Countering the No Excuses PR Machine

For white conservative civil rights advocates (try Googling that phrase), the appeal of the No Excuses segregated chain gang schools  has always been the total compliance behavioral regimen aimed to make those lazy and out-of-control negro children pay attention and work.  For sure, there are no curriculum innovations, no instructional breakthroughs, and certainly no assessment experimentation that excites the Fisher or Walton Foundation to cough up between 40 and 60 million dollars each to fund these charter chains.  It is, rather, an old-fashioned notion that is as American as apple pie and Sunday lynchings: working hard and keeping your mouth shut will earn you a place at the master's table, or at least a job cleaning up one of his box stores.

The innovation, real innovation, comes in the form of off-the-charts pay for school CEOs, once known as principals,  and lower wages and fewer benefits for "teachers," now deemed highly qualified by virtue of a 5-week summer training program.  And let's not forget the innovative 10 hour school day and every other Saturday at school, with summer vacation time reduced to get KIPP-notized for coming year.

With hundreds of millions of bucks to create a public relations message that has most education writers swooning and poor parents wondering where they can sign up, it is important to say thanks to those who take time to dig a little deeper than the Executive Summaries of some of the KIPP-funded research that has shown up over the past few years. 

Richard Kahlenberg has this insightful piece that Valerie Strauss published last week:

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He is the author of "All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice." In this post, he refers to a debate that I had with my inimitable colleague Jay Mathews about school reform that discussed Teach for America and the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP. You can find that debate here.

By Richard D. Kahlenberg
In the recent education debate between Valerie Strauss and Jay Mathews, a question arose about the attrition rates at the highly regarded Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. The issue is important because if large numbers of weaker students drop out of KIPP’s rigorous program, it would be highly unfair to compare the test score gains won by the top KIPP students against the scores of all regular public school students – who include KIPP dropouts.
In the debate, Strauss mentioned some studies finding that KIPP schools “have had a very high attrition rate.”

Mathews responded by saying it is a “myth that KIPP schools have poor retention rates” and cited a 2010 study that found that KIPP school “are doing about as well as regular schools in their neighborhoods” in terms of attrition.
Who’s right? While I respect Jay Mathews’s grasp of educational issues, on this question, the data overwhelmingly support Valerie Strauss’s skepticism.

In a rigorous 2008 study of five KIPP schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, researchers at SRI International found that an astounding 60% of KIPP students left over the course of middle-school. Moreover, the researchers found evidence that the 60% of students who did not persist through the tough KIPP regimen (a longer school day and week, and heavy doses of homework), tended to be the weaker students.

KIPP supporters, like Mathews, respond that a 2010 study of 22 KIPP schools by Mathematica found that the attrition rates were comparable to nearby high poverty public schools that also have lots of kids leave. Poor people tend to move frequently, so high attrition rates are to be expected at KIPP schools, it is argued.

The big difference between KIPP and regular public schools, however, is that whereas struggling students come and go at regular schools, at KIPP, student leave but very few new children enter. Having few new entering students is an enormous advantage not only because low-scoring transfer students are kept out but also because in the later grades, KIPP students are surrounded only by successful peers who are the most committed to the program.
 
Below is a figure that shows the attendance at KIPP Bay-area schools. (The figure is part of a Century Foundation document entitled “Charter Schools that Work: Economically Integrated Schools with Teacher Voice.”)

Bay Area KIPP Net Student Enrollment by Grade from 2003-04 to 2006-07


In the comments section of the Answer Sheet blog, when readers pointed out that KIPP schools don’t generally fill students back in, Mathews responded “KIPP schools DO take in new students beyond the 5th grade.”

This is technically accurate, but as the figure above suggests, the vast majority of students enter during the 6th grade (a natural time to enter middle school) and then the total number of KIPP students in 7th and 8th grade falls precipitously.

The KIPP Bay-area schools cannot be dismissed as an outlier on the KIPP attrition question. Columbia University researcher Jeffrey Henig’s 2008 review of several studies found high attrition rates at a number of other KIPP schools.

It may well be, in fact, that high attrition rates are a key explanation for KIPP’s success in raising test scores. When KIPP tried to take over a regular public school – where the students are not self-selected, but are assigned to the school; and where students not only leave, but large number of students enter — KIPP abandoned the field after just two years. KIPP long ago realized that what we charge regular public schools with doing is far more difficult than what KIPP seeks to do.