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November 30, 2006
Paul Tough's article
I may be a bit late to the party (Eduwonk, Alexander Russo and Whitney Tilson have all weighed in), but I just took the time to look it over.
Initially I felt Tough provided a good primer, but only a primer, for somebody unfamiliar with the ed reform debate as it relates to the achievement gap/NCLB. (See the comment in Russo's thread.) Tough really does little more than merely scratch the surface. In summary, he says, "Low-income kids need help catching up, NCLB won't get the job done, but public charters like KIPP show it's possible!" But remember that this appeared in the New York Times. The fact that the paper of record is talking about issues that have been bouncing around ed reform for years now--and trying to connecting the dots between closing the achievement gap and accountability/charters--could mean that the debate may finally be moving to a broader audience.
Speaking of KIPP, one passage I found a bit humorous:
The leaders of this informal network [of public charter schools in New York] are now wrestling with an unintended consequence of their schools’ positive results and high profiles: their incoming students are sometimes too good. At some schools, students arrive scoring better than typical children in their neighborhoods, presumably because the school’s reputation is attracting more-engaged parents with better-prepared kids to its admission lottery. Even though almost every student at the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, for example, is from a low-income family, and all but a few are either black or Hispanic, and most enter below grade level, they are still a step above other kids in the neighborhood; on their math tests in the fourth grade (the year before they arrived at KIPP), KIPP students in the Bronx scored well above the average for the district, and on their fourth-grade reading tests they often scored above the average for the entire city.
I don't question that this influx of students puts public charters like KIPP in a rather uncomfortable situation. But while it may be an unintended consequence of achievement, it's a natural consequence all the same--after all, they're called "schools of choice" for a reason.
I do agree with Tilson on the article's disregard for the political boundaries of closing the achievement gap. Tough points out that schools like KIPP demonstrate that low-income kids can make it academically, and lists what it takes to make that happen: longer school days, more time in class, weekend work, etc. (Read our interview with KIPP Philadelphia principal Marc Mannella, who openly says, "What KIPP does isn’t terribly complicated, but it’s hard.") But he doesn't acknowledge the level of persuasion it would take to get the unions to accept such a work load. And while higher pay for teachers is definitely a factor (as union blog Edwize confirms), there's quite a bit more to the equation. It would require autonomy on the part of principals to make personnel decisions, institute some form of merit pay, no more dancing lemons. In short, the unions would have to get out of the way and let principals run their schools, a feat requiring a level of political muscle not present in either party at the moment.
I'd also point out that one of the components of these successful schools (and a constant complaint from establishment types) is parental involvement, which is a built-in facet of choice schools. As Mannella points out, everybody involved--student, teacher and parent--signs an agreement promising to do whatever it takes to achieve success. If the parent doesn't like it, the parent is quite free to take his or her child elsewhere. Such an agreement just wouldn't carry the same clout in a traditional public school.
It's true that Tough says very little that ed reform veterans haven't already heard. But then, he wasn't writing to the ed reform crowd anyway.
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