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.

Learning About KIPP: Lesson 1

After Valerie Strauss at WaPo posted yesterday D. Ravitch's sweet talk to the execs of KIPP, Inc., I thought it potentially useful to post some excerpts from my chapter on KIPP that recently appeared in an edited volume from Routledge.  After all, if Dr. Ravitch's top-flight reeducation has left her with such huge blind spots when it comes to KIPP, what must the general public think?

The chapter is "Corporatism, KIPP, and Cultural Eugenics."

. . . .If threats, punitive measures, or wishful thinking (in any combination applied by liberals or conservatives) would have worked in the public schools to bring about the closing of the achievement gap between black and white, or rich and poor, then the children of the poor over the past twenty years may have been spared, perhaps, the continuing steroidal remedies and monstrous ministrations[i] that are now accepted practice in many urban schools trying to keep pace with the demands of NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress decree.  And even as sanity insists that poor children will find the more rigorous national tests (now on the drawing board) even harder to pass than the less-rigorous state ones that they now fail in droves, the next likely tough-love chapter in the reform-schooling of urban America appears to be moving into alignment, explicably borne forward by willful ignorance, political hubris, moneyed arrogance, and a national advertising campaign to publicize a new secret weapon in the continuing crusade to raise test scores and close the achievement gap.  The reformers’ new secret weapon is a non-profit corporate chain of charter schools known as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). 

Since being embraced George W. Bush in 2000, KIPP, Inc. has become the new miracle (or mirage) choice model that promises to finally fix the children in neighborhoods where poverty is left unchecked and in a viral state.  With a new administration now in Washington even more keen than the last one on accelerating the number of charter schools in urban areas where a psychological “no excuses” rehab seems to be in order, we could see the fruition of an ideological commitment to privatization, anti-unionism, and social efficiency control that, heretofore, has constituted the education agenda of political conservatives only.  The seamless replacement of urban public schools by corporate-run charter schools could depend, sadly, on the ability of cash-starved states and cities to withstand takeover bids from corporations and their foundations, which now effectively exert their power through the federal education establishment. With the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, publicly supportive of the CEO-powered urban model, from the mayor’s office down to the principal’s office, resistance may prove futile among economically hard-pressed state and city governments.

Begun as a single middle school in 1994 by two ambitious Teach for America alums in Houston, Texas, the KIPP chain now has over 80 locations and the financial backing of America’s most active corporate givers to K-12 education.  Since 2000, when a simulated KIPP classroom skit was presented as part of the program for Republican National Convention, the growing list of benefactors has grown impressively. With many deep pockets at the ready to assist, KIPP has emerged as the poster school for urban education reform.

Here is a partial list available from the KIPP Foundation website [updated today]:

60,000,000 and above:

Doris & Donald Fisher Fund

25,000,000-39,999,999:

The Walton Family Foundation, Inc.

10,000,000-24,999,999:

 The Atlantic Philanthropies

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation

5,000,000-9,999,999:

 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 

Michael & Susan Dell Foundation

Rainwater Charitable Foundation

Robertson Foundation

1,000,000-4,999,999:

Anonymous

Arnold Family Foundation

Reed Hastings and Patty Quillin

Jack Kent Cooke Foundation

Marcus Foundation

Miles Family Foundation

New Profit Inc.

500,000-999,999:

Thomas and Susan Dunn

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

100,000-499,999:

Abrams Foundation

All Stars Helping Kids

The Annie E. Casey Foundation

CityBridge Foundation

Credit Suisse

John and Laura Fisher

Robert and Elizabeth Fisher

William and Sakurako Fisher

Goldman Sachs Foundation

Goldsbury Foundation

Kinder Foundation

Koret Foundation

Leon Lowenstein Foundation

The Louis Calder Foundation

Hee-Jung and John Moon

Stephen Jr. and Susan Mandel
 

National Geographic Education Foundation

Prudential Foundation

Arthur Rock

SAP America, Inc.

Paul Singer

State Farm Companies Foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Along with politicians of all stripes, the news media, too, is eager to see the KIPP model adopted in urban schools as the next promised solution to the achievement gap.  Jonathan Alter, again writing for Newsweek (2008), typifies the view presented within the news media, which continues to target the “Paleolithic teachers [sic] unions” as the real reason the achievement gap has not been closed:

The irony is, we know what works to close the achievement gap. At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids. While KIPP isn't fully replicable (not enough effective teachers to go around), every low-income school should be measured by how close it gets to that model, where kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and part of the summer, and teachers are held strictly accountable for showing student improvement.

Although he is no less falsely convinced that KIPP offers the solution to the achievement gap, Alter at least offers a refreshing admission that Gates and others are unwilling to make as they hawk the idea of KIPP charters as the urban education solution: KIPP cannot be scaled up to fill the bill for which it is advertised.  Here’s why.

Until the first longitudinal research study was published by SRI International (Woodworth, David, Guha, Wang, and Lopez-Torkas 2008), an impressive public relations apparatus from within the KIPP Foundation closely controlled the KIPP narrative and product image, with rising test scores and the percentage of KIPP students going on to college as that part of the KIPP story cited as evidence of KIPP’s ability to close the achievement gap.  If we accept KIPP's own numbers that 80 percent of students who complete 8th grade at KIPP go on to college, what does that really say, or not say?   In the SRI study of five KIPP schools in the Bay Area, researchers found that 60 percent of 5^th grade students in five Oakland KIPP schools who began KIPP in 5th grade did not finish 8th grade:

Together, the four schools began with a combined total of 312 fifth graders in 2003-04, and ended with 173 eighth graders in 2006-07 (see Exhibit 2-3). The number of eighth graders includes new students who entered KIPP after fifth grade (p.12).

Now if the 40 percent of children who survive KIPP from grade 5 through 8 all finish high school, that would mean that 30-35 percent of children who began KIPP in fifth grade eventually go on to college. That would still be an impressive statistic, if we were to accept Alter’s claim that, nationally, 20 percent of poor kids go to college.  According to more reliable sources, however, the percentage of “poor kids” attending college soon after high school is, in fact, 52 percent (National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education 2008), rather than 20 percent, as Alter claims. 

In terms of family income, 91% of high school students from families in the highest income group (above $100,000) enroll in college. The enrollment rate for student from middle-income families (from $50,001 to $100,000) is 78% and for those in the lowest income group ($20,000 and below) the rate is 52% (p. 7).

So much for that aspect of the KIPP miracle.

Given the winnowing of KIPP students between grades five and eight, and given the fact that KIPPsters spend 65-70 percent more time in school than their public school counterparts, KIPP’s college attendance rate begins to appear less miraculous.   Important in the college attendance rate, too, is the self-selection process (Rothstein 2004) among parents who are keen on having their children become participants in the unique kind of academic lockdown that characterizes the total compliance regime of KIPP. When these factors are considered, then, KIPP’s potential as the next silver bullet for urban education achievement gaps appears less of a slam-dunk than the mainstream media might believe—or have readers to believe.

As long as it remains a small charter boutique chain with 82 schools [now 99] in 19 states, plus the District of Columbia, KIPP can continue to emphasize the fact that it is a school of choice that encourages those who disagree with its philosophy and methods to go elsewhere.  If KIPP, indeed, were to become the model that Bill Gates would like all urban schools to emulate, we must wonder what would happen to the other 50-60 percent of middle schoolers in the Bay Area (and in other urban communities, we may assume) who leave KIPP, the ones who are unable or unwilling, or whose parents are unwilling, to be subjected to the kind of boot camp educational intervention that KIPP provides without exception. Where would they go? So far, KIPP’s wide and thin dispersal across 19 states makes KIPP a scarce commodity with a very effective public relations machine that cannot conceal, however, the odds that KIPP’s “best chance at success is to be the exception rather than the rule in any city where it operates” (Mosle, 2009).

Another significant finding of the SRI report involves the predominance of low achievers within that 60 percent of students who leave KIPP between grades 5 and 8. Even Jay Mathews (2008), the mainstream media’s self-acknowledged cheerleader for KIPP, admitted in the Washington Post that "60 percent of Bay Area fifth-graders entering KIPP in 2003 left before completing eighth grade, and they were usually low achievers."  It should come as no surprise, then, that sizable increases in test scores would result over time among the surviving higher achievers, since low performers or those who are too far behind to keep up are lost by the wayside, without the unpleasant publicity associated with involuntary expulsion: 

We found that students who remained at KIPP had higher incoming scores in both reading and mathematics than did their peers who entered KIPP in fifth grade but exited before completing the program (see Exhibit 2-5). We also considered the question from another perspective: Are students with lower scores more likely to exit KIPP? We used fall fifth-grade SAT10 scores to predict those exiting KIPP and found that the probability of a student’s leaving KIPP before completing eighth grade is higher for those with lower entering scores (Woodworth, et al 2008, 15-16).

KIPP’s low-flying students, then, “choose” their way out to other schools, as do those whose parents question the punitive, cultish culture of KIPP. The KIPPsters' reputation for impressive test performance is based largely on the winnowing of those who “choose” to go elsewhere, thus leaving the KIPP brand unscathed by low-test score performance. 

If public schools had the luxury or lack of conscience required to lose most of the lower performers, public school test results surely would be more in line with these results that Mathews (2008) is glad to report for KIPP:

"Since 2001, middle school students who completed four years at KIPP increased their average math achievement level on average from the 40th to the 82nd percentile and their reading level from the 32nd to the 60th percentile -- gains not seen anywhere else."

And with almost half the school day spent on math and reading test prep—a school day that runs from 7:30 to 5 (plus a half day on Saturdays and three extra weeks during the summer)—we might, indeed, expect significant gains among the fittest survivors.

Student attrition, then, is a real problem, to say the least—but one that does nothing to dampen the heat of enthusiasm among those looking to “rigor” to close the achievement gaps. The idea of "scaling up" a system that leaves over half the students to give up may be a laudable model for philanthro-capitalists like Don Fisher who believed “that education is a business” and that a school is “not much different from a Gap store” (Duxbury 2008), but such a system would throw gasoline on the failure fire that, under NCLB, is already consuming public schools in poor communities. The big gains in the testing bottom line among the KIPP survivors only ignores the retail brutality of a system that treats children like dry goods that can be culled and sorted, within a compliance model based on pressure cooker pedagogy and a pervasive application of psychological interventions aimed at cultural displacement.

Assured by other means of holding only the better test performers, the denial among KIPP proponents and the KIPP Foundation of “creaming” the best test performers through selective recruitment remains technically true.  The high selectivity that KIPP maintains, rather, is achieved by an unceasing recruiting process to replace those low performers and resistors who “choose” to go elsewhere, and by a strict and unwavering socialization process that depends upon a stringent behavioral catechism and psychological realignment.  Sometimes referred to as KIPP-notizing (Smith, 2005), the psychological induction and maintenance regimen is effective in quickly weeding out those who threaten the compliance structure of the organization or the results upon which KIPP’s marketing strategy is based.  The persistent admonition to students, parents, and teachers alike that KIPP is a school of choice (see Pillar # 2 of the Five Pillars[ii]) is not just an empty element of a mission statement:  it is the method used to distinguish between a cult and a sect on the continuum of selectivity, if KIPP were a religious organization (Etzioni, 1961, p. 156).

Teacher Attrition

An attendant problem to the 60 percent attrition rate among KIPP students is the attrition rate among KIPP teachers, a rate that would be unsustainable if KIPP did not depend upon large numbers of recruits from Teach for America (TFA), another favorite non-profit educational organization among philanthro-capitalists (Mosle, 2009). When David Levin and Mike Feinberg created KIPP in 1994, they were, in fact, fresh TFA[iii] alums, and it is clear that they envisioned TFA, with its two-year service contract for inexperienced teacher candidates who are heavily recruited from Ivy League schools, as a ready source for a ready supply of fresh blood that would be required to sustain the martyrly commitment and performance standards that KIPP demands from teachers.

Even though TFA has seen a recent surge in recruits with the current economic decline and its ramped-up advertising campaign that spends more each year on recruitment than it does on pre-service training (Teach for America, 2007, p. 29), it is inconceivable, however, that TFA could offer the hundreds of thousands of teachers that would be required to sustain such a model as KIPP on a scale that would serve all or most of the schools of urban America.  Interestingly, TFA recruits who score high during their KIPP teaching missions are subsequently recruited into KIPP leadership positions[iv]. These new leaders, in turn, are given CEO power in the principal’s office to make decisions that were once the responsibility of publicly-elected school boards, now relics in an era of publicly-funded schools that are planned and managed by corporations without oversight or regulation.  As we shall see, such a singular, unmonitored focus on the new bottom line opens the door to unethical and abusive practices.

The teacher turnover issues at the Bay Area KIPP schools are made clear in the SRI Report (Woodworth, et al 2008), which found the teacher turnover rate ranged from 18 to 49 percent at the five KIPP schools studied:

Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom before leaving (32).

SRI researchers found teachers committed but clearly doubtful of their capacity to continue under the stress of 65 hours of school-related work per week (includes 2 hours per night for telephone homework assistance).  One veteran teacher told researchers: “The consequence is I can’t do this job very much longer. It is too much. I don’t see any solution with our structure and our nonnegotiables. No one has really presented any way to solve that problem” (35). 

Meanwhile, TFA continues to ramp up its advertising to include national buys on television, as many of the same corporate benefactors from KIPP’s impressive list of givers pour in more edu-preneurial investments through non-profit and tax-sheltered foundations and social entrepreneurial investment funds such as the New Schools Venture Fund.  With the average KIPP teacher leaving after three years service (Browne 2009, 174), and with new KIPP locations planned, the $18-20 million annually that TFA now spends on recruiting will likely fall short of the amount needed to sustain the teacher induction effort.

NOTES

---

[i]  See, for instance, Linda Perlstein’s (2007) Tested. . ., unforgettable chronicle of the teachers, principal, and students of Tyler Heights Elementary School in Anne Arundel County, MD.  For a qualitative case study (Horn 2003), see LEAP-ing toward accountability: Ideology, practice, and the voices of Louisiana educators.

[ii] KIPP schools share a core set of operating principles known as the Five Pillars:

1.     High Expectations. KIPP schools have clearly defined and measurable high expectations for academic achievement and conduct that make no excuses based on the students' backgrounds. Students, parents, teachers, and staff create and reinforce a culture of achievement and support through a range of formal and informal rewards and consequences for academic performance and behavior.

2.     Choice & Commitment. Students, their parents, and the faculty of each KIPP school choose to participate in the program. No one is assigned or forced to attend a KIPP school. Everyone must make and uphold a commitment to the school and to each other to put in the time and effort required to achieve success.

3.     More Time. KIPP schools know that there are no shortcuts when it comes to success in academics and life. With an extended school day, week, and year, students have more time in the classroom to acquire the academic knowledge and skills that will prepare them for competitive high schools and colleges, as well as more opportunities to engage in diverse extracurricular experiences.

4.     Power to Lead. The principals of KIPP schools are effective academic and organizational leaders who understand that great schools require great school leaders. They have control over their school budget and personnel. They are free to swiftly move dollars or make staffing changes, allowing them maximum effectiveness in helping students learn.

5.     Focus on Results. KIPP schools relentlessly focus on high student performance on standardized tests and other objective measures. Just as there are no shortcuts, there are no excuses. Students are expected to achieve a level of academic performance that will enable them to succeed at the nation's best high schools and colleges (KIPP Foundation, 2009).

[iii]  Its critics often refer to TFA as Teach For Awhile, since most of the Ivy League recruits do not teach beyond the two-year commitment required in the contract.

[iv] The relationship between TFA and KIPP is even more than cozy—it is familial.  Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of TFA, is married to KIPP CEO, Richard Barth.

Stay tuned for Part 2: The KIPP Crusaders

Defending the Indefensible: KIPP

Advocacy that remains blind to evidence is a dangerous thing—especially in the pursuit of equity and democracy.

Recently, Diane Ravitch addressed the misleading charter movement by challenging Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charters:

If that is the lesson they want to teach, then I reiterate my challenge of two years ago: KIPP should find an impoverished district that is so desperate that it is willing to put all its students into KIPP’s care. Take them all: the children with disabilities, the children who don’t speak English, the children who are homeless, the children just released from the juvenile justice system, the children who are angry and apathetic, and everyone else. No dumping. No selection. No cherry picking.

I have also questioned the motives and genuine support for KIPP and Teach for America (TFA) by offering my own challenge:

I suggest that we test the new reformers’ commitment to TFA and KIPP. How?

Let’s fully fund TFA and KIPP initiatives, but only if TFA and KIPP serve top students, releasing the most experienced and well-qualified teachers to teach students living in poverty, students of color, and students speaking home languages other than English.

So far, no one at KIPP (or TFA) has accepted either challenge, of course. But that doesn't stop advocates for charters, school choice, and KIPP/TFA specifically to maintain their talking points.

As expected, then, Jonathan Schorr has replied directly to Ravitch's latest blog, prompting a counter-response from Katie Osgood, in which she expresses her exasperation: "I am sick of hearing the same old KIPP talking points."

Bruce Baker also offers detailed evidence responding to KIPP's responses, leading him to wonder:

I actually hesitate to write about KIPP and perhaps that’s just what they want. Apparently no one should write about them that hasn’t been paid by them to write about them. Those who do should be forewarned that you’ll have to waste inordinate time responding to their complaints – excuses – about what you wrote. As of this post, I hope to be done with this topic.

As it stands, KIPP advocates remain mired in talking points and hollow advocacy, refusing to address the evidence and refusing to stop defending the indefensible [1].

Schorr's defense of KIPP is typical of nearly fanatical KIPP advocacy narrowly and the problem with advocacy broadly. First, Schorr's post spends an inordinate amount of time attacking Ravitch directly and indirectly, suggesting that his argument fails to hold water if he simply were to address evidence on KIPP (and research on all charters—all of which paints no clear picture of any form of schooling outperforming any other because its type [charter, public, private]).

Simply put, any claims of "miracle" schools, as Ravitch has correctly explained, are either unmasked as inaccurate (most of those claims) or outliers, thus not representative of possible reform solutions for all of public education.

Next, the technical arguments leveled by Ravitch (but refuted by Schorr) against KIPP are important and accurate:

• KIPP results are powerfully impacted by selection, even when lotteries are involved because parents self-select by entering the lotteries. This dynamic is absent in public schools; thus, comparisons are distortions.

• KIPP does reap benefits of attrition. Students and their parents must sign highly restrictive agreements, and once those agreements are broken, KIPP can send a child packing. Public school cannot (and should not) have this option.

• KIPP, and many charter movements across the U.S., are segregating schools by race and class. KIPP schools are isolating children by race and class in ways that do not address how public schools are in need of reform (public schools are too often highly segregated also due to the community-based inequity that public schools reflect and perpetuate).

• KIPP schools work in conjunction with TFA and other alternatives to staffing that also perpetuate the ways in which public schools need reform—assigning poor children and children of color inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers. (See my challenge above for more on this indefensible process.)

• KIPP schools, and many charters, underserve bi/multi-lingual learners (commonly called "English language learners") and special needs students—populations that tend to negatively impact test scores and overburden schools in terms of funding and staffing.

• KIPP, and other "miracle" charter schools, often have funding advantages, and combined with all of the above, are thus not scalable—making KIPP advocacy a distraction in the public school reform argument.

All of these evidence-based concerns are well documented and thus show that making comparisons between KIPP outcomes and public school outcomes is an agenda-driven campaign of misinformation that benefits primarily KIPP advocates.

Finally, however, these are not my primary reasons for rejecting KIPP, and I regret that the main reason KIPP defense is indefensible remains mostly unspoken.

KIPP's "no excuses" ideology is racist and classist.

KIPP is primarily a mechanism for isolating "other people's children" and "fixing" them, creating a compliant class of children unlike the middle-class and affluent children who have experienced and certified teachers and rich academic programs while sitting in low student/teacher ratio classrooms.

KIPP's primary focus on authoritarian discipline creates a police state in schools; KIPP's test-prep focus reduces the learning opportunities for some children.

So I stand with Ravitch in my challenge and hers: I reiterate, If KIPP is so wonderful, when will we see schools treating middle-class and affluent children like KIPP treats their students?

Defending KIPP is indefensible, unless you ignore the evidence.

[1] Search "KIPP" here on Schools Matter for a powerful collection of commentaries and evidence by Jim Horn addressing KIPP.

Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools: Part 5

Below is next installment from Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys through "No Excuses" Teaching.  Please share widely.

Chapter 5

KIPP and the Teaching Profession

. . . our teachers have normal lives, and many have families and children. --Richard Barth, KIPP CEO (Philanthropy News Digest, 2009)

The KIPP Foundation has no requirements for professional preparation, and certification requirements are governed by the state charter school statutes where each of the 183 KIPP schools is located.   While a few KIPP advertisements state a preference for teaching credentials, no ads could be located that required anything more than what the state charter laws stipulate.  The KIPP Foundation website (2015d) states,

the primary requirement for teaching at a KIPP school is a belief in a very simple concept: that we will do whatever it takes to help each and every student develop the character and academic skills necessary for them to lead self-sufficient, successful and happy lives. 

The Foundation leaves it to each school to determine the qualifications required for new teachers.  While many KIPP schools list two years of experience as a requirement in their ads, the necessity of replacing teachers who quit or who are fired make these requirements less applicable in real life.  The KIPP website (KIPP Foundation, 2015d) points out that some schools have special programs for teachers with no prior experience. 

In 2008, David Levin joined another charter school operator, Norman Atkins, and hedge fund mogul, Larry “L-Train” Robbins to found a non-profit corporation, the Relay Graduate School of Education, which focuses on preparing prospective teachers for the No Excuses charter school environment.  Begun as Teacher U in 2006 by KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools, Relay requires evidence that degree candidates can raise test scores before receiving their Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree. 

In one of the first cohorts, “seven out of 110 teachers did not receive Master’s degrees because they could not show that their students had made at least a year’s worth of academic progress” (Green, 2011). The “pedagogical content” curriculum at Relay is based largely on the Doug Lemov’s (2010; 2015) text, Teach like a champion…  Lemov holds an MBA from Harvard and is founder and Board member of Uncommon Schools, a charter chain that largely emulates the KIPP organizational model. 

Showing steady growth, Relay has campuses in New York, Newark, New Orleans, Houston, and Chicago, with plans in 2015 to open a location in Memphis.  Prominent among Relay’s philanthropic investors are the Gates Foundation, Credit Suisse, the Walton Family Foundation, the New Schools Venture Fund, and the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund. These same organizations and many others with them channel millions of dollars of tax-exempted donations through their corporate foundations to supplement the hundreds of millions of dollars in public education funds that go to KIPP each year. 

When Bill Gates delivered a TED talk in 2009 on two of the world’s most pressing problems, malaria and bad teachers, he provided a copy of Work hard, be nice…, to all attendees, and in 2014 Gates told an interviewer from the American Enterprise Institute that he had concluded “the greatest cause of inequity” in America comes from “the failures of the education system” (American Enterprise Institute, 2014, p. 3).  Gates’ preferred solution, for poor urban children at least, is the KIPP Model.

KIPP has an attrition rate among teachers that would be unsustainable if it were not for the large numbers of recruits from Teach for America that replace the 30-40 percent of KIPP teachers who leave KIPP each year.  When David Levin and Mike Feinberg founded KIPP in 1994, it is likely that they envisioned TFA, with its two-year service contract for inexperienced teacher candidates who are heavily recruited from top-tier colleges and universities, as a prime source of new teachers to sustain, perhaps, the heroic demands and test performance standards that the KIPP Model imposes (Horn, 2010).

While former TFA corps members make up between thirty and forty percent of KIPP teachers nationally, some schools have a much higher concentration.  At the KIPP Endeavor Academy in Kansas City, for instance, 80 percent of KIPP teachers were TFA corps members in 2014.  Even though TFA has always attracted more applicants than it has teaching slots, the organization regularly spends more money for advertising and recruitment (Teach for America, 2007, p. 29) than it spends on pre-service training, which lasts for just over four weeks. 

One would-be recruit from a few years back (Chernicoff, 2006) wrote this assessment in the Yale Daily News:

In just a few years, TFA has established itself as one of the smart-people-who-just-graduated-with-liberal-arts-degrees-and-now-have-no-idea-what-they-want-to-do-with-their-lives-but-are-pretty-sure-it-isn’t-remain-in-the-spin-cycle-of-academia-or-move-on-to-the-next-preset-hierarchy-in-the-finance-world demographic. Used to be those poor souls could only go to law school or move to New York and “go into, like, publishing or something.” But TFA positioned itself in such a way that it gets the lost souls who have an impulse to do something to help the world immediately upon graduating (para 12-13). 

New TFA recruits who are not assigned directly to KIPP are commonly harvested after two years into KIPP teaching and leadership positions. As KIPP school leaders, they are given CEO power in the principal’s office to make policy and rules that were once the responsibility of public school boards.

KIPP’s teacher turnover rate became a public fact in 2008, with the publication of the SRI evaluation report San Francisco Bay Area KIPP Schools. . .  (Woodworth, David, Wang, & Lopez-Torkos, 2008).  SRI researchers found KIPP’s teacher annual attrition rate ranged from 18 to 49 percent at the five Bay Area KIPP schools that researchers studied:

Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom before leaving (p. 32).

While SRI found KIPP teachers committed, they also found them clearly doubtful of their capacity to continue under the stress of 60-80 hours of school-related work per week (includes 2 hours per night for telephone homework duty).  As one KIPP teacher told SRI researchers, “the consequence is I can’t do this job very much longer. It is too much. I don’t see any solution with our structure and our nonnegotiables. No one has really presented any way to solve that problem” (p. 35). 

Browne (2009) found the average KIPP teacher leaves after three years of service (p. 174).  KIPP researchers (KIPP Foundation, 2013) reported in 2013 that 33 percent of teachers left their teaching positions in 2012 (p. 26).  Teacher attrition in KIPP’s largest district, Houston, was 36 percent across 24 schools in 2014.  Two other No Excuses chains that are based on the KIPP Model, Yes Prep and Achievement First, report average length of service for teachers between 2 to 2.5 years (Rich, 2013). 

In an analysis by the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt University, Stuit and Smith (2009) found the teacher attrition problem severe across all types of charter schools.  Using NCES data from 2003-2004, the authors “. . . found the odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the same school are 132% greater than those of a traditional public school teacher. The odds of a charter school teacher moving schools are 76% greater” (Abstract).

The KIPP Summit: Professional Development Revivalism

An important element of “teacher KIPP-notizing” comes each year when the KIPP Foundation hosts an annual summit that brings together all KIPP teachers just before the new school year begins. Part celebration, sales meeting, revival, and professional development opportunity, the KIPP Summit serves to indoctrinate new staff into the KIPP culture, which is referred to by the KIPP founders as “Team and Family.”  One former teacher enthused about the KIPP Summit for the “interesting atmosphere” and opportunity to “learn new things” and the chance to hear teachers and school leaders “talk about successes that they had with kids going to college.”  Interestingly, she found the Summit “fun . . .[and] real, even though “it was like a good educational Nuremberg Rally, but a good educational Nuremberg Rally—they really got you pumped up.”  When I asked her to elaborate she said,

. . . it’s kind of rah-rah-rah, really this is what our mission is, and I . . . everybody is marching in the same direction.  In this case it’s a good direction.  We want the kids there to get to college, but in a way it is kind of the same direction, and kind of a lot of hype, and . . . there’s banners, and each school had their banner, and that’s probably the worst reference to make, but there is a certain correlation between the two [KIPP Summit and Nuremberg Rally] in terms of—it’s an enthusiasm that a whole crowd is getting, and kids would come up, and they would talk about their achievements, and everybody would clap and cheer, and it was really, everyone moving in that same direction. 

         And I think it was a good direction, but I’m a history teacher so part of me was kind of outside my body going, ‘This is interesting.  I’m glad this is for a good reason, it’s really kind of whipping people up to go this direction.’  So I’m glad it’s a good direction, but I can see where, if you were in another place in time, it could be whipped up into that way.

Summits are often held in popular tourist destinations such as Orlando, Miami, or Las Vegas.  In 2011, for example, the KIPP Foundation’s 990 non-profit federal tax return showed that $1,008,633 was paid to Opryland Hotel in Nashville for hotel and hospitality during one Summit, while almost $4 million was spent on travel that year.  Most Summit expenses are paid by the KIPP Foundation, but then KIPP recoups some of that money from each KIPP franchise, which must pay up to $30,000 each year to use the KIPP brand name.  In 2011, KIPP, Inc. collected a total of $2,050,256 from individual schools in these licensing fees.

One former KIPP teacher who had witnessed the extravagances of the 2014 Summit wondered why KIPP would claim there is no money for hiring substitute teachers, all the while renting huge arenas for general sessions and lavish hotel ballrooms for after parties that featured an array of desserts and snacks, open bar, and DJs:  “To me it seemed like if we have the money for a summit and we don't have the money for substitute teachers, then we should kill the summit and find the money for substitute teachers.”                                                                                  

Several of the teachers I interviewed talked about their experiences at the annual summits that always come just before school starts, thus leaving new teachers, in particular, feeling unprepared to meet students.  As teachers worry about a lack of lesson planning, the Summit vendors sell books and kits that are advertised to fill those needs and assuage those fears.  One teacher said, “They were pushing products and they were pushing new ideas from business perspectives.”

One first-year teacher attended a KIPP Summit in Las Vegas, which she described as a “whole big feel-good session.”  She saw students receive awards, and she heard “inspirational stories with how KIPP changes lives.” She said some of her colleagues “who had been in teaching for awhile thought it was a waste of time,” but she said, “I enjoyed it because I’m completely new, and I know nothing. . . . It was fun.  I enjoyed myself.  I got to go to Vegas for free so that was pretty nice.  Then we get back and immediately, I mean I started work July 19 and did not physically stop working until Christmas.”

         When another teacher mentioned the KIPP Summit as she described the beginning of school, I asked what she thought of the Summit.  She replied:

Honestly, I was just kind of like what the hell did I get myself into. It was just really weird . . . . I don’t mean everybody, but it was like they were just so beyond enthusiastic, and I am kind of like, this is a little off putting because, I don’t know—it felt cheesy in a lot of ways . . . . I mean I am definitely a passionate educator and I think education is so important, and I definitely get enthusiastic about my content area, but it was just a little over the top, and I just felt like I didn’t fit in because I wasn’t that way, and KIPP is really big on little songs and chants and things like that, and that is just like not me at all. I mean there were a couple of points where I kind of got into it, and it was kind of goofy.

Besides feeling out of place at the Summit, this teacher thought the professional development had much in common with other professional development she has experienced during her six years in charter schools, where young teachers are teaching other young teachers who know only slightly less than they:

. . . it was kind of like the blind leading the blind. It is kind of hard to remember all the details, but I just remember thinking okay I feel like I have learned nothing . . . and I don’t feel like I walked away with things that made me feel like wow I can really use this in my classroom or wow that is really meaningful. That sort of professional development is a hole in charter schools. You need somebody coming in there who really has a lot of experience.

         Another teacher used the word “interesting” with a clear inflection of disapproval.  She noted “there was a very common thread that ran through meetings and conversations about the evils of unions.”  During the roll call of schools at the Summit, each school staff stood wearing their own shirts and did a song or a chant.  She described the atmosphere as “frenzied.” She also said that when teachers in the auditorium were asked to stand who had less than five years total teaching experience, almost everyone rose: 

 [The KIPP Summit] had a part where they would have everybody who has been teaching five years or less stand up, and everybody pretty much in the auditorium stood up—for 5 to 10 years, very few, and there were hardly any over 10 years. That was for teaching in general and not necessarily teaching at KIPP, but that was also very interesting to see it. And [KIPP leaders] didn’t seem ashamed of that. They seemed to think that was just fine.

“it was almost like a cult”

         One teacher noted what she called the Summit’s “cultish mentality” that others around her saw as well.  During the chanting of the KIPP motto, a friend said to her, “I’m not doing this—this is some cult bs.”  This same teacher likened the conditioning to what she described as a fundamentalist cult.  When I asked one teacher how KIPP values affected how she taught, she said,

You had to have all the KIPP values posted.  You had to constantly remind the children of the KIPP values.  It was an Orwellian type of teaching.  You had to focus on teaching almost like a cult.  It was very much brainwashing is how I could describe it.  It was like it wasn’t you.  I mean, believe me, if you didn’t have those KIPP values posted in your room, if you did not go over them daily, someone would know and they would remind you, hey, these are the KIPP values, teach them. 

This teacher talked about the “language they’ve created where they just rename things,” which she described as “almost comical.”  When I asked why “almost comical,” she replied:

Almost comical because it’s not fully comical, because it’s serious.  It’s just serious.  You’re working but it’s like you’re teaching these values and if you stop and think for a second you’re like okay, wait a minute, this is bizarre and ridiculous, but you keep doing it.  It’s still serious.  I don’t know.  Sometimes you laugh about it.  You had to laugh about it because you couldn’t stop and think, what am I doing. You just have to laugh because you’re like okay, here I am stuck in this situation, and I don’t want to quit, so very often you find yourself just laughing at yourself because you fell for it.  I don’t know.

Another teacher noted, too, the private language and the “different phrases that were used” as “very cultish.”  It has long been noted among scholars (Lifton, 1961) who have studied thought reform environments that a common characteristic is “manipulation of language in which clichés substitute for analytic thought” (p. 419).  A former KIPP teacher who was older and more experienced than most offered this analysis:

. . . they take these young kids 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.

References

American Enterprise Institute.  (2014, March 3).  From poverty to prosperity: A conversation with Bill Gates.  Retrieved from  http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transcript_082217994272.pdf

Browne, L. W.  (2009).  A character education approach to founding a KIPP college preparatory charter school. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Dissertation and Theses database.  (UMI No. 3344513)

Chernicoff, D.  (2006, October 27).  I want you, Yalie, to teach for America.  Yale Daily News.  Retrieved from http://yaledailynews.com/weekend/2006/10/27/i-want-you-yalie-to-teach-for-america/

Green, E.  (2011, February 14).  A new graduate school of education, Relay, to open next fall.  Chalkbeat New York.  Retrieved from http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2011/02/14/a-new-graduate-school-of-education-relay-to-open-next-fall/#.VLGzeyeTDOE

Horn, J.  (2010).  Corporatism, KIPP, and cultural eugenics. In P. Kovacs, (Ed.), Bill Gates and the future of U. S. “public” schools. New York: Routledge.

KIPP Foundation.  (2015d).  Frequently asked questions.  Retrieved from http://www.kipp.org/careers/application-resources/applicant-faqs#Candidate

KIPP Foundation.  (2013).  KIPP: 2013 report card.  Retrieved from http://www.kipp.org/reportcard

Lemov, D.  (2015).  Teach like a champion 2.0: 62 techniques that put students on the path to college.  San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Lemov, D.  (2010).  Teach like a champion:  49 techniques that put students on the path to college (K-12).  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Philanthropy News Digest.  (2009, August 21).  Richard Barth, Chief Executive Officer, KIPP Foundation.  Retrieved from http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/newsmakers/richard-barth-chief-executive-officer-kipp-foundation

Rich, M.  (2013, August 26).  At charter schools, short careers by choice.  The New York Times.  Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/education/at-charter-schools-short-careers-by-choice.html

Stuit, D., & Smith, T.  (2009).  Teacher turnover in charter schools.  Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University.  Retrieved from http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/documents/stuit_smith_ncspe.pdf