Can successful schools serve average students?

A good article about how KIPP seeks to serve the neediest students but, ironically, its success and growing reputation work against that goal.  Frankly, I don't have a huge problem if KIPP ends up serving a SLIGHTLY more motivated group of parents and students (from among the lowest-income families).  Given how few spaces there are at high-quality schools serving this group, why on earth would it make sense to have these seats filled with parents and/or students who don't cherish the opportunity to get an excellent education and at least make some tiny effort toward that objective?

 

What I care about is the incremental value added -- in other words, where would the KIPP students be if they hadn't gone to KIPP?  Thus, the study that would be first on my priority list would look at the KIPP students vs. those who applied for the KIPP lottery but didn't get in.

o one can accuse them of lacking good intentions. KIPP's AIM Academy, located in Southeast Washington, D.C., has all the trappings of a needy school trying to serve a needy populace. Its physical plant--a church annex on semi-permanent loan from Methodists--is distinctively unglamorous, and the teachers have the characteristic combination of idealism and exhaustion that seems to come with the job description. ("It seemed like the only way I could get a vacation," quips one teacher of her pregnancy and imminent maternity leave.) And the student body seems to fit the criteria, too: All of AIM's 166 students are black, and the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch is equal to or greater than that in the surrounding schools.

That's unlikely to satisfy KIPP's critics at EPI or in the academy. But the organization's challenge, over the coming years and months, will be to prove the naysayers wrong. It's a challenge KIPP wants to meet: Last month, it started drafting a request for research proposals to study not just how it serves, but who it serves--looking at questions like "how do students at KIPP schools compare to students of similar characteristics at other traditional public schools?" There are reasons to believe that KIPP students might be different--that they might leave for school each morning from homes with better resources or more supportive parents. But it's in everyone's interest to hope that's not the case.

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Can successful schools serve average students?

The Paradox of Choice

by Conor Clarke
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 12.07.06

or teachers, policymakers, and academics, the question of how to close the achievement gap--the disparity in education success between the average middle-class and impoverished student--has a kind of Holy Grail quality: difficult to answer, but impossible not to pursue. Would more money do the trick? Or fewer students? Better teachers? These questions are not going anywhere anytime soon. But, every once in a while, at least, a ripple comes along and suggests that maybe, just maybe, the debate is moving. This happened last week with Paul Tough's hefty New York Times Magazine essay--8,393 words, but worth every syllable--about a new breed of intensive charter schools, meant to serve lower-income students. The most influential of these is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a collection of 52 schools spattered across the country. And, unlike almost every other educational experiment out there, there just might be something approaching consensus that these schools actually work.

When programs like KIPP are pushed into the spotlight as saviors of American education, critics are skeptical for two reasons. First, they wonder if these rigorous charter schools can be reproduced on a mass scale, since the hours tend to run late and the pay tends to fall short. (Jonathan Chait tackled this earlier in the week: To successfully replicate the programs, you'd need to either find an army of masochistic saints or start paying real teachers real money.) The second charge is that these schools don't tell you a whole lot about "average" achievement, because they don't contain "average" students--a problem academics lovingly refer to as "selection bias." The notion is controversial, but it makes sense: After all, students don't fall out of the sky and into charter schools--parents must decide to place them there. The critics that cry bias claim that the kind of parent willing to make this choice--willing to research schools, fill out forms, or sign a "commitment to excellence contract"--is the kind of parent who would push a child to succeed no matter the school. And, for many (if not most) lower-income kids, that's atypical.

When you're telling a larger story about education, the first complaint gets all the attention: Educators are desperate for strategies that can be applied to the public education system as a whole. But, for the new breed of charter schools themselves--as they grow in number and in reputation--the second problem is just as important, at least if the schools genuinely want to find and serve the neediest kids on the block. And, while it's obvious to anyone who visits a KIPP school that the organization is genuine in this pursuit, finding and keeping the average low-income students--students that lack educational advantages coming in--is no mean feat. Indeed, the battle these schools face isn't just about finding the right educational strategy. It's about finding the right students.

 

f educators could force students into charter schools, selection bias wouldn't be a problem, and we could know whether or not a school succeeds in helping average students. But they can't, and selection bias is a problem. Few rigorous studies have been performed in the realm of charter schools--in part because there is a frustratingly limited amount of data to study--but the problem of selection bias has been confirmed repeatedly in the context of school vouchers. Just this summer, it happened in Washington, D.C.: A July working paper examining the D.C. School Choice Incentives Act--a 2004 voucher program offered to students whose families are at or below 185 percent of the poverty line--found that students who accepted the offer had higher test scores than those that did not, a fact that probably reflects familial differences. "Some see low income families as an undifferentiated mass without looking at differences between families, but some low-income and blue-collar families are very committed to education," says Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and political science at the University of California, Berkeley. "The charters are probably taking on the families that are most committed to education."

For some critics, the problem with KIPP is that its students have higher-than-average entering test scores, too--a shot fired by the Economic Policy Institute's (EPI) 2005 study, "The Charter School Dust-Up," which found that while 42 percent of students entering KIPP-Bronx schools could pass a fourth-grade reading test, only 28 percent of fourth graders from neighborhood schools could claim the same. As a result, EPI charged, KIPP institutions were "unrepresentative of the neighborhood schools from which they draw."

But KIPP knows the danger of selection bias exists, and it does take steps to reduce it--especially when the program opens a new school--through what Washington, D.C. Director Susan Schaeffler calls "community recruiting." KIPP teachers go door-to-door. They hunt parents in front of grocery stores and carpet-bomb impoverished neighborhoods with flyers. In Washington, D.C., they advertised on pizza boxes; in Gary, Indiana, it was with refrigerator magnets. And, most importantly, KIPP asks public school teachers to refer struggling students to the program. "We don't sit around and wait for the kids to come to us," laughs Schaeffler. "We beg." Some of this reflects a simple need to fill a class, especially when a school is first founded, but KIPP makes a bigger effort to target the neediest students. "We want the students in underserved communities," says Public Affairs Director Steve Mancini.

These steps are all about manipulating the flow of information: Since KIPP can't force average low-income parents to sign up, it wants to at least offer the choice to the right parents. But what happens when the information becomes harder to manipulate? When a national magazine cover story is written about the organization--or, more importantly, when it's featured on "Oprah" or "Anderson Cooper 360"--KIPP loses control over the spread of information. For the purposes of fundraising, that's obviously a good thing. But, for the purposes of retaining a carefully tailored student body, it isn't. Could educational results actually make selection bias a bigger problem? "I think that's likely," says Fuller. "Your applicant pool simply goes up, and it becomes a richer mix of applicants." In other words, when a school like KIPP is proclaimed a success, it becomes more attractive to the atypical families that EPI worries about and KIPP wants to avoid. "The demographic makeup of some KIPP schools is changing," says Harvard's Richard Elmore, "because there's a sense that KIPP schools are very effective."

There is a very simple reason why this is the case: The longer a KIPP school is around, the larger its footprint grows and the more parents try to place their kids in it. "It is clearly in evidence that the longer a KIPP school is around, the larger a waiting list becomes," says Mancini. Some of this is just the natural progress of spillover from one year to the next. But much of it has to do with media and word-of-mouth exposure. Now, Mancini says, "the original two KIPP schools have waiting lists of well over 400." And if the applicant pool is flooded with high-achieving students, there's nothing the organization can do: By law, it must use a lottery system.

 

o one can accuse them of lacking good intentions. KIPP's AIM Academy, located in Southeast Washington, D.C., has all the trappings of a needy school trying to serve a needy populace. Its physical plant--a church annex on semi-permanent loan from Methodists--is distinctively unglamorous, and the teachers have the characteristic combination of idealism and exhaustion that seems to come with the job description. ("It seemed like the only way I could get a vacation," quips one teacher of her pregnancy and imminent maternity leave.) And the student body seems to fit the criteria, too: All of AIM's 166 students are black, and the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch is equal to or greater than that in the surrounding schools.

That's unlikely to satisfy KIPP's critics at EPI or in the academy. But the organization's challenge, over the coming years and months, will be to prove the naysayers wrong. It's a challenge KIPP wants to meet: Last month, it started drafting a request for research proposals to study not just how it serves, but who it serves--looking at questions like "how do students at KIPP schools compare to students of similar characteristics at other traditional public schools?" There are reasons to believe that KIPP students might be different--that they might leave for school each morning from homes with better resources or more supportive parents. But it's in everyone's interest to hope that's not the case.

Conor Clarke is a writer in Washington, D.C.