WaPo Urges Caution re: Matthews' KIPP Book

Just when I think the Washington Post education section has gone over completely to the privatizer/edupreneur camp, along comes Richard D. Kahlenberg's review of WaPo education reporter Jay  Matthews' Work Hard. Be Nice. - Matthews' hagiography of KIPP charter schools.

Kahlenberg doesn't bash the book; he just cautions against seeing KIPP schools as the miracle cure (as Gates and Duncan seem wont to do).

And Kahlenberg sees the danger of the book in the same way I saw Gates' boosterism of it in that TED Talk: its implication that charter schools and non-unionized teachers are The Answer.

Money paragraphs: the "two misguided 'lessons' that many readers may take away" from the book:

that the KIPP example suggests that union-free charter schools are the key to closing the achievement gap and that poverty and school segregation are just excuses for teacher failure. Mathews himself doesn't explicitly endorse either position, but he lauds the union-free charter school structure. It provides, he writes, "a haven for Levin-Feinberg methods such as longer school days and school years, principals' power to fire poorly performing teachers, and regular visits to students' homes." Nevertheless, the highly accomplished KIPP Academy in the South Bronx, started by Levin, has been unionized from the beginning, as are the Green Dot charter schools that Mathews cites as equally successful. Meanwhile, plenty of nonunionized charter schools fail dismally. Some nonunion KIPP schools have suffered high rates of teacher turnover, and just last month teachers in two KIPP schools decided to unionize so they would have a greater voice in school affairs.

Moreover, KIPP's experience does little to rebut the longstanding social-science consensus that poverty and segregation reduce achievement. In many respects, KIPP schools more closely resemble middle-class than high-poverty public schools. KIPP does not educate the typical low-income student but rather a subset fortunate enough to have striving parents who take the initiative to apply to a KIPP school and sign a contract agreeing to read to their children at night. More important, among those who attend KIPP, 60 percent leave, according to a new study of California schools, many because they find the program too rigorous.

--It's not necessary to spell out how those who leave don't lower the much-touted "higher performance" as measured by test scores, is it?

As KIPP's reputation grew, it could select among the best teachers (who wish to be around high-performing colleagues), and it became funded at levels more like those of middle-class schools.

None of this should take away from the wonderful education provided to children in KIPP's 66 schools, a tale beautifully rendered by Mathews. But neither should KIPP's story become the ultimate excuse for ignoring the devastating effects of school segregation and poverty. ·

--in other words, we need solutions that are, ahem, Broader and Bolder?