The Sinister Assumption Fueling KIPP Skeptics?

Stuart Buck on KIPP critics:

It’s unwitting, to be sure; most of the critics haven’t thought through the logical implications of what they’re saying, and they would sincerely deny being racist in their thoughts or intentions. But even granting their personal good will, what they are saying is full of racially problematic implications. These KIPP critics are effectively saying that poor minority children are incapable of genuinely learning anything more than they already do. If poor minority children seem to be learning more, it can’t really be true; there must be some more sinister explanation for what’s going on.
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Now here’s the key point: If selection and attrition is what explains KIPP’s good results, then that logically means that several hundred extra hours a year being instructed in reading, math, music, art, etc. do NOT explain KIPP’s good results. But wait a minute: what does that really mean?
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Nothing less than this: several hundred hours a years instructing kids doesn’t actually make much difference. Recall that KIPP’s critics say that if KIPP’s students seem to be learning more, it must be an artifact of how KIPP selects kids and then pushes out the low-performers. In saying that, KIPP’s critics are implying, however unwittingly, that no amount of effort or study could possibly get poor urban minorities to learn anything more.

Okay, let me be clear that I am not speaking for any other KIPP critic. While I don’t talk much about KIPP, I am certainly one who thinks their results are due to attrition, creaming, and the benefits that accrue from a homogenous and motivated population.

But yeah. In a nutshell, I’m saying this:

IF you take low ability kids (of any race or income) and IF you select for motivation in the parents, at least, and IF you remove the misbehaving or otherwise highly dysfunctional kids who don’t share their parents’ motivation, and IF you enforce strict behavioral indoctrination in middle class mores and IF you give them hundreds of hours more education a year and IF they are in middle school and IF they are simply being asked to catch up with the material that middle to high ability kids learned fairly effortlessly—that is, elementary reading and math skills…..

…then they will have a slightly better test scores than similarly motivated low ability kids stuck in classes with the misbehavers and highly dysfunctional kids and fewer hours of seat time and less behavioral indoctrination into middle class mores, but their underlying abilities will still be weak and just as far behind their higher ability peers as they were before KIPP.

I’ve written before, improving elementary school or middle school scores is a false god when it comes to improving actual high school outcomes. Children who need tons of hours to get up to grade level fundamentally differ from those reading at or above grade level from kindergarten on, and this difference matters increasingly as school gets harder. High school isn’t the linear steps through increased difficulty that occurs in grades K-8, but a much different and far more difficult animal, now that we make everyone take college prep classes. There’s no evidence that KIPP students are learning more or closing the gap in high school, and call me cynical but I’m really, really sure we’d be hearing about it if they were. KIPP is not transforming low ability kids into high ability kids, or even mid-level ability kids.

I am comfortable asserting that hours and hours of additional education time does nothing to change underlying ability. I’m not a racist, nor am I a nihilist who believes outcomes are set from birth. I do, however, hold the view that academic outcomes are determined in large part by cognitive ability. The reason scores are low in high poverty, high minority schools is primarily due to the fact that the students’ abilities are low to begin with, not because they enter school with a fixable deficit that just needs time to fill, and not because they fall behind thanks to poor teachers or misbehaving peers.

That doesn’t mean we can’t improve outcomes, particularly in high school, when we do a great deal of harm by trying to teach kids what they can’t learn and refusing to teach them what they can learn. And it doesn’t mean we couldn’t tremendously improve elementary school outcomes in numbers, if not individual demonstrated ability, by allowing public schools to do what KIPP does—namely, limit classes to motivated kids of similar ability.

Paul Bruno, another KIPP skeptic (whose views in no way should be confused with mine), thinks it’s wrong to dismiss KIPP achievements, because they show that public schools for low income kids simply need much more money. I disagree. What KIPP “success” shows is the importance of well-behaved, homogeneous classes.

So here’s my preferred takeaway from KIPP and other successful charter schools:

Since it’s evident that much of these schools’ success stories come from their ability to control and limit the population, why are we still hamstringing public schools? Here’s a thought: how about KIPP schools take those really, really tough kids and only those kids? Misbehave too often in public schools and off you go to a KIPP bootcamp, where they will drill you with slogans and do their best to indoctrinate you into middle class behavior and after a while you’ll behave because please, god, anything to get back to the nicer public schools! You could also create KIPP schools for special ed kids–put the special ed kids with cognitive issues and learning disabilities in their own, smaller schools. Meanwhile, public schools could extend the school day a bit, help the kids catch up as much as possible while still making school fun. While the average test score might not improve much, this approach would keep a lot of kids engaged in school through elementary school instead of lost, bored, or acting out in chaotic classes disrupted by a few unmanageable or extremely low ability kids.

See, that would scale a lot better. Instead, we set up small schools for what is actually the majority of all low income students—reasonably well-behaved, of low to middle ability and, with no one around to lead them astray, willing to give school a shot. Only a few kids get into these schools, while the rest of them are stuck in schools where just a few misbehavers make class impossible and really low ability kids take up a lot of addtional teacher time. Crazy, that’s what it is. But what I just laid out is completely unworkable from an ideological standpoint, and as I just explained in an earlier post, school policy is set by ideology and politics, not educational validity. To say nothing of the fact that KIPP doesn’t want to teach “those” kids.

Anyway. The reality is that yes, a low ability kid, regardless of income or race, will not, on average, become a high or mid ability kid simply because he spends a lot of seat time working his butt off in a KIPP school. Sorry Stuart.