One such retooling may be Knowledge Is Power Program charters, if this piece at Education Next authored by Alexandra Boyd, Robert Maranto and Caleb Rose is any indication: “The Softer Side of ‘No Excuses.’”
I probably wouldn’t have spent much time on this article since it comes from two people connected with the University of Arkansas’s Walton-funded Department of Education Reform. No need to read because charter schools and school choice receive the same distorted advocacy from the DER’s crowd of endowed chairs as cigarettes did by the scientists working for Big Tobacco in years gone by.
But I noticed something interesting in the opening paragraphs, me (and a fellow KIPP critic, Jim Horn):
Also not surprisingly, KIPP and other No Excuses schools have no shortage of critics. Furman University education professor P. L. Thomas, who admitted in a recent speech at the University of Arkansas to never having been in a No Excuses charter school, complains in a widely referenced 2012 Daily Kos post that in such schools, “Students are required to use complete sentences at all times, and call female teachers ‘Miss’—with the threat of disciplinary action taken if students fail to comply.” Regarding KIPP in particular, Cambridge College professor and blogger Jim Horn, who admits to having never been inside a KIPP school, nonetheless has referred to KIPP as a “New Age eugenics intervention at best,” destroying students’ cultures, and a “concentration camp” at worst.Please continue reading HERE.
My comment not yet posted the Walmart scholars' article:
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, dogs could never be trained to work like KIPP teachers and students, even though dogs and children do respond similarly to the same learned helplessness techniques that KIPP uses to subdue urban black and brown children.
I agree with you that KIPP teachers should have, indeed, lots of “joy” if they are to survive their one to two years that the vast majority put in before all their joy is sucked out by a work regimen that humans cannot sustain.
And I did not say at AERA or elsewhere that KIPP schools are concentration camps, even though I did reference concentration camps in response to the question as to whether or not I have ever visited a KIPP school. I said, no, in fact, I have not, nor have I ever visited a WWII concentration camp. But the documentation is clear what it was like there (despite the Holocaust deniers), just as it is clear what life is like in a KIPP school–despite your propaganda piece that tries to paint a picture of a kinder, gentler form of chain gang, total lockdown schooling.
My new book on KIPP will be out in 2014. I hope you will look for it.
I have read several of your blog posts and I am a KIPP teacher. What will be the title for your book? And how are you writing a book about KIPP without ever having been to a KIPP school?
ReplyDeletePerhaps these places of sheer joy you open their doors all doors to authors academics journalists to witness firsthand
ReplyDeleteTry getting access to a test factory
Not easy but there's nothing like reports from the front line
Good luck with your next book
Perhaps these places of sheer joy you open their doors all doors to authors academics journalists to witness firsthand
ReplyDeleteTry getting access to a test factory
Not easy but there's nothing like reports from the front line
Good luck with your next book
According to former teachers, all visits are choreographed for visitors to see what the CEO wants them to see. Remember Jim Jones.
ReplyDelete