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 13, 2004 5:00 AM