It is Absolutely Possible for Minority Kids to Achieve at the Highest Level

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An excellent article from Business week on Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) Schools in the US. More support for Charter Schools in Canada? I sure think so. Would KIPP come to Canada?


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Ivy Leaguers’ Class for Poor Becomes ‘Platinum’ Charter Schools
By Molly Peterson

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- In 1993, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin were recent Ivy League graduates teaching fifth graders in Houston’s inner city. The students were as much as two academic years behind their middle-class peers.
A year later, Feinberg and Levin started a classroom that operated nine hours a day instead of the normal seven, as well as on some Saturdays and during the summer. Within a year, the number of students performing at grade level in reading and math jumped to 90 percent from 50 percent.
Today the 50-pupil experiment has grown into the biggest U.S. charter-school operator, with 82 schools for poor and minority children in 19 states. The Obama administration cites the Knowledge Is Power Program, as the nonprofit system is known, as a model of the kind of education reform it hopes to spawn with $100 billion in stimulus money.
KIPP has gotten “remarkable results from students,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview. “The program helps kids “who didn’t really have a good work ethic, who didn’t have dreams, start to become extraordinarily successful.”
In addition to adopting working-world hours -- KIPP says its students spend 60 percent more time in class than regular public schools require -- the organization’s founders say they have been inspired in part by Gap Inc., FedEx Corp. and Southwest Airlines Co.
Commencement Walk
Adopting Southwest’s emphasis on employee motivation helps principals keep teachers, students and parents focused on preparing every child for college, said Feinberg, 41, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who is head of KIPP’s 15 Houston schools. Yale University alumnus Levin, 39, runs the system’s six New York City schools.
When KIPP students graduate, “it’s not just the high school teachers that walk in the commencement,” Feinberg said. “The middle-school teachers and the elementary teachers that taught those kids walk in the commencement as well.”
A 2005 study by the Educational Policy Institute in Virginia Beach, Virginia, found “large and significant gains” among fifth graders in KIPP schools nationwide on the Stanford Achievement Test, a standardized assessment used by school districts. The students scored an average of 9 to 17 points higher in reading, language and math, on a scale of 99 points, than they had the previous year elsewhere.
KIPP has an 85 percent college matriculation rate, compared with 40 percent for low-income students nationwide, according to a 2008 report card on the organization’s Web site. About 90 percent of KIPP’s 20,000 students are black or Hispanic; 80 percent qualify for subsidized meals.
‘Platinum Brand’
KIPP’s charter schools are a “platinum brand,” said Dan Katzir, managing director of the Los Angeles-based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which has donated $18 million to the schools.
For all its success, education scholars such as Jeffrey Henig, a political science and education professor at Columbia University in New York, question whether the KIPP experience can be replicated on a large scale.
The main reason is that KIPP is able to staff its relatively small number of schools by recruiting from a limited pool of top candidates, many of them from programs other than traditional education colleges.
About two-thirds of KIPP’s principals and a third of its teachers are alumni of Teach for America, a New York-based nonprofit that recruits graduates of Ivy League and other top colleges to teach in high-poverty areas for two years. Feinberg and Levin met when both joined Teach for America in 1992.
“KIPP and Teach for America have shown that it is possible to get good, bright, enthusiastic, energetic young people into schools,” Henig said. “But we don’t know whether that’s sustainable.”
Careful Growth
“The KIPP school is not a transformative model,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group. “The KIPP school is a school that takes meat-and-potatoes education and does it incredibly well,” Hess said.
KIPP, which plans to have 110 schools by 2011, never envisioned becoming ubiquitous, said John Fisher, chairman of the KIPP Foundation, which supports the schools. “We will not open another school if we don’t believe it’s going to be as good as the last school we opened,” he said.
KIPP’s New York chapter has expanded “in a way that ensures quality control,” said New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. “They have consistently opened up very good schools, and we want to support that.”
Chosen by Lottery
The nation’s 4,900 charter schools, including KIPP’s, operate under contracts with school districts or states and receive most of their operating funds from them. KIPP says most of its schools get no tax dollars for capital needs such as school buildings and relies on donations. Students attend for free and are chosen by lottery.
Partly to spur the growth of charter schools, President Barack Obama said yesterday he wants to add $1.35 billion to the $4.35 billion already in the government’s Race to the Top education program, which rewards states whose innovations can serve as models for others.
While KIPP can’t compete directly for that money, it’s “hopeful that there are real opportunities to help us be part of the larger effort” to improve education, KIPP Foundation Chief Executive Officer Richard Barth said in an interview.
Gap Founders
John Fisher’s parents, Gap clothing chain founders Don and Doris Fisher, were among KIPP’s major boosters, giving Feinberg and Levin $15 million to start its foundation in 2000 and $64 million in all over the years.
Philanthropies including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation also have donated, bringing total contributions to $130 million. Don Fisher was chairman of the KIPP Foundation’s board until his death last September at the age of 81. John succeeded him.
The foundation funds a yearlong Fisher Fellowship for prospective KIPP principals, whose coursework includes business school classes that examine companies such as Southwest and FedEx. KIPP’s founders say FedEx offers insights into competing with a government monopoly.
The classes are followed by “residencies” at KIPP schools and six months developing a business plan in the communities where the participants plan to open schools.
Students as Customers
“KIPP school leaders are small business owners in many respects,” said Elliott Witney, who completed the fellowship in 2002 and is chief academic officer of KIPP’s Houston schools. “I’ve got friends in New York starting their own companies, and the issues they deal with are identical to ours.”
Witney, 34, says about half the books in his office are business and management-related, including Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” and Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.”
KIPP school leaders, who refer to students and parents as “customers,” have more control than traditional public-school principals over budgets, staffing and curriculum, Feinberg said. They also continually assess whether students are likely to succeed in college. Schools that fall short can lose the right to the KIPP brand.
The branding strategy came from Don Fisher as he helped KIPP craft an expansion plan. Feinberg recalled showing Fisher uniforms bearing the names of three KIPP schools opening in 2001. “Don was like, ‘These are great. Where’s KIPP?’” Feinberg said. The KIPP name began appearing on T-shirts and signs, and in the name of every school.
KIPP Academy Middle School is the centerpiece of the group’s Southwest Houston campus, which houses three schools for students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. U.S. News and World Report last month ranked KIPP’s Houston high school 16th best of the U.S.’s 21,000 public secondary schools.
‘No Shortcuts’
At the middle school, motivational slogans such as “No Shortcuts” line the corridor walls. Pre-kindergartners wear shirts emblazoned with “Class of 2024,” the year they plan to start college. Classrooms are named after universities, including Yale and Penn.
Fifth graders recite multiplication tables in unison through rhyming chants, a mnemonic method known as rolling numbers. First-grade spelling lessons make use of body language, with students snapping their fingers for each vowel in a word, and clapping for each consonant.
FedEx Effect
Feinberg wants to expand in Houston from 15 to 42 KIPP schools serving 10 percent of the city’s public-school students by 2020. He says the competition might spur traditional public schools to adopt KIPP methods, the way the U.S. Postal Service began offering overnight mail nationally amid competition from FedEx.
That probably won’t happen, said Gayle Fallon, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. “Public schools don’t always react that way,” Fallon said. “They’ll whine about losing enrollment” to charter schools, “but whether they do anything about it is another story.”
KIPP provides “healthy competition” that “makes everybody better,” said Houston Independent School District spokesman Norm Uhl. Some other charter schools have followed KIPP’s lead by increasing class time, and many regular public schools have started effective after-school programs, Uhl said.
Michelle Rhee, head of the Washington, D.C., public schools since 2007, said she’s modeled some initiatives after KIPP, including Saturday classes and more rigorous summer school. Rhee has known KIPP-D.C. founder Susan Schaeffler since 1992, when they too were in Teach for America.
KIPP proves that “it is absolutely possible for poor minority kids to achieve at the highest level,” Rhee said.
She cited a KIPP school in Washington where, she said, 90 percent of students are performing on grade level, compared with 10 percent at a regular public school six blocks away.
“Same neighborhood, same challenges, same kids with those wildly different outcomes,” Rhee said.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-20/ivy-leaguers-class-for-poor-becomes-platinum-charter-schools.html

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