Nearly half of all black secondary charter school students attended one of the 270 charter schools that was hyper-segregated (80% black) and where the aggregate black suspension rate was 25%.
More than 500 charter schools suspended black charter students at a rate that was at least 10 percentage points higher than that of white charter students.
Even more disconcerting, 1,093 charter schools suspended students with disabilities at a rate that was 10 or more percentage points higher than that of students without disabilities.
Perhaps most alarming, 235 charter schools suspended more than 50% of their enrolled students with disabilities.* (*This count includes schools with at least 50 students enrolled and excludes alternative schools, schools identified as part of the juvenile justice system, virtual schools and schools that enrolled fewer than 10 students with disabilities. Any school where rounding of the data or another error produced a suspension rate of more than 100% for a subgroup also was excluded.)
In the Preface of my book on No Excuses charter schools, I ask the rhetorical question: Would black parents of the Jim Crow era choose a modern-day No Excuses charter school if they has such a choice available. The book begins and ends with that consideration. I hope lots of black and brown parents read the book, and I hope lots of white policy elites do the same.
Preface
KIPP is the way the
white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated. –Ira Socol
It is interesting to speculate as to what
direction education for black and brown children in the segregated South might
have taken if separate schools based on race had not been declared
unconstitutional by Brown v Board in
1954. Would policy elites have continued
to ignore the plight of black children in the absence of the Brown ruling, or would they have tried other
educational interventions besides desegregation and resource transfusions to
raise achievement levels of black children stranded by generations of poverty,
racism, and separation?
What if black parents during the late Jim
Crow Era before Brown v Board had
been offered something other than neglected public schools with old textbooks
and worn-out band instruments and leaky roofs?
What if the philanthropic community and government had come together to
offer a different kind of school as a tax-supported alternative to the grossly
inequitable public schools for black children during the late Jim Crow
era? What if it were, in fact,
a school that would be based on a
non-negotiable philosophy and instructional model that accepted No Excuses
for any shortcomings in expected behaviors, attitudes, or academic
performance?
a school where privileged, beginning
teachers with little or no professional training would replace most of the
credentialed black teachers with years of experience in working with black
children?
a school that focused principally on
reading and math, with little interest, time, or resources expended for
athletics, drama, art, libraries, vocational skills, or even textbooks?
a school that required children to attend
school for 10 hours a day and on Saturdays, plus 3 weeks during the summer?
a school where a school uniform and
even a desk to sit in would have to be earned?
a school where children would be
forced to be silent most of the day and made to march silently in single
file from class to class?
a school that would demand total
compliance with instant punishment for any infraction, using methods that
would include isolation, shaming, humiliation, and screaming at them?
a school that would be open to white
middle class children, even if none chose to attend?
a school that would remain, in fact,
segregated, even though the stated goal of the school would be to prepare
children for college and careers in the wider world?
a school that would require parents
and children to sign contracts if they were to be admitted and remain
enrolled, contracts that guaranteed support for rules, policies, and
methods that parents would have no direct or indirect role in
deciding?
a school that would use public
school tax dollars without public oversight to pay a non-profit
corporation to run the school?
a school receiving millions of
dollars in support from the largest corporations and corporate foundations
in America?
a school that, in fact, required
children to sacrifice much their childhoods just to survive in the school?
Would black parents of the Jim Crow Era
choose such a new kind of school for their children, or would they, in fact, continue
to prefer the run-down public schools in their neighborhoods where their
children at least would be taught by professional, empathetic teachers who believe
children deserve dignity and respect? Somehow
I think that black parents of the 1950s would wonder how such a new “choice”
could represent an educational improvement over what they were accustomed
to.
After all, their children in the old Jim
Crow Era public schools had a curriculum that emphasized social studies and
science, health and art, along with reading and math, even if their textbooks
were discards from the white schools. And
their children certainly were less stressed, tired, and guilt-ridden for not
living up to white adult expectations and demands of the new “choice” school. Their children could, at least, remain
children.
I believe black parents of the 1950s would
denounce such new schools, much the same way that black intellectuals, leaders,
journalists, and parents, too, rejected the methods and ideology of the
industrial education schools so popular among white Northern philanthropists in
post Civil War era South (Anderson, 1988).
In those schools of that earlier era, teaching focused on the “dignity
of labor,” rudimentary academic skills, character traits, and social skills
required for second class citizenship, continued racial separation, and total
compliance to white economic demands.
Though largely uneducated, the majority of
black parents, even then, wanted the same educational rights for their children
that were provided for white children of the late 19th and early 20th
Century. In most cases, of course, black
parents never came close that kind educational equality, but they remained
insistent upon control of their schools, even if public support was meager at
best. The majority of black parents and
leaders rejected the spread of schools, either public or private, developed on
the “industrial education model” (Anderson, 1988), as it came to be known.
If black parents of the Jim Crow Era,
whether in 1890 or 1950, would have rejected the alternative “choice” described
above, then we may wonder how long it will take parents of this era to reject
the new No Excuses schools that have all the qualities described above and that
are now proliferating in the early 21st Century. When will black and white citizens, alike,
demand what most former slave parents and their children asked for over a
hundred years ago, which was an equal education in non-segregated schools?
And why have they not done so already,
when we might expect rage from parents as a suitable response to such
second-class schools? Part of the
answer, I believe, is attributable to a widespread hopelessness among urban
parents for anything better than what is being offered as the only choice to another
generation of schools characterized by malignant neglect. As Hannah Arendt (1969) noted, it is only
where “there is some reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are
not [that we see] rage arise.” The absence of rage or resistance or demands for
humanizing educational alternatives among urban parents may offer “the clearest
sign of dehumanization” (p. 63).
Another part of the answer to these
questions has much to do with how little parents, children, teachers, and other
citizens know about the No Excuses KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter
school model. Most of what they do know
has been provided to them by corporate think tanks, sponsored research reports,
corporate foundations, public relations and marketing specialists, charter
school organizations, spokesmen for the education industry, and print and
non-print mass media outlets and social media that can be counted on to report
the talking points of corporate education reformers and their wealthy
benefactors.
This book represents a modest effort,
then, to provide information that most parents and teachers, college presidents
or local politicians, have not heard or read before. As such, it represents a departure from the
official story of the No Excuses school model presented in Jay Mathews’ (2009a) paean to the
KIPP school founders, in Work hard, be
nice: How two inspired teachers created the most promising schools in America. Unlike Mathews’ Work hard, be nice…, however, this is not a book designed to
celebrate the KIPP Model or KIPP’s founders, David Levin and Mike
Feinberg.
Work hard, be hard: Journeys through “no
excuses” teaching is not
a book that ignores or downplays the uncomfortable facts, sad ironies, and tough
questions surrounding the widely-supported segregated No Excuses model for educating
urban poor children in punishing, total compliance environments. My purpose in writing this book was to
closely examine and interrogate the practices and ideology of the No Excuses
charter schools that have become synonymous with the KIPP Model.
Unlike Jay Mathews, I did not visit any
KIPP schools during the years of writing this book—even though I tried. In fact, when my repeated requests to visit
the KIPP schools in Memphis in 2013 and 2014 were denied, I contacted Jay, with
whom I have maintained a prickly relationship over the past 10 years of writing
from contrasting perspectives about corporate education issues and education
reform schools. His interventions did
not help, however, and his queries to KIPP’s Director of Public Affairs, Steve
Mancini, brought a finalizing negative response that indicated that the content
of my previous writing and speaking about KIPP had disqualified me from
visiting any of KIPP’s campuses. And so it goes.
The principal source materials for this
book, then, are from public documents and first-person published and
unpublished accounts. The book’s core is
based on in-depth interviews with 25 former charter school teachers, 23 of whom
are former KIPP teachers and two who are teachers from charter chains based on
the KIPP No Excuses model. All the
interviews were conducted between 2011 and 2014, and each was recorded and
transcribed verbatim. All former KIPP
teachers who contacted me wanting to share their stories were included, and all
of the individual interview excerpts were selected with an eye to remaining true
to the tone of the individual accounts.
Because former teachers expressed anxiety
or fear of potential repercussions as a result of sharing their experiences, all
information has been carefully edited to eliminate the possibility of breaching
anonymity. Along with some descriptive
thematic groupings and some limited interpretation and contextualizing of
participant accounts, I have used many direct quotes from former teachers,
preferring the profundity of participant accounts to my commentary on them. Each excerpt is identifiable by a number
designated by the data analysis tool, Hyperqual (Padilla, 2011), which can be
linked back to individual interview transcripts. These identifying numbers have been excised
from the final submitted manuscript. All
original recordings have been retained.
While two teachers were still teaching at
KIPP when they were interviewed, all of the teachers interviewed had made already
made the decision to leave KIPP. I was
most interested to know what it was like inside the KIPP bubble from the
perspectives of those who were no longer inside it, either psychologically or
physically. The majority of participants
had had some time to recover and to reflect on their experiences prior to their
interviews, even though all these teachers felt working in No Excuses
environments had indelibly influenced them.
Seven of the 23 KIPP teachers interviewed
(see Figure Prologue.1) had less than two years of experience when they began
at KIPP, and five of them began teaching at KIPP without teaching experience. Seventeen
of the teachers had less than five years experience. Fourteen interview participants were women,
and eight were men. Nineteen were
Caucasian, and three were African-American.
Seven of the teachers worked at KIPP between two and four years, and
eight lasted less than a year at KIPP.
Seven worked between one and two years at
KIPP. Five had degrees in education
with professional certification.
Seventeen had bachelors’ degrees, and 5 had advanced degrees. Sixteen of the teachers taught at KIPP middle
schools, and four taught at KIPP high schools. Six KIPP teachers had previously
taught two-year stints for Teach for America before coming to KIPP, and none had
been assigned by to KIPP to fulfill a TFA commitment.
Using
hundreds of pages of transcribed data based on firsthand accounts of life
inside No Excuses schools, the goal has been to achieve a new level of public
understanding of the KIPP Model. While
the stories of former KIPP Model teachers provide the core of this work, the
book offers, too, a brief historical perspective on previous efforts to provide
paternalistic educational interventions directed toward marginalized and
economically disadvantaged populations.
Joining me in
this effort with their own individual contributions in Chapter 3 and Chapter 9,
respectively, are Scott Ellison and Barbara Veltri. Professor Ellison provides a cultural studies
orientation to examining the KIPP organization as exemplifying the convergence
of neoliberal politics and the assertive activities of the business and
philanthropic communities.
Teacher
educator, Professor Barbara Veltri, examines key elements of KIPP’s sister
organization, Teach for America.
Professor Veltri, author of the Learning
on other people’s kids: Becoming a Teach for America teacher, examines the
role of Teach for America in providing the manpower and ideological complements
required to counter very high levels of teacher attrition in No Excuses
schools.
As an antidote to the KIPP Foundation’s
marketing and public relations outreach, which can be found in any number of
examples from both print and nonprint media, this book offers a critical eye
and raises serious questions related to public culpability for a punitive type
of tax-supported segregated schooling that our dominant culture celebrates only for children who are
disenfranchised by poverty and discrimination.
As one former KIPP teacher wondered aloud
near the end of our interview, would such schooling practices that we see at
KIPP be allowed for the children of white philanthropists who fund these
schools. Or would KIPP practices be
allowed in the private schools attended by the supportive politicians’
children, or for the KIPP administrators and teachers who would never allow
their own offspring to be subjected to a harsh, total compliance charter school
like KIPP?
Readers
are asked to keep in mind this central question that I try to answer throughout
this book: As a result of the spread of the No Excuses charter school teaching
model exemplified by KIPP, “who wins and who loses, and by what mechanisms of
power?” (Flyvbjerg, 2000). In addition
to trying to answer that core question, this book attempts to unravel a number
of conundrums and apparent paradoxes:
How did the spread of an
unsustainable boutique education intervention like KIPP reach its
exemplary status among the advocates of education reform?
How did high achievement
expectations become exemplified by total compliance enforcements that are
applied only to the segregated and economically disadvantaged children?
How did economic and social
advantages and resources become insignificant factors to school
achievement only for those who don’t have such advantages and resources?
What rationale is used for insisting
that children who are handicapped by poverty and all its attendant
problems will achieve equally on standardized measures with children who
have every economic and social advantage?
How do the grim and punitive environments
of No Excuses schools remain underreported by the media and, otherwise,
ignored by policymakers and child welfare advocates?
What may serve as more humane,
sustainable, diverse, and democratic alternatives to the No Excuses
charter school teaching model?
By presenting the firsthand facts about
teaching within total compliance No Excuses schools, this book goes beyond
accounts offered in news features, articles, and interviews that focus only on
KIPP Model’s test scores and its goals for expanding college opportunities among
economically disadvantaged children. In
short, this book offers a naturalistic palliative to the naïve and misleading
portrayals of No Excuses schooling that have garnered support among political
and economic elites.
From discipline that crosses over from
rigorous intent to abusive practice, and from teacher expectations that go
beyond the upper reaches of possibility into the stratosphere of the absurd, this
book presents accounts by former teachers who forthrightly share experiences in
total compliance schools that have not been heard before and that are not
likely to be soon forgotten.
Finally, Work Hard, Be Hard… examines new
developments in No Excuses
schooling
practices that, in addition to academic remediation, now focus on psychological
interventions intended to alter children’s neurological schemas in order to
effect changes in their emotional and socio-cultural values and behaviors. Fraught with potential for abuse by
non-professionals who remain laser-focused on test performance and grades for
“performance character,” these latest developments are explicated and then
contrasted with other orientations and practices that acknowledge both the
sociological and psychological sides of children’s experiences. In doing so, I hope to reawaken the virtues
of teaching and learning within the expansive boundaries of the science and art
of humane pedagogy applied to children who require the most caring, qualified,
and experienced teachers.
References
Anderson, J. (1988). The
education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press.
Arendt, H. (1969).
On violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2001).
Making social science matter: Why
social inquiry fails and how to make it succeed again. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Horn, J.
(2010). Corporatism, KIPP, and
cultural eugenics. In P. Kovacs, (Ed.), Bill
Gates and the future of U. S. “public” schools. New York: Routledge.
Mathews, J. (2009a).
Work hard, be nice: How two inspired
teachers created the most promising schools in America. New York: Algonquin Books.
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