« Education News for Tuesday, April 24 | Main | Who is Public Education Supposed to Help? (Dave Johnston) »

April 24, 2007

Morning Shots

Washington Post - Looking at KIPP, Coolly and Carefully
Jay Mathews looks at the rose-colored reporting on KIPP charter schools' success, and offers to balance that with some scrutiny of their challenges, including student retention problems and the handful of schools from which the KIPP name has been withdrawn for poor performance. He concludes:

The report card said the average student who has been with KIPP three years started at the 44th percentile in math and the 34th percentile in reading at the beginning of fifth grade. By the end of seventh grade that student was at the 83rd percentile in math and the 58th percentile in reading. It is important to note that many students who start KIPP in fifth grade move away or decide to return to the regular school system, so the number who stay three years is relatively small. Also, these results are from tests given not by the school district but by KIPP officials so they can place students properly, diagnose weak areas and keep track of their progress. Such internal assessments lack external monitors and thus, at least in theory, can be subject to cheating. But at least three independent studies have decided the KIPP gains are real, and more such research is under way.

I continue to look for programs that have done better than KIPP in raising the achievement level of low-income children, the central problem in American education today. I have not found any yet, and will keep looking. But I will also continue to watch KIPP, with caution and with some hope.

New York Sun -  Bush To Salute a Charter in Harlem 
Look for more coverage tonight on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric

"The president is highlighting charter schools specifically as a useful option for parents who are seeking choices for their children — especially children who are not achieving at their current schools," a spokesman for the president, Blair Jones, said. The Harlem school, he added, "sets high standards and has worked in innovative ways to make sure all students achieve."

The No Child Left Behind Act requires all schools to bring all students up to grade level in reading and math by 2014, and the founder of the charter school, Deborah Kenny, said she believed the school's track record in quickly improving the performance of low-achieving students is the reason the White House chose her school for the president's speech.

...the recent increase in the statewide cap on the number of charter schools and the Bloomberg administration's school reorganization efforts have recently drawn national attention — and also mirror many of the president's own education plans.

Mr. Klein, who will accompany the president today and often repeats Mr. Bush's line about the "soft bigotry of low expectations" in his own speeches, is currently pushing through a reorganization of the school bureaucracy that borrows from many of the major elements of the No Child Left Behind Act — including increased accountability for individual schools.

Also accompanying the president is Rep. Charles Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who chairs the Ways and Means Committee and who has been more critical of the No Child Left Behind Act in its current form.

In a recent article in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, Mr. Rangel wrote: "Education officials … are right in complaining that it has unfairly burdened school districts because it fails to provide sufficient funding for full implementation. That needs to be corrected."

Mr. Bush faces some hurdles in getting the act reauthorized, and it is possible that Congress will wait until a new president takes office before revising the federal education law. The stop in Harlem is a part of an ongoing campaign by the president to convince lawmakers to reauthorize the law.

Altanta Journal-Constitution: School choice welcome in today’s world

The problem with politics is the perpetual existence of one reality of representative democracy. That reality is that most elected officials — and editorialists, too, for that matter — are forever making assumptions based on the world as it existed during their childhood or formative years. New information is reinterpreted to fit the worldview we hold.

The consequence is that legislators are most always legislating for yesterday. In the case of education, that means they’re completely unmindful of the culture, of lifestyles, of the education marketplace that has evolved. Consequently, they keep trying to reconfigure the model, convinced as they are that if the class size is smaller, or if more money is made available for teacher salaries, or nicer buildings or newer books, the problems that existed a few generations ago would be cured. And they might. If this was then.

Reality is, however, that many children reach school with far more needs and far less appreciation for learning. Their families are often never formed, transient, overly litigious, demanding and altogether unreasonable.

Children, regardless of need or potential, are thrown together, sometime for no other reason than to achieve political correctness. And the teacher monopoly on talented women vanished decades ago.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.edspresso.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/1415