Success Academy Lies to Parents about September 30 Political Rally

from Politico:

Employees of Success Academy, New York City's largest charter school network, have been instructed to tell parents an upcoming rally organized by a well-funded charter advocacy group is "not political," according to a document obtained by POLITICO New York.

The five-page document was sent by Success' "advocacy team" and is billed as "messaging assistance" intended to help staff convince families of Success students to attend the Sept. 30 pro-charter rally and march across the Brooklyn Bridge organized by Families for Excellent Schools.

Success administrators are also strongly encouraging parents to attend the rally and march even if it presents hardships for them in terms of arranging for child care or taking time off from their jobs.

"This is not a political event," employees are being asked to tell parents who may be hesitant about participating in a rally with political implications. "This is an event in support of your scholar, our school, and the right for families to have access to equal schools."

But when parents ask the purpose of the rally, staffers should respond, "we are rallying to call on Mayor de Blasio and the rest of our city's leaders to end this system of inequality," according to the document.

The flyer begins with a plea to staffers, in bright red font: "Please do not pass this FAQ out to parents.". . .

Eli Broad's California Strategy, Part 1: Million$ for "Grassroots" Organizing

Mike Simpson posted a link to the Broad battle plan to convert LAUSD into a charter school system.  A central part of that plan calls for millions of dollars to buy support for charter expansion, and the two main organizations to help in that are owned by Broad's toadies: Parent Revolution and the California Charter Schools Association.  

Broad wants half of all LA Schools by 2022.

Broad's plan is designed to exploit poor parents and their children to advance the billionaires' paternalistic end game to dehumanize education for the poor and to make money, lots of money, while doing it.  

Link here for full document.

Slippery Bill Haslam Caught in a Web of Lies

Bill Haslam and his billionaire cronies have a plan to privatize Tennessee state prisons, parks, higher education facilities and services, hospitals, and military installations, "including everything from security and custodial work to financial accounting and business operations.  

Today's News-Sentinel has more details on the Haslam plan, which is costing the state more for private consultants than the state employees assigned to come up with the implementation plan.  You might call it the Blackwater Model, after the corporate welfare contractors and mercenaries in Iraq who got filthy rich while military personnel could not feed the families back home.

From today's story:

NASHVILLE — Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration is paying more each month to three consultants retained to develop plans for privatizing management of all Tennessee government-owned real estate than it paid in salaries to four state employees assigned to the effort, state figures show. 

The team is operating under the title Strategies for Efficiency in Real Estate Management, or SEREM, and is led by Terry Cowles, who is director of the governor’s Office of Customer-Focused Government. 

It was set up earlier this year and has a goal of implementing a broad new outsourcing plan by July 1, 2016, according to SEREM documents initially obtained by WTVF-TV, though Haslam insisted last week the idea is to just explore options for saving taxpayer dollars and that he has no bias toward privatization. . . .

This news comes even as Haslam has repeatedly denied that any implementation plan has been approved.  Can an implementation plan exist without state approval??  

Will NEA Follow Weingarten's Autocratic Hillary Endorsement?

Source here:

...Last summer, the NEA invited all presidential candidates to participate in the union’s endorsement process. Only Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders did so. Each made a video statement that was shown at the summer’s RA meeting and posted by many to their local groups. Though more candidates have entered the race since then, none have chosen to interview with the NEA. 

Ironically, at the same RA meeting, the assembly voted specifically NOT to ignore rank and file membership before endorsing a Presidential candidate. New Business Item 79 states: 

NEA, as an organization, will actively engage in conversation and outreach on the NEA endorsement process with all 2016 Presidential campaigns prior to the consideration of a primary recommendation. 

It seems if the leadership goes through with the primary endorsement as outlined above, they may be violating NBI 79. 

The move is doubly troubling because of the strong-armed manner in which the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Clinton in July. 

Though the AFT Executive Board voted to endorse Clinton, there is little evidence it did so after adequately gauging members opinions through claimed multiple surveys and telephone town halls. The move caused an uproar and claims the AFT endorsed too early and without rank and file support....

Open Letter to the Tennessee State Board of Education Regarding MNPS Charter Company Appeals

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Open Letter to the Tennessee State Board of Education Regarding MNPS Charter Company Appeals

On August 18, the Nashville Metro School Board voted to deny new charter applications from KIPP, Inc. and Rocketship, Inc. These companies are representative of the proliferating “No Excuses” charter chains that provide the kind of harsh, economically segregated, and paternalistic total compliance school experience that white philanthropists prefer for poor children of color.  

I strongly urge the State Board of Education to sustain the majority vote by the MNPS school board and to uphold the right of elected and local education agencies to determine the direction of public schools for the tax-paying communities they serve.

When two of the Metro school board members voted against the “no excuses” charter expansion based on what the Tennessean described as “perceived practices of the schools,” they were voting for children’s rights.  I am talking about the basic right to have a voice in school and to have resources that other public school children take for granted, rather than being forced into all-day silence, single file marching, zero tolerance discipline catechisms, constant test prep, and the behavioral straightjackets that keep “no excuses” charter children locked down at school. 

These school board members who oppose further charter expansion were voting for disadvantaged children to have a more integrated education with children of other racial and class backgrounds, rather than the kind of apartheid “no excuses” schooling that middle class parents would never, ever allow for their own children. 

They were voting for the children of poor parents to have the opportunity to participate in their education, rather than receiving it from marginally prepared and inexperienced teachers who are clueless about the many challenges and needs of children living in poverty. 

We applaud these school board members for standing up for parents who want public choices for their children, rather than the one-size-fits-nobody corporate reform schools that benefit hedge fund managers and the corporate charter school industry.

We support, too, those school board members whose votes against charter expansion are based on fiscal realism.  The present commitments to charter schools in Nashville Metro represent a massive, annualized siphoning of public resources that could be used to improve public school facilities, add science labs, re-hire librarians, improve student-teacher ratios, and to provide art and music education where none exists. 

Nashville-Metro is already underfunded in comparison to other urban districts in the South, and the district cannot possibly improve its current public school system while transferring hundreds of millions every year into the pockets of corporate charter school operators with minimal program oversight or fiscal accountability.

KIPP’s Director in Nashville, Randy Dowell, was furious following the MNPS board vote to deny his application.  He declared that KIPP had “done what the district has asked of us every single time,” and he argued further that the new applications followed the same template that KIPP had used when the Board had previously approved four KIPP schools in Nashville.  Dowell went on to protest that the Board’s recent vote to deny KIPP’s expansion plans in Nashville had been for “ideological reasons rather than on their merits.”

I suspect that Mr. Dowell’s billion-dollar company did, indeed, cross every “t” and dot every “i” in its application for KIPP expansion in Nashville.  Having a completed application does not entitle Mr. Dowell, however, to determine the outcome of his application, as any college freshman knows. 

Having a perfect application is not enough to get even the most eager student into Yale or the University of Virginia (Mr. Dowell’s alma mater). Whether college application, job application, or charter application, sometimes those evaluating your package decide that what you bring does not fit with the mission of the organization, or that the liabilities you bring with you outweigh any potential benefit. 

I agree with Mr. Dowell, too, that the Metro Board’s rationale for rejecting KIPP expansion is based on ideology if, by “ideology,” he means, as Webster’s defines it, “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.” 

Mr. Dowell’s case is weak for this very reason, as the policies of Nashville Metro Schools are intended to benefit first and foremost the taxpayers’ and the voters’ interests, along with the interests of our community’s children.  These are the same Nashville voters and taxpayers who decided most recently to turn down recent ballot appeals paid for by hedge fund managers, real estate moguls, and billionaire philanthropists. 

In short, I think the majority of Nashville citizens believe that the “no excuses” charter schools are not a good fit, and they introduce liabilities that far outweigh any claimed benefit.

Just a few days ago the national research firm, Mathematica, released the final part of an eight-year study that concluded that KIPP’s impact on test scores has dropped steadily since 2007, and that its brutal, dehumanizing practices do nothing to improve any of those behaviors or traits that KIPP has largely based its reputation: 

"Across grade levels, we generally find no impacts of KIPP schools on measures of students’ motivation, engagement, educational aspirations, or behavior. . . . At all three grade levels, KIPP did not significantly affect measures of motivation and engagement related to student self-control, academic motivation, academic confidence, grit, school engagement, or effort in school, including student reports of the time spent on homework" (p. xxii)

http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/~/media/publications/pdfs/education/kipp_scale-up_vol1.pdf

Finally, I think it is prudent for anyone hearing the “no excuses” charter appeals to keep in mind the sound reasoning by Board member, Jo Ann Brannon, who voted against corporate charter expansion for the most pragmatic of reasons.  How can anyone disagree with her when she points out that the District needs to “come up with a plan for charters before approving additional operators.”

Thank you for your kind attention.

Sincerely,

Jim Horn, PhD

Teaching Based on Doug Lemov's Robot Method

I posted this interview with former Brooklyn Ascend charter school teacher, Emily Talmadge Kennedy, in early 2014.  Given the firestorm over the Relay Graduate School's dependence on Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, I am re-posting that entire interview below.  In it Emily tells what it's like to teach in one of these oppressive, dehumanizing environments where children and teachers, alike, are roboticized into the KIPP Model of total compliance and parrot learning. 

Emily now happily teaches third grade in a Lewiston, Maine public school and has given permission to post her entire interview, which was originally conducted with an assurance of her anonymity. Since moving to Maine, she has become an outspoken advocate for children and against corporate education reform.  Emily's eloquence requires no embellishment.  Read her blog posts here.

As you read, you may want to keep a tally of ethical breaches and statute violations by Brooklyn Ascend.  I have heard all of these and more in interviews conducted with former KIPP teachers, which I will share in early in 2016.

INT: Tell me a little bit about your own education, and how you came to be a teacher.

R:  I grew up in Brunswick, Maine.  I went to public elementary and middle school, and then public high school for my senior year.  I actually went to boarding school for three years of high school.  I was at Exeter in New Hampshire.  I spent four years at Amherst College, and I was an art major.  I was a New York City teaching fellow, so I actually had no real education background. I moved to New York and started teaching at a public school for kids with severe special needs.  I taught a class of kids who had emotional disturbances.  It was third through fifth.  I did that for three years.  I carried through.  I had a group that I started with in the third grade, and went through with them to fifth.  After that, I thought, "I ought to try working at a charter school."  That was how I ended up at Brooklyn Ascend, and how I ended up getting in contact with you.  That's the short version.

INT:  The first school you taught at that you worked with these children from third through fifth grade?

R:  Yeah.

INT:  Was that a regular public school?

R:  It was a regular public school.  It was part of what's called District 75, which is the district that they have in New York City for kids with special needs, with autism, or mental [challenges], or emotional disturbances.  Yes, it was a regular public school.  It was PS 352 up in the Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx.

INT:  How did you find about the opening at Brooklyn Ascend?

R: I found it on idealist.org.  They had a posting saying that they were looking for a special educator.  It didn't end up being a special education position.  That was what they were advertising for, that they needed a pull out teacher to work with small groups of kids.  It was third grade.  It sounded like something I would be qualified for.

INT:  You went for an interview.

R:  I did.  They hired me almost right away.  I was also looking at a couple other charter schools, at Harlem Success who had actually also offered me a position.  It would be teaching second grade coaching teaching.  When I told them that I had been offered a position at Harlem Success, they immediately offered me a position, and offered me a salary that was a little bit more than I was getting at the public school.  I was getting fifty four thousand that year at the public school, my last year at public school.  They offered me sixty thousand five hundred, which to me sounded like a lot.  As soon as I saw that number, I thought, "All right.  I'll give this a shot."

INT:  When you went looking for an opportunity to teach in a charter school, can you talk about that a little bit?  Why a charter school?

R:  At the time I didn't know a whole lot about them.   I actually hadn't seen it yet.  I had seen the advertisement for Waiting for Superman.  I had this idea in my head that charter schools were, and I think I even said at the time that they were, "getting the job done."  I didn't really know what I meant by that.  What I was looking for was just a different type of experience after working at the public school that I had been at for three years.  I had heard that you can get paid more at a charter school.  I had heard that they treat teachers more like professionals at charter schools.  I don't even know what else I heard.

I went on the web sites, and I had found a couple of schools that had really nice looking websites.  Harlem Success had one.  There was this school called Harlem Village Academy in Harlem that had one also.  I had heard that charter schools are closing the achievement gap.  There are these certain schools that are really making it work.  I didn't really do my homework before I got into it. A lot of what ended up happening, ended up really surprising and disappointing me.

INT:  Let's talk a little bit about that.  I guess I could phrase it this way.  How was the experience of working in a school different from your expectations?

R:  I had thought that I would be treated like a professional, and that teaching would somehow be seen as a respected job.  I don't really know what I expected, looking back.  I know that when I got there, they immediately changed what I had applied to do.  I had applied to be, and they had hired me as a third grade pull out teacher.

A couple of months into the year, they gave the students a mock ELA test and a mock math test.  They panicked, and realized that the kids weren't really doing very well, or that they weren't on track, just pulling threes and fours at the end of the year.  They decided to completely rearrange the third grade.

INT:  What kind of tests did they give them?

R:  They gave them a mock ELA.  You know New York State has a state exam each year, and they gave them a mock test.  I think it was one from one of the previous years.  These are done about once a month, all through the school year, gave them a mock test to see what their progress was.  They completely changed it, and then they decided to restructure the third grade.

They had us come in over Christmas break, and told us that I was no longer going to be the pull out teacher.  They were going to put all of the lowest performing kids into one class, and have it so there was the low, medium and high class.  Now all of a sudden, I had a class of thirty scholars, we had to call them.  I was only allowed to teach reading and math.  I really wasn't even allowed to plan my own lessons.

That was a big difference than what I had expected versus what actually happened.  I had it in my head that I would be working in this place where teaching is really respected.  Then I ended up having to spoon feed to the kids.  They were handing everything to me, saying, "You have to teach this lesson, and this lesson."  I felt more like a robot for a while, to be honest.  It was pretty miserable.

INT:  What were these lessons like?  Were they scripted lessons?  Did you have a script?

R:  What they did is we had at Brooklyn Ascend a data analyst.  She's a former Teach for America person.  I think she was a PhD in Data Instruction, or something like that.  Basically, she took the mock ELA and the mock math data and analyzed it, and came up with these certain concepts that the kids weren't doing well on.  Some certain percentage hadn't done well on the main idea questions.  Some certain percentage hadn't done well on making inferences in narrative procedure type passages.  Just pulled right from the test.  I'm trying to get this all right.  Our data analyst basically pulled out these skills from looking at the mock data.   I remember another thing that really surprised me which was that I didn't have any authority to actually assess the kids myself.  Which for me was really disappointing because I had come from working with a really small group, and that was a big part of what I enjoyed about teaching.  Really getting to know the kids, and figuring out on a really deep level what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, why they're struggling in some parts of reading and not others.   That was something I loved about teaching.

All of a sudden, I had no power to do that at all.  We had to use documents placed in front of us that said, "This percentage needs to work on this."  Our school Director, who incidentally a Teach for America graduate, decided to take one of the second grade teachers and put her in charge of the third grade.  We now had this supervisor, and it was her job to come up with these scripted lessons that we would then have to present to the kids.

INT:  You had a script.  You had something to say, and the children had something that they were supposed to say back to you?

R:  Some of it was.  The lessons were scripted in that it was all written, like say such and such to the kids.  We had to do this thing where we had to snap our fingers and then the kids would repeat it back.  To me it was just complete and utter nonsense.  The kids aren't learning a thing this way.  It blew me away.  For some reason, nobody said anything about it, either.  Everybody was just going along with this way of teaching.  I don’t know--It felt like we were training dogs, with all the snapping.

INT:  Was their chanting also?

R:  We had to do the chanting, oh yeah.  Every morning we had to start out.  The way it worked is the kids would come in at seven-thirty.  They came in silently.  They had to walk in single file.  The first thing that would happen would they would stop in front of the doors to the cafeteria.  There would be a teacher sitting there who would pull up their shirt, and make sure they had a belt on.  Pull up their pants, pull up the bottoms and make sure they had on the right color shoes, and the right color socks.  If the top three buttons weren't buttoned, she'd button up the top button.

The kids would come in and they had to have breakfast completely silently, which I think is what they do at KIPP.  I'm not positive.   A completely silent breakfast, which was also fairly disappointing to me because at my old school, breakfast was a time when I'd chat with the kids about their weekend.  Get a sense of where they were at in their lives.  What was going on with them.  Are they having good days?  Are they having bad days?   Did they get their homework done?  Do they need any help with it?  This was a time to chat with the kids.  It was also a time I really liked.  Now I had to be completely, completely silent.

As teachers, we were required to carry these clipboards that had a list of each child's name.  Any time we had to give a kid a "correction," we had to mark it on the chart.  If a kid whispered to another one during breakfast, we had to write down "talking."  We had what I think at some schools they call it “Slant,” but at Brooklyn Ascend we called it STAR.  They had to sit up tall, track the speaker, attention forward, respect always.  That's what it stands for.  At breakfast, everybody'd come in silently, eat their breakfast silently.  They had a choice to either take out a book, or they had to sit with their hands folded in front of them.  I wasn't even allowed to talk to them.  Sometimes I'd secretly try to walk beside them and whisper, "Did you have a good weekend?  Is everything okay?"

Their eight year olds, and they need somebody to check in with.  At least that's the way I feel.  I had one little girl who I had moved into a shelter, but we had to whisper about it at breakfast.  She had to whisper and tell me, "Things are okay."  (Deep sigh.) It was awful.  A silent breakfast.  Silent breakfast would stop when one of the head teachers -- our third grade supervisor would stop and say, every morning was the same thing, it was "Good morning, scholars."  They'd say, "Good morning, Miss Bacon."  Then we'd say, "How do you feel today?"  Then they would say, "Hungry for knowledge to get us to college."

Then we'd do some other type of cheer, "Pick up your pencils, and you will be rewarded" was another one.  These all come right out of, I don't think they come from KIPP but I know that they use them at the Uncommon Schools, and a lot of the other charter schools in the area.  Every morning, right before you went upstairs, we had to say this one cheer, "What's out destination (clap clap)?  Higher education."  Have you heard that one before?

INT:  Mm hmm.

R:  We'd do that, and then the drums would start, and they'd have to march out silently.  Again, completely silent though the kids have been at school for thirty to forty minutes and have had a chance --

They--we'd walk out of the cafeteria around eight or eight ten.  Even after a weeklong vacation, they still haven't even had the chance to say good morning to each other.  They still haven't even had a chance to say good morning to the teacher.  It was crazy.  We'd go up to the classroom.  They'd go to their seats.  Their job was to silently take out a book.  They'd sit for another half an hour, doing completely silent reading.  This was for most of the year, except for starting December.  They'd come up, they'd unpack.  We'd have small groups where we had this scripted reading comprehensive test prep thing that we had to do.  Which was basically completely mimicking what happens on the state ELA test.  There was a reading passage, and they'd have to read it and figure out what answers to pick, and bubble it.  Sometimes we got to talk if we were doing that.  At eight thirty, it would be the first period of the day.  We'd start a lesson.  Even the lessons, there still wasn't an opportunity to talk.  Again, you asked what my expectations were versus what actually happened.  I thought that a school that really prides itself in giving the kids what they need, and bringing them to where they need to go, you would assume that it's going to foster some kind of community, and that the kids are going to get to know their teacher.  Something, but there was nothing.

You had to go right from silent breakfast to silent reading, to the first lesson.  Every single lesson had to be in the format of what's called I Do /We Do /You Do.  You've heard of that probably?

INT:  No, I haven't heard of that.

R:  I Do /We Do /You Do is one of Doug Lemov’s techniques.  Everything the lesson did had to be, first the teacher explicitly models how to do it on the board.  Let's say we're learning, if it were math, how to write a fraction.  You would say, "First, I'm going to show you how to do it."  Literally, we would have to say, "First, I'm going to show you.  Watch what I do.  I'm going to write the number 1, and then I'm going to draw a line, and write the number two."

That was the I Do.  Then We Do would be, "Now, can somebody help me do the next one?"  We'd do it together.  Then You Do would be we'd pass out worksheets, and the kids would do it on the worksheets.  It was always, always worksheets.  We did stacks, and stacks and stacks of worksheets.  You wouldn't believe how many worksheets these kids had to do.  It was crazy.  It all had to be in that format.  I Do.  We Do.  You do.  Then You Do would be independent worksheet time.  There was no pair work.  Nothing.

INT:  No group work, no cooperative group work?

R:  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Also, sometimes I would get in trouble because we got observed constantly.  The impression I got was that they thought the reason the third graders hadn't done well on that original mock exam was because the third grade instruction was off.  I was new to a charter school.  In fact, actually all four of us were new to charter school that year.  We were constantly being observed.  We had to come in over Christmas break, and do this whole training, and it was all based on Teach like a Champion, which is the Doug Lemov technique.  We were always being observed.

Our supervisor would come in and videotape, or check off that we were doing this, that and the other thing.  I used to present a question for the kids to ponder.  I like to start lessons like that from time to time.  Not all the time, but some times.  Let's look at this problem on the board.  Let's brainstorm some ways about how we might solve this.  We were not allowed to do that.  That was an inefficient use of the time.  I had to go right from teacher shows the kid how to do it, to We Do, to You Do.  Which I hated.  I couldn't get over how superficial it was.  I didn't understand how no one seemed to be saying anything about it.  It was like, "No.  This is just how things happen here.  We've got to get them ready for the tests."

INT:  Your three new colleagues, there were four sections of third grade, right?

R:  At first, there were three classes.  I was the pull out teacher.  They restructured it so that at first, I had the whole class of the lowest performing.  We had this one floating teacher who would teach some classes of different things, and coach each in some classes.  They changed it again.  I can't remember when.  I think it was in January or February.  The class that I was teaching we'd pull out not quite half, ten of them at a time, to a special room because they were starting to realize that having thirty "struggling kids" in one class wasn't really working out very well.  All sitting in rows.  All of the kids in my class, not all of them, but we had seven of them who had IEP.   You know what IEP is, right?

INT:  Yes.

R:  Individualized Education Program.  Of course.  Some of them with IEP, at least four of them, who had diagnosed ADHD.  These poor kids just had to sit there with their hands folded, and they would rock and they would tap.  Every time they would rock or tap or talk, you would have to mark it on the chart.  If you had to mark it three times, then they had to go to time out.  If they had to go to time out twice, they had to go to the Dean.   There was about five, six or seven kids who just couldn't get through it.  They were constantly either in time out, or in the Dean because they just physically were struggling to sit that still.

I don't blame them at all.  The kids that I had taught up in the Bronx, they also had ADHD.  Part of what I thought as my job was to find ways to make it so that even though they still had a lot of energy, and needed to move, and talk, and be active they could still learn.  There are so many things that you can do, I think, to be active, so that they can still learn.  Instead of this, they just got sent to the Dean.  I had one little boy who got suspended probably once or twice a week.  He wanted to talk, and he wanted to tap, and he didn't want to have to sit completely still.  He couldn't sit completely still like the rest of his peers.  It was really, really sad.  I didn't think it was fair to some.  It really was.

INT:  Were these children with special needs, were their needs being met?  Were their IEP's being paid attention to?

R:  I'll tell you what, I never saw them, because we had a special education coordinator.  She's the one that oversees what happens with all special education needs.  I never even got to see the kids IEPs, so I don't know exactly what they specified.  We did have one teacher for the whole school.  She was the SEP teacher, Special Education something, I can't remember what it stands for.  She would come once a week maybe, and take the kids out.  I honestly have no idea what she did with them.  I never saw an IEP.

INT:  You were their teacher but you never saw their IEPs?


R:  Nope.  Those were in the office with the special education coordinator.  Frankly, even if I had seen them, we literally weren't allowed to differentiate.  We had to teach every single lesson in the same exact format.  Every kid.  There was no concept of accommodating.  There was no concept of maybe having this one group work on something a little bit different.  It was the most rigid way of teaching. 

INT:  How did the parents of these children feel about that [the rigidity with no accommodations]?

R:  I don't really know because I don't really know if they were aware of what actually happened in the school.  I never saw a parent actually come in and observe a classroom.  I never once saw a parent actually in the school during school hours.  I don't think they really knew what their kid was being expected to do, and why they kept getting in trouble.  They just kept getting these phone calls saying, "So and so was talking during class.  We had to mark it down four times.  It disrupted everyone.  Now you have to come pick him up."  I don't think they really knew.

I do know that the one little boy that I was talking about earlier, his parents were getting angry with the school because the school was putting enormous, enormous pressure on them to have him medicated for ADHD.  There was this idea that the only way he was going to be able to stay in his seat was if he was on medication.  I'm not anti-medicine, but I have seen having worked with special kids up in the Bronx, kids that are way, way more extreme than this little boy was.  The fact that everyone was pushing meds for him so hard, it just didn't seem right to me. He was the kind of kid that if I had been given the opportunity, I really feel confident that I could have found ways for him to succeed in the classroom.  I don't think he was a kid that needed medication.  I'm not an expert for that obviously, but I know that his parents were getting very frustrated and had stopped showing up for the meetings.  In fact, I never really set them up.  Our supervisor set them up.

. . . .

So we would have our first class of English from 8:30 till ten.  Then we would have a twenty minute--once again silent--in that break, till 10:20.  They had to take out their books, and silently read.  We'd give them a little bit of Cheez-its or something.  Then we would go right into math.  Then they'd have the special.  They didn't get a break until 12:45. So they've been at school from 7:30 to 12:45, literally have not been given any opportunity to talk unless it's for an explicit question that the teacher's asked them.

INT:  What kind of specials did they have?

R:  How many specials did they have?  They had art a couple time a week.  It was just funny, though, because I was an art major.  The way art was taught blew my mind.  Even art was like, "Now pick up your black pen.  Draw a line down the center of the page."  It was just like fear that if we gave the kids any freedom at all that somehow the school would collapse which I didn't think was going to happen.

INT:  Every class was taught with this total compliance?

R:  I Do.  We Do.  You Do.  Do you have Doug Lemov's book, by any chance, to teach Teacher like a Champion?



INT:  I've read about Doug Lemav.  I haven't read his book.

R:  He's got a chapter in there about it.  Doug Lemov was the bible of our school.  If Doug Lemav said it in his book, it was how it was going to be done.

INT:  The world according to Doug?

R:  If Doug Lemov says, "I Do,  You Do,  We Do," then that's how every single lesson's going to get done.  If Doug Lemov said that call and response is a good form of teaching, where the teacher says, "Two times two is four," snap.  There was a lot of snapping, a lot of repeating.

INT:  You heard no resistance, or dissension among your colleagues?

R:  The one teacher I worked with had come to this school.  She'd been teaching through the Peace Corps in Thailand for a few years.  She felt very similar to the way I felt.  She was very shy.  She didn't really say a whole lot.  Her whole thing was that she was happy that she had a job at all.  She had just come back from Thailand. She moved right to New York.  I don't think she really wanted to argue with anything.  None of the other two teachers in my group were.  They just went with it.

How do I describe this?  There was a sense among us of competition.  I felt that in particular from this one teacher, that she was very competitive with the rest of us.  She would send out these long emails to our supervisor for all us.  I just got the sense that she was really trying to make herself look good all the time, and at other people’s expense.

There was, in fact one morning where I came into her room at seven AM to check in with her.  We were both teaching the same math lesson that day.  She looked at me and she literally said to me that she refused to speak to me if I ever came in her room after seven o'clock again, and that I needed to get out.  I came to her later, and was, "That was so disrespectful.  Why did you speak to me like that?"  She was, "I realize what the scholars need."  It was basically this whole thing of how she was doing it for the scholars, and I was being a slacker.  Frankly, I was in at seven and I had left at seven the night before.  I felt like I was doing a pretty darn good job.  One of my colleagues told me to get out of the room, and that she didn't want to speak to me.

INT:  The students got there at seven thirty.

R:  They did.

INT:  You guys got there at seven.

R:  We would get there some mornings at six, some mornings 6:30, some mornings at seven.  It just depended on how much you'd gotten done the night before.  During the heart of the year, I would say the really intense part which was the period between December and April break, because we were so focused on getting them ready for the test, we would come in at six and stay till seven, seven thirty, eight at night.  It was hard.

INT:  You're doing twelve to thirteen hour days.

R:  Yeah.  It was a lot.  It was a lot.

INT:  Let's get back to our lunch time.  They finally get lunch at 12:45, right?

R:  No.  12:45 is when they get recess.  They get recess only if they have completed the homework that we'd given them the night before.  If they have even one little section missing of their homework, then they don't get recess.  They have to sit at their seat.  It was indoor recess.  It was a maximum of fifteen minutes during lunch time.  At the beginning of the week, they could choose one game.  They had five different games like Sorry! or Connect Four.  That was their one game for the whole week.  They would get ten minutes to play because the last five minutes were for clean up.  They get literally ten minutes to sit on the floor, and play one game.  The same game all week.  That's it.

INT:  They'd play the same game for five days for ten minutes each day.

R:  Oh, you've got it.  That was recess.  They only got to do that if they completely, one hundred percent finished the homework from the night before.  It was crazy.

INT:  How long did these children work on their homework?  Would you estimate that they spent an hour?  Two hours?  Three hours?

R:  I would say about one hour.  That was what we aimed for, what they wanted us to aim to give the kids.  I wrote this in one of the emails that I sent.  For a while, they had all of the lowest performing kids, I think it was optional, the parents had to sign a form.  Most of them agreed that the kids would come in either for an hour before school, or an hour after school to do additional test prep.  For a lot of my kids, they would come in from 7:30.  The school day ended at 4:30.  They would stay an extra hour till 5:30.  They'd have to go home and do another hour of homework.  If they didn't get all of that done, the next day they wouldn't get that ten minute break.  To me, I thought it was inhumane.  I really did.  I was, "For an eight year old child to have to spend that much time with that short of a break, is this legal?  Can you really legally be doing this to these children?"  I guess they could.

INT:  Were you at this school for one year, two years?

R:  Yeah.  I was at this school until about a month ago.  I'm not sure if you got that email.  I didn't exactly get fired, per se.  It was a mutual parting.

INT:   I remember the story about your friend being gravely ill, right?  You mentioned you had a friend.

R:  Yeah.  My friend had fallen down the stairs.  I needed to take the day.  It was the third day that I'd asked to take off the whole year.  The other two times, one I was sick, and then another.  I didn't feel like I was screwing anybody over by taking that day.  My friend needed the help.  My boss, our school Director, he didn't want to hear it.  He told me that it seems that I had recently stopped being part of their mission, and that it wasn't helpful to have somebody on the team that wasn't part of the mission.  He said that I should resign.  I did, which was kind of foolish.

I kind of wish that I had actually just gotten fired because then I could be getting unemployment now.  It was a big relief.  It was sad.  I had actually called him back, and I was, "We can work this out.  It's not fair to the kids or me to go with this short of amount of time left."  The teachers were treated with the same total compliance attitude as the children were.  The fact that I had questioned things at times, or disagreed, or even said, "Wait a second.  This doesn't make sense.  I don't like this."  That wasn't tolerated.  At least I didn't feel like it was.

INT:  The children have their recess at 12:45.  At one o'clock, I assume that's lunch time, right?

R:  One o'clock we did a whole class trip to the bathroom.  All bathroom trips were whole class.  We had to walk down the hall.  I'm sure you've seen it at these charter schools.  It's called Halls.  What was it?

Hands by you sides,
Attention forward,
Lines straight,
Lines together,
Silent always.

That's how they had to walk down the hall.  We'd walk down.  We'd do a whole class bathroom trip.  It was their opportunity to go to the bathroom, basically for the rest of the day.  Unless they had an emergency, in which case we had a procedure for that.  They'd go down to lunch at 1:15.  I would say about fifty percent of the time they were allowed to have social lunch.  The other fifty had to be silent lunch because the day before had been too rowdy or something like that.  There were a lot of days where they had to have a silent lunch.

INT:  I missed that part there.

R:  About half the time they were allowed to have, we would call it social lunch.  The other half they had to have silent lunch.  It would be because the school Director had decided that the previous day's social lunch was too loud, or they had gotten too rowdy so the next day was completely silent.  There were literally some days where they'd come in at 7:30, and not be given any opportunity to interact with one another through the entire day.  Even after lunch, there was not.  That was the lunch period.

INT:  The lunch period is thirty minutes?

R:  No, the lunch period went from 1:15, and we could pick them up at 1:35.  That was also the teacher lunch period, from 1:15 to 1:35.  We got a twenty minute lunch.  We'd come back upstairs.  If the kids were in my class, they'd have an hour of reading comprehension or math.  After that, they did have PE.  What was called PE.  What PE looked like at our school was a structured dance class.  We had a dance teacher rather than a gym teacher.  The dance teacher would teach them these very choreographed routines that were really cute.  They looked really great, but they were very, very structured.  They had to learn all the steps.  It was for a performance they did at the end of the year.  Even PE time they didn't have a chance to kick a ball around, or play tag, or anything like that.  It was still one row in front, another row in the back, these are how the steps go.  Even PE was very, very structured and very controlled.

INT:  Did they dress out, or did they go to the gym?

R:  We had what we called the NPR. Brooklyn Ascend is not in a school building.  I'm not sure what it was before it was a school, but it's more like an office type building that they had converted into a school.  There wasn't a real gym.  There was NPR downstairs, which is what they used for the cafeteria for breakfast and lunch.  They pushed the tables to the side, and that would become the PE room.  That's where they went for that.

INT:  That happened after lunch.

R:  After lunch, they would have a period of either math or reading.  Which again, from December to May was a scripted test prep lesson almost always.  They would have that, and come back for the last period of the day.  If they had reading after lunch the first period, then they would do math the second, or we'd flip flop.  That brought us to almost four o'clock, or 3:45.  We'd pack up.  They would get a snack, and again this snack was a silent snack.  They'd get their book bags, one at a time.

We had a very strict procedure of how the kids went up and got their belongings.  Each kid had what's called a snapshot, where we'd sign the snapshot.  They got a zero, one or two for behavior that day.  They got a zero, one or two for their homework, and whether they got a zero, one or two for attendance and punctuality.  We'd circle that.  Put it in their homework folder.  They'd put it in their book bags.  They'd have silent snack.  Then it was time to go home.  That was the day.

INT:  They'd have math, reading and PE.

R:  In the afternoon, yes.  The higher kids, the kids that didn't do quite so poorly on the first mock exam were allowed to have a period of science in the afternoon.  They got science for part of the time, and then I think they switched to social studies.  My kids, because everybody was so panicked that they weren't going to pass the reading and math state exams, got no social studies and no science.  Which wasn't very nice for them, because they were, "Why don't we get science?  We like science?  Why don't we get social studies?"  It was quite unfair to them.

INT:  If your children went home at four o'clock, why were you there until six or seven?

R:  The kids were gone by 4:45, because from four o'clock to about 4:20 was pack up, snack, and things like that.  We had to lead them outside, and wait for the parents to come.  That would take another twenty minutes.  At the end of the day, every Wednesday we would have a team meeting.  That would usually take up at least an hour, hour and a half.  How did it work?  After a while they stopped actually scripting and handing us the lessons, and said, "This is what you have to write lessons about."  We had to stay and write the lessons, and make copies.  What else?  There was all this paperwork, too.  Also we had to make phone calls.  At the end of the day, any child who left the day on Fix It or Stop.  What we had in the classroom was a behavior system where every kid would start out at the top of the chart with a green circle that said, "College Bound."  I think I described the behavior chart, where we had to mark down if they talked, or turned around in their seat, or this or that.  Any time we had to make three corrections, we had to move their clip to Fix It.  If you had to make another three, we'd move their clip to Stop.  At the end of the day, any kid that was on Fix It or Stop we had to call home to the families and say that their kid had done this, that or this and left the day at Fix It, left the day on Stop.  That took some time, too, making phone calls.  What else?  A lot of really mundane things.  A lot of hanging out by the photocopy machine waiting for copies to come out.  That type of thing.  What was your question?

INT:  How has your experience at this school affected you professionally and personally?

R:  Great question.  I hate to say this, but I think it was a big emphasis for the decision I made this year not to go back to teaching this fall.  Part of that is something I've been playing with.  The past two years I've been working part time at Teacher's College.  I'm getting a Masters in Developmental Psychology.   I thought maybe I'd end up wanting to go into psychology, or educational psychology, or something like that down the line.  Before going to this school, I thought it would be a while down the line.  I still really love teaching.  I first saw myself teaching for maybe five, six years, and then applying to PhDs, going in that direction.

This year was so miserable that I don't want to go back.  The idea of starting at a whole new school, it's too much.  I don't want to do it.  I've decided to take this summer and the fall.  I'm not going back to a school this fall.  I'm going to take the time to finish up my Masters full time, looking to applying to PhDs, and that’s everything.  You could say that I decided to leave teaching at least a couple of years before I had intended to.  Before this year, I was playing with the idea of, "I could really teach for a long time."  I really loved it.  I was getting this Masters in Psychology, but it was all very education focused.  I had this idea that I could keep teaching, and I could start writing, and build a career that way.  That all changed this year.  I got really disillusioned with a lot of things.  In some ways I'm really grateful that I had the experience because it really forced me to look into what's happening in schools.  I've been doing a lot of reading.  I don't think I would have found your web site.  For example, the Schools Matter web site.  If I hadn't had this experience, and I don't think I would have been doing the same amount of my own research.  I've been reading a lot.  I have Diane Ravitch's book.  I'm reading that.  I'm going to the Save Our Schools at the end of the month.  I've really been trying to start conversations with my friends, too, about what's happening at these schools.


I've got another friend that's starting up at a charter school that sounds quite similar to mine this fall.  I don't want to scare her, but I've tried to share what I've been through.  It's definitely affected me.  Definitely.  In some ways, in a great way.   In some ways, it's fueled my fire to actually do something.  I have to say it's been a huge change.  I admit I started out the year really not knowing I had been duped, to be honest.  I hadn't really done my homework, and was believing everything that I had heard about how they're closing the achievement gap, and they're giving these kids these opportunities to get into college.  Then I worked at one of them.  Wait a second.  This is not right.  If this is what's happening to tons of kids, this is a really big issue.  Something that really concerns me.

INT:  When you think of Brooklyn Ascend, what comes to mind?

R:  The first thing that comes to mind is that I am so happy I'm not there.

INT:  Is there an image that you end up with?

R:  Yeah.  The image that comes to mind is this kid with their mouth closed, with their hands by their side, and really not looking happy.  There wasn't a lot of happiness there.  The image that comes to mind is kids with either their hands folded, or their hands by their side, with their mouth shut.  Also, really unhappy teachers.  I have a lot of images in my head.  I should have picked up on that, and I wish I had picked up on that before I ever started working there.  The teachers at that school, everybody just seemed annoyed and frustrated all the time.  There was so much scowling.  I got the impression that the kids were pests.   That's what comes to mind.  Scowling teachers, and silent kids.

INT:  Do you ever dream about it?

R:  Yeah.  The dreams I have are good.  The dreams I have are me finally saying the things to my higher ups that I never got to say.

INT:  You're having healthy dreams.

R:  I think so.  I think that they're healthy dreams.  For a while, they weren't.  I'll tell you that I remember the day that we had to go back to school after April break.  I didn't sleep the entire night before.  When I got to school, I found out that neither had either of the two female teachers that I worked with.  That can't be healthy that none of us can sleep, literally the entire night before they had school.  I remember just tossing and turning.  I remember when I got there, this feeling, this lump in my throat.  This feeling of how am I going to make it?  I felt like I was being asked to be a referee, or a cop.  I didn't feel like I was a teacher at all.  We watched some European championship soccer game.  I remember watching the referees. There was so much pressure to "catch" the kids.  Catch them whispering.  Catch them doing this.  Catch them doing that.  It was exhausting.  It was all about catching them.  One of Doug Lemov's ideas is that if you don't have one hundred percent compliance, one hundred percent authority, then other things will think they can question.  There's something to that, maybe, but I think that that idea just got taken way, way too far at the school I was at.  If a kid even giggles.  The kids weren't even allowed to giggle.  If a student giggled too loud, we had to mark it down that they were being disruptive.  If I'm reading a story aloud, I'm okay with my kids giggling every now and then.  That's what kids do.  That shows that they're listening.  It shows they're interested.  We had to mark it because any little misbehavior was a threat to the one hundred percent authority, and one hundred percent compliance.  It was just so exhausting, and it left no time.  I was there for a year, and I feel like I never got know the kids.  Whereas compared to where I was before, I still hear from them.  I still miss them.  I still think about them.

Whereas these kids, I barely know them because they had to be silent the entire year.  I didn't like the relationship that I had, the way I was forced to treat them.  The way I felt like I had to act towards them.  It was so inauthentic.  If you can't tell, I just really hated it.  I just really hated it.  The thing that I can't stand the most is that I feel like people are being fooled right now.  These schools are being touted as the solution and it's these movies like Waiting for Superman and my parents have seen it.  Isn't this so wonderful?  Wait a second.  Why isn't anybody asking what's actually happening?  That's the way I feel about that.

INT:  Your voice is going to be heard.

R:  I hope.  I really hope.  I'd like to do whatever I could to do something.  I'm actually really looking forward to this rally at the end of July.

INT:  Yes.  All of us are looking forward to it.  If you were in charge of changing this school, what would you alter?

R:  If I were in changing it?

INT:  Yeah.  If you were put in charge of making the changes that you would like to see at this school, what would you do?

R:  One of the first things I would do if I could, obviously this is a dream, but I would make the sizes of the classes smaller.  Thirty eight year olds sitting in rows in one class is way too much.  I would definitely make the classes smaller.  Even if it's twenty kids.  Four classes of twenty kids.  I would have the kids sit in groups rather than have them sit in rows.  I would have to be concerned about the results of the state tests, but I don't think I would use that for the basis of everything we teach them.  I would encourage teachers to use what they know about how to assess kids, and how to get to know kids.  I would encourage teachers to actually form relationships with their kids to find out what's going to work best for them.  I would completely change the curriculum.  I wouldn't use what they use at the school we have right now.  The use at Brooklyn Ascend what's called SABIS.  It's something that was developed in Lebanon.  It's this curriculum that suits very well the I Do, You Do, We Do format.  I'd get rid of that.

I'm much fonder of curriculums that actually have kids asking questions, and doing a lot more writing.  That's another thing I didn't mention.  We didn't do any, any writing.  No creative writing.  No open response writing.  No journaling.  That's something for me that's so important.  With writing, kids learn about the mechanics and stuff of the language, but they also learn how to find their own voice.  They learn how to express themselves.  They learn how to interact with others through writing.  We didn't do any of that.  It killed me.  I'd definitely institute a writer’s workshop during the day.  That was something I did at my old school that, to me, was one of the most valuable things we did.  I'd have us do that.  Is getting rid of the state exams an option, or is that not a choice?

INT:  It's your redesign.

R:  If I could get rid of those, then I really would.  I would find teachers that I trusted, and that I knew cared as much about the kids as I do, and that were smart.  They would preferably have Masters in Education.

INT:  Let me ask you this.  What makes a good Ascend teacher?  What makes a teacher who really thrives in that environment?

R:  Not me, that's for sure.  The one's that seemed to get the least grief were the first year teachers.  We had a pretty big number of Teach for America grads, or Teach for America first year teachers.  Those are the people who got the least grief because they didn't have any basis on which they would be asking questions.  They'd follow directions, and they did what they were told.  If they had to read a script that says, "Now watch while I show you how to do this," then they'd do it.  Which, my first year of teaching, I might have been grateful to have that because I was lost, and didn't know what to do.

You have to be good at following rules.  You asked how I've changed professionally or personally.  I've certainly learned one thing about myself.  Following very scripted, structured rules is not one of my strengths.  Definitely not one of my strengths.  The teacher who yelled at me to get out of her room, it baffled me that somebody could spend so much time with kids, and call themselves a teacher, but not be looking into what was actually happening, or asking, "Why are we going to do that?"  Once it started to feel like things were not right, I got the book that the President of the school, Stephen Wilson, had written, called Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools.  And it was kind of my first time about hearing and thinking about this idea of business and public schools, and how this school really was trying to run itself like a business and like a corporation.  I didn't understand why other people weren't talking about that, and weren't reading it, and why I was the only one that had ordered the book.  One thing that blew my mind is that I got this book that Steven Wilson had written, and who has a chapter about these genius curriculums that are going to make it so that it doesn't matter if teachers are idiots.  They can still do it.  One of them is the SABIS thing.  SABIS has this brilliant concept of having prefects.  The prefects are the four or five best performing scholars in a class, they check the rest of the kids' work.  Rather than having to hire an instructional aide, or having smaller classrooms, the teachers have the four kids.  They finish the work real quick, and that fast, and then they go around the room checking other kids' work.  It's in the book.  It says it's possibly that this is to cut costs.

After I read that, I went into school and I was, "Did you guys know this?  Did you know that that's what this prefect thing is about?"  Nobody wanted to listen.  They were, "No.  It's because of the good instructional strategy."  "Really?  Because I think that these kids should probably be getting to do more challenging work."  I remember when I was in third grade, I did really well.  I got good grade.  My teacher, Mr. Carey, sent me to the library and I got to do my own research project.  Why aren't these kids allowed to do that?  Why are we using them as a substitute for instructional aides in order to cut costs?

It blew my mind.  This was the beginning of the unraveling for me, when I started to really look into things.  That was how I came across the Schools Matter blog, was because I was on line being like, "What's the deal with these charter schools anyway?  Whose idea was this?"  I guess I found out a lot that really made it hard to be there.

INT:  It sounds like it took quite a sacrifice for this lesson that you learned.  It sounds like the veils had fallen away from your eyes in some way.

R:  Yeah.  Definitely.  Maybe I had to have this experience in order to realize that.  Now I'm going to be more cheerful in general.  Also, do my homework before I go to work anywhere.  I wish I had done that before.  That's part of what makes me angry.

INT:  Do not censor yourself here.  This is your opportunity to say what you feel, and to get it off your chest.  A couple of other questions I'd like to ask you.  One is what was your high point and your low point when you were teaching there?

R:  The high point was right at first, when I was doing what they told me I was going to be doing.  When I was taking out small groups, and doing what I had spent the past three years learning how to do.  Getting to know their learning needs.  Designing activities that were really going to help them.  Getting to know a new group of kids.  I love getting to know kids.

The low point came the end of January, maybe.  All we were doing was teaching these test prep lessons.  It was all we were allowed to do.  There was one time when I had to put up an overhead on the overhead projector.  It was one of these "let me show you how to do this, then you're going to do it."  I looked around the room at the kids.

INT:  You just started talking about your low point.

R: . . . The low point was sometime in January.  Starting from Christmas break onwards, you were only to teach these test prep lessons that I had nothing to do with.  I had no business in deciding how we were going to teach these, or what we were going to teach.  I was really just administering what they had given me.  I just remember one morning putting the projector on, and putting the overhead, and looking around the room.  I had one kid falling asleep.  They just looked miserable.  They looked bored.  I was miserable.  I was bored.  I remember just feeling like I can't teach this lesson right now.  I remember turning the overhead off.  We need to do something that actually matters, that's actually going to get these kids going.  I don't remember what we did, but it was this sense of I can't do this.  This is not fair to them.  It was just so clearly all the way through, not about the kids.  It was so blatantly obvious that it was about the scores that they were going to get on these tests.  We weren't teaching writing.  We weren't giving them any time that they needed to rest.

All the conversation we'd have during our meetings was about had they mastered this concept?  It's going to be on the state exam.  This concept might be on the state exam.   When they ended up taking the state exam, I don't know how they did.  I remember there were certain questions that asked them to use the concepts that we had tried to teach them.  We basically were teaching them these tricks and formulas.  I remember one was number patterns.  We had to teach them very explicitly the way to find the answer to a number problem problem.  A number problem question is you have a series of numbers like four, eight, twelve, sixteen.  What's the next number?  The way to find it is you had to teach them step by step, follow what I do.  Step one.  Look at the first two numbers.  Step two.  Find the difference between the first two numbers.  Step three.  Write down the rule.  Step four.  Apply the rule to the final number.  Let's say the rule we figured out was add four.  That was how they had to go about doing it every time.  They got to the state exam, and I remember the question was two, four, eight, basically it was multiplying by two so it didn't work to use that formula.  You'd just subtract the first two numbers.  My kids, at least, they had no idea what to do because they didn't know the concept.  They didn't know the idea of what it meant to look for a pattern.  All they knew was this formula.

To me it was of course they got that one wrong.  The formula is not going to work all the time.  That's how math works.  Sometimes you have to be able to look into it, and think critically about it.  [Sighs] There were a lot of low points.  There was a low point where this little boy, K_____, got suspended for the fourth time.  He just wasn't that bad.  I had seen kids in the Bronx that were bad, that got in fights, and they were disrespectful.  [K_____] wasn't like that.  This little boy was just a busy body.  He tapped his feet all the time.  He would make these little humming noises while he worked.  He was really bright.  He was really sweet.  Because we had this very rigid behavior system that we absolutely had to stick to, we had to mark every time he talked.  We had to mark every time he turned around in his seat.  He had to go the Dean.  It broke my heart because this poor kid basically lost the majority of his third grade year.  He didn't have to.  If we had been teachers that were allowed to actually teach, and actually allowed to do at least what I learned how to do when I got my Masters in Education, then when I did my first three years.

Actually really get to know a kid, and really figure out what's going to work for them, he could've been fine.  Even if seventy five percent of Brooklyn Ascend scholars passed the state test, I can tell you for a fact that there were some of them who we, personally, completely failed.  Completely and utterly failed them because we did nothing for them, because they didn't fit this total compliance model.  They got completely left behind.  That's one thing that I wish I'd thought more about.  I was a special education teacher to start out, so I have a special place in my heart for these special education kids.  That's what I'm most passionate about, and most committed to.  A school like Brooklyn Ascend, maybe it does work for the kids who can do it, the kids who can keep their hands still, and who tend to sit and nod, and say things back.  It doesn't work for the kids who have learning disabilities, or have special education needs.  It just doesn't.

I had another little girl in my class.  To me it was just blatantly obvious that she had dyslexia.  She would flip her numbers.  She would flip her words.  There was nothing I could do.  She had to go through the exact same structure, exact same I Do, We Do, You Do lessons, with the same worksheets, and the same thing as everybody else.  She'll probably get left back.  She's probably going to have to repeat third grade.  That's another thing at Brooklyn Ascend is that they're very proud of the fact that they don't do social promotions.  Very proud of the fact that if the kid doesn't meet the cut off, that they have to repeat the grade.

INT:  How many third graders do you think repeated this year?

R:  I don't know how many will end up doing it.  I can tell you that in the class that I taught for thirty kids, all but three of them we labeled them as promotion in doubt because of the results on their mock test scores, and that type of thing.  I would really doubt that they would hold back that many kids, because that in and of itself isn't going to look very good if they have a third of the class staying back.  I wouldn't be surprised if at least ten, maybe sixteen end up having to repeat third grade.

INT:  Thirty to fifty percent?

R:  I would say that.  If they actually end up doing it.  I don't know if they ended up doing it.  Another little anecdote.  Another low point for me was the day after Osama Bin Laden got shot and killed.  This was something that at my old class up in the Bronx, we would have taken a few minutes in the morning to talk about it.  It was all over the news.  Everybody had seen it.  The kids want to know what's going on.  Who was this guy?  Why is this everywhere?  Why is this everywhere I look?  It would have been something we would have talked about.  I probably would have had them journal about it, and maybe even later in the day gone and get a map of Afghanistan and talk about that.  I would have found ways to connect it.  I'm not going to just waste the day chit chatting.  It's important.  To me, it's important that a kid knows what's going on around them.

Because our day was so structured, and there was no time for anything except for these structured I Do, You Do, We Do lessons, there was no chance for them to ask about it.  I remember it was ten days later.  Maybe even longer.  I think it was ten days, almost two weeks, when one my little girls raised her hand.  I had to sit down and crouch beside her.  She was, "Who is this guy, Osama Bin Laden?"  "That's a really good question.  We should really talk about that, if I have a chance to talk about it."  We never had a chance to talk about it.  These kids have these questions, because they're kids.  They have questions, and they're not being allowed to ask them.  All in this name of getting to pass these tests.  I'm a little bit worried that they did pass them, because then is Brooklyn Ascend going to be held up as another one of "look at how great, we're closing the achievement gap."  . . . .

R:  Right now, I think I've said as much as I can think of.  That's mostly my story of what happened at Brooklyn Ascend.

. . . .There's another thing that bothered me at Brooklyn Ascend.  I'm pretty liberal with my views about language and how people use language.  I took a socio-linguistics class at Teachers College, and we would actually recording kids talking, and analyze their speech patterns.  I'm a really big believer that the way we speak isn't better, and isn't superior, it's just the way people in power speak.  When I taught in my old school, my kids would speak the way they spoke, and I'd speak the way I speak.  I would try to have conversations about how people talk in different situations.  I tried to teach them this is the way you're going to want to speak in this situation.  I not only valued, but really admired a lot of the ways that they used language.  At Brooklyn Ascend, any time a kid would say something that wasn't in proper English, we would have to stop them and say, "Rephrase that."  We'd have to make them rephrase it until they said it in a way that was right, because Doug Lemov has got a chapter of "Right is Right."  There's a right way to say things, and a right way to do things.  All, to me, stripping them of their identity, and stripping them of any power or voice that they have, and saying that "you've got to do this our way."

R:  If you want to take anything, I'm giving you my permission.  Anything I have written or said, whatever you want to do with it, I grant you permission.

Peg with Pen: Understanding Teach Like a Champion

Peg with Pen: Understanding Teach Like a Champion: I'm currently in the process of reading Teach Like a Champion 2.0 .  I'm reading it because it is one of the "go to" book...

Houston Chronicle Exemplifies Media Coverage of KIPP

Please do go the Houston Chronicle for a clear example of how corporate media covers research on KIPP. 

Admittedly, the research firm, Mathematica (which collected millions from KIPP sponsors to conduct the study) had its part to play in emphasizing the sunny side for KIPP, Inc., but it remains the journalist's job to tell the whole story, rather than the parts that billionaires want to hear. 

My comments on the Houston Chronicle story at their site:

This article is a great example of how the media treats the billionaire philanthropist school choice for urban children. It is written to spin the Mathematica study to suit the billionaires at Atlantic Philanthropies who paid for the research in 2008. 

Here are a few core findings that you might have presented if reporters chose to report the whole story, rather than the parts that support the agenda of corporate education reformers:

--KIPP's impact, or effect size, on student learning has declined steadily since 2007 as the charter chain has almost tripled in the number of KIPP schools.

--One in four KIPP middle schools had no impact or negative impact on student learning over the 8 years of data collection by Mathematica.

--Of the elementary schools in the study, more than half the schools had marginal impact or no impact at all on achievement.  From the study:

"The impact of KIPP at the elementary school level varies by school. Among the eight KIPP elementary schools we examine, three have positive and statistically significant impacts on at least one measure of academic achievement (Figure III.1). Two additional schools have marginally significant positive impacts on one outcome (p < 0.10). There are no statistically significant impacts in the other three schools. In these schools, the point estimates for one school are positive and the estimates for two schools are negative in both subjects" (p. 25).

--At the KIPP high schools where 70 percent of students come from KIPP middle schools, KIPP provides no added academic benefit when compared to regular public schools.

--Most telling of all, however, is the Mathematica finding that KIPP's brutal and dehumanizing school environments contribute nothing at all at any level to improve student behavior, motivation, aspirations, confidence, grit, effort, self-control, or engagement.  From the study:

"Across grade levels, we generally find no impacts of KIPP schools on measures of students’ motivation, engagement, educational aspirations, or behavior, but positive impacts on the satisfaction of parents with their child’s school. At all three grade levels, KIPP did not significantly affect measures of motivation and engagement related to student self-control, academic motivation, academic confidence, grit, school engagement, or effort in school, including student reports of the time spent on homework" (p. xxii).

We may wonder why the Houston Chronicle chooses to provide the public such a skewed version of the facts.

For better reading: Libraries, not heavy phonics

Sent to The Australian, September 18

The Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority wants a concentration on phonics because of its importance in developing reading ability ("Phonics, faith and coding for primary school kids," September 19)
This doesn't agree with what the research says.  The research says that heavy, intensive phonics instruction does not lead to better performance on tests of reading comprehension, tests in which children have to understand what they read. The research says that those who read better are those who have done more real reading for pleasure, and children with more access to books do more reading for pleasure.
If we are interested in developing reading ability, the concentration should be on libraries, not heavy phonics.
Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Article: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/education/phonics-faith-and-coding-for-primary-school-kids/story-fn59nlz9-1227534083014?sv=2f37b94f8cac5b5fff430d9cafd1ef41
Sources:
Krashen, S. (2004). The power of reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited (second edition).
Krashen, S. (2009). Does intensive reading instruction contribute to reading comprehension? Knowledge Quest 37 (4): 72-74.

KIPP Study Shows Declining Test Performance and No Improvements in "Character"

by Jim Horn

The final piece of Mathematica’s $4 million KIPP study was just published.  It was designed principally to try to gauge the effect of KIPP's continuing expansion on student achievement at elementary, middle, and high school levels. 

One of the prominent findings demonstrates that KIPP’s heyday came about 10 years ago, and KIPP’s continued expansion in the number of schools in recent years (thanks largely to a $50 million handout from USDOE) correlates closely to a decidedly downward trend in KIPP's ability to raise test scores.  The chart below is from p. 31 of Mathematica report.

Middle Schools
The best news for KIPP, Inc. relates to test performance by students in the 43 KIPP middle schools included in the study.  And if we were to read only the key findings summary provided by Mathematica, which obviously provides the basis for reporting by the Washington Post, we could be as misled as reporter Lyndsey Layton by the extent of the gains:

Consistent with prior research, KIPP middle schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on student achievement in math, reading, science, and social studies. Average impacts of middle schools were positive and statistically significant throughout the 10-year period covered by the study, though higher in earlier years than recent years (from Key Findings).

Not surprisingly to anyone who has either worked in the highest performing KIPPs or who has studied test results from these schools, students from the 10 over-subscribed middle schools with lotteries did better than the other middle schools in the study.  

This finding lends credibility to former KIPP teachers who speak of the advantages (parental self-selection and KIPP skimming) of working in a lottery school, as compared to under-subscribed KIPP schools, where teachers have to pound the pavement to recruit wary parents and students from the surrounding community.

If we look closer inside the report, however, we see that the key findings gloss above needs some serious qualifications.  For instance, 23 percent of the middle schools in the Mathematica study had either no statistically-significant impact (8 schools) or negative statistically-significant impact (2 schools) on student achievement:

We also examined the distribution of school-level impacts for our matched-student sample of 37 schools (Figure III.2). Each point plots one KIPP middle school’s math and reading impact estimates two years after students enroll, based on all years covered by our data. Overall, 18 schools have positive and statistically significant impacts in both math and reading and nine schools have a positive and statistically significant impact in either math or reading (but not both). Eight schools have no statistically significant impacts, one school has a negative and statistically significant impact in only one subject, and one school has statistically significant negative impacts in both math and reading (p. 28).

Elementary Schools

We find the same misleading kind of information in Mathematica’s summary of findings for KIPP elementary schools:

KIPP elementary schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on three of four measures of reading and mathematics skills (Key Findings).

Sounds impressive, yes?  When we look inside the report, however, we find only three of the eight schools had significantly positive impacts on student test scores:

The impact of KIPP at the elementary school level varies by school. Among the eight KIPP elementary schools we examine, three have positive and statistically significant impacts on at least one measure of academic achievement (Figure III.1). Two additional schools have marginally significant positive impacts on one outcome (p < 0.10). There are no statistically significant impacts in the other three schools. In these schools, the point estimates for one school are positive and the estimates for two schools are negative in both subjects (p. 25). 

Mathematica's examination of KIPP elementary schools involved only oversubscribed schools with lotteries (8 schools).  By doing so, Mathematica ignored the effects of self-selection by motivated parents, which makes later test results suspect and most likely higher than other KIPP schools, where  teachers had to go out recruiting parents and students from their communities.

With the knowledge, too, among KIPP leaders that they have an oversupply of applicants from which to restock, the oversubscribed KIPP schools have the luxury of “weeding out” low performers, English language learners, special needs children, and other problem students whose lack of performance could damage the KIPP brand.

High Schools
As for high schools, the news for KIPP gets worse, especially for new KIPP high schools.  In locales where KIPP middle school graduates’ parents have a choice to continue to send their children to a KIPP high school, 70 percent enroll their 9^th graders.  I think KIPP would rank that as a C- in retention.  Keep in mind, too, that over half of KIPP middle schoolers who start KIPP in 5^th grade never finish 8^th grade at KIPP.  

We are left to wonder how many KIPP middle school grads would continue to a KIPP high school if they could make that call, rather than their parents. 

We find out, too, from the Mathematica study that KIPP middle school students who do continue on to a KIPP high school should not expect KIPP to have any impact on their achievement, when compared to students attending regular public high schools:

For students continuing from KIPP middle schools, the achievement impacts of KIPP high schools are not statistically significant on average, but these impacts vary by school.

Other findings show that KIPP has a positive testing outcome for high school students who are new to KIPP, even though new students make up only 32 percent of KIPP high school students: 

KIPP high schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on achievement for new entrants to the network (p. xiv).

And yet behind this summary, we find further caveats that are ignored by Mathematica's summary and by the news media.  For instance, 5 of the high schools 12 schools with both math and ELA scores available had either no significant impact or negative impact on new students in KIPP high schools:

As is the case with both KIPP elementary and middle schools, the impact estimates for new entrants vary across the different KIPP high schools in our sample (Figure III.8). Of the 12 schools with both math and ELA impact estimates, two high schools have positive and statistically significant impacts on new entrants in both math and ELA, five schools have a positive and significant impact on new entrants in one subject but not the other, four schools have no significant impacts on new entrants in either subject, and one school has a negative and significant impact on new entrants in one subject (p. 37).

No "Character" Gains
Despite the KIPP's founders insistence that KIPP is focused 49 percent on academics and 51 percent on character, there is no evidence that KIPP's chain gang methods, total compliance, and "No Excuses" brutality does anything to improve any aspect of student behavior, motivation, aspirations, confidence, grit, effort, self-control, or engagement:  

Across grade levels, we generally find no impacts of KIPP schools on measures of students’ motivation, engagement, educational aspirations, or behavior, but positive impacts on the satisfaction of parents with their child’s school. 

At all three grade levels, KIPP did not significantly affect measures of motivation and engagement related to student self-control, academic motivation, academic confidence, grit, school engagement, or effort in school, including student reports of the time spent on homework. Student behavior was measured only at the elementary and middle school levels; we find no evidence that KIPP schools affect behavior, including indices of positive behaviors, undesirable behaviors, peer pressure, illegal activities, parental concerns about their child, frequency of school disciplinary actions (according to the parent), and the extent to which the child is well-adjusted (pp. xxii)

Finally, Mathematica fails to address KIPP skeptics who focus on the selective admissions at KIPP.  In so doing, the research firm opens up questions as to the objectivity of Mathematica’s longitudinal research that KIPP’s benefactors at Atlantic Philanthropies commissioned in 2008 at a cost $4,000,000.  Here is Mathematica's weak attempt at silencing the skeptics:

Skeptics of KIPP argue that these schools rely on selective admission…. However, data on student characteristics provide little evidence that KIPP “creams” or selectively enrolls higher-performing students at the middle school level (Tuttle et al. 2013). The typical KIPP student scored at the 45th percentile within the district—that is, below the district average—in reading and math prior to entering KIPP (pp. 1-2).

The fact that KIPP beginning KIPP students score below the district average tells us nothing about characteristics of KIPP students in comparison with other school children in the same neighborhood.  Large districts like Memphis, for instance, contain many schools in the leafy suburbs and the county countryside, where middle class students attend school.  

If Mathematica had wanted to really find out if the KIPP students in Memphis had self-selecting parents with higher-scoring children, as skeptics insist, they could have compared KIPP student averages with the students in poverty-riddled public schools in and around downtown Memphis. But as the old saying goes, I guess you get what you pay for.

Jim Horn's new book, Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through "No Excuses" Teaching will be published in 2016.