KIPP Schools and What Can We Do For Urban Poor Kids?

When I picked up the Globe and Mail last Saturday the first thing I noticed was a Margaret Wente piece on KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Charter schools www.globeandmail.com Yes These Children Can and my first thoughts were “oh no Wente is going to do a puff piece on these American charter schools and then tell us to adopt them in Canada.” Wente had done a hatchet job on me a few years ago for a ‘Why is America Hated’ article I did for the local OSSTF but much like Rush Limbaugh, she probably increased my street cred in the process. The theory in the progressive movement that you’re nobody until you have been attacked by the right still holds.

To my almost complete surprise, the piece verged on fair minded. Wente did the puffy stuff for the first half and they balanced it off in the back end by putting up a little bit of a straw man critique and then tearing it down. She claims that several independent studies with control groups show that KIPP is not simply creaming the best poor students but she does not site the studies. In fact, a number of recent studies in Michigan , Ohio , and North Carolina show that creaming is exactly what is happening (see Little Report archives “Research Show School Choice Making Things Worse”).

Charter schools cannot take over the public system due to lack of capacity but they can live off the public system in a parasitic relationship where the hard to teach and the school resistors are left to the public system. It is not good enough to say KIPP students come from the same public housing projects as public school kids, not good enough to say they have the same income and racial profile. Within each group, even as narrowly defined as this, there are the highly motivated, well behaved students as well as the much less motivated, badly behaved kids. If you push out 40% of your kids as KIPP does, where do they go? Back to the public schools who are now worse off having lost their best kids to KIPP or another charter. KIPP has an ‘educate the best and shoot the rest’ outlook that sadly even Obama buys into to some extent.

Wente acknowledges that it is very difficult to upscale the KIPP model. I would add much less necessary in Canada where as bad as it is, we have never let public schools deteriorate to the American level. Not yet anyway. She does argue that there are things we can learn from KIPP. I agree although not necessarily with the same priorities as she has. Point number one is that treating poor kids the same as middle class kids will leave them perpetually behind. This is not only unfair it is counterproductive economically. Do we want another and another generation condemned to an underclass of welfare, EI, crime, prostitution, incarceration and so on or do we want them to become active citizens, productive workers, taxpayers, and generally happy people? There is one way and only one way forward-education. 

The discipline probably drives out the kids KIPP wants to drive out (did I say that?). It is the time on task that is really what works however. KIPP uses a longer day, longer year, and Saturday school model. There are other ways. Smaller classes from K-12 for all schools with high numbers of poor kid’s works. Teacher training works, more support staff works, public free tutorial programs like Pathways works, free, high quality childcare with an Early Childhood Education focus works. Our major problem is a total lack of political will. The politicians at Queen’s Park and the school boards know what works but when they see this list they reach for their calculators and the defibulator. We need to get over the cost and do ALL OF IT. It is an investment in people and the only really safe one in this world as we are finding out.