From Alan Singer’s July 2 piece in The Huffington Post, a few important trends are noted. For example:

But a closer look at the Locke [highschool] miracle, way down in the Times article, exposes what has actually taken place there. In 2007, a former principal complained that Locke was the Los Angles dumping ground for problem students. Only 15% of its students could pass the state standardized math test. The first thing Green Dot did was get rid of all the troubled students and bring in a fresh supply. It also dumped most of the teachers – keeping those prepared to work longer hours for less pay, what it defined as enthusiasm. Locke reopened in Fall 2008 with a new freshman class. Green Dot also fixed up the place to make it attractive for the photo ops.

The big problem was cost, although Green Dot is a non-profit company, its administrators do get paid. The four year turnaround at Locke was $15 million over budget. This does not include part of a $60 million grant from the Gates Foundation to support state development, which makes the actual cost of the turnaround much higher. Unfortunately, the federal government has set a $6 million cap for the reorganization of an individual school. Green Dot is now more than 150% over budget. The rest of the money, $9 million, was covered by donations from foundations, supposed charities, but often business groups hoping to make lucrative profits from the dismantling of public education.

Locke is actually a good model of what educational change will really cost. The school now has additional administrators, security, two psychologists, busing, and health services for students, in addition to staff development provided by the Gates Foundation. None of this has anything to do with being a charter school. This is just the real cost of educating inner city children.

I think that any school would show improvement wtih the extensive investment of those kinds of resources — except for the reportedly aggressive use of force.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, New York questions have been raised about another miracle charter school, the Hebrew Language Academy. While 15% of the students in New York City are white, white children make up two-thirds of the students attending this school. This is essentially a private religious school for white Jewish families financed with government money. The parents have made this very clear, explaining in a New York Times article that if it were not the Hebrew Language Academy they would be paying $20,000 a year to send their children to private religious schools. Additionally, the curriculum is chauvinistically pro-Israel. There are Israeli flags all over the building and children sing songs about Israeli pioneers who built homes on empty land, the area’s Arab population conveniently ignored.

This school also receives outside money to operate, from a Jewish philanthropist named Michael Steinhardt who also happens to be a hedge fund manger and a big financial supporter of Israel. The school’s organizers, using Steinhardt’s money, plan to open a string of similar charter schools around the country.

So, not only are charters associated with increasing segregation by class and race, we here too see the ideological sifting and public support for religious instruction that will take place.

And finally, the last part is suggestive an all too common connection between charter operators, fraud and abuse.

This superhero principal actually grew up in this Bronx neighborhood and has an understanding of the life faced by these kids. However, he is in constant trouble with school authorities and has bounced from school to school. He is now under investigation by the Department of Education for three serious rule violations and was suspended at least once.

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And,

“In the case of the latter reform strategy of declaring the facts irrelevant, New Jersey’s (and the Business Roundtable’s) Education Commissioner, Bret Schundler, provides a prime example. Because the reality does not fit the “terrible teacher” narrative that Governor Christie has adopted, two days ago Schundler denounced New Jersey Public Schools as a “wretched system” and the state’s #1 national ranking on the NAEP in both 4th and 8th grade reading and math as “irrelevant.” Facts don’t fit the ideology? Just declare them meaningless.”

From  the NYDailynews: “”Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years. In Albany, which boasts the state’s highest percentage of charter school enrollments, a nonprofit called the Brighter Choice Foundation has employed the New Markets Tax Credit to arrange private financing for five of the city’s nine charter schools.”

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November 17, 2009

Contact: Patrick McEwan, (781) 283-2987; (email) pmcewan@wellesley.edu

Gary Miron, (269) 599-7965; (email) gary.miron@wmich.edu

TEMPE, Ariz. and BOULDER, Colo. (November 17, 2009) — A report released three weeks ago looked at the competition effects of New York City’s charter schools, concluding that “students benefit academically when their public school is exposed to competition from a charter.” A new review of that report finds that the report’s own findings are pretty minimal, and even that slight improvement could be explained by factors other than charter-school competition.

The report is boldly titled, Everyone Wins: How Charter Schools Benefit All New York City Public School Students. It was written for the Manhattan Institute by Marcus Winters, a Senior Fellow at the institute. The report was reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by Patrick McEwan, professor of economics at Wellesley College.

The report’s focus reflects an important premise behind the market-competition approach to education reform. While critics of market theory contend competition from charter schools or other alternatives will end up penalizing the public schools that must educate most children, market advocates contend competition will help the entire school population. Competition, this argument runs, doesn’t just expand choices for parents; it also prods existing public schools to improve in order to avoid losing students.

Everyone Wins draws on three years of test score data in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) from New York City public schools as well as data on the percentage of students leaving public schools for charter schools. As McEwan explains, the report uses the rate of departures for charter schools as a proxy to measure increased “pressure on public school administrators to ‘compete,’ improve test scores, and staunch the flow of students to charter schools.” Using appropriate statistical controls, the report finds that increasing competition does not appear to be associated with improved math test scores, while it has “small positive effects on ELA scores” that are “slightly larger among public school students with lower levels of achievement.”

In his review, McEwan observes that the report itself is modest in its conclusions and that it “correctly notes that the statistical findings do not necessarily imply that increases in the measure of competition cause test scores to rise…” Unfortunately the report’s title suggests a much more positive definitive outcome, and the nuances are lost as well in the executive summary. Causal claims also pervade Winter’s own NY Post commentary about his study.

McEwan notes that a longer, dryer, and more accurate title for the study might be: “Some win and some lose, but, on average, they slightly win — though mainly on the ELA test and with caveats about the causal interpretation of the effects.”

The reviewer praises the report on several counts: its use of “a high-quality, longitudinal dataset of student achievement,” its use of appropriate statistical methods, and its contribution to “an established literature that finds roughly consistent effects of ‘competition’ that are often zero or slightly positive, depending on the state and method.”

But he also points out important limitations. The statistical methods used, “while appropriate… cannot control for several potential biases,” McEwan writes. “As a result, the measured effects of competition could also reflect the influence of shifting peer quality, declining class size, or other unobserved variables.” Other sources of market pressure, such as private schools or schools of choice, are also not considered in this report.

The report notes in passing some of those limitations, but “does not make a serious attempt to assess their validity,” the reviewer concludes. In the end, then, it does not deliver what it claims, and we do not know whether, in fact, “everyone wins.”

Find Patrick McEwan’s review on the web at:

http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-Everyone-Wins

Find Everyone Wins: How Charter Schools Benefit All New York City Public School Students, by Marcus Winters and published by the Manhattan Institute, on the web at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cr_60.pdf

CONTACT:

Patrick McEwan, Associate Professor

Department of Economics

Wellesley College

(781) 283-2987

pmcewan@wellesley.edu

Gary Miron, Professor of Education

Western Michigan University

(269) 599-7965

gary.miron@wmich.edu

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder’s Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed because, “despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a timely fashion.” He adds, “we don’t consider our reviews to be the final word, nor is our goal to stop think tanks’ contributions to a public dialogue. That dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through rigorous critique and debate.”

**********

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The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance

(http://educationpolicyalliance.org).

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Here’s the state’s press release about King’s appointment:

STATE BOARD OF REGENTS APPOINTS DEPUTY COMMISSIONER TO LEAD EDUCATION REFORM EFFORT

The State Board of Regents today announced the appointment of Dr. John B. King, Jr. as Senior Deputy Commissioner for P-12 Education. In his position, King will lead the State’s school reform efforts. He will begin State service on October 5, 2009.

Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said, “John King is a nationally recognized education leader with a proven track record of lifting student achievement, particularly for low-income minority students in urban settings. His goal is always the same – ensuring that the students in his care are prepared for college-level work and productive careers.”

“New York’s children, teachers, and schools are fortunate to have John King assume this important leadership position,” said Education Commissioner-elect David M. Steiner, who will begin service as Commissioner on October 1, 2009. Steiner added, “Students have thrived at the schools John King has overseen. And I know he will bring the same commitment to educational excellence to all of New York’s children in his new role at the Education Department.”

King said, “I look forward to working with teachers, school leaders, parents, and all of those throughout the State who are interested in raising student achievement. The Regents have set an aggressive reform agenda and I am thrilled to work with them and Commissioner-elect Steiner to accelerate the progress already underway.”

John King has been recognized across the State and the nation for providing results-driven educational leadership. As co-founder and co-director of the Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston, he developed an instructional program and school culture that provided not only the academic skills but also the self-discipline and character essential for success in high school and college. Under John King’s leadership, Roxbury Prep’s students attained the highest state exam scores of any urban middle school in Massachusetts, closed the racial achievement gap, and outperformed students from not only the Boston district schools but the city’s affluent suburbs. One hundred percent of the school’s students are Black or Latino, over 70% of the students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and all of its graduates matriculate to college preparatory high schools; 80 percent of the school’s graduates who are now college-age are persisting in college.

In his current role as Managing Director with Uncommon Schools, a non-profit charter management organization that operates schools in New York and New Jersey, Dr. King has continued to improve educational outcomes for low-income students in urban settings. In 2009, 98 percent of grade 3-8 students in the New York State Uncommon Schools network scored at Level 3 or 4 on the State math assessments, compared with 86 percent of all New York students and 82 percent of New York City students. In addition, 89 percent of the New York State Uncommon Schools grade 3-8 students scored at Level 3 or 4 on the State’s English Language Arts assessments, compared with 77 percent at the State level and 69 percent in New York City.

A former high school history teacher from a family of New York City public school educators, John King is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College. Additionally, he holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and both an M.A. in the Teaching of Social Studies and an Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. He has served on the board of New Leaders for New Schools, the nationally recognized principal training program, and is an Aspen Institute-NewSchools Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education Fellow.

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Matthew Stone, writing in the Kennebec Journal quotes Duncan: “States such as Maine that don’t allow charter schools are putting themselves at a ‘competitive disadvantage’.” According to the article, 10 states do not allow charter schools, while 26 put caps on the number of charter schools. These states risk being denied Duncan’s so-called “Race to the Top” funds, widely recognized as bribes for complying with unpopular initiatives of the federal government.

Stone reports:

Critics of charter schools in the Legislature said a new set of schools would divert too many resources away from local districts at a time when they’re struggling to make ends meet.

Sen. Justin Alfond, D-Portland, said during debate that a vote against charter schools was a vote of confidence in Maine public schools.

“It’s time for us to put confidence back to the schools that we already have here,” he said Thursday.

As reported in The Tennessean, state lawmakers have also been put into motion by Duncan’s carrot.

Republicans “contend that Tennessee could lose out on $100 million as part of a $4.35 billion ‘Race to the Top’ federal grant program for states that commit to education reform — including increasing access to charter schools. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is scheduled to talk to reporters today about President Barack Obama’s administration’s emphasis on the importance of charter school access to receiving the funds.

Department of Education spokesman Justin Hamilton said, “States that don’t search for innovative solutions certainly don’t help their chances.”

In previous committee discussions, some Democrats accused charter school leaders of targeting urban areas to draw poor, black students and their state funding away from the public school system for monetary gain.

With budget cuts scheduled for physical health and safety programs, losing student funding could further hurt schools, said Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Turner, D-Old Hickory.

“We’re cutting things from schools already, and now we’re talking about taking money out of schools? That’s a problem,” he said.

[...]

State law allows up to 50 charter schools, which typically can accept only low-performing students and students in low-performing schools. Tennessee now has 16 charter schools, including three in Nashville.

[...]

But the $100 million doesn’t depend solely on charter school eligibility, and Tennessee hasn’t lost out on any of the funds because they haven’t been distributed yet, said Earl Wiman, president of the Tennessee Education Association, which opposes the bill.

If legislators are going to expand eligibility of charter schools, they should tighten regulation and give the schools less time before being subject to state review, Wiman said.

“If they’re going to be getting that money and making that promise, they shouldn’t be afraid of increased accountability,” Wiman said.

Applications for the federal grant program will be accepted beginning in late fall 2009. First payouts are scheduled for spring 2010.

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She writes:

The state has certified the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff as the bargaining unit for teachers at three campuses of the Chicago International Charter School, which would seem to make it the city’s first unionized charter.

The union is calling on Chicago International Charter School management—which is handled at the three unionizing campuses by Civitas Schools—to sit down with teachers and start hammering out a contract.

Not so fast, Civitas says.

Election vs. card check. The nonprofit management group is arguing that the feds should have jurisdiction over the union certification, not the state. So it’s filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board. A decision is expected this month.

Civitas’ motivation? Under federal law, the three charter campuses fighting for union representation would have to hold an election to determine whether teachers want the union.

State law doesn’t require an election at the schools, because a majority of teachers have already signed union cards. The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board says it received 91 signed and dated cards; organizers say that’s about 75 percent of employees at the three campuses.

Civitas’ CEO Simon Hess says he wants teachers to be able to make a “private, informed decision” about whether to join the union. The union says Civitas is stalling and would love to buy time to pressure teachers not to join the union.

Standing behind the fight over unionization is the distinction between public and private. Lutton writes:

The legal fight has forced Civitas to make a prickly argument: Charter schools have worked hard to emphasize they are public schools, funded with public dollars. But in order to fall under the jurisdiction of the NLRB, you’ve got to be a private firm, and that’s what Civitas is arguing. The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board has jurisdiction over public educational employers.

“I wouldn’t be so certain that you’ve got a bargaining unit there in that charter school as long as there’s a question about whether the employer is a private firm,” said Robert Bruno, a labor expert at UIC.

Then again, arguing you’re a private firm just because “the place is being managed by some private management firm, that’s not gonna wash. They’re still a public entity,” Bruno told me. It’s not a clear-cut case.

Civitas CEO Simon Hess said Civitas is essentially a private vendor. Just because you receive public funds doesn’t mean you’re a public entity, Hess told me.

This raises a key problem: why would public funds be given to a private entity in the first place? The original arguments for what the right-wing calls “government schools” is that public funds should serve public purposes and to ensure public purposes are being served, public oversight is required. That “private vendors” receive public funds under the guise that “charter schools are public schools” yet demand regulations consistent with private not public entities suggests not only a self-serving agenda, but more importantly, a broad shift in the public/private distinction.

Lutton continues, summarizing legal precedent:

There’s been one other case like this, which might give us some idea of how things will turn out. A year ago, teachers at Cambridge Lakes Charter School in Kane County formed a union. Their employer, the Northern Kane Educational Corporation, also argued that the NLRB should have jurisdiction in the case, using the same private employer argument. But the state IELRB ruled otherwise. In a decision issued in November 2008, the IELRB determined that Northern Kane should indeed be considered a public employer subject to the state public educational employer act.

The school’s administration appealed the decision to the appellate court, which is where the case remains.

Who is our boss? That’s one of the first questions Chicago International Charter School teachers faced when they began organizing.

The Chicago International Charter School has 12 campuses—they’re run by four different educational management organizations: two for-profits (EdisonLearning and Victory Schools, Inc.) and two non-profits, American Quality Schools and Civitas.

Civitas was started by Chicago International Charter School in 2002 and is described on the Web site as a “wholly owned subsidiary” of CICS. For you business maj0rs out there, Hess told me that technically Civitas is a limited liability corporation whose sole member is CICS. The Civitas name is on teachers’ paychecks at the campuses it manages, so “we decided they were the employer,” says Northtown Academy teacher Eric Levy.

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“My speculation is that the damage this recession will do to kids’ education prospects is far more than the positive good most changes in educational policies can produce.” – EDDRA email listserv participant.*

Since the research basis for our sharings here requires some credentialing, allow me to post the following as (now retired) “Director of School Security and Safety” for the 35,000-member (at the time) Chicago Teachers Union as well as my current work as editor of Substance.

During those years I worked in that capacity, I organized a great many programs and events to further the union’s objective of neutralizing the impact of Chicago’s massive drug gangs on the city’s public schools. Therefore, you can assume my expertise in these matters I speak of below, since our work almost always overlapped poverty and drug gang problems.  

Some “educational policies” furthered over the past decade and likely to grow under Arne Duncan will do much, much more harm against these backgrounds of poverty and the destruction of the so-called “safety nets” over the past two decades. One will be hunger. The other will be the expanded impact of drug gangs within our cities (and in some cases, our more impoverished suburbs). Let me suggest two that may be going national out of Chicago now that Arne Duncan is CEO of the Education Department (in Chicago, the chief of the schools has not been a “superintendent” since 1995, when mayoral control became law; we have a “Chief Executive Officer”).  

1. School closings for “failure” (“underperformance,” “underutilization”,  etc.). Duncan has already suggested that he will be pushing the Chicago model of school closings for “underperformance” nationally. In Chicago, that has generally meant that schools described as “underperforming” (they stopped using “failing” here about five years ago) are closed and (usually, but not always) privatized. Invariably, those schools are (no surprise here, I’m sure) serving the most impoverished children (often schools with a 100 percent  “free and reduced lunch” rate) in completely (in Chicago, that means 90 percent to 100 percent black and/or “minority”) in the ghettos and barrios. For many of these children, the closing of their schools is the last straw, the destruction of the final stability in their lives. At one of the schools that Duncan proposed to close for “underperformance”  this school year (Holmes Elementary, the closing of which was rescinded by Duncan’s successor), teachers who organized against the closing (it was slated to be a “turnaround” which is Chicago for “reconstitution”), teachers  now report that homeless families of their children await the disposal of the garbage from (free and reduced price) school breakfasts and lunches. As a result, the school’s staff has asked that the food be separated before being placed in the dumpsters, so that the families that are waiting to salvage the uneaten food don’t have to sort, say, cartons of cereal from a spoonful of milk-and-cereal.  

2. Massive increase in gang violence. Once the final prop of stability is removed from these children’s lives (i.e., the now privatized public school where all the teachers who knew the community have been fired), the remaining locus of stability in many of these communities is the drug gang. In Chicago, which has the largest drug gangs in the USA (organized into two “nations” called the “People” — five-pointed star as main symbol — and “Folks” — six-pointed star as main symbol), the expansion of these drug gangs, and the highly publicized teenage body count that has followed from it, is partly caused by the school closings policies that Arne Duncan will soon be trying to bring to a school district near you.  Five years ago (June 12, 2004) I was still working as “Director of School Security and Safety” for the 35,000-member Chicago Teachers Union. My job at the time was to organize and train teachers to utilize union resources to counter the drug gangs in the schools here. In June 2004, Arne Duncan proposed the first “closing” of public high schools (later to be flipped into charter school hands) against Calumet and Austin high schools. I organized the testimony in opposition to those closing, and everyone who testified about the proposal said that one of the main results would be an increase in gang violence. The reason? In Chicago, gang members identify young people as being members of one gang or the other by virtue of their neighborhood. Therefore, any student who goes to another general high school after having attended Calumet High School would be identified as being a Black Stone (“People”,  five-pointed star) and an enemy (if the other schools was “Folks” — six pointed star).  That is precisely what happened. One of the main causes of the huge increase in the number of gang shootings of young people has been the policy of CPS in closing (and usually charterizing) traditional public schools, excluding the kids who had gone there and forcing them, if they want to attend public school at all, to attend a school outside their community. (Charters in Chicago utilize and elaborate application, lottery and elimination process to get rid of undesirables, with KIPP just being the most well known nationally).

That’s enough sharing for one morning. The impacts of poverty will go well beyond the disruption or destruction of once stable families. When corporate “school reform” polices such as those practiced by Arne  Duncan in Chicago are added to the mix of the economic downturn, the results can  be not only more suffering for children (hunger, dental and medical  neglect, etc.), but actual death from the increase in drug gang violence.  If you have seen The Wire (HBO) you have a sort of sense of what Chicago  has been facing with the drug gangs that I once organized against. But  Baltimore is child’s play compared with the fully developed drug gang empires of  Chicago and Illinois. If you are interested in more details, you can get “The  Gang Book” from the Chicago Crime Commission. Note only that those vast maps  showing areas of Chicago’s South Side as being controlled by the Gangster  Disciples or Latin King street gangs are realities in the lives of thousands  of black and Hispanic children and families.  And Chicago has let those realities proliferate as a matter of public  policy neglect for more than 30 years.

George N. Schmidt Editor, Substance

http://www.substancenews.net/

* Copied from the Education Disinformation, Detection and Reporting Agency email listserv managed by Gerald Bracey on April 30, 2009.

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Colorado Department of Education – Schools of Innovation

Overview: The Colorado State Legislature passed the Innovation Schools Act in 2008 (Senate Bill 08-130). The law is intended to improve student outcomes by supporting greater school autonomy and flexibility in academic and operational decision-making.

The law provides a means for schools and districts to gain waivers from state laws and collective bargaining agreements. The law includes procedures and criteria for a school or group of schools within a school district to submit to its local board of education a proposed plan of innovation. A local school board may initiate and collaborate with one or more public schools of the school district to create innovation plans or innovation school zones. From the

The law:

• Allows a public school or group of public schools to submit to its school district board of education an innovation plan to allow a school or group of schools to implement innovations within the school or group of schools. The innovations may include but are not limited to innovations in delivery of educational services, personnel administration and decision-making, and budgeting.

• Requires the local board to review each submitted plan and approve the school as an innovation school or the group of schools as an innovation school zone or reject the plan.

• Allows a local board to initiate creation of a plan in collaboration with one or more schools of the school district. The law specifies the minimum contents of a plan, including the level of support needed from the personnel employed at the affected schools.

• Encourages schools, groups of schools, and local boards to consider innovations in specified areas and to seek public and private funding to offset the costs of developing and implementing the plans.

• Allows a local board to submit the plan to the commissioner of education and the state board of education and seek designation as a district of innovation (following creation or approval of one or more plans by the local board).

• Directs the commissioner and state board to review and comment on the plan, and directs the state board to make the designation unless the plan would likely result in lower academic achievement or would be fiscally unfeasible.

• Requires the state board to provide a written explanation if it does not make the designation.

• Directs the state board to grant any statutory and regulatory waivers requested in the plan for the district of innovation, however, certain statutes may not be waived by the state board.

Status

• Implementation procedures, guidance and the statute are currently on the CDE Web site.
• CDE staff has worked with several school districts interested in submitting District of Innovation applications. One district application is currently pending action as of March 2009.

Next Steps

• Collaboration with numerous stakeholder groups continues – Colorado Children’s Campaign, Colorado Association of School Boards, Colorado Common Good, Donnell-Kay Foundation and Metro Organization for People. The groups are in the process of developing technical assistance materials including, for example, model school board policies and procedures, schematics and other helpful information.

• Some stakeholder groups are interested in holding forums and workshops for interested applicants.

• Include school and district personnel in future stakeholder meetings to determine technical assistance needs and what organizations (CDE, foundations, or non-profits) can best assist applicants with specialized needs.

More Information; Innovation Schools; Contact
William Windler, Colorado Department of Education, 201 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, CO 80203 windler_w@cde.state.co.us

(Added: 11/26/2008 | Last Modified: 3/12/2009)

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The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is, according to its promoters, a “nationwide network of open-enrollment college-preparatory public [charter] schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States.” KIPP schools have been heavily promoted in the monopoly media as the key to “closing the achievement gap”. Particular attention has been given to a book celebrating KIPP by Washington Post writer Jay Mathews. The book is titled after the KIPP program theme: Work Hard, Be Nice.

KIPP began in 1994 when Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg completed their Teach For America commitment and launched a program for fifth graders in a public school in inner-city Houston, Texas. Early on, Doris and Donald Fisher, co-founders of Gap Inc., took the lead in bankrolling efforts to replicate KIPP across the U.S. At least $150 million in private funds have been given to KIPP by known supporters of eliminating public education such as the Broad Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

Although promoted as an open enrollment school, any family wishing to have its children attend KIPP must undergo a home visit by school personnel, where the family and student(s) are instructed in what is required by the KIPP program. Students and parents must sign a contract agreeing to KIPP methods and aims. Even with these selective methods, researchers found that only 60% of originally enrolled students completed the program in one San Francisco KIPP school. Sara Mosle, an education writer for Slate Magazine, found that “the academic program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day every other Saturday…. There is a lot of rote learning and test prep,” at KIPP, she said.

According to education researcher Jim Horn, KIPP adopts the motivational methods of psychologist Martin Seligman. Horn notes that Seligman’s methods are also used by CIA interrogators, who use his method of “learned helplessness” to control “terrorists.”

Reports of KIPP Abuse and Cheating

Between April and June 2008, parents of children attending KIPP Academy Fresno Charter Middle School (California) filed multiple complaints with the Fresno Unified School District about practices at the school. Even though the District passed the complaints to the KIPP Board to investigate, the Board had no authority to demand answers or to make personnel changes and, therefore, advised the District to take charge of the investigation.

Following an investigation, a 64 page Notice to Cure and Correct report was issued on December 11, 2008 to the general counsel for San Francisco-based KIPP schools. The principal of the school has since resigned (though his name is still listed on the KIPP website), but no charges have been filed against him or the school. The school remains open.

Similar complaints have been made against a KIPP school in Fulton County, Georgia. Although released more than three months ago, no major news outlet has carried the story of the Fresno KIPP report detailing abuse and cheating, nor does the Atlanta Journal Constitution, in covering the Fulton KIPP case, mention Fresno.

Below are excerpts from the report. Note the names of many of witnesses were blocked out in the report. The complete report can be downloaded from here.

Alleged Abusive of Students

Witnesses saw Mr. Tschang (the school’s principal) “pick up a student off the ground, hold the student by the neck against a wall, and then drop the student.” When asked about this incident Mr Tschang stated, “I don’t remember picking up and dropping a student, I do remember shaking a kid.”

Witnesses report Tschang push another student’s face against the wall and saying, “Put your ugly face against the wall, I don’t want to see your face.”

Another student reported witnessing Mr. Tschang “draw a circle on the ground and force a student to stand in the circle for two hours in the sun during the summertime.”

A student at KIPP from 2004 to 2007, stated that in the 04-05 term he saw “Mr. Tchang pick students up and drop them. If a student wasn’t sitting correctly he would pick them up by their shirt, move the chair, and drop them on the floor.”

A student said that in December of 2007, Mr. Tschang told him to get on his hands and knees and bark like a dog.

Students who were late to school “would not be allowed to eat their meals provided by the state.” Student (name deleted) stated that Mr. Tschang told her, “People who are late don’t get to eat.”

A parent reported that Mr. Tschang took a student’s “glasses away from him because” he “was constantly adjusting his glasses.” The student is totally dependent on his glasses and cannot see without them. “Mr. Tschang admitted to taking (name deleted) glasses away.”

“Several students stated that students are not allowed to talk or socialize at all during school hours.” When asked about this policy, Mr. Tschang stated, “If parents are not happy with the school program, it is a school of choice. They are free (and indeed encouraged) to remove their kids from the school. There are plenty of other public school options for their children.”

A parent “confronted Mr. Tschang about yelling at her daughter who was a student at the school.” She reported that she told Mr. Tschang she did not appreciate Mr. Tschang yelling at her daughter. Mr. Tschang responded, “well next time I won’t yell, I will ask you to leave the school.” Mr. Tschang told the investigator, “my thought on this is if a parent or child is not happy with our disciplinary methods; to get the results we do, discipline and structure is a part of the way we instruct; you can’t have it both ways. This is a school of choice.”

It was reported that Mr. Tschang put “the entire 5th grade class into a two stall bathroom and kept them there for 20 minutes. …

Mr. Tschang admitted that he did ask students to go into the bathroom and figure out a way to solve the bathroom vandalism issue.”

“Mr. Tschang put a garbage can on a student’s head. Mr. Tschang admitted to putting the garbage can over the student’s head because the student, (name deleted), had been clowning around.”

“A 5th grade class had their behavior tested by being left unattended in the cafeteria where a video camera recorded their actions. Mr. Tschang told the investigator that this was an exercise to ask the students the question, “What are you doing when no one is watching?”

“A common complaint from students was that teachers were not letting student go the bathroom.” One student reported that “there was a student in Ms. Sosa’s class who urinated in his pants because he was not allowed to use the restroom.” Student who started with the Charter School in 2004 and just graduated in 2008, stated, “They would not let us use the bathroom during classes. Parents heard about this and they had to have a meeting to get hem to alow us this, to allow us to go to the bathrooms.”

Alleged Irregularities in Standardized Testing

The report indicated that “tests were stored in a location where students and parents had access to the tests;” two years in a row, the Charter School failed to abide by mandated testing procedures, and the testing coordinator failed to report testing irregularities for the 2005-2006 STAR testing session; “the school adopted a policy that students were required to check their answers again and again after they had finished their tests and were not allowed to do other activities”; “teachers recorded students’ answers during testing, reviewed students’ tests, and told students which page to correct”.

In a staff meeting in May of 2006, staff were told by the principal that the legal and ethical guidelines for testing were, in fact, only guidelines that could be ignored.

Alleged Efforts to Cheat the National School Lunch Program

“Vincent Montgomery was the Charter School’s Chief Operating Officer from February 2005 to April of 2006. He told investigators that Mr. Tschang would ask him why the school was losing so much money on the school lunch program and instructed Mr. Montgomery to count students as present whether they were there or not. Mr. Montgomery disagreed because he thought that this practice was illegal.”

Suspension and Suspension Procedures

Throughout the school years from 2004 to 2008, the Charter School failed to abide by the California Eduation Code grounds and procedures for suspension of students.

The report found that a student was “left outside without supervision for three hours for a minor infraction that occurred during breakfast.”

Witnesses report “students being forced to stay in small rooms near the school’s office for hours or even entire days withou supervision”. Parents “of suspended studetns were frequently not notified of the suspensions.”
Students were routinely sent home for non-serious offenses like talking in class, chewing gum, and bringing a mechanical pencil to school.

The report also found that “students were routinely transported from school without their parents being notified.”

Work Hard, Be Nice, Or Else

While several corporate charter school supporters — including Jay Mathews — have attempted to hide these crimes or present them as anomalies, still insisting KIPP schools as the “most successful public schools” in the United States, the crimes reported in the Fresno Unified School District report are consistent with what Mathews himself chronicles in his book celebrating KIPP. With apparent approval, Mathews speaks of how the KIPP founders Levin and Feinberg loaded children into a windowless U-Haul trailer for a local field “lesson” and how Feinberg smashes a chair through a plate glass window in front of children who failed to be silent during a movie (see Jim Horn’s essay review).

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Before addressing the political basis of this methodological project, it is important to note that the authors make the mistkae that Robert Yin suggests is all too common: research on school performance confounds schools as the proper unit of analysis with individuals; this is especially common with those obsessively turning to randomized field trials. (See Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.)

I think exposing their position as emanating from political theory — rather than an thoughtless imports from the natural and sciences — might prove helpful in both evaluating the book and articulating the political significance of school choice policy more generally.

Random Trials as Opportunity Science

Of note is the book’s adoption of U.S. Department of Education, and in particular the Institute of Educational Sciences, insistence on the “gold standard” of experimental design: the “random assignment of units to experimental and control or contrast conditions (2).”

“Randomized field trials” are thus adopted as the key method for studying school choice. By studying the measurable outcomes of applicants who were lotteried into an oversubscribed charter school or voucher program to those who were lotteried out and attended a traditional public school, the influence of family background can be separated out from that of the school itself (but again, this promotes confusion regarding the unit of analysis).

According to the authors, the strength of this method and other efforts such as over time measures of “value added,” is that they help “take into account the powerful influence of families” and help “establish the separate and distinct contribution of the school to a student’s achievement.”

The postulate that experimental design is equally the gold standard for the social sciences as it is for the natural sciences is taken for granted. It presents itself as a solution to a perennial problem in school evaluation research predating even the “Coleman Report”: controlling for the influence of family characteristics on school outcomes. It seems as a rational way out of that conundrum — but only if certain things are ignored or forgotten.

What is the assumption behind the presupposition that students must be separated from their historical position, their social circumstance, in order to assess the quality of their school and the degree to which they have learned what is required of them? How does this premise inform the cultural meaning of “achievement” as distinct from student learning?

What is the political significance of the fact that this kind of “controlling” for social circumstance was largely impossible under a traditional public school model where place of residence determined school assignment for all but a tiny minority of public school students?

Irrespective of the logic justifying the “controlling” for social circumstance, is not such a project irrational? Can one “control” for social circumstances? Such efforts reveal a profound distortion and patently unscientific view of social reality. Does not the entire project of “controlling” for social circumstance — which includes everything from assumptions about “ethnicity” and parental “SES” to larger understandings of religion, culture and sub-cultures of neighborhoods — itself constitute a social circumstance and a patently normative project which serves the interests of some over others?

Political Logic of Random Selection

In beginning to answer my own question posed above (“What is the political significance…”) I am not arguing with the general logic of the controlled experiment, or the statistical reality of randomization and its utility for understanding cause and effect. What I am arguing is that this fetish of random trials pushed by the IES is derived from the following notion: that schools are successful to the degree they produce students who successfully compete in the academic marketplace (the exchange of grades and test scores for places of opportunity, praise and so on). Closing the achievement gap is an official effort to contend with the overgrowth of social inequality while simultaneously violently blocking any real effort or even discussion of reducing (let alone eliminating) social inequality. This pathology stems from the long-standing assumption of American political theory that replaces class struggle with the struggle for education. (Refer to classic quotes from Horace Mann for an elaboration, or even better, see Rush Welter’s (1962) Popular education and Democratic Thought in America.)

The underlying logic of this strand of charter school research (Berends et al.) is that charters should be promoted, not because they are necessarily proven to be better, but because they create competition — not only among schools, but among teachers, as researchers document a lower average salary, yet a larger spread in annual earnings for charter as compared to traditional public school teachers. Randomization is opportunity science speak for fair competition (e.g., no “selection bias”).

This competition is key because it allows for arrangements heretofore difficult to make, like linking student achievement with teacher pay, something the authors deem of obvious value and unproblematic. Teachers are evaluated on the degree to which they help students compete (e.g., note the language and real meaning of “high flying schools”), irrespective of the background and ability of the students. Good teachers are those whose students successfully compete in academic competitions (i.e., high stakes tests). Charter schools eschew the working class politics of union and solidarity and stand as institutions more firmly on the grounds of individual merit and competition. That is to say, good teachers are those that help liberate students from their social place through academic competition (again, there are other notions of “good teacher”) just as black and poor kids are supposed to “achieve” because in this “meritocracy,” race and class aren’t factors in determining ones place in the social order — charters are to replace public schools as the means for this liberation. Those that have a different view are deemed to have a bad attitude (“low expectations”).

The logic goes like this: pointing to realities of structural inequality and the impact “going without” has on child development (and thus “achievement”) introduces bias, just as introducing lotteries eliminates it. One could of course point out that it is quite biased to set up a social system which forces some more than others to be in positions where they need to “choose a good school.” This question has of course been forced off the agenda by advocates of “change” and “innovation”.

Randomization helps create, then, as a standardized norm-reference test does, a “fair playing field” — a free market, unencumbered by the realities of ones historical location, only “merit” rules. Like academic tests, charters, the logic goes, are the engine of a meritocracy for educational institutions, and the “best and brightest” will rise to the top, but could fall any moment, like a dot.com, if they don’t continually “strive” and “achieve”.

In this way, the research continues not because it is helping to answer questions of policy makers or the public (an admission that openly appears in the book) but because it is a mechanism for instituting more forcefully that arrangement of which charters are a part. The idea that one “lotteries” into a school not only suggests an open disregard for planning for the future of youth, a willingness to gamble on their future, but also a particular notion of fair play — rich and poor are equally selectable by the dice.

This entire view is antithetical to education as a right and signals an outright rejection of the notion that society has any responsibility to its members. Yet, successful schools are those that are not able to coach kids to the top of the heap, but prepare them for full participation in social life, in solving problems, etc.

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