Incoming Kindergarten Parents Aren't Going to Take it Anymore!

Parents of incoming SFUSD kindergarteners this year are experiencing unprecedented issues with the enrollment system. Not surprisingly, they're mad, and they're organizing. Below is the text of a petition that parents are circulating; click here to add your name (anyone can sign, not just parents of incoming kindergarteners).

Dear Superintendent Garcia, Darlene Lim, and members of the School Board,

We, the undersigned, are writing to express our hope that you will keep the spots you are offering to the displaced families from Flynn and Alvarado open to those of us who are listed in the waitpools for those schools, both in the August run and in the 10 day count.

We are pleased that you are making accommodations for the 23 families, spreading the impact over the district by increasing a few class sizes at the most popular schools to 21 kindergarteners. Since the District is prepared to expand the number of slots by two at select schools, we are requesting that --regardless of any movement during the 10 day count-- that you continue to keep those places available, and not reduce the open spots by two (to return the class size to 20) when attrition occurs during the 10-day count. In this way, the spots that you are generously offering to the displaced Flynn and Alvarado families now would not be ones that were simply being taken away from those of us who received nothing in Round I or Round II and are in the waitpools for those schools.

In addition, we would like to request that you keep the waitpools open for all schools until the end of the first semester of this year.

In your literature and publicity about the SFUSD assignment process, you say that it "promotes and supports family choice", and that 87% of families receive one of their Round I choices. The implication often heard during the application process about those families who did not get their choice, is usually that those families did not list 7 choices or that they only listed the "7 most popular" schools.

Many of us with soon-to-be kindergarteners diligently took time off of work and got extra childcare to spend the fall and early winter touring the 10 or 15 schools closest to us in order to make sure that we listed 7 schools that would be good fits for our family and our children in years to come. We made sure that our list included schools that were underenrolled or were not as popular the year before. We got excited about our child's attending any one of those schools. Little did we know that nearly half of us (45%) whose first child was entering kindergarten would not receive ANY of our choices.

So we scrambled to visit more schools to try to expand our lists for Round II. We included schools that were nearly always underenrolled, we included schools farther away, and still, many of us got nothing.

In Open Enrollment, we had few choices, and many of us ended up enrolling our children in schools which were across the city, with start times that were difficult for work schedules, ending times difficult for younger siblings' nap schedules, some with no aftercare options. Many of these schools had qualities which might be a good fit for some families, but were completely different than what we had been looking for in our original and exhaustive searches. This is not "family choice" at all. For 45% of us, it is random placement, at a school which could be across town, unworkable logistically, which may not be a good fit for our families.

We do not think that this is how the system was intended to function, and it is certainly not how the SFUSD portrays the system as an attempt to keep families in San Francisco and attending public schools.

Those of us who got nothing in Round I were counting on our priority status in this last waitpool run in August, and especially in the 10 day count, to give us a chance at getting a school that works for us logistically, a school we could be happy for our children to attend, a school we could be involved in, a school we could love. We were counting on the fact that, aside from those with a family hardship, those of us who had gotten nothing in Round I after listing 7 choices, would be given the highest priority in filling spots left by children who were enrolled, but not planning to attend kindergarten in public school in San Francisco this year.

Now we have learned that, to rectify a District error, families displaced from the Flynn and Alvarado immersion programs will be offered a special lottery, where they can choose from "found" spots at many of our neighborhood schools, where we have sat on the waitpools for months with no movement. We do not begrudge these families the right to the best solution, given what has been done to them. But we question why the solution that has been found cannot be left in place for us as well, so that any slot one of these families takes, does not take away a spot from anyone in the waitpool.

This is simple to remedy: the EPC would only have to agree to keep those spots open through the waitpool run after the 10 day count, so that any spots taken by the displaced families were, if more spots opened at the school through attrition, not lost to those of us in the waitpool. We urge you to do so, as a part of your attempt to make the idea of "family choice" a bit closer to reality.

Sign the petition >>>

Comments from PREFund about the Webster dual immersion program

As this enrollment fiasco has unfolded, I have been very interested to hear more about the impact this event may have on Daniel Webster ES. I've been following this story every since the school closure dramas back in 2005 (here and here), and frankly I've been rooting for the parents and volunteers that have been working to strengthen the Webster program and community.

So I contacted Katherine Doumani at PREFund and asked her if their group had any comments they could share with this audience. Sure enough, here is her response:

We really hope that SFUSD can accommodate these families and make them feel confident about the solutions they are offering.

We learned about the displacement a week ago, and have been trying to offer our support to the affected families by making sure they are aware of everything PREFund has done and has in the works to turn Daniel Webster into a first-rate school, so that they can make a fully informed decision in this difficult process.

Daniel Webster's immersion program was scheduled to open in 2009, converting the existing Spanish Bilingual program into a Dual-immersion program by adding native English speakers to the current native Spanish speakers in the bilingual program. The principal, staff and current population at DW are very supportive of the program, as is SFUSD. The Principal, Ms. Moriama Machado is a native Spanish speaker, as are several current staff members. There is an active native Spanish-speaking population at the school. And Because the school has been historically under-enrolled, there is ample space to establish and grow this program.

At Daniel Webster - Our goal has been to help increase and integrate enrollment, so that it better reflects our whole community, by attracting families from Potrero Hill and the surrounding neighborhoods into the school. In addition to the programs currently in place, We are working to establish additional inclusive programs to help bridge all the various groups in DW to create one community--these include nutrition programs for all with hot breakfast and lunch, inclusive after-school programs for all students, tutoring & mentoring programs, and classroom volunteers. These are in addition to the physical improvement projects we have completed over the past year: Gardening, tree planting and painting of the entire school building by Rebuild Together San Francisco, Friends of the Urban Forest and scores of local volunteers, that have improved the physical environment for the existing families.

We are proud to showcase Potrero Kids @ Daniel Webster, our Spanish Bilingual Preschool, scheduled to open September 29th 2008, as an example of what we have done by working together with our community. Including 25% scholarship slots, it is fully enrolled, with a waiting list, though we may be able to offer additional slots once we complete licensing, to the SFUSD displaced families.

We are aware that there are no official 'feeder' preschools for public schools in San Francisco, and that if successful, and if the current enrollment lottery stands, we may, in effect, close ourselves out of Daniel Webster in the future as we have no guarantee of specific school or program placement. This, however, is a chance we are willing to take as we strongly believe that our neighborhood schools should be a reflection of our community, and are what raising a family in a community is about. If through our efforts Daniel Webster becomes the fine and sought-after school we envision, we will have done our job, and then some.

Please see www.prefund.org for more information about us. We welcome the opportunity to talk with any parents considering Daniel Webster, as well as connecting them with other interested parents or people we have worked with who may be able to answer questions about DW and the programs there.

Update on the Alvarado / Flynn enrollment SNAFU

When I first heard about the dual-immersion enrollment debacle at Alvarado and Flynn, I thought it was a fairly private matter that mostly affected the handful of families in each incoming Kindergarten class. Now that word of the problem has spread, it has become a public issue with potentially far reaching impact on the enrollment issue going forward.

In that spirit, I contacted the district to get their response and received the following publicly released memo that I'm sharing with you:

Leonard R. Flynn & Alvarado Elementary
Two-Way Spanish Immersion Re-Assignment

OPTIONS FOR RE-ASSIGNED FAMILIES

Kudos to the district for providing this response. Reading through it I am struck that they have made a terrible but very human mistake and are now struggling t do the right thing. The bottom line about what the district is doing now is found in this response:

What did the district do once it realized the coding error?

As a result of this error, the district was faced with tough choices. Officials decided that it was best to assure access to the non-English speaking families who were not given their higher choice due to the coding error, and to uphold the integrity of the Two-Way Immersion model, by re-assigning some of the English speaking families.

Several different options were considered and discussed at length with district staff, including teachers and principals at Flynn and Alvarado. One staff member called native English speaking families affected by the error to inform of the imbalances and asked these families if they would consider a re-assignment to the general education class at the same site. Through multiple phone calls, all families who were reached indicated that they preferred to remain assigned to Two-Way Immersion even though there was an imbalance of English Home Language Speakers.

The main options that were discussed included:

1. Create a “bubble class.” This option was seriously considered but numerous factors (facilities, capacity, program implementation and quality issues) were major barriers.
2. Add a team teacher to each Immersion class and expand enrollment. Numerous factors (physical classroom size, capacity, program implementation and quality issues) were reasons why this option was eliminated.
3. Change the program from a Two-Way Immersion class to a Total Immersion class. This option would have been unfair to the Spanish speaking families who requested the program because Total Immersion is designed for non-native speakers whereas two-way Immersion is designed to include both native and non-native speakers.
4. Create a new Dual-Immersion Program at a nearby location that can accommodate space and programming needs. This is one of the options currently being pursued.

Having just endured a weekend of flying the crowded skies, I am struck by the analogy to airlines booking errors. The airlines freuquently overbook their flights and have to secure the cooperation of flyers to resolve their mistakes. They do this using incentives like cash rewards and flight discounts. I wonder if there is something the district could offer to the affected families -- maybe a priority placement guarantee for any family that volunteers to move their child? Move to a balanced program now and be guaranteed a middle school placement later? Maybe even commit to opening more middle school classrooms for graduates of dual-imersion programs? Just an idea...

KIPP attrition vs SFUSD attrition

I'm only doing this by popular demand (see comments on previous post about KIPP attrition). I'll bet KIPP wishes you wouldn't egg me on.

OK, San Francisco's two KIPP schools are distinctive in that they do not fill up for grade 5, which is the starting grade for all KIPP schools (not counting a new high school or two). Jay Mathews, the Washington Post/Newsweek education writer who covers KIPP frequently and admiringly, asked me about that, because apparently it's unusual for KIPP. Evidently students in SFUSD K-5 schools, and their families, aren't eager to switch until it's time to move on to middle school — kids don't want to miss their 5th-grade graduation. But then the San Francisco KIPP schools get a surge of 6th-grade applicants, and KIPP says both have 6th-grade waiting lists (and KIPP confirms that the 5th grades do not have waiting lists).

So because of that I'm looking at the enrollment from 6th to 8th grade for the most recent 8th-grade class, which finished grade 8 in June '08. Note that these figures (including SFUSD's) are for FALL of 8th grade and do not indicate how many finished 8th grade. The attrition in the two KIPP schools was significantly higher than attrition in SFUSD.*

KIPP S.F. Bay Academy:

Total enrollment for that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 75, 06-07 (7th grade) 55, 07-08 (8th grade) 44. That's a loss of 41.4% of the class.

This KIPP has enough of a Latino population that I crunched those numbers too, as well as African-American. The subgroup with the highest attrition was African-American girls, which is unusual; in other KIPP schools the subgroup with the highest attrition has been African-American or Latino boys. Please let me know if I've miscalculated any percentages.

African-American boys in that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 17, 06-07 (7th grade) 15, 07-08 (8th grade) 9. That's a loss of 40% of the African-American boys in the class.

African-American girls in that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 21, 06-07 (7th grade) 14, 07-08 (8th grade) 10. That's a loss of 52.4% of the African-American girls in the class.

Latino boys in that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 9, 06-07 (7th grade) 7, 07-08 (8th grade) 5. That's a loss of 45% of the African-American boys in the class.

The number of Latino girls just went from 11 to 10, so I didn't bother to crunch that subgroup.

KIPP Bayview Academy:

Total enrollment for the class that finished 8th grade in June 2008:
05-06 (6th grade) 88, 06-07 (7th grade) 58, 07-08 (8th grade) 47. That's a loss of 46.6% of the class.

African-American boys in that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 27, 06-07 (7th grade) 27, 07-08 (8th grade) 10. That's a loss of 63% of the African-American boys in the class.

African-American girls in that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 32, 06-07 (7th grade) 34, 07-08 (8th grade) 20. That's a loss of 37.5% of the African-American girls in the class (after a small increase from 6th to 7th).

San Francisco Unified School District:

Total enrollment for the class that finished 8th grade in June 2008:
05-06 (6th grade) 4,106, 06-07 (7th grade) 4,025, 07-08 (8th grade) 4,016. That's a loss of <3%.

There was striking attrition for African-American boys and African-American girls in that grade, districtwide -- but far below that of both KIPP schools.

African-American girls in that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 320, 06-07 (7th grade) 230, 07-08 (8th grade) 266. That's an overall loss of 16.9% of the African-American girls in the class.

African-American boys in that one class:
05-06 (6th grade) 318, 06-07 (7th grade) 233, 07-08 (8th grade) 287. That's an overall loss of 9.75% of the African-American boys in the class.

Attrition of Latino girls was >4%. The number of Latino boys in that one class rose from 456 in grade 6 (05-06) to 465 in Grade 8 (07-08).

*Note that it only makes sense that attrition in the two KIPP schools would be much higher than attrition in the district overall, because students who leave the KIPP schools are likely to move to a non-KIPP SFUSD school, while mobile students within SFUSD still show up in the district statistics.

Kindergarten enrollment meltdown: meeting 2night

A foulup in enrollment threatens to disrupt the assignments of 23 kindergartners who had been placed in Spanish immersion programs at Alvarado and Leonard Flynn elementary schools. A forum TONIGHT will address the problem. Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco has put up a web page with updates on the issue. An explanation of the problem from PPS is pasted below:

PPS-SF has recently learned about an error made by the school district in enrollment of English and Spanish speakers in the Immersion programs at Alvarado and Flynn. This is information we have as of this writing:

• The desired balance of English to native Spanish speakers in Spanish Immersion programs is 50%/50%, but due to an error in coding siblings in the system, a disproportionate number of English speakers were assigned to each school.
  
• 23 families will receive phone calls and letters offering to enroll them into a new Spanish Immersion program at Daniel Webster Elementary.
• Families who don’t choose this option are being given the option of priority in the waitpool for any other school.
• Spanish-speaking families who listed the immersion programs at Flynn and Alvarado as their first choice but who didn’t get assigned there are being contacted to offer them spaces in the immersion program at Flynn, Alvarado and Webster.
• Additionally, Spanish-speaking families from Marshall and Paul Revere may also be contacted to offer them spots at Flynn, Alvarado and Webster, opening up spots up for the displaced English-speaking families.
• The district is having an informational meeting on Tuesday, July 29 at 6pm at Daniel Webster to give more detailed information and to clarify any concerns or questions.
  

PPS-SF is hosting a forum:

Monday, July 28 at 6pm
The Women’s Building
3543 18th Street between Guerrero and Valencia.
We recommend public transportation as parking is limited.

Please RSVP for KidsWatch and Spanish translation to 861-7077 or info @ ppssf.org

The purpose of this meeting is to have a forum for parents to share their viewpoints around this issue. As there are many perspectives within the parent community, all viewpoints will be respected. PPS-SF is compiling and summarizing notes from the forum and all other comments, phone calls, and emails to share with the district. Please note that SFUSD representatives will not be present on Monday to clarify or answer questions.

Please help us reach people who are interested in this issue to invite them to this meeting.

My view, for the record, is that SFUSD cannot rescind these assignments and must find another way to deal with the problem -- either accept the imbalance or find room to open a new class at Flynn or Alvarado, presuming that a few families would have to accept that move.

Discussion is heated on TheSFKFiles blog about this foulup.

For more info: Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco, 415/861-7077 or info@ppssf.org

Attrition — a KIPP school vs. its district

An admirer of KIPP schools is resolutely defending them against observations I've made and is insisting that KIPP schools have lower attrition than their school districts.

As noted, my past research has found that six of California's nine KIPP schools have very high attrition — and attrition for the demographic subgroup that is (on average) statistically most likely to be academically challenged is strikingly higher than overall attrition in all of those six schools. (That subgroup is either African-American boys or Latino boys, depending on the school's overall demographic.)

The claim that district attrition overall is higher doesn't make sense on its face. That's because KIPP schools largely don't replace students who leave (they officially don't accept any new students for 8th grade, and apparently accept few for 7th grade), while in district schools, students transfer in and out as part of the natural course of family life.

It would theoretically be possible to look at numbers for every KIPP school and the district in which it's located, but it would be pretty pointless for the reason mentioned above. Just for the heck of it, though, I looked at the numbers for KIPP Bridge Charter in Oakland Unified, and for the district. This is just a random sampling and a snapshot; I just looked at the class that started 5th grade in the '04-'05 school year and finished 8th grade in spring/summer 2008.

KIPP's Oakland school is notably one of its less successful, but it's also in a very troubled school district, so it seems like a fair choice for a random snapshot. Oakland Unified is also losing overall enrollment, as is SFUSD.

So anyway, the numbers please, assuming my percentage calculations are accurate (please correct me, anyone who sees an error)...

KIPP Bridge
Total enrollment for that one class:
04-05 (5th grade) 76; 05-06 (6th grade) 75, 06-07 (7th grade) 54, 07-08 (8th grade) 44. That's a loss of 42% of the class.

African-American boys in that one class:
04-05 (5th grade) 33; 05-06 (6th grade) 27, 06-07 (7th grade) 15, 07-08 (8th grade) 13. That's a loss of 60.6% of the African-American boys in the class.

Oakland Unified
Total enrollment for that one class:
04-05 (5th grade) 4,032; 05-06 (6th grade) 3,876, 06-07 (7th grade) 3,598, 07-08 (8th grade) 3,476. That's a loss of 13.7% of the class.

African-American boys in that one class:
04-05 (5th grade) 785; 05-06 (6th grade) 791, 06-07 (7th grade) 728, 07-08 (8th grade) 680. That's a loss of 13.3% of the African-American boys in the class.

OK, that's only one KIPP school in only one district. But. And it's particularly noticeable that OUSD's overall attrition of African-American boys is not higher than the district's overall attrition.

By the way, the poster is also voicing outrage that I indicated that KIPP schools use volume meters in classrooms, accusing me of making it up. Honestly, I'm not creative enough to make that up. The information came from the parent handbook of KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy. I acknowledge that I didn't ascertain how common a practice this is in KIPP schools before I started posting about it, but the KIPP S.F. Bay handbook treated it as a practice to be cited proudly, while the commenter is treating it as an embarrassment to be downplayed.

Because of the proud tone of the KIPP handbook, it didn't occur to me that KIPP partisans would treat it as some kind of slander if I mentioned it, and thus that I should carefully ascertain exactly how many KIPP schools engage in this practice. So I acknowledge that I don't know -- and I passed on the handbook to another interested KIPP observer, so I no longer have it to recheck. I acknowledge that perhaps KIPP S.F. Bay is the only one of all the KIPP schools that uses a decibel meter — only KIPP knows for sure.

Are more kids dropping out of school these days?

As anyone who follows education news knows, the California Department of Education has come up with a new way to keep track of high school dropouts, an efficient new system replacing what seems to have been a hodgepodge of seat-of-the-pants methods and on-the-fly guesswork.

But even the world’s most efficient system can’t give us the full picture. The Los Angeles Times article reporting the new process included a line that made me nod my head sadly:

What is inescapable, ultimately, is that the effort to statistically capture the complications of teen life does not lend itself to the simple analysis that a dropout rate suggests.

And if you weren’t paying close attention, it would be easy to be misled into believing that the dropout rate has risen over the years, or taken a jump recently. But of course that isn’t true in the big picture.

It used to be the norm for many working-class kids and almost all poor kids to drop out of high school -- if they started high school at all. Finishing high school was a luxury for the privileged.

According to Nicholas Lemann’s book “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,” a history of the SAT and higher education in this country, the high school graduation rate only hit 50 percent around World War II.

My own grandmother, born in 1899 in Cumberland, Md., and raised in various spots in the Appalachians along the B&O Railroad line, was emblematic. She quit school after eighth grade to go to work in a glove factory in Columbus, Ohio. This was the norm for her culture, fully in accordance with her family’s expectations. It would have been an act of defiance and disloyalty for her to try to insist on continuing on to high school, let alone attempting to graduate – I’m sure it would have been futile for her even to try.

(I have mentioned that to people who have chimed in with the view that eighth grade was far more advanced than it is now. They’re wrong. While Grandma – who worked on auto assembly lines for much of her adult life and later became a hairdresser – was quite literate and loved to write letters, she also totally believed that men have one fewer rib on one side than women do, for example.)

There are still many families and many communities with the same expectation for their kids my great-grandparents had for Grandma: Your earning power is far more valuable than a piece of paper saying you finished high school. And of course there are families and communities struggling with many deeper issues too.

Today’s Chronicle story on the dropout issue quotes a community worker who gives a good view of the problem: “A lot of kids are dealing with issues far beyond their control.,” says Andre Aikins of San Francisco’s Omega Boys Club. But I have to disagree with Aikins’ implication that it’s the responsibility of -- or within the realm of possibility for – educators to remedy the situation. Educators’ role is to teach our children academics. The entire community – the entire society – must share responsibility to work to help low-income, at-risk students and families engage and focus in school. Here’s the section quoting Aikins.

At the Omega Boys Club in San Francisco, which has worked with school districts for years and earned a reputation for keeping boys and girls from dropping out and getting them into college, operations manager Andre Aikins says schools need to go beyond academics.

"A lot of kids are dealing with issues far beyond their control - Mom's on drugs, Pop's in the penitentiary, and now the grandparents are on drugs," he said. "A lot of kids have very little parenting going on."

Youngsters come to school like a full balloon, he said: They're so filled with troubles that "it's hard to add anything else, or they'll burst."

Schools are poorly equipped to help students with their emotional troubles, he said. But if they could find a way to do it, he said, the dropout rate would decline. San Francisco's dropout rate is 21 percent, according to the new state estimate.

"They have to change the mind-set of students to value education," Aikins said. "Right now, the way the system is designed - how can I say it - the kids don't see the value and relevancy of what schools are in place to do for them."

Meanwhile, everyone is poring over those dropout rate breakouts, school by school and district by district. They presumably fall in line with demographics – all the numbers show high dropout rates for African-American and Latino students. But as the Los Angeles Times line emphasizes, there are so many complexities that I’m not really convinced those numbers are clear indicators that one school is doing so much better than another.

Latest school food news

The best source for all the latest information on school food in the SFUSD (and beyond) is at www.sfusdfood.org . Two of the most popular documents at that website, "Why can’t we have better food in our schools?" and "A Short History of Food in the SFUSD" (PDF) have both been updated to reflect the most current information. Both documents are also being translated into Spanish and Chinese so that soon they will be available to more people.

For those who don’t have the time or patience to read through these documents just to learn what’s new, here are the latest updates. First, the good news:

• Student Nutrition Services (SNS) piloted a hot breakfast in 10 elementary schools in the spring of 2008, with a goal of getting more students to eat breakfast; schools selected for the pilot had some of the lowest breakfast participation rates in the district, often serving as few as 6 students a day (SNS does not recoup the costs of providing breakfast at a school unless at least 60 students participate.) Overall, nearly three times as many students ate the hot breakfast, as compared with the previous number eating cold cereal, and some schools increased their participation by 400-500%. As a result, the hot breakfast will be expanded to all of the elementary breakfast programs this year; cold cereal will still be available for those students who prefer it.
• Salad bars operated in 25 schools in 08-09 and nearly all resulted in significant increases in the numbers of students choosing to eat the cafeteria lunch. For example, at Lowell High School, 10% more students chose the cafeteria lunch once the salad bar opened during the second semester, as compared to the number eating in the cafeteria earlier in the school year. At the same time, the number of Lowell students choosing to buy the a la carte lunch (which does not include the salad bar, but offers large and small salads among the choices) also increased. The other middle and high schools with salad bars also showed double digit increases in participation. Clearly salads are popular, especially with middle and high school student. More middle and high schools will open salad bars in 08-09. The salad bars will offer increased choices of produce, including corn and beans, allowing vegetarian students a non cheese protein option to supplement the vegetarian hot lunch offered daily.
• Elementary schools which do not have salad bars will begin offering a wider variety of raw vegetables served with lunch, not just the baby carrots of previous years.
• Brown rice and whole wheat pasta will be appearing on the menu monthly.
• All cafeteria meals are now have 0 grams of trans fat.
• More students ate school lunch last year than in 2006-07, despite the fact that district enrollment declined. Participation increased 2.1% even as enrollment drop by .7%

Now, sadly, the bad news:

• The cost of providing school meals is increasing at a rate which is devastating to the meal program. The price SNS will pay for a meal at an elementary school without a salad bar in 08-09 has increased 30% just since last year – and that does not include increases for the price of the milk which must be served with every meal. At the middle and high school level, between 2004-05 and 2007-08, the prices of the 60 most commonly used items in the preparation of food for the a la carte lines increased between 40-101%. Delivery costs are up 42% from last year due to rising fuel costs.
• Meanwhile, the federal reimbursement for meals served to students qualified for free lunches has increased only 4% since 07-08, and the state reimbursement has dropped 13.6% since last year. The amount of the contribution the City makes to support the salad bars has also dropped 54.5% from 2007-08 to 2008-09.
• Due to the skyrocketing costs of food, fuel, and labor, meal prices for those students who don’t qualify for free or reduced price meals will be increasing to $1.50 for breakfast at all schools (previously this was $1), while lunch prices will be $2.50 at middle school and $3 at high school (both previously $2). Elementary school lunch price remains unchanged at $2.
• These price increases are not unique to San Francisco.
  
  Visit www.pasasf.org/cna/prices.html to see how districts all around the country are raising meal prices, and Rising Cost of Food - Child Nutrition Programs | Hearing to hear what witnesses recently told the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Labor and Education about the impact of rising prices on federal child nutrition programs (especially recommended is the testimony of Katie Wilson of the School Nutrition Association.)

If you think it is time the federal government started funding our school meal programs at a higher level so that our kids can be served the kind of high quality food they deserve, please visit PASA: Speak Up for Better School Food to see a quick and easy way to help.

--- Dana Woldow

How self-selection works

A poster disputes that KIPP's application methods self-select for more-motivated applicants. Honestly, this seems so obvious that I'm really not convinced that the poster is sincere. But in case there's anyone who truly doesn't get it, here are some ways that happens.

1. The student must have a family that pays enough attention and cares enough about schooling to fill out the application and otherwise pursue the process.
2. The student and family must be willing to commit to KIPP's longer hours and days, including some Saturday school and an extended school year.
3. The student and family must be willing to agree to abide by KIPP's many requirements, from strict uniform policies to making sure homework is done.
4. KIPP gives a test to all incoming students. (I am told that in the community this is viewed as an entrance test, though KIPP says it's not.) In any case, the student and family must be willing to cooperate with this test requirement; in cases where the test is believed to be an entrance test, the student and family presumably must assume the student has a chance of passing it and getting in.
5. Once in the school, the student must be willing to cooperate with KIPP's unusual practices, such as the SLANT behavior (students must "sit up, listen attentively, ask and answer questions, nod in response to the speaker, and track the speaker with their eyes). The student must also be willing to comply with the decibel rules (each classroom has a decibel meter, with approved levels depending on the activity). And the student must accept and comply with the KIPP discipline policy, which is based around shunning.
6. In most districts, the student's default school would either be close by or would have busing. In many cases, that wouldn't be true of the KIPP school. So the family must be willing to deal with getting the child to school.

I suppose there may be somebody somewhere who's so naive that he/she doesn't understand that there are many families less functional than this — not to mention many students without families at all — but I can't imagine any readers of this blog would be that sheltered from reality.

KIPP alumni in college: the number, please?

In the current Newsweek, columnist Jonathan Alter earnestly claims that 12,800 alumni of KIPP schools have gone on to college. Here's what Alter wrote:

At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids.

The actual number, according to KIPP itself, is 447.

It's ironic that Alter made that rather significant error in a column mostly devoted to blasting and blaming teachers for troubled schools and calling for getting rid of problem teachers, along with eliminating tenure and increasing "accountability" for teachers. I wonder how he feels about more accountability for journalists.

Here's a memo from KIPP explaining the actual number. It went from a KIPP staffer named Debbie Fine to KIPP press spokesman Steve Mancini to Washington Post/Newsweek education writer Jay Mathews to me.

We have been tracking KIPP middle school alumni (i.e. KIPP students that
completed the 8th grade at KIPP) since the fifth grade class that entered
KIPP in 1995. Since that time, 546 students have completed the eighth
grade at KIPP, and 447 of those students have matriculated to college for
an average college matriculation rate over five years of roughly 81
percent.

This number only includes students who attended the original two KIPP
schools in Houston and New York since those are the only KIPP schools that
have been in operation long enough to have kids progress from eighth grade
to college freshmen. Kids from the next generation of KIPP schools that
opened this decade will not matriculate to college until 2009.

Also, it's not truly fair or accurate to claim that KIPP students are "randomly selected," though they are presumably randomly selected from among those who pursue the application process all the way through. The KIPP application process, as has been extensively discussed here and elsewhere, aggressively self-selects for motivated, high-functioning and compliant students from motivated, high-functioning and compliant families. So the implication that KIPP students are a random sampling of low-income students is wildly off the mark.

I'm not opposed to creating schools for motivated, high-functioning, compliant low-income students from motivated, high-functioning, compliant families. KIPP's target is a low-income, high-need, at-risk demographic, and it does seem to be working well with that subset of kids.

I just think the public discussion needs to be clear and honest about the fact that this is not a random cross-section of low-income, high-need, at-risk kids. KIPP misleads, and insufficiently questioning journalists with an overly shallow understanding of education issues eagerly accept and spread the misinformation.

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