To the KIPP Crusaders

Nothing seems to get more virulent and antagonistic comments than my impugning the sacred honor of the KIPP schools. Once again, educationalists are falling victim to binary thinking: if I’m not wholly for KIPP in everything they do, then I’m clearly against KIPP and anything they might have to offer. Prompted by yet another aggressive comment and yet another GATE student going to KIPP, I want to respond to the marauding KIPP crusaders, unleash my data, and say: Your school, as a model of classroom instruction, is a paragon of best practices, but your school, as a model of public education, is still the worst thing since Plessy vs. Ferguson. Before you dismiss that as hyperbole, skip past the niceties to the last few paragraphs.

I’ve visited our local KIPP twice and brought several of their best practices back to our school. Did I mention, yet, that we are the most improved elementary school in the district? Our upper grades now use SLANT and its corresponding high expectations for engagement. Our departmentalization this year was inspired by a similar practice at KIPP. We have begun to include college visits and college talk as a regular part of our classroom culture. Half of each day of our first week was spent in indoctrination about culture, pride and the exceptionality of this class and this school. These practices have made a major difference in the focus and achievement of our upper grades, and I duly credit KIPP for that. But to enact these changes in all grades and enhance their power for all students, we cannot be sending our most change-capable students, parents and teachers to KIPP.

Similarly, my criticism of KIPP does not stem from some silly notion that my school is “better.” There is no one harder on my school and its teachers than I am. There is no one who has more belief in the potential of our students and who has more frustration with the achievement of our teachers than I. But that is precisely why KIPP drives me crazy. I am unwilling to place the educational future of any of my students in the hands of a lottery. Solutions that do not equitably offer themselves to all of the children in my community are half-measures, or worse, and simply not acceptable. When my school achieves a 900 API, we will have done so with anyone who walks in our door.

Along with this, I am driven slowly mad by the suggestion that any disparagement of KIPP is an effort to make excuses for what I can’t do with my students. I know and I have proven that my students are capable of KIPP-like results. I have no need to make excuses for my classroom; my results are at the top of district.

Finally, I am simply sick and tired of people –even some very intelligent allies of mine— telling me that KIPP's students are my students. For two years now, I have looked at KIPP students and watched them all read novels while mine struggle with paragraphs, watched them all master math at a rate that would require my students to make truly impossible leaps of language. All the while, I’ve thought, “if only I were a better teacher, I could do this.” All the while, I’ve been told that KIPP students “are the same kids” in my classroom. Well, I have some shocking news: KIPP students are not my students and the publicly available demographic data (here for ELL, here for all others) proves it.

KIPP, at least our KIPP, looks far more like a talented tenth than a typical list of lucky lotto winners. Our local KIPP school enrolls true English Language Learners, i.e not EO, IFEP, or RFEP, at a rate less than one-third of my school. At my school, over 70% of the population is truly an English Language Learner, the district as a whole has 60%. Only 23% of KIPPs students are truly ELL. In fact, in their first year, without teaching anyone anything, KIPP had almost no students below an Early Advanced CELDT level, which signifies the beginnings of competence in the English language. Four kids, only ten percent! To give you an idea how unfathomably disconnected this is from our reality: over 50% of our district scores into a lower range! Did no one at KIPP notice that in a predominately Spanish-speaking neighborhood, with a very large percentage of first-generation immigrants, almost all of their students spoke English? More worrying, KIPP’s percent of students who are on free/reduced lunch is a full quarter less than my school and almost ten percent less than the district average. Surely this figure, if any, should line up. Most disturbing, however, is that KIPP’s ethnic demographics are significantly unaligned with our district's averages. They enrolled some groups at twice the rate of the district and others at significantly less.

I want to say again that I do not bring these points up to discredit KIPP’s academic success. I want to say again, that they are a model of many best practices in instruction and I credit them for a lot of the success in my class and at my school. I certainly agree: if all schools took a few pages from KIPP, all students would be much better off.

But a KIPP school is not a textbook, they are not a passive model of reform. They are a real school, enrolling real students. If they want to teach only our English Speakers, preferably from more well-to-do families with certain cultural mores, can’t we send them to the suburbs where they belong? They need to resemble the community they inhabit. Segregation means a terrible education for all.