An April Fool’s Day-free zone for reforming American public education.
S-KIPP-ing Around the Facts: Your editor won’t waste your time giving a full analysis of Western Michigan University’s report on KIPP’s finances and student attrition. The flaws in how the study compares the attrition data of KIPP schools compared to traditional public school peers (or apples-to-watermelons, as Robin Lake argues) have already been pointed out by others. On this, I will say that the authors, Gary Miron, Jessica L. Urschel and Nicholas Saxton, are no more wrong for using Common Core data available on KIPP schools to determine attrition than school reformers who do the same thing; Common Core is an accurate data source.
But there are some real issues with the study, and those lie with the interpretation of the data. Miron and his team engage in some sloppy thinking. This is particularly not befitting of a longtime academic.
For one, Miron and company argue that KIPP conducts “selective entry” when the data he cites doesn’t prove any of that. Arguing that attrition is one reason for this is sloppy, especially when they are actually noting an end-of-pipeline issue, not an issue of what KIPP actually does to enroll students. The other basis for the argument — that KIPP schools have fewer numbers of special ed students — fails to consider the reality that in most urban districts, the families of special ed districts are unlikely to leave the traditional district for a charter school because they have already have Individualized Education Plans for their kids in place, are familiar (if not always friendly) with the bureaucracy and are apprehensive about moving to a charter school which may have less capacity to support them. The Miron team’s argument also fails to consider the reality that far too many kids are being diagnosed as special ed cases because of their low levels of literacy (and shouldn’t have ever been placed there in the first place). Given that the data Miron and his crew cite also shows that KIPP schools enroll higher numbers of black students than traditional districts, the selective entry argument falls apart.
What Miron and company also fail to consider is the other side of school choice: That an environment in which parents can choose schools also means that they can choose to opt out of them, even at risk to their kids. As a public charter school of choice, KIPP can’t always control the reality that some of its students also have parents who can walk them out of the school, or don’t want to participate in the hard work of engagement in the school community that it demands. In this regard, urban parents could easily decide that they prefer a Montessori approach or even think the traditional district school may be more nurturing (whether or not the data bears it out) than a KIPP environment. This, by the way, is the flip-side of school choice (and one that all choice supporters must admit and accept). On one level, this may mean school reformers need to do a better job of informing less-knowledgeable parents about the hard work it takes to improve their child’s academic achievement, (a major issue no matter what side of the education debate one might sit) and that we must overhaul all of American public education. Or, as we accept in the case of suburban middle class parents, that some parents want something different for their kids than what KIPP offers.
The biggest problem with Miron’s study lies with its underlying argument that KIPP is successful in improving student achievement because it has more money and raises more of it. His team fails to consider the long history of KIPP schools of raising achievement even before it gained its high profile. They ignore the fact that, by design, charter schools are dependent on outside support and don’t have the capacity to increase taxes to sustain its operations the way traditional districts can (and, from where I sit, it’s the way it should be). Miron’s team even ignores its own flawed data, which shows that KIPP gets high quality results despite spending less on instruction and support than traditional districts. (By the way, Miron and his team do a terrible job of actually breaking out administrative expenses; one can’t tell if the study is looking at school administrative costs or general administrative costs).
And Miron and company don’t understand that the ability of KIPP to raise so much money is a sign that it is successful in its ultimate goal of improving student achievement for kids in urban communities. As an operator of charter schools (which gets less state and local tax revenue than traditional districts), KIPP must go out and prove its success each and every day in order to get philanthropic support. If it doesn’t perform, it won’t continue to get financial support. This concept may be difficult for Miron — a charter school skeptic — and his colleagues to understand. But folks familiar with that thing called economics completely get it. It’s called serving your market (and your students) well and reaping the benefits.
There are areas this study could have explored that would have been of value. One is what are the limitations of the KIPP focus on middle school students, many of whom have spent five or more years suffering through academic neglect and malpractice. Given the need for intensive reading remediation and math instruction in the early grades, Miron and his team could have actually dug into existing data to figure out some of KIPP’s instructional methods, curriculum development efforts and school leadership techniques are useful for overcoming those issues. Such data could help traditional districts improve the odds of graduation for students on the path to academic failure. But this didn’t happen. Instead, what we have is well, something that contributes little to education discussions.
All in all, the study will be mishandled, as always, by folks who oppose the expansion (and the existence) of charter schools. But it’s a shoddy piece of work that will just aid and abet even more-slovenly thinking.
DIY Schools Redux: Dropout Nation‘s report on the concept of DIY schools garnered a lot of attention this week. What is particularly heartening is that more families and communities are embracing this idea of doing-it-for-ourselves in reforming American public education.
In Naperville, Ill., for example, parent have come together to form Covenant Classical School, which offers classes in Latin and logic as part of its curriculum. The 91-student school opened this past August after parents spent eight months putting together a curriculum, forming a board and doing all the kind of school-building work that districts and charter operators such as KIPP do every day. As the Chicago Tribune reported last year, fellow parents in Joliet have formed their own independent Catholic school, St. Joseph Academy, to replace the now-shuttered diocesan school that served their community.
Another opportunity for DIY education may come courtesy of the departure of New York City Department of Education honcho Joel Rose from the nation’s largest district to expand upon his School of One initiative. The program has garnered attention and acclaim for giving middle-school teachers the ability to customize math for middle-school students based on their success in mastering goals and tasks. But even in New York City’s more-innovative-and-reform-minded-than-usual school district, there are still political and bureaucratic obstacles to fostering this innovation. One can imagine a School of One-style concept that gives parents the tools they need to handle instruction, bring rigor to curriculum and measure performance.
With so many tools available for families and communities to start their own schools, the real problems lie with money, mobilization and information. The first can be solved by reforming school funding, making it a fully state-financed affair; this would then allow for the creation of a system of publicly funding the best educational options for all children — including DIY schools. The second will be solved by expanding the reach of Parent Power groups and other grassroots-based school reformers (something that the Beltway crowd and philanthropies such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation should do). And the development of more-robust school data systems can deal with the third, providing parents with better data that they can use to make the best decisions for their children.
Families can no longer wait for systemic reform to happen slowly. We need to help them make the overhaul of American public education happen as immediately as possible.
The School Reform Battles to Come: Michigan in Action: Dropout Nation noted last month that the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers weren’t going to take Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s successful move to abolish collective bargaining lying down. And with the NEA doubling the dues dedicated to political efforts, using its foundation arm to raise more money to beat back the most-aggressive school reform efforts (and the possibility of stepping up its donations to think tanks and other groups theoretically willing to do its bidding), it isn’t shocking that its affiliates would mobilize its rank-and-file to engage in the kind of mass-strikes that are typically found in France.
This is certainly a possibility in Michigan, where the bellicose NEA affiliate there is threatening to launch a series of what they laughingly call “crisis activities” this month ostensibly in opposition to spending cuts contained in Gov. Rick Snyder’s proposed education budget. The real issue, however, is the move by Snyder and the state legislature to give the state’s school finance czars — including Robert Bobb, the commissar of Detroit’s public schools — the ability to essentially render contracts with their AFT and NEA affiliates null and void. That, along with the possibility of Snyder taking up the kind of efforts to banish collective bargaining pursued by fellow governors Walker and John Kasich in Ohio, is rallying the NEA affiliate to take up arms. The union is asking its locals and members to vote on taking up these strikes by April 15, then will take action once members decide which way they will go.
As one would expect, Salters’ call hasn’t had the effect on Snyder or the state legislature that she expected. Last week, statehouse Republicans introduced a bill that would add even more sanctions to the state’s anti-strike law; this includes allowing state education officials to suspend the licenses of striking teachers for as long as two years. And even in a union-heavy state such as Michigan, the NEA local may not gain much sympathy from taxpayers vexed about the state’s low-performing schools and decades of fiscal fecklessness that the union aided and abetted. As Detroit News columnist Frank Beckmann points out: “Public employee benefits come from the pockets of their neighbors and it’s hard to imagine many outside of other public employee union members who are going to feel sympathy for state teachers, who earn an average of about $58,000 a year, according to the National Education Association, or for union leaders like Salters who reportedly is earning just south of $300,000 per year.”
As usual, Michigan will be fun to watch. It may be the NEA’s own air traffic controllers strike moment.
