Gerald Bracey shared his letter to the author of the New York Times article cited in the OP. From the
EDDRA listserve, 11/29. Mr. Bracey runs EDDRA (Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency).
Mr. Tough,
Your take on NCLB was as good as I’ve seen in confronting some of the issues that the President, Secretary Spellings, and the culture at large would just as soon not confront with their glib assurances about what NCLB can do. Still, you say that the president and others haven’t yet recognized “the magnitude of the effort that will be required.” There are in the end so many omissions in your own essay, I must conclude you have not recognized this magnitude either.
I will come back to this statement in the end, but first a sequential run-through of a few other important problems that afflict the President, the Secretary and the paper.
First, you quote Bush as saying “Some kids can read at grade level, and some can’t and that’s unsatisfactory.” It’s also inevitable. In addition to the natural variation of human beings on all characteristics, “grade level” is only meaningfully defined as the score of the average (median) child in a grade on a test. The median score for third graders is grade level. This means that, by definition, half of all children are always below grade level—to repeat, by definition. It is this definition that permits the existence of the “Lake Wobegon Effect” where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.”
It is theoretically possible to define grade level in some other way, but no one has ever successfully done so. Grade level seems to be meaningful only when reported in the same way as we report the height and weight of babies: for instance, this child of 6 months is at the 63rd percentile for height and 74th for weight, etc.
When the president and, especially the Secretary say that the law requires that all children be at grade level by 2014 they are uttering nonsense, gibberish—and the law doesn’t even mention grade level. It says “proficient.”
Which brings us to the second definitional problem: proficiency. When I address audiences I tell them that we can have a meaningful definition of proficiency or we can have 100% proficiency, but not both. Richard Rothstein has just published a fine essay on the absurdity of aiming for 100% proficient (“Proficiency for All: An Oxymoron”).
You and the president assume that the NAEP definition of proficient is meaningful (very dangerous that—accepting an assumption also accepted by Bush). It is not. It has been rejected by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the GAO, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing as well as by individual psychometricians. I have an essay in the queue (hopefully) at Education Week, “Why are we Still Using the NAEP Achievement Levels?” (Answer: because there is much political hay to be made by pointing to numbers that apparently show that the public schools are doing poorly.
Some examples of the NAEP goofiness: In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, American 4th graders finished 3rd in the world in science among 26 nations. NAEP, administered the same year, said only 29% of fourth graders were proficient or better. In a NAEP reading assessment, 71% of American 4th graders were labeled as scoring at “basic” or “below basic” (when kids are reading at the “basic” level, it is often implied that they are nearly illiterate. This is not true). In the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, Sweden topped the 35 nations and American students were significantly outscored by only three countries. But, if the Swedish kids took the NAEP reading test, 67% of those students in the #1 country would be declared at the “basic” or “below basic” level, almost as many is in the US.
There are many more things in the paper that could be critiqued but I will limit myself to just three: You report that there are 52 KIPP schools and say “KIPP is doing a great job of educating its students.” But you also report that Doug Harris could find only 23 “high-flying” schools. That means that more than half of the KIPP schools are not “high-flying.” So, are they great, still?
While the paper maintains a neutral tone for most of its exposition, there is some nasty, politically laden rhetoric (and an error) that slips in when you write that some states have “slashed their standards in order to allow themselves to label uneducated students educated.” What is your justification for using of the word “slashed?” Did you systematically compare the old standards with the new? This is a Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh word.
More importantly, in this sentence you buy into a false dichotomy, one that is perpetrated by the Bush administration as well, namely, there are two kinds of students: educated and uneducated. For the administration in the context of NCLB, you’re either proficient or you’re left behind. That is absurd. Achievement always falls along a continuum. If a score of 80 is needed to attain the designation “proficient,” does a score of 79 mean the child is “left behind?” Is the 79-kid’s future now foreclosed?
Finally, among the three criticisms, you say that educating poor children will take more money and effort than we have realized, but if we don’t make the effort it will be “the outcome we chose.” You do indeed call attention to needed resources in a useful way, but I don’t think you realize the money and effort required.
Is that poor six-year-old not paying attention to me, the teacher, because he’s sassy or ADHD? Or has he had repeated bouts of untreated media otitis and can’t hear me well? Is this other one lolling about because of high levels of lead in his brain? Is this kid absent because his parents don’t care or because he’s been felled by another bout of asthma (don’t forget, the Bush EPA tried to hide a study showing that slum air is dirtier than suburban)? There are oodles of pediatric problems that schools cannot, as currently constituted, attend to. Not to mention the prenatal and perinatal problems occurring because of inadequate attention to the pregnant mothers. To reconstitute them to include clinics would take big bucks.
Richard Rothstein argues that parents who send their kids to KIPP are not your average low-income parents—and he has presented more compelling evidence about this than what you cited. That begs the larger question: Do we leave these parents behind? What kind of community/school action project would it take to transform them to KIPP-like parents, motivated and willing to sign parent participation contracts? More big bucks.
You note that KIPP teachers are young and work 15-16 hour days (they are also mostly single since most marrieds won’t do that, esp. if they have any kids of their own, nor will they put up with the 24/7 intrusiveness of KIPP).
Again, you observe there are 52 KIPP schools. How many KIPP-like communities are there? Where will you find the hundreds of thousands of teachers and administrators to run KIPP-like schools? And if you can find them, can you recruit them at current pay levels to leave what are likely more comfy homes and neighborhoods to work in KIPP-like communities?
To leave as you do the whole job in the hands of just schools--which is quite amazing if you actually read Schools and Class—is to guarantee that success will not occur on a large scale.
You’d get closer to reality by making your next Magazine article about Richard Rothstein and throw KIPP a couple of lines.
Gerald W. Bracey
Alexandria, VA
Another post on the listserve:
The New York Times Sunday Magazine explored the issue of closing the achievement gap in Paul Tough's 11/26/06 article, "What it Takes to Make a Student." It focused partly on KIPP and the factors behind its schools' success. That prompts me to recount my amateur volunteer research on KIPP.
A dad at San Francisco's KIPP Bayview Academy mentioned proudly on a local school discussion e-listserve that his daughter had "tested into" the KIPP school. My question about what he meant by "tested into" got no response. I decided to see if KIPP was telling applicants they had to "test into" the schools. I took my 7th-grader to drop by a San Francisco KIPP school (KIPP SF Bay Academy, because we were nearby) and ask about applying. They said she did not have to "test into" the school itself, but were very clear that she would have to be tested to determine what grade she's in. I've visited many schools as a prospective applicant, and that's the only time I've even been given the message "don't assume that she'll be in her current grade, because only our tests will determine her grade level" (my interpretation, not a direct quote).
That raises the question of whether many incoming KIPP students are moved back a grade level. This seems feasible, as the KIPP schools are grades 5-8 and generally all the feeder schools are grades K-5. I don't know of any way to know that if KIPP isn't announcing it. It seems like a very legitimate way to help students catch up, but if so, shouldn't KIPP be discussing it publicly as one of its strategies? That wasn't mentioned in the New York Times magazine article.
I went fishing through demographics of California's KIPP schools on the Dataquest section of the California Department of Education website. There are several patterns at the majority of California's KIPP schools:
-- Most of them show changes in the number of African-American students, especially boys, from grade to grade, that seem to indicate that a large number are held back in the higher KIPP grades. The numbers show reductions in one grade and corresponding bumps in the grade behind.
-- The numbers at most of those schools also show significant attrition among African-American students, especially boys. Many who enter the KIPP schools do not finish.
Again, it's legitimate for KIPP schools to have high numbers of kids repeating grades, and it's legitimate for many students who start the school to leave before finishing. However, if those are strategies that help explain KIPP schools' successes -- especially high attrition of unsuccessful students -- they were not mentioned in the New York Times magazine article, and they have not been discussed in other commentaries on KIPP schools that I have seen. If those are successful strategies, they should be aired and explored so that all educators can learn from them.
A few other points from my unscientific research:
-- I learned in my visit to a KIPP school and from other research that KIPP schools have discipline policies built around a "shunning" system that to my middle-class eye is shockingly draconian. This might help explain the schools' high attrition.
-- The KIPP schools rely on a strategy of ongoing material rewards to students, who receive regular "pay" in KIPP dollars to spend on goods at a KIPP store. Again, if that is a significant part of the schools' successful strategy, it should be aired and discussed.
-- The numbers as gleaned from the California Department of Education website do not appear to bear out the unattributed claim in the New York Times magazine article that "all (KIPP schools) have long waiting lists." Incoming class sizes in most California KIPP schools vary in a manner indicating that they are not all full. As an aside, I also learned in my visit that KIPP rewards students and families for aggressively recruiting to the schools. They get KIPP dollars for bringing in an inquiry and Gap/Old Navy gift certificates for bringing in a new enrolled student.
I think a report on KIPP is incomplete without these pieces of information, so I'm adding them to the discussion.