December 10, 2004
EQUITY OR EDUCATION?:
Learning curve: In the battle over education reform, charter schools may be the closest thing to ground zero -- as the city of Lynn is finding out (Cara Feinberg, December 5, 2004, Boston Globe)
The newest public middle school in this mostly working-class town 11 miles north of Boston is a small six-room annex at the rear of a church. Its playground is an empty parking lot. There's no official gym, no theater, no science lab, no lockers, no room to spare. Yet for the 77 Lynn families who sent their fifth-graders to the brand new KIPP Academy charter school this past August -- a month before classes began at regular public schools -- this place is a godsend. The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a national network of 38 public schools across the country, has been widely acclaimed for its success putting underserved students on the path to college. Started in 1994 by two former Teach for America teachers, KIPP's flagship schools in Houston and New York City continue to outperform their district counterparts, and in the last 10 years each has risen to become one of the top-performing schools in its district.Five months into their first year at KIPP Lynn, students are at home in their new classrooms. The atmosphere is one of quiet concentration, thanks to KIPP's strict standards of behavior, but the lessons are engaging and even spirited. In one math class, the teacher leads a group of enthusiastic fifth-graders as they clap their hands and shout their way through the multiplication tables in unison: "Boom! KIPP, KIPP, good as gold, let me see your fingers roll: 8, 16, 32, 40!"
And yet these children are not exceptional learners. As an open-enrollment school, KIPP draws from the same population found in its neighboring district schools, and, says principal Josh Zoia, is more heavily minority and has a higher percentage of special education students than the district as a whole. So what's KIPP's secret? According to the 31-year-old Zoia, who also wrote KIPP Lynn's charter, success comes from placing education at the center of children's lives and teaching behavior expectations as systematically as their lessons. [...]
So why in the world -- no matter what its financial situation -- would a public school system aching with underachievement even think of turning away a program with proven success? On the other hand, why would a state department of education approve a school that the city itself actively fought against? How can a fledgling charter school survive, much less thrive, in a district that doesn't want it? And how, after all that, can both sides claim to be fighting for public education? [...]
Proponents envisioned charter schools as laboratories of innovation, places where progressive solutions could be developed and the best of them integrated back into the system. Placing power in the hands of the private sector, they claimed, would not only speed up educational reform, it would create healthy competition -- both of which would improve the overall system.
As it matured, however, the movement attracted its share of adversaries. Though (like supporters) opponents are found on both sides of the aisle, the loudest voices come from teachers' unions and liberal thinkers, who raise issues of equity. Charters, opponents claim, are unregulated experiments that siphon money and public confidence away from the system that supports them. [...]
[A]s Marc Kenen, the executive director of the Massachusetts Charter School Association, sees it, Lynn is representative of school districts across the country that are resistant to charters encroaching on their territory.
"The truth is, there are many districts who claim they can't afford to have charter schools," says Kenen. "From my point of view, these are exactly the places that can't afford *not to." Seen from a different angle, Kenen suggests, the issue of money raises a basic philosophical question. "There is an assumption that the money belongs to the system, not to the kids," he says.
Precisely what makes vouchers so terrifying to the liberal establishment--tie the money to the student instead of leaving it to the education bureaucrats and results start to matter. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2004 5:53 AM
Whatever the virtues of voucherization, teaching 5th graders the times tables does not impress me. They should know this by age 7, and lots of us know them before we set foot in a gubmint school.
The big advantage that private or voucher systems have over public education in the current environment is quite simple. They can boot out the disruptive, the under-achieving, the violent etc. while the standard neighborhood school cannot. As the article states, 'the atmosphere is one of quiet concentration.' Try doing that when you are a teacher in a standard neighborhood school where the courts and the bureaucrats have decided that you can't discipline or expel the disruptive, remove the mainstreamed mentally defective, or otherwise employ any coercive power whatsoever. So we are left in standard neighborhood schools with an environment more reiminscent of 'Lord of the Flies' rather than 'Goodbye Mr. Chips.'
Reinstituting reform schools for the 'youthful offenders', removing the violent, the disruptive and the mentally-defective from the classroom, and allowing the teacher to employ discipline including significant corporal punishment on the little snotnoses is just as effective and significantly cheaper than the 'scheme of the month', like vouchers.
But we're 'progressive' so the methods that worked in 1950 America, 1850 Britain or for that matter 1650 Holland can't be employed today.
Posted by: Bart at December 10, 2004 6:27 AMWhatever the virtues of voucherization, teaching 5th graders the times tables does not impress me. They should know this by age 7, and lots of us know them before we set foot in a gubmint school.
The big advantage that private or voucher systems have over public education in the current environment is quite simple. They can boot out the disruptive, the under-achieving, the violent etc. while the standard neighborhood school cannot. As the article states, 'the atmosphere is one of quiet concentration.' Try doing that when you are a teacher in a standard neighborhood school where the courts and the bureaucrats have decided that you can't discipline or expel the disruptive, remove the mainstreamed mentally defective, or otherwise employ any coercive power whatsoever. So we are left in standard neighborhood schools with an environment more reiminscent of 'Lord of the Flies' rather than 'Goodbye Mr. Chips.'
Reinstituting reform schools for the 'youthful offenders', removing the violent, the disruptive and the mentally-defective from the classroom, and allowing the teacher to employ discipline including significant corporal punishment on the little snotnoses is just as effective and significantly cheaper than the 'scheme of the month', like vouchers.
But we're 'progressive' so the methods that worked in 1950 America, 1850 Britain or for that matter 1650 Holland can't be employed today.
Posted by: Bart at December 10, 2004 6:27 AMLast I heard, the most effective school system in the country is the Department of Defense Dependent Schools (DODDS).
Disciplined parents, and the schools are free to eject trouble makers.
Gee, do you think there is a connection?
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at December 10, 2004 7:07 AMBart has the right bead on this. The villains are "inclusion" and "equity," although "Constructivism" and "cooperative learning" have added to the disaster.
Contemporary urban schools are intentionally set up as prisons run by the inmates and asylums run by the patients. The system is much too corrupt to be refurmed, and the only cure is to crush the infamous thing. Fortunately, 2014, the Cinderella stroke of midnight in NCLB, gets closed every day.
Posted by: Lou Gots at December 10, 2004 8:03 AMNCLB is only the latest educrat scam. They will simply lower standards again and every kid will get a high school diploma, unless his drooling is too obvious.
Posted by: Bart at December 10, 2004 8:14 AMI cannot concur that NCLB is merely a scool establishment scam. The was it is set up, states are allowed to set up their own timetables for improvement, which prerogative they abuse by deferring improvement to the later years of the plan.
This results in a kind of Ponzi scheme which doen't look too bad at first but is predestined to come apart in the future. The only way the pumpkin and white rats don't pop up is if the system loses its nerve and reneges on its promises before midnight.
Will this happen? I can't say, but a lot of people thought the Berlin wall would never fall as well.
Posted by: Lou Gots at December 10, 2004 11:10 AMBart -- For people in fifth grade do not know their multiplication tables, the fifth grade is good time to learn them, no?
Posted by: Seven Machos at December 10, 2004 3:27 PMLou,
Which is easier? Lowering the existing standards or getting the little bastards to meet the standards? That answers the question.
Seven,
If you don't know the times tables, you shouldn't be in third grade, much less 5th. If your statement were carried to its logical conclusion, you would have people teaching the times tables in college.
Posted by: Bart at December 10, 2004 5:20 PMBart -- This is my problem with the Brothers and many of the people here. So much intelligence and wit, and tact, but so little political acumen.
The point is that these kids DID get passed to the fifth grade and the DON'T know their times tables but there are good people (who could make a lot more money in the private sector) who are busting their butts teaching these kids NOW.
You can stand on the side and be a critic, or you can assess the situation, and jump in and do what you can with what you have where you are. Politics is the art of the possible.
Posted by: Seven Machos at December 10, 2004 11:43 PMSeven,
Point taken. Although I've been called many names in my life, I can't ever recall being accused of having tact. :)
What we should have in school is a quantum of knowledge for each grade level. You get promoted to the next grade when you acquire that quantum.
Sure, teaching them the times tables in 5th is better than not teaching them at all. But singling this instance of remediation as something special and marvelous, as this article does, rather than as an abject indictment of the system is flummery of the first order.
Posted by: Bart at December 11, 2004 6:26 AM