases astounding) attrition rate at some KIPP schools. When I researched it, six of California's then-nine KIPP schools showed high attrition overall, and very, very high attrition of the most academically challenged subgroup — either African-American or Latino boys, depending on the school. Why some KIPP schools and not others? Is this true at KIPP schools elsewhere (California's data is unusually accessible, or maybe it's just that I know how to find it)? Once again, if the students who are leaving KIPP schools are the least successful, how is that impacting the schools' success? If the traditional public school down the street had as many students leave — and, a key point, go unreplaced — what would the impact be?
4. Much of the publicity surrounding KIPP exaggerates and oversimplifies its successes. There's the pervasive implication that KIPP enrolls a full cross-section of disadvantaged inner-city kids — that those barely parented children of the street who disrupt class, roam the halls, get combative with teachers and intimidate other kids at some schools have been transformed into diligent, engaged, middle-class-behaving students at KIPP schools.
No. Those kids do not enroll at KIPP schools. Only someone fully out of touch, who has no contact with urban youth, would believe that myth — but a lot of commentators are that out of touch. KIPP enrolls the high-functioning, motivated and compliant among low-income students. Why does this matter? Because again, these claims are used to make KIPP schools look superior to the traditional public school down the street, causing that school to lose approval and support, hurting its students and all of public education.
I asked Steve Mancini about KIPP's claims about how many alumni have gone to college. Here's the way this is typically described, including on KIPP's website: KIPP runs 57 schools serving over 14,000 students. ... 80% of its graduates go on to college. Wow! KIPP has sent 11,200 students to college! But no, actually: KIPP schools are grades 5-8. The only KIPP students old enough to have reached college age attended KIPP schools that existed before 2003 — and KIPP ran only two schools at that time. Steve Mancini didn't give hard numbers, but they're not big schools. It may well be that 80% of those 14,000 current KIPP students will go on to college, after four years in high school, but at this point that implication is not accurate.
Same with the claim that "all KIPP schools have waiting lists," which is not true. Everyone pins the blame on New York Times writer Paul Tough, who made that claim without attribution or backup in a long article last year. Now it's repeated everywhere. Paul! Do-over on Journalism 1A!
5. KIPP depends on these exaggerated claims and on the positive press coverage it routinely gets to win the huge amount of private funding it attracts from the usual roster of billionaire benefactors. That also, in my opinion, leads KIPP to downplay issues such as its rate of requiring students to repeat a grade, and its schools' attrition. And this all makes it much more difficult to know what are the keys to KIPP's success and what can be emulated throughout our schools. But KIPP, being heavily dependent on that private funding, has no choice but to depend on the exaggerated claims and oversimplification, and to downplay the details and nuances that might actually illuminate how KIPP achieves its successes.
I'm not blasting KIPP schools overall. I'm saying that it's all but impossible to learn from them, to find out which parts of their program are best practices that can be emulated, because there's so much misleading publicity about them and so little illumination of the details. They could be beneficial for our entire public school system, but instead they're doing harm.
Labels: Charters
1 Comments:
Well, unfortunately your points about KIPP are pretty far off the mark. I do, however, understand where the misperceptions come from, but as someone who has visited and researched a number of KIPP schools and other schools like them, I have some particular insights that may be of interest to you: http://socmethod.blogspot.com/2008/02/somebody-hates-kipp.html
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