Grannan: Where have all the KIPPsters gone?

Guest post by Caroline Grannan.

“[Charter schools] have a distinct advantage … Their families have already chosen to be at a charter and have often jumped through numerous hoops to get there. This makes it easier for charters to create their own cultures. They can define the length of their days, dictate exactly how children dress and enforce strict codes of conduct. Those students — scholars, in charter parlance — who fall out of line don’t last.”

– Jonathan Mahler in the New York Times Magazine

“I will never follow the lead of those who exclude the kids who need education the most so that their precious scores will rise.”

– John Kuhn, superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District, Perrin, Texas

The highly acclaimed charter school operator KIPP – the Knowledge is Power Program – wins widespread praise for the overall high achievement of the low-income students it serves. It's no wonder that KIPP's practices are watched closely. And that means asking an obvious question: Why do so many KIPP students leave the schools without being replaced, and how does that affect the schools' achievement?

Why is attrition at KIPP schools an issue?

Several studies show that a high number of students who enroll at KIPP schools leave the schools early, and the numbers show that students who leave aren't replaced by new, incoming students. At public schools that serve comparable demographics, students who leave are replaced by new, incoming students.

A 2008 study of San Francisco Bay Area KIPP schools by SRI International found that it's consistently the lower-performing students who leave.

How does this affect KIPP's achievement? The lower-performing students are no longer there to bring down averages – but it would also be valuable to learn more about the impact on the students who don't leave after the lower performers have departed. Do they learn more and achieve more, unfettered by their less successful former classmates? This is difficult to address, since the topic is so often met with denial and distortion. Would those students do as well at public schools if their less successful classmates left and weren't replaced?

KIPP schools' achievement is regularly compared to public schools' achievement (i), but the attrition question confounds those comparisons.

Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the New Century Foundation, wrote: “The issue is important because if large numbers of weaker students drop out of KIPP’s rigorous program, it would be highly unfair to compare the test score gains won by the top KIPP students against the scores of all regular public school students – who include KIPP dropouts.” Unfairness is only one issue. If we want to look at KIPP schools to see how they often achieve academic success, the high attrition confounds efforts to do that.

We frequently hear that KIPP schools have waiting lists, but the attrition puts that supposed situation in a whole different light. If there are waiting lists, why aren't all the departing students immediately replaced?

The movie “Waiting for 'Superman',” a PR tool for charter schools, presented the story of Daisy, who hoped to attend KIPP Los Angeles College Preparatory Academy and was devastated to lose out in the admission lottery. But in real life, the high attrition at KIPP LA Prep means Daisy shouldn't have to wait long for an opening. For example, KIPP LA Prep's most recent 8th-grade cohort lost a third of the students who started in grade 5 by the beginning of 8th grade – figures aren't publicly available for how many students finished 8th grade. For that class, which started grade 5 in the 2006-'07 school year and finished grade 8 in 2010, the number dropped from 97 students at the beginning of 5th grade to 81 by the beginning of 6th grade to 65 by the beginning of 8th grade.

Based on that attrition rate, the school would have room for Daisy and many more hopeful applicants if the administrators filled those spots from the waiting list. Why isn't that happening? It's a mystery.

Does this attrition happen at all KIPP schools?

The available research doesn't provide that information.

• In early 2007, I researched attrition at KIPP's California schools as a volunteer project, using data publicly available on the California Department of Education website. At the time, KIPP had nine schools in California. My research found very high attrition at six of them. I also broke down the attrition by demographic subgroup. At all six of the schools with high attrition, the attrition was much higher in the subgroup that's statistically likely to be the most academically challenged – either African-American males or Latino males, depending on the school. My blog posts about the issue appear to mark the first time KIPP attrition had been publicly discussed. What my findings refer to is the overall drop in the number of students – total and by subgroup – year by year in a grade cohort.
• In fall 2008, the organization SRI International released a study of the five KIPP schools that existed at the time in the San Francisco Bay Area. SRI used data that went deeper than the publicly available data I'd used, and found high attrition at all five Bay Area KIPP schools. SRI reported that overall, 60% of the students who enrolled at the five KIPP schools didn't finish at those schools. SRI also found that the students who left were consistently the lower-performing students. If SRI's research broke the students down by demographic subgroup, that wasn't included in the final report.

(Interestingly, SRI International found the high attrition pattern even at a KIPP school – KIPP Heartwood in San Jose – that didn't show high attrition in the figures I researched. As noted, SRI International had access to more complete data than I did; I used only publicly available statistics.)

• KIPP supporters responded to my research and to the SRI study with this claim: “The San Francisco KIPP schools are outliers.” But that was an invalid, misleading and inapplicable response. I had researched all the KIPP schools in California (nine at the time), and SRI had researched all the KIPP schools in the Bay Area (five at the time) – not just the two San Francisco KIPP schools. The two San Francisco KIPP schools, KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy and KIPP Bayview Academy, did show high attrition, but not the highest among the Bay Area's or the state's KIPP schools. It wasn't true that the San Francisco KIPP schools were outliers, and that claim didn't negate my findings or SRI's findings. It didn't even make sense in context of those findings.
• A 2010 study of KIPP schools by Mathematica Policy Research was framed in a manner intended to refute reports of high attrition at KIPP. The report found that of the KIPP schools studied, one-third showed lower attrition than comparable public schools, one-third showed higher attrition and the rest showed comparable attrition. However, the Mathematica report failed to address the issue of whether KIPP replaces the students who leave, which leaves a giant gap in the report.
• A 2011 study by Western Michigan University researchers, published jointly with Columbia University, found significantly higher attrition at KIPP schools than at comparable public schools – 15 percent attrition per year at KIPP vs. 3 percent at public schools. The study found that 30 percent of KIPP students leave between 6th and 8th grades.

But many KIPP supporters say that public schools have the same high rates of attrition, and the Mathematica study said that too.

That's not valid because of the critical difference that at public schools, the students who leave are replaced by new, incoming students. The numbers show that at KIPP schools, students who leave are not replaced. The cohort of students simply shrinks drastically. Even though Mathematica did indeed make that statement, it's not valid. It flies in the face of logic. The distinction puts the situations in an entirely different light.

To give a clear picture: Let's say 100 students start 5th grade at a KIPP school that serves grades 5-8. Sixty of the students leave along the way, before completing 8th grade, and those are the lowest-performing 60 students. They aren't replaced with incoming students. So that cohort at the KIPP school winds up with only the 40 highest-performing students.

At the public school down the street, 100 students start. Sixty of them leave along the way, but each time one leaves, a new student arrives to replace him or her. So that cohort at the public school consists of 100 students from start to finish. Clearly, those two situations are not parallel, equivalent or comparable.

Low-income, at-risk students are likely to be “high-mobility” – meaning that they move a lot due to the instability that tends to afflict the lives of impoverished families. Those students are also statistically likely to be low academic achievers. With the high mobility that characterizes low-income communities, if if a high-mobility student leaves a public school, he or she is replaced with a similarly high-mobility student. By contrast, if a high-mobility student leaves a KIPP school, the numbers show that KIPP is usually not replacing him or her with an incoming student.

Why do the students leave KIPP schools?

That's not publicly known. KIPP spokespeople and supporters deny that KIPP expels or “counsels out” (ii) low-performing students.

Does KIPP have a policy of not enrolling new students after the starting grade? How do we know KIPP isn't replacing the students who leave?

KIPP doesn't appear to have an actual policy of not enrolling new students. But the enrollment numbers at the KIPP schools studied show that the students who leave are, overall, not being replaced with incoming students. It's not clear why that is, given the widespread reports of “long waiting lists.” Even if some of the students who leave are replaced with incoming students, the numbers still show that a very high number are not, resulting in very high total overall attrition and significant shrinkage of the grade cohorts.

If schools receive state funding based on the number of students, doesn't the attrition mean that KIPP schools lose funding as students transfer to other schools?

Yes, it must mean that, though there's discussion of whether the students leave after they are counted for the year, so that KIPP still receives the funding. (This situation could vary state by state.) The KIPP organization receives an immense amount of private philanthropical funding, which may provide enough of a cushion against the loss of the public funding. Perhaps the tradeoff – losing the less-successful students and also losing the per-student funding – is worth it to KIPP schools.

But there's a high dropout rate in public schools that serve low-income populations, so how can we say that public schools replace the students who leave?

Most KIPP schools are middle schools, serving grades 5 through 8. (Almost all of the KIPP schools that have existed long enough for their attrition to be tracked are middle schools.) Except for a very small number of extreme, problematic outliers, students don't drop out of middle school, so public schools don't suffer from dropout rates at those grade levels. Students who leave KIPP schools would be transferring to other schools. I did comparisons of grade cohorts in demographically comparable public schools, and those schools simply didn't show a pattern of attrition at all.

Why would Mathematica make the misleading statement that attrition was comparable to public schools?

Research organizations are known to negotiate with the funders of the research about just how the findings will be presented. It is not publicly knowable what kind of negotiations went on with Mathematica, whose report was funded by KIPP.

The 2008 SRI International report – the one that found 60 percent attrition at all the Bay Area KIPP schools and reported that it was the lower achievers who left – presented that finding as a secondary one in its report. The report, which was also funded by KIPP, announced KIPP's high achievement as the primary finding. The attrition was the newsworthy finding and the one that is still extensively – and increasingly – discussed today.

Some reports have said it might not be that students are leaving KIPP schools but that they're being required to repeat a grade.

That might be true in some – or many – cases. But the overall numbers still show the grade cohorts shrinking, so many students are clearly leaving the schools.

So what's the conclusion?

KIPP attrition isn't comparable to the flow of high-mobility students in and out of public schools – it simply isn't, no matter how many claims there are to the contrary. Why it happens and what it means are still hard to pin down.

i The usual question is: “But aren't KIPP schools public schools?” I don't believe that schools run by a private operator are truly public schools, even if they receive public funding.

ii “Counseling out” refers to a practice of gently but firmly persuading the student and family to leave the school. The archetypal method would be to tell the family that the school isn't the “right fit” for the student, or vice versa.

Under Seige

Very few, if any, urban public school systems have been spared from the pompous neo-liberal mentality of today’s education reform cabal.

Beware: Do NOT confuse the term “neo-liberalism” with “social liberalism.” There is NO connection.

Neo-liberalism is an economic theory that outlines a set of policies which support and promote the economic system of capitalism. According to CorpWatch, the main points of neo-liberalism include:

• THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government [Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights].
• CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care [In the name of reducing government's role and supporting government subsidies and tax benefits for business].
• DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminish profits.
• PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water [Usually done in the name of greater efficiency].
• ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF "THE PUBLIC GOOD" or "COMMUNITY" and replacing it with "individual responsibility."

If you've been following the arguments for today's school reform movement, all these principals will sound familiar.

Americans usually associate “reform” with a movement that will make things better, for example, reforming child labor laws. However, this is a case where U.S. citizens need to be much less naive!

The ultimate outcome of today’s public education “reform” is the elimination of our children's schools as a public institution, followed by a rebuilding where all schools will be operated privately. This time, reform isn't going to mean any type of improvement which the trusting, average person is likely to have in their mind.

In the 19 months since I started this blog, I’ve connected with parents, teachers, and community members in Boston, New York City, Albany, Baltimore, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Portland, Oregon. In each of those cities, people are experiencing the same neo-liberal siege of their local public school system. In some cases, the condition is at a very advanced stage.

Recently I had an exchange with the authors of Seattle Education 2010, a blog that focuses on charter schools as well as the presence of the Broad Foundation within Seattle public schools. They display the following quote from Albert Einstein at the bottom of their website:

‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.’

The rational mind beams brightly from the minds controlling public education reform today. Think about places like Harvard Business School and about all those now-interested-in-education MBAs. Think about Milton Friedman who designed the blueprint for the total corporate privatization of Earth. He was originally a mathematician and statistician who became an economist. And think about the billionaires who are suddenly devoted to "improving" public education. Eli Broad was a precocious Certified Public Accountant (the youngest ever in Michigan at the time) who became a corporate CEO. Bill Gates was a precocious computer scientist before he became a corporate CEO and the wealthiest, and thus the most powerful, person who has ever lived on this planet. There would be little balance in the minds of today’s education reform leaders; they are weighted down by their strategic business-minded rationality.

The danger of today’s education “reform” movement is that the arguments which defend it are so damn logical. That logic – potentiated by the billions spent on developing and pushing it – may be what is giving it so much strength. But might doesn't necessarily make right.

Unfortunately, their logic wins, especially when so many people don’t view propaganda with a critical eye, don't know that they need to be skeptical about grand claims, have absolute trust in “philanthropists,” and want the ugly problems which chronically exist in inner-cities to simply disappear.

They think to themselves, why not fixate on data? What's wrong with testing children a little bit more, and a little bit more? Why aren't teachers to blame when their students have trouble absorbing information in the classroom? Why not replace teachers with smart, analytically-minded, Ivy League-trained, 22-year-olds, even if they've only had six weeks of summer training? Why wouldn’t the KIPP model work for every single child, it makes them so obedient? What's wrong with calling students, their teachers and their schools "failures" when test scores don't measure up? What could possibly go wrong if our nation's public schools were replaced with those that are privately-run?

I really liked the Einstein quote, so I looked it up and found more great quotes about rationality and creativity.

On Rationality...

Being rational does not necessarily kill creativity, but it can very easily do so. This is because we are not rational, even though we think we are. Psychologists call it ‘bounded rationality' because although we have a deep need to appear rational, the world is simply too complex for us to fully understand.

Quotes:

‘Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour germinates no more.’ — Henri-Frédéric Amiel

‘No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.’ — Niels Bohr

‘Sir, we must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic.’ — Winston Churchill

‘Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.’ — Lord Dunsany

‘Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.’ — Albert Einstein

‘Rules and models destroy genius and art.’ — William Hazlitt

‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ — Martin Rees

‘Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.’ — James Harvey Robinson

‘Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.’ — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

‘The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.’ — George Bernard Shaw

'People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.’ — William Butler Yeats

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Periodically I’ll take a look at Whitney Tilson’s blog. The first time I became aware of Tilson was when word went out about his account of Ben Chavis’ verbal attack on New York City Council Member Charles Barron at Sharpton’s National Action Network EEP forum. Chavis, Oakland’s notorious and poorly-behaved American Indian Public Charter School founder, had been invited to sit on the panel.

According to Tilson, Chavis approached Barron and said, “You're a mother f-ing black pimp, you're f-ing our kids. Come to the reservation and I'll beat your ass. You want our kids to take Home Ec? YOU should wear a dress!"

For those of us in Oakland who have been experiencing Chavis for years, hearing something like this was nothing new. But then there was Whitney Tilson’s enthusiastic response of, “I LIKE this guy!”

Tilson's day job is as the founder and managing partner of a New York company that manages investments. He also writes about financial investing and is a minor TV business celebrity. He has posted some of his appearances on YouTube.

In addition to the things above, Tilson's super-intense hobby is being involved with education reform-minded things. He co-founded Democrats for Education Reform, and is on the board of directors of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. He has spoken to Philanthropy Roundtable members, guiding and reinforcing their K-12 education philosophy. Tilson is a huge fan of Joel Klein, according to whom he meets regularly, he adores Michelle Rhee, and Jay Green gives him praise.

Whitney Tilson was the first person to join Wendy Kopp as a founding member of Teach For America. He is the vice chairman of KIPP Academy Charter Schools in NYC. All-in-all he is a big pro-charter, pro-voucher cheerleader of TFA and KIPP; possibly the ultimate neo-liberal education reformer of our day.

Tilson explains on his blog that his parents spent most of their careers doing international development. His interest in education came about because of both the work of his parents and from his experience with TFA.

“I remember the many times, going back to my teenage years, that she [his mother] reminded me of all the good fortune I’ve had in my life and told me that I had a duty to give back and make the world a better place.”

A photo posted online reveals that he was a high school student at Northfield Mount Hermon School (where today's current tuition, room, and board charge is $43,400+, and $30,500+ for day students). He attended Harvard, and eventually Harvard Business School. His education trajectory is very much like Duncan and Obama's.

Tilson invites his readers to look at the photos and videos of KIPP celebrations which he has posted online. I was surprised to see them intertwined with photos and videos of his personal life, and have no idea why someone involved in a controversial, public topic would do such a thing. But since he made them available to the world and I'm a curious person, I thought I’d take a look. I’m fascinated with trying to understand the make-up of people who think so differently from me. For some reason, or the other, I keep looking for a bridge.

The photos and videos feature the travel and activities of an extraordinarily privileged American family; Machu Picchu, Kenya, Prague, Jackson Hole, skiing, golfing, water skiing, private plane flying, white-water rafting, paragliding, and on and on and on. It strikes me that Whitney Tilson is one entitled dude. Incidentally, I learned that his children attend a private school who a mother described as "one of the most elite girls’ schools in the nation." It has a student to faculty ratio of 7:1 and its tuition is around $34,000/year. No public schools will be experienced here.

This all brings me to a fascinating and useful article I discovered during my googling of “elite schools,” The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz, a literary critic and former Yale professor. I love how he begins his piece:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

Here are nine additional excerpts which not only relate to Tilson and TFA, but also to the current state of education reform, the vision of which has been conceived, and is being pushed, by our nation’s elite. The article also gives us a clue as to why other social classes are being excluded from participating in important conversations about their own schools. Deresiewicz writes:

(1) It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(2) The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(3) At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(4) My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(5) [Elite universities] …select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(6) Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(7) The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth… It’s been said that what those tests [SAT, GRE, and other numerical rankings] really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(8) One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(9) This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others… Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.

We need to have a public discussion about the extent of the patronizing contempt for the middle-class-on-down held by some of those in the non-public school using elite, and how it is manifesting itself in the way our public education system is being treated and where education reform is being headed. The People who actually use the public schools, and the providers who work in them, are being excluded from important decisions on both the local and national levels.
The response by the elite is always about how much they are trying to "help." Sorry, I just don't buy that, especially because so many of the reforms are being pushed onto communities after the elite arranges for general public input to be forcefully disengaged.*

Before a reader charges me with inciting class warfare, I hope they realize how much class tension is already there, and growing by the minute. Think of these entries as reports about what is going on at the ground level.

*Remember Joe Williams' (Tilson's buddy) description in his report for the Center of Education Reform of a desirable "politics free zone" conveniently created by the state control of Oakland's school district, and which opened the door for Eli Broad's reform ideas to be implemented?

The Scheming Called "Venture Philanthropy"

Over the weekend I read "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy," by Janelle Scott (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, formerly NYU). It is published by SAGE which gives free access to their publications until April 30, 2009.

Scott explains the billionaires' strategy to push charter schools onto communities by careful maneuvering of their immense foundation-giving. She also describes the not-always-well-intentioned, and/or misguided, history of foundation "giving" which has targeted communities of color in the past.

The outcome of the foundation-giving programs of today requires an important trade-off from the local communities, namely, the relinquishment of interest and power over their own public schools to the public education notions of a few immensely wealthy oligarchs. What does it tell us that the communities where this is occurring necessitated first being placed under authoritarian rule (a.k.a. wealthy oligarch/billionaire-influenced mayoral &/or state control)?

[The backroom deals are being made in every city where pro-charter school forces have gained a foothold. The parent informant of one of my associates explained that the Federal City Council, a group of business leaders who really run Washington D.C., met with Mayor Fenty immediately after he took office. As the D.C native describes it, Fenty emerged from the meeting and immediately announced the mayoral takeover of the D.C. schools; this is the circumstance that brought in Michelle Rhee in June 2007. The D.C. native says Fenty never hinted about this scenario during his campaign.]

Scott’s article explains how the "gifts" of these foundations are going to a broad range of charter advocacy groups, pro-charter research organizations, alternative teacher, principal, and superintendent training programs, charter school development organizations, etc. EdVoice, Center for Education Reform, TFA, NewSchools Venture Fund, NewLeaders for New Schools, KIPP, Green Dot, Democrats for Education Reform, and the EEP are just the teeny tiny tip of the you're-going-to-have-charter-schools-whether-you-want-them-or-not iceberg.

Scott describes the flow of money to these organizations with the intent to have them work as a network in unison to further the billionaires' goal. Very few of the donations go directly to individual schools and their students (just enough to make them look a lot better initially than their traditional school neighbors – read here and here). Their many, many dollars mostly go toward advocacy, propaganda, and the building of a national pro-charter school structure.

Speaking of propaganda, I've recently learned how Broad has bought off large, important portions of PBS, and how M. Gates, a major supporter of the KIPP organization, is on the board of the Washington Post, home to Jay Mathews, the staff writer with an education column who perpetually praises and promotes KIPP schools.

The extent to which the media has been co-opted by this force would be a good topic for someone to track. We know how heavily they have influenced the White House (just one person being John Doerr).

Be aware that there is little objective information coming from the media anymore, and that only the wealthy, top business elite (certainly not educators, scholars, or any other highly knowledgeable people) are determining the future of our nation's public educational system; any other input is being blocked.

The masses are also being used. For instance, Scott's article tells how the 2004 Philanthropy Roundtable donors guide describes a technique to push charter schools. It is "...the sponsorship of efforts that put parents of color out front instead of 'rich, white Republicans.' " The technique is exactly described here and here. This general strategy, which turns out to be bipartisan, may also explain why a deeply-in-debt-to-the-IRS Al Sharpton was persuaded to join the pro-charter force.

Another small item that may be of interest to some of you is that the Broad Foundation paid the Century Foundation $100,000 (in 2004) and $29,973 (in 2007) to "support research on the late union leader Albert Shanker." View the Broad Foundation 990's here. This interest of theirs is certainly connected to how much pro-charter forces like to mention that Albert Shanker was responsible for the idea of charter schools (as if to brush off any responsibility for them!). They use this statement frequently to both justify the existence of charter schools, and to attempt to disarm the teachers' union complaints about them. Of course, they don't tell the whole story.

Shanker's real views are revealed in Tough Liberal, Richard Kahlenberg's biography. Mike Klonsky’s review of the book states:

In a speech to the National Press Club in 1988, he [Shanker] proposed the idea of teacher-led "charter schools" where rules could be bent if the great majority of teachers in a small school approved. He called on districts to "create joint school board-union panels that would review preliminary proposals and help find seed money for the teachers to develop final proposals."

So Shanker's vision was for teachers to have more control over their schools, not the fringe others. Kahlenberg states:

Shanker "watched with alarm as the concept he put forward began to move away from a public-school reform effort to look more like a private-school voucher plan. Shanker came to believe that the charter school movement was largely hijacked by conservatives who made many charter schools vulnerable to the same groups that made voucher schools so dangerous: for-profit corporations, racial separatists, the religious right, and anti-union activists...Shanker watched with dismay as 'those who had tremendous contempt for public education' jumped on to the charter school bandwagon."

The breadth of the billionaires' maneuvers is extensive, and the details which confirm it are many. It is going to take a little more time to help the American public grasp the diabolical, anti-democratic nature of their strategy.

It's crystal clear that a set of this nation's upper business elite has overstepped its boundaries in too many ways, and for too long, from the managing of our nation's finances to its public education system. They have been forcing us with well-financed trickery to go down the wrong track. Even a not-too-long-ago politically mild-mannered person (myself) can see that when The People realize the degree of selfish, arrogant scheming that's been done, their response may be strong and accompanied by outrage, and possibly violence.

Charter School Tactics

Today at Alexander Russo’s “This Week on Education”

On KIPP: "Just Another Model Program"?

"Until KIPP tries to succeed within an entire, single community, it is, for all its remarkable rise and deserved praise, just another model program that has yet to prove it can succeed with all—or even most—disadvantaged children."

Sara Mosle on Jay Mathews' KIPP book in Slate

Ah, yes, those MOST disadvantaged children. Remember them?

KIPP’s school in Oakland has a specially selected population -- there is no doubt.

When Oakland Unified was taken over by the state in 2003, courtesy of the California State Superintendent of Education who received major campaign contributions from pro-charter forces (Eli Broad & friends), a whole host of graduates from the Broad Academy were sent to transform the district. We were one of the first districts they obtained control of, and as a result, nearly 20% of our students now attend charter schools.

Under the pro-charter reign, there has been NO district-led interest in looking at the charter schools with a critical eye, nor in revealing the tactics they use to boost their test scores. The only so-called “reports” have been ones periodically issued by the pro-charter California Charter School Association. I guess they think we're stupid.

As a result, I decided to independently investigate my local charter schools. This week I compared charter vs. non-charter middle schools using the CDE data for 2007-08.

California documents the average Parent Educational Level at each school. The figure is an average of all responses where:

• "1" represents "Not a high school graduate"
• “2” represents “High school graduate”
• “3” represents “Some college”
• “4” represents “College graduate”
• "5" represents "Graduate school"

The PEL at the charter middle schools was 2.42. The average for our non-charter schools was 2.08. Charter middle schools in Oakland have a more educated parent body.

The Oakland KIPP school was third from the charter school top, at 3.27 (the highest charter PEL was 3.63). In comparison, the PEL’s for the two middle schools in the same neighborhood were 2.20 and 2.15. Of course, a lower PEL will influence each school's student achievement.

In the scheme of the charters and non-charters combined, a total of 36 schools, the KIPP parent body is the fifth most educated. Their education rivals Montera Middle School (PEL = 3.37), Oakland's high achieving middle school in the hills (API = 794). KIPP's API = 760.

In addition to the variation in parent education levels, a wide variation is also reflected in the percentage of students w/disabilities between the charter schools and the non-charters. Oakland's charter middle schools are managing to avoid these needy students.

KIPP had 3% students w/disabilities. The two other middle schools in the same neighborhood had 4% and 11%.

The district non-charter middle school average for students w/disabilities is 9%. It reaches a high of 17% at one traditional middle school. The charter middle school average was 3.9%.

The most blatant avoidance of students w/disabilities is by the American Indian Model schools. These are the Blue-Ribbon-award-winning American Indian Public Charter School, the American Indian Public Charter School II, and the Oakland Charter Academy. Their combined enrollment in 2007-08 of students w/disabilities was 1.3%.

Throughout the district, students w/disabilities test significantly lower than other subgroups, their district-wide API is only 470. When a school has one-tenth or more of its population producing extremely low test scores, those figures will also lower the test scores for the whole school -- and these are the numbers upon which the schools are largely judged.

It is also important to note that when there are enough students at a school with severe emotional and social problems on top of their cognitive problems, the entire school climate can be negatively affected. The regular inner-city schools are responsible for a substantial number of these kids, but the charter schools are given a pass.

So really, how much of KIPP’s achievement, and the praise lavished on it by so many, is truly deserved? How much is a result of parent self-selection and the screening-out of the most low-performing subgroup?

Is it right to blame the regular public schools for lower achievement, when they have a student body that is much more disadvantaged? Perhaps the special "innovation" that charter schools have discovered is how selection and self-selection will produce higher test scores.

One more thing...

I am just getting underway with looking into the enormous financial contributions that KIPP and other charters receive as a supplement to their state per pupil funding. These contributions, often delivered by pro-charter agents, permit them to pay teachers for extended days, cover the costs of summer programs, etc. In the meantime, the regular schools are being chronically starved to death, after which they are labeled as failures.

For instance, the 2006 990 form for KIPP Bay Area shows that the Oakland KIPP school received $138,117 in the previous year. This amount of money would pay for at least two teachers. The school serves ~175 kids.

Undercover supplementary funding gives the charters a hidden advantage over the regular public schools that are trying their best to serve difficult-to-educate populations, and the scope of this advantage needs to be made public. As it stands now, the stealth nature of this extra funding is one of the methods being deployed to undermine, and ultimately destroy, our traditional public education system.

ALL schools need to be funded sufficiently. ALL students would benefit if the schools were provided with the means to meet the needs of their most disadvantaged students. All that charter schools do is cause them to become more and more concentrated together, so that they can still be perpetually neglected.