TFA Corps: Corporate America's Paris Island

KIPP: ". . .it's almost like a cult"

Bill was an experienced urban teacher when he came to Memphis to teach at KIPP.  Like other teachers I have interviewed, he found himself so compromised and burned out that he did not last very long.  When he unexpectedly was offered an opportunity in another state, he bailed.  Here are a few excerpts from our conversation:

INTERVIEWER: How do you think KIPP achieves its purpose and its aims?

BILL: They don’t, not in Memphis, and, you know, I knew about KIPP __________ when I was working down there as well. They don’t achieve their aims. Here’s what KIPP’s MO is. They’ll take kids who are academically the lowest of the low, whose test scores—they’re not at the bottom—they’d already reached the bottom and had begun to dig. They’ve dug a hole. And they take all those kids. And then they tell the public, well, yeah, they’re not passing yet, but they are improving. Well, yeah, the kids have nowhere to go but up.

And through rote memorization, you can turn a kid into a robot. Doesn’t know how to think. Doesn’t know how to process. But you can turn a kid into a robot where he’ll get enough to improve on the test. But long-term, it’s not going to happen. Are there kids who come out of KIPP schools who do well in college? Absolutely. But there are kids who come out of every school who do well. Are there are teachers at KIPP schools who are good teachers? Yes. But from what I saw, I don't know where they come from, because they’re running off more good teachers than they’re keeping. Of the ten teachers who were at KIPP Memphis, and I didn’t know this until I actually arrived on campus. But of the ten teachers that they had for the 201_-201_ school year, only two survived.

. . . .What it is, is they take these, like I said, they take these young kids [young teachers] and they indoctrinate them into the KIPP way. Whether it works or not doesn’t really matter. It works from KIPP’s perspective; the teachers who stay are indoctrinated. It’s almost, and I hate to use this word, but I’m going to anyway. But it’s almost like a cult. 

. . . . 

INTERVIEWER: You didn’t hear dialogue with students?

BILL: No. No. It’s, like, you know, the students came in. The browbeating was all day, if you will. They were going to do things one way, the KIPP way. It’s what I kept hearing, it’s the KIPP way.  OK. The whole idea of grit and determination, you know, if you just do 80 hours a week, you'll be successful. I’m, like, really? How about worker smarter, not harder? Like I said, it wasn’t a good fit. And I knew it. They knew it. And when an opportunity arose, I jumped at it. I will say this. On some level, I feel really bad about leaving Memphis because I think, I’m pretty sure that there were a few kids that I could have reached if I didn’t get fired along the way. I’m a firm believer that if you save one, you save the world. And I miss teaching. I’m no longer in education. I’m now an ___________consultant for a _______ company. I miss the classroom. I miss the interaction with the kids. I miss being _________ , because I’m not _________ anymore. I’m just Bill at work.

. . . . 

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that there was a possibility of turning kids into robots. Did you see kids being turned into robots?

BILL: Yeah, that’s all KIPP does. I’m convinced that’s what their whole MO is . . . they think that the idea to help young urban youth is to turn them into automatons. I don't believe that. I believe that in order to help any young person, you have to get them to think. And that means that they can disagree with you. Used to tell the kids all the time, you can disagree with me all you want. You'll be wrong, but that’s OK. It was actually a quotation from one of my professors in college. That’s where I got that. It’s the whole idea of Socratic teaching. The whole idea of Socratic, you know, dialoguing and critical thinking is to get these kids to think. They can form their own opinions. That’s my feeling. That’s not the KIPP way.

. . . .

INTERVIEWER: So how does your experience teaching at KIPP compare to your other experiences?

BILL: I’m a teacher. And I wasn’t teaching at KIPP. You know? I had moments, brief flashes where I was.

INTERVIEWER: What were you doing?

BILL: Just teaching, like I said, the conversations with the kids. That was the worst ______ months of my career. And yet, you can always try to find a silver lining in it with the kids. I keep going back to the kids. My wife and I have talked about this. You know, I was talking the other day. Will I ever be a teacher again? I don't know. I don't know what the future will hold. I would like to think that some day that I might be a teacher again. But it would have to be under the right circumstances. And the right circumstances to me, I don't necessarily need 100% autonomy in the classroom. I’m not a college professor. At the same time, I want to be appreciated for my experience. I want to be appreciated for the things that I do. You know, it’s the old saying, leave me alone. As long as the kids are learning, what does it matter? You don’t have to understand it. And so who knows what will happen? I’m happy now at my current position.

. . . .

INTERVIEWER: So when you're having your day and you're going along and suddenly KIPP comes to mind, is there an image that stands out to you?

BILL: Yeah, the administration telling me that they could change me into a KIPP teacher.

INTERVIEWER: How does that make you feel?

BILL: It made me feel almost like my entire career had meant nothing. And you know what really angered me about it? I had kids on the south side of _____________, who when they came to me as juniors had no idea that they were really going to go to college. And two years later, they were not only going to college, they were ready. And I still get emails from them. One of them told me that she went down to [local college]. She walked into class the first day and when the teacher handed them the syllabus, she started laughing. She knew that she wouldn’t have any problem. The work was obviously a little different, but she wouldn’t have any problem doing the work.

. . . . BILL: You know what it reminded me? I’m sitting here thinking about it. KIPP reminds me of Brave New World. They’re trying to feed the kids the soma. And I guess people all over the country are buying it because they don’t think that there’s any way else to reach these kids. So when you have somebody that comes in and says, wait a minute, there is a way to reach them, and really reach them, that person can’t last in society. Didn’t happen in Huxley’s book. And it didn’t happen to me at KIPP.

KIPP Gets $20 Million in Tax Dollars As Nashville Continues to Delay Action on Public Housing Rebuild

Mayor Karl Dean started the money ball rolling toward KIPP, Inc. in 2010, even as Metro public schools were using garbage cans to catch rain water from leaky roofs and children were forced to have lunch in hallways.  Dean committed 10 percent of Metro's 4 year capital improvement funds for schools to this one project.

Four years later, the new KIPP Academy is about to open after the City used over 19 million public dollars to renovate a building that will be used by a non-public corporation.  Will Bill Gates or the Fisher Family or the Broad Foundation help rebuild public housing in the neighborhood where this new segregated KIPP is opening?  Didn't think so.



Nearby at Cayce Place, public housing residents are still waiting for some action on a talked-about renovation of 716 units that are home for some 2,000 residents. 

Opposition the Common Core is More than Opposition to Testing

"Promoters of Common Core say that it is designed to make America’s children 'college and career ready.'  We instead judge Common Core to be a recipe for standardized workforce preparation." --132 Catholic Professors

With the Chicago Teachers Union now officially in opposition to Common Core, Randi Weingarten is in a big PR push to do what she can to save the CC for her plutocratic power base responsible for commissioning this awful version of national standards from the corporatocracy's curriculum expert and once-part-time tutor, David Coleman.  

Linda Darling-Hammond has now joined Weingarten in pretending that the primary reason for opposing Common Core has everything to do with high-stakes testing.  Here is the beginning of a recent piece in Huffington Post:

Voices across the country are raising concerns about the new Common Core State [sic] Standards. But if you listen carefully to the conversations, the main concern is not about the standards, themselves, but about the consequences of high-stakes tests attached to the standards.

Now certainly high-stakes testing is a primary concern of anyone wishing to preserve public schools, student diversity, inclusive classrooms, and humane school learning practices, for we know that without the eradication of HST, none of these things is possible. 

But the opposition to Common Core is not limited to opposition to a high-stakes testing. If by some miracle high-stakes testing disappeared tomorrow, opposition to common core would continue, some for ludicrous reasons, i. e., CC will make your children gay, and many for excellent reasons that focus on curriculum quality, age appropriateness, college readiness, intellectual and moral development, and the long-standing values of civilization.

Dr. Carolyn Wallace, for instance, calls our attention to several glaring reasons to oppose CC that has nothing to do with tests: science teachers were not involved in the decision to use standards to improve the learning of science, and the standards were produced by non-teachers.  Dr. Wallace has noted, too, that CC creates barriers to quality science education that would continue to exist even if high stakes testing disappeared:

1) The tightly specified nature of successful learning performances precludes classroom teachers from modifying the standards to fit the needs of their students.

2) The standards are removed from the thinking and reasoning processes needed to meet them.

Numerous scholars and educators have noted, too, that the research does not support CC Standards as a viable way to improve raise student achievement.  The Brown Center in 2012 concluded that the rigor of state standards is not related to NAEP scores.  

More recently, the Brown Center and Brookings issued another report that found that  “states with standards most different from the CCSS . . . gained the most on NAEP" (p. 29).  Offering this dismal assessment of prospects for states adopting Common Core, the Brookings research estimates

it will take 24 years for a noticeable improvement to unfold. And that improvement would add up to 7.62 NAEP scale score points, a gain in 24 years that falls far short of the 22 point gain that NAEP registered in its first 23 years [without Common Core] (p. 32).

And then there is the issues around preserving diversity of thought and freedom to decide what our children learn and what values will best sustain our civilization--if that is possible.  These most important questions have never been put on the table by the corporationists who are now wringing their hands as their ill-fated attempted takeover of schools begins to melt away under closer inspection by scholars and the public.  

If there are ever to be national learning standards that are consistent with our democratic principles, the effort now underway by the oligarchs must be discarded. 

Any new effort must begin with a thorough and open and research-based dialogue about whether national standards are needed or desired.  That has never occurred, and until it does, any attempt at imposing a more draconian version of social engineering posing as equal educational opportunity is doomed to fail.  

The sooner Randi Weingarten and her patrons realize this, the sooner we can move toward begin working in concert to design schools aimed to preserve sustainability and create a planet that is livable and fair for all, rather than to perpetuate a cancerous inequality that promises nothing but political and environmental catastrophe.

For a complete library of reasons to reject Common Core, go to Susan Ohanian's site here.