KIPP schools failing to match hype

Knowledge is Power Program schools come highly recommended in documentary films like Waiting for Superman. KIPP schools are touted by charter advocates as success stories in raising academic achievement among low-income and minority students.

But all too often, studies reveal that schools promoted by ideologically blinkered education "reformers" tend to cover up their failures and fudge their successes.

Such a study now raises questions about claims made for the KIPP franchise. In this article, Education Week reporter Mary Ann Zehr writes that 40 percent of the black male students enrolled in KIPP schools drop out in between grades six and eight.

That figure comes from a study out of Western Michigan University. The author of the study, Professor Gary J. Miron, says, “The dropout rate for African-American males is really shocking. KIPP is doing a great job of educating students who persist, but not all who come.”

The study acknowledges KIPP's successes, but also explores reasons why KIPP schools, like other semi-public schools, has advantages that cannot be replicated in traditional public schools, and probably cannot be translated into a larger universe.

KIPP schools, for example, spend about $6,500 more per student than other public schools in the same districts. Most of the extra comes from private donations and grants. That is funding which is simply not available to traditional public schools which, if similarly resourced, might show similar academic achievement.

KIPP schools, the study notes, serve fewer students with limited English or who are disabled. The report concludes that “The limited range of students that KIPP serves, its inability to serve all students who enter, and its dependence on local traditional public schools to receive and serve the droves of students who leave, all speak loudly to the limitations of this model.”

Panel dissects Superman

LFT President Steve Monaghan, left, makes a point during a panel discussion of the documentary Waiting for Superman. Monaghan described the film as a dishonest, partisan attack on public education and the dedicated teachers who work in our schools. With Monaghan on the panel are Lafourche Parish Superintendent of Schools Jo Ann Matthews, moderator Barry Erwin, State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek and Albemarle Corp. Assistant Treasurer Lorin Crenshaw.

To read a flier handed out by members of the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers at the screening, please click here.

Advocate reporter covered the screening of the film for this story.

A preemptive strike on Superman...

On Tuesday night, Governor Bobby Jindal and leaders of the legislature will host a screening of the documentary film Waiting for Superman, as dishonest an attack on public education as has ever been committed to celluloid.

Don't take our word for that. Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote a devastating critique of the film for the New York Review of Books last November, in which she said "The message of the film is clear. Public schools are bad, privately managed charter schools are good."

As a piece of anti-public school propaganda, the film succeeds nicely. But it only does so by skirting or ignoring inconvenient facts that don't fit its preconceived agenda.

As Ravitch puts it, "Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film's quiet acknowledgement that only one in five charter schools is able to get the 'amazing results' that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic."

Here is that statistic, from the well researched CREDO study. After surveying math tests in half of the nation's 5,000 charter schools, the report found that:

• 46% had academic gains no different than those of a similar public school
• 37% were worse than a similar public school
• Only 17% were superior to a similar public school

The dishonesty of Superman goes beyond willful ignorance, all the way to deliberate distortion and, the ultimate sin of a documentary film, a faked scene. Washington Post writer Valerie Strauss revealed the quackery in this article, which gives the likely reason why Waiting for Superman was not nominated for an Academy Award.

Strauss wrote, "The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did Superman, fake scenes for emotional impact."

In another column, Strauss reprinted a point-by-point refutation of Waiting for Superman's anti-public school agenda.

There is no doubt that public education has its problems. Those problems are overwhelmingly associated with poverty and lack of opportunity in too many of our urban and rural school districts.

The solution to these problems does not lie in demonizing teachers and their unions, or in funneling public school funds to entrepreneurial enterprises that have captured the fancy of billionaire dilettantes.

If there is a silver lining to Superman's cloud, it is that the film may motivate people to support real solutions to help all children - not just those lucky enough to win a lottery - receive the education they deserve.

Those solutions include:

• Developing great teachers through revamping preparatory programs for teachers and overhauling teacher development and evaluation programs.
• Ensuring supportive educational leaders
• Creating robust curricula
• Creating conditions that promote learning for all children
• Ensuring shared responsibility and mutual accountability that holds everyone responsible for fixing our schools, not just teachers.

(You might also be interested in this article, "Inside Job or Superman: Which one better explains the School crisis," by Kevin Welner. Inside Job, which did win the Oscar for best documentary, explains how Wall Street greed, deregulation and the inequality of wealth in the nation led to the great recession of 2000. Those same issues, Welner argues, play a big role in the "bleak educational future" faced by too many American families.)

For true believers, facts don't matter

If you've ever tried to convince horoscope-believing friends that the alignment of stars and planets stars doesn't really determine the course of their lives, you can understand why it is so frustratingly difficult to have a meaningful conversation about charter schools.

Many well-meaning people have developed an almost religious faith that charter schools are just better than traditional public schools. No matter what the evidence says, it's hard to convince them otherwise.

So a new study from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado probably won't change many minds, but it still bears a close look.

The study, conducted by Bruce D. Baker and Richard Ferris of Rutgers University, has some surprising conclusions about charter schools in New York City, one of the nation's largest charter school laboratories. The results challenge the conventional wisdom bandied by popular documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery."

Most significantly, the study shows that charter schools on average do not out-perform traditional public schools in the city.

Beyond that, the study reveals that there is a wide disparity of resources provided to charter schools in New York. While some get almost no funds other than the base school allotment, some receive private donations that amount to $10,000 per pupil more than traditional public schools.

And yet, "there is little or no relationship between spending and test score outcomes after including appropriate controls. Some high-spending and some low-spending charters perform well, while others perform quite poorly."

The city in the United States with the most charter school experience is New Orleans. Wouldn't it be nice to see a similar study made of the Big Easy's charter schools?

Survey puts educational blame where it belongs

"Blaming teachers for low test scores, poor graduation rates and the other ills of American schools has been popular lately, but a new survey wags a finger closer to home."

That's the opening line of an Associated Press story covering the AP-Stanford Poll on Education, and it has some results that teachers may find surprising.

Not the one that says 68 percent of Americans believe parents are more to blame for educational failure than teachers, their unions or school boards - most teachers already know that. A majority of those surveyed also said that the education in their local public schools is either excellent or good - most teachers already know that, as well.

And while many believe that the U.S. is falling behind other countries educationally, "a majority of parents see improvement in the system since they were in school: 55 percent believe their children are getting a better education than they did, and three-quarters rate the quality of education at their child's school as excellent or good. Most say their child's school is doing a good job preparing students for college, the work force and life as an adult."

Again, most teachers probably know that education is really improving, mainly because research is better and more targeted, and serious efforts are underway to improve both professional development for those in the classroom, and teacher education for those planning to enter the profession.

The result that may surprise teachers is in the ideological breakdown of respondents. Those who self-identify as conservative are much more likely to blame parents for educational shortfalls than teachers.

Why is that surprising? Because among the political classes, it's been the conservatives who hammer hardest at so-called "bad teachers," and it is legislative right-wingers who have been most likely to introduce bills seen by teachers as punitive.

Although that has shifted somewhat in the very recent past. Propagandized documentaries like Waiting for Superman and The Lottery, which lean heavily on teachers and unions as villains for poor performance in impoverished urban school districts, were financed and produced by liberals.

To see the full results of the AP-Stanford poll, click here.

Charter movement blinded by free-market ideology?

There is a gathering pushback to the idea of charter schools as some sort of magic bullet that can fix the troubles of public education. In this new post, education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch states it as plainly as it gets: "Charters are not a silver bullet. They are a lead bullet. Their target is American public education."

Ravitch begins with yet another criticism of the documentary Waiting for Superman, the cinematic wet kiss to the charter movement that she pegs as "a one-sided, propagandistic attack on public education which echoes the prescriptions of those who have devoutly wished for the privatization of education."

Then Ravitch describes a laundry list of recent charter school failures. Two recurring themes emerge in the list: charter schools are susceptible to financial shenanigans, and they tend to marginalize students who would pull down their scores. One of her examples is the recent Newsweek article about New Orleans charters' discrimination against special needs students.

Ravitch is right on target about fiscal mismanagement. Most of the charters in Louisiana that were forced to close failed because of shoddy bookkeeping.

Which leads us to this post in The Lens, an investigative journalism blog in New Orleans. The article is most critical of charter school boards that violate the state's open meetings and public records laws, making it difficult if not impossible for parents and the public to know how the schools are being run:

In response to three months of requests from The Lens, a surprisingly large
number of New Orleans charter school boards failed to comply with even basic
requests for information. Many didn’t respond at all. Of the officials who did
answer, some provided only partial information – and still others claimed they
aren’t public officials or required to do their work in public, even though
state law says otherwise.

Even if a charter school is on the up-and-up, transparency is an issue. Because each charter school has its own board, it's just not possible for the news media to cover them as they do traditional public school boards. That makes charter schools less accountable to the public, even though the schools are funded by the same public dollars as other schools in the district.

And that is just an invitation to mischief.

Backlash: Critics see problems with Superman

Waiting for Superman, the current darling of the talk show circuit, passionately advocates for children but unfairly trashes public school teachers as it paints a simplistic, black-and-white picture of the state of public education in America today.

The film rehashes some predictable right-wing talking points, blaming teacher unions for protecting "bad teachers" and making overinflated claims for charter schools as the way to salvage public education. If the documentary has a villain, it is American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

But if Superman is guilty of promoting erroneous dogma, it also opens the debate and provides an opportunity for public education to defend itself against detractors, as the AFT has done in its Not Waiting for Superman Web site. Here one can find examples of the many public schools and teachers who have great success stories to share.

Fortunately, reviewers are noticing some of the documentary's shortcomings. National Public Radio's Claudio Sanchez notes in this article that the film's "blistering attack on teachers' unions is unfair and counterproductive."

Sanchez gives Weingarten a forum to say, "the fact that the movie does not portray one great public school, does not portray one great public school teacher," calls the film's credibility into question.

Even more critical of Superman is this article in The Nation by Dana Goldstein, who calls it "a "moving but vastly oversimplified brief on American educational inequality."

Goldstein points out that, while the film portrays charter schools as the best solution for poorly performing schools, it ignores "the four out of five charters that are no better, on average, than traditional neighborhood public schools (and are sometimes much worse)..."

Neither does Superman acknowledge "the millions of children who never have a chance to enter a charter school lottery (or get help with their homework or a nice breakfast) because adults simply aren't engaged in their education. These children, of course, are often the ones who are most difficult to educate, and the ones neighborhood public schools can't turn away."

Goldstein doesn't let the movie get away with blaming unionism for the ills of public education:

(I)n the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in the
world, teachers are—gasp!—unionized and granted tenure, and families benefit
from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that includes universal daycare,
preschool and healthcare, all of which are proven to help children
achieve better results at school.

The Nation article also recognizes that, under Weingarten's leadership, AFT is engaged in teacher-driven school reform that includes forging relationships with formerly anti-union advocates such as Bill Gates, who has "embraced (teacher unions) as essential players in the fight for school improvement."

Inconvenient facts mar "Superman"

The education community is abuzz about the new documentary from the makers of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth." Called "Waiting for Superman," the movie has a distinct and disturbing bias against traditional public education and the teachers in our schools.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is painted as the villain in the piece. She was interviewed extensively for the documentary, and has appeared in panel discussions to rebut its conclusions since its release.

As Weingarten says in this article, the film's producers have a deep concern for children, but completely missed the mark by vilifying teachers and promoting charter schools as the answer for public education's woes.

Writes the AFT president, "the film casts two outliers in starring roles - the 'bad' teacher as villain, and charter schools as heroes ready to save the day. The problem, of course, is that these caricatures are more fictional than factual."

By focusing on a few identifiably bad teachers and a few high-achieving boutique charter schools, the film skews reality. That's the problem with an ideological, anecdotal approach to documentary film making.

"It is insulting and counterproductive to suggest, as the film does, that the deplorable behavior of one or two teachers is representative of all public school teachers," writes Weingarten.

The reality, she writes, is that many charter schools "perform worse than or just about as well as regular public schools."

The real answer, says Weingartern is to redouble our efforts to make sure that all schools work for all children.

"This film," she writes, "misses a crucial point: We think about all kids, not only some of them. And reforms that affect small numbers of students, even when they live up to their promise, still leave that promise unfulfilled for others. Every child should have access to a great education - not by chance, not even by choice, but by right."

For another viewpoint about "Waiting for Superman," click here to read a blogger's suspicion that the documentary is a stalking horse for business interests that want to privatize public education.

"Yes, public schools have big problems," writes Susie Madrack. "Selling them off to unregulated private bidders will only make things worse."