KIPP SLANT Redux

Through Katharine Beals' blog, Out in Left Field, I am once again thinking about KIPP schools, and trying to clarify my (extremely negative) reaction to them.

In Schools Matter: A Former KIPP Teacher Shares Her Story, I found the following poster, which is apparently common in KIPP schools:



(It's a bit hard to read; here's what it says.  In the first panel, a coach berates a student: "You ! ¿ a ! ".  In the second panel, the student thinks [sic]: "I won't be bad next time I will be better The coach can be mad so what I'll do better next time".   In the third panel, three smiley-type faces are shown with the captions "I feel okay", "I feel very angry!", and "I feel a little sad".  The "I feel okay" smiley has an arrow drawn to it.)

Here, kids are taught that it's OK if they get screamed at by a coach, or, by extension, a teacher, and that they shouldn't get sad or angry about it; they should tell themselves they feel OK and try to do better next time.  The message of the poster is that kids should accept abuse from those in authority.  (Elsewhere in our society, abusive coaches get fired.)

From an interview with a KIPP student in Schools matter: Why Students Call KIPP the Kids in Prison Program:

I had to sit like this. [demonstrates]

It’s called S.L.A.N.T.: Sit straight. Listen. Ask a question. Nod your head. Track. Track is, if the teacher is going that way you have to… [demonstrates] follow… If you didn't do that, they'll yell at you: "You're supposed to be looking at me!" [points to demerit sheet] "No SLANTing." They'll put that on there. 

If I got into an argument with a teacher, I would have to stand outside the classroom on the black line, holding my notebook out. [Stands up and demonstrates, holding arms out] I would have to stand there until they decided to come out. For 20 minutes, 30 minutes, sometimes they’ll forget you’re out there and you’ll be there the whole period –an hour and forty minutes standing. if you have necklaces you have to tuck them away so they can’t see them – or else they’ll have you write four pages of a sentence about KIPP – “I must follow the rules of the KIPP Academy” or “I must not talk” for four pages.

Here's the bottom line for me:  I don't like authoritarian schools.   I don't like schools that tell kids how to sit, what to wear, where they're allowed to look during class,  and how to walk in the hallway. I don't like schools that take over their students' lives through a long school day followed by enormous quantities of homework.

I wouldn't send my own kids to an authoritarian school, and I don't want to support authoritarian schools with my tax dollars.  I don't accept the values they teach, namely total compliance and unquestioning obedience.  I don't really care whether the kids at these schools do better on standardized tests, because the price is too high.  It's not worth higher test scores if children are being trained to accept abuse.

For that matter, I don't like schools that abuse their teachers.  KIPP schools routinely make their teachers work 90 hours a week.  Only young adults with no families of their own can handle the workload.  I've learned through experience that teachers who don't have their own kids are often much less sympathetic and understanding of the child's point of view, but these are the only teachers employed by KIPP.  

We need a humane society.  We can only achieve a humane society by treating all people humanely and with respect. This includes young people, female people, dark-skinned people, people whose first language is not English, employees, and everyone at the bottom of the totem pole.

The Pleasure of Making Somebody Else Work Hard

In the NyTimes, Rigorous Schools Put College Dreams into Practice.

This is the story of an early college high school that Bard college has opened in Newark.  The early college model has so far been used for elite students who want to get to college-level work quicker; now Bard is trying the same model for disadvantaged kids in Newark.

Why does this article bother me?

1.)  Hard work is not always a good thing.

I love hard work; I could watch it all day.  (Yes, that joke is a million years old, but it's relevant.) 

Schools love to crow about making kids work hard, and most Americans, with our Puritan heritage, find it difficult to criticize work.  As a dissenter, I'm willing to ask:  is the work worth doing?  Is it well-designed, so the students actually learn something by engaging in it?

And even in a perfect universe, where the curriculum is well-designed and appropriate, and the assignments are useful and interesting, there is still such a thing as too much.  There are only so many hours in a day, and human beings are only capable of so much scholarly work at a time.  Are we burning kids out?  What do they no longer have time for because of the workload?

I find an uncomfortable undercurrent of racism when a white reporter tells mostly white readers about black kids working hard.  This is the population, of course, that white people like to criticize as "lazy", going all the way back to the days of slavery (gee, maybe people are less motivated to work when they're paid absolutely nothing.)    

2.)  Learning is necessarily sequential.

From the article:

Gone is the thinking that students must master all the basics before taking on more challenging work.

The article describes under-prepared kids struggling through an essay called "Post-Modernism is the New Black".  The kids don't understand words like "phenomenon" or "sinister", and don't know what "Auschwitz" refers to.  It's just too much to ask anyone to simultaneously remember the meaning of a half-dozen complex words she's never seen before and also engage in a debate using the new words.

Learning is sequential, and you can't skip steps and expect good results.
 
I see this in my own experience teaching kids math in an after-school program in Philadelphia.  One of the kids I regularly teach is in 8th-grade algebra.  She's a good kid; hard-working and eager.  But it is almost criminal to put her in an algebra class and assign homework where she's expected to work out problems comparing weekly pay.  She looks at "2 + 3n" and adds it to "5n".   She can't reliably work with fractions or decimals or the distributive property.  I spent almost an hour a couple of weeks ago showing her how to add 2-digit numbers, and why it works to "carry" the 10s to the next place. 

It's as if you threw me into a 3d year Polish class.  How hard would I have to work to get anywhere at all?   Wouldn't it be more fruitful to start me out in first-year Polish?

For that matter, why is it universally accepted as a good thing that kids should do college-level work in high school?  

3.)  It's all a scam.

The economy is a mess, and middle-class jobs are disappearing.   But here we are tantalizing under-privileged kids with the prospect of a college degree and a good job.  How many of these kids will make it through college?  If they get a college degree, how many will be able to find jobs?  If we don't fix the economy, we're not doing these kids any favors.

A Mother Speaks Out

Here's an interesting blog post from the mother whose son got kicked out of a Harlem Success Academy (first discussed in my blog here:   Cherry-Picking Charter Schools):

My Special Child, Pushed Out of Kindergarten at a NYC Charter School

I learned from this post that parents at HSA are actually required to buy their kids' uniforms!  How can that be justified for the children of the poor, in a school supported by taxpayers?

Cherry-Picking Charter Schools

In today's NYTimes, Charter School Sends Message -- Thrive or Transfer.

The article is about a young boy who was pressured to leave a Harlem Success Academy charter school.

The boy was made to stay after school to "practice" walking in the halls correctly. According to a spokeswoman for HSA:

“Practicing walking through the halls is the opposite of a punishment,” she wrote. “Just as in math, when a child does not get a concept, we re-teach. We don’t let the child fail. We ensure he gets it. We take the same approach with behavior. If a child is struggling, we re-teach. This is an example of when the school went out of its way to help Matthew be successful.”

Oh, please. If you force a kid to do a boring, repetitive, pointless task, that's a punishment. You can call it "practice", you can call it "consequences", you can call it whatever you want, but it's still punishment. No, it isn't less punitive if you smile and speak with a gentle voice when you tell the kid he's going to practice walking silently in the hallway. It's the same old abuse that's been perpetrated by those with power against those without power for centuries.

I'm not surprised young Matthew was throwing up most mornings and asking his mother if he was going to be fired from school.

The good news is that Matthew is now doing very well at his local public school.

Flattening the Mind

From a comment to an op-ed by David Brooks in the NYTimes (as usual, the comments are more interesting than the original article!):

As someone who has spent several decades in education, I wonder how much you really know about what happens in the schools that are billed as success stories. I had the opportunity to work with students in such a school (one that has gotten national press and $$ from the Gates Foundation because it's seen as a success). I saw kids there who hated to read, and whose answer to every question about why they were doing what they were doing was the school mantra, So I can get into college. A perfectly fine mantra -- except that I had to look far and wide to find a kid who showed a passion for the learning they were currently doing, and who hadn't forgotten how to relish text. ("I hate reading," I heard, again and again.) The kid who still loved reading? He'd just transferred there from a "low-achieving" neighboring school.

The teachers at the "successful" school focused heavily on teaching to the test, and were pretty successful at that. They were caring, committed, smart people, by and large. But there was no room for them to notice or honor their student's intellectual curiosity. I'd home school my kid before I'd send her to a place that deadened the mind like that. I can point to a number of other schools that are lauded for test scores and test improvement where this flattening of the mind is customary.

Of Course It Won't Work

A recent NYTimes article, New American Academy in Brooklyn is an Experiment in Class Size, describes

an audacious public education experiment taking place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, one that its founder hopes will revolutionize both how students learn and how teachers are trained. Instead of assigning one teacher to roughly 25 children, the New American Academy began the school year with four teachers in large, open classrooms of 60 students. The school stresses student independence over teacher-led lessons, scientific inquiry over rote memorization and freedom and self-expression over strict structure and discipline. The founder, Shimon Waronker, developed the idea with several other graduate students at Harvard. It draws its inspiration, he said, from Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding high school in New Hampshire where students in small classes work collaboratively and hold discussions around tables.

What are you, crazy? Why would a system designed for a small, hand-picked group of smart, well-behaved high school students be appropriate for a huge mixed group of first-graders?

Why would a bunch of Harvard graduate students have any insights into the needs of a bunch of Brooklyn kids? It's a completely different world.

It seems to me that young childless adults are the worst possible candidates to put in charge of a school. They're too close to their own childhood to have any perspective on it, and, with no children of their own, they don't understand the parent's point of view either. That's not to say they can't be good teachers. They just need plenty of coaching and support from those with more experience.

I can't believe these wankers were actually given a school to run. And as one commenter asked, haven't they heard of Montessori?

Some Thoughts about "The Lottery"

So, I just finished watching "The Lottery" (streamed on Netflix). For those who haven't heard of it, it's a documentary (though not a balanced one) that follows several families as they apply to get into a charter school called the Harlem Success Academy.

I have mixed feelings about the movie, and charter schools in general. On the one hand, I increasingly feel that parents should have choices about where to school their children, and everyone should be able to vote with their feet, as I did. Surely one of the worst ideas in education is that one size fits all.

I don't criticize the parents who applied to the Lottery in hopes of getting into a charter school. The zoned public schools where they live are terrible, and a decent charter would be a big step up. The parents in the movie are dedicated to their kids and want to give them a chance to succeed in adult life.

On the other hand, the Harlem Success Academy, like KIPP, runs schools that I would never willingly send my kids to. Now, as a white, upper-middle-class, left-of-liberal type, I'm not their intended audience. But I wonder, if someone opened a Montessori charter in the inner city, what kind of results could they get? Would parents be interested, or do they prefer the authoritarian model?

There's an interesting article about Eva Moskowitz, the founder of Harlem Success Academies, here. Here's an excerpt which convinced me that my kids would never attend such a school:

New students are initiated at “kindergarten boot camp,” where they get drilled for two weeks on how to behave in the “zero noise” corridors (straight lines, mouths shut, arms at one’s sides) and the art of active listening (legs crossed, hands folded, eyes tracking the speaker). Life at Harlem Success, the teacher says, is “very, very structured,” even the twenty-minute recess. Lunches are rushed and hushed, leaving little downtime to build social skills. Many children appear fried by two o’clock, particularly in weeks with heavy testing. “We test constantly, all grades,” the teacher says. During the TerraNova, a mini-SAT bubble test over four consecutive mornings, three students threw up. “I just don’t feel that kids have a chance to be kids,” she laments.

Noguera, too, has reservations about the “punitive” approach at Harlem Success and other high-performing charter networks. He thinks it grooms conformists, and that middle-class parents would find it anathema. “What concerns me are the race/class assumptions built into this,” he says. “If you’re serious about preparing kids to be leaders, you have to realize that leaders have to think for themselves.”

Also, the sight of classrooms full of dark-skinned children being taught and supervised by lily-white teachers and administrators is troubling. How about training some of the parents to become teachers in the school?

KIPP SLANT

[Continuing the discussion of KIPP which I started in a previous post.]

KIPP schools use the acronym SLANT for required classroom behavior:

Sit up straight
Listen
Ask questions
Nod
Track the speaker with your eyes

From a typically fawning NY Times article:

[Dave Levin is one of the founders of KIPP.] Levin’s contention is that Americans of a certain background learn these methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students, he says, need to be taught the methods explicitly ... Middle-class Americans know intuitively that “good behavior” is mostly a game with established rules ...

And why is behavior so important?

Angela Duckworth published ... a research paper that demonstrated a guiding principle of these charter schools: in many situations, attitude is just as important as ability. Duckworth studied 164 eighth-grade students in Philadelphia, tracking each child’s I.Q. as well as his or her score on a test that measured self-discipline and then correlating those two numbers with the student’s G.P.A. Surprisingly, she found that the self-discipline scores were a more accurate predictor of G.P.A. than the I.Q. scores by a factor of two.

Oh yeah? I'm not surprised a bit. Grades are all about compliance. The compliant, conventional, average kid will outperform the unconventional genius every time.

For a little balance, here's a rare critical article about KIPP, from the LA times: Long days, strict rules mark schools.

A Visit to A KIPP School

I have long been suspicious of KIPP, or the "Knowledge is Power Program", a charter school company which is a darling of the mainstream media. KIPP mostly teaches low-income, minority kids.

KIPP's motto is "Work Hard, Be Nice", and they ain't kiddin' about "Work Hard". KIPP schools have long hours (7:30 -- 5:00), and their students spend about 67% more time in class than most public school students. They are also given upwards of 2 hours of homework per night, and homework over "vacation". Famously, KIPP students are taught middle-class habits like sitting up straight and tracking the teacher with their eyes.

As for "Be Nice", as a woman, I've had people telling me that all my life, and it's never done a bit of good.

Not content with taking over the kids' lives, KIPP also overworks its teachers. From the KIPP website:

KIPP teachers are expected to help all students succeed, and they typically work a nine-hour work day during the week, half days on selected Saturdays, and three weeks in the summer. They also are available via cell phone for homework help in the evening.

No one should expect teachers to martyr themselves for the good of their students. Teaching, like all jobs, should allow a reasonable balance between work and personal life.

I was interested to read the following comment posted by "chemtchr" at Bridging Differences:

Actually, I accepted Kipp's invitation today, to come and look at a charter middle school. Four academic classes had a smartboard with a worksheet up on it. The board was smart, the content was dumb, the teachers were exhausted from leading the stereotyped clapping and response activities that accompanied the filling of the worksheet.

"What is classification? How does classification help us?" There was nothing to classify, no student interaction, and the teacher was unable to get any kid to respond with the desired answer, so she couldn't fill in the dumb answers so the class could copy them. The kids, instead, made comments about whether a person in a coma or an unborn baby was alive. The teacher could only respond by critiquing their adherence to the behavior rituals. Apparently the lesson was "How do we classify is a living thing?", and this was a science class.

Only one worksheet was not agressively dumb, because there were actually a couple of styrofaom cups set up in the front of the room, with thermemeters in them. Students didn't move, or handle the cups, but that teacher alone was able to address the content of what children said in response to the worksheet questions.

The other smart-board teachers were lost in the continuous struggle to maintain conformance with the bizarre clapping and posture rituals. This required continuous peppering of all discourse with monitoring, admonishments, threats to take away games, and little reward claps and games. The funniest reward games were Simon Says, and shooting a little Nerf gun at a target.

The kids (all very cute ones) were okay with it, and seemed neither beaten down nor particularly educated. I can see how you'd be able to take some great still pictures. The teachers were a visible wreck, but then their principal had just strolled in with a guest at the end of a very long day of this.

The kids were fresh as daisies, I have to say. They are indeed the lucky ones, and over half will win scholarships to the Catholic high schools, so they won't have to deal with MCAS. The unselected half will go to the public district, which is increasingly under the control of KIPP and other turnaround partners.

Hmm ... reliance on clapping and posture rituals ... does this remind you of anything?

Siphoning off Motivated Students

From The Death and Life of the Great American School System, by Diane Ravitch:

Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools.

FedUpMom again: One of the claims of the charter school movement was that charter schools would improve the public schools, through the magic of competition. This was always a ridiculous idea. You could throw me into a race with Michael Phelps, but would I suddenly become an Olympic-quality swimmer? Of course not.

What the charter schools can provide is an escape hatch from the crummy public schools. People with enough money have always had an escape hatch, namely private schools. Those with less money can escape to Catholic schools (which Diane Ravitch seems to like), or, with a great deal of luck, a good charter school.

If this means that the public schools lose some of their best students, too bad. It is their own fault if the best families in their district are desperate to keep their kids out of public school.