Ryan Hill, head of the remarkable network of KIPP schools in Newark, wrote a BRILLIANT rebuttal to some nonsense that Richard Kahlenberg has been writing about KIPP (published, to my great surprise, by Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss, who is usually simply a mouthpiece for Ravitch and the status quo):

Last week I ran a post by Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and author of "All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice," about the KIPP charter schools. He criticized KIPP, arguing that KIPP "skims motivated students and yet is pointed to as a segregation success story." Here Ryan Hill, executive director of four KIPP charter schools in Newark, N.Y., responds.

By Ryan Hill

As executive director of TEAM Charter Schools – the four KIPP charter schools in Newark, New Jersey – I read Richard Kahlenberg's recent blog post with great interest. Our schools serve about 1,300 Newark public schoolchildren and over 100 alumni, and are consistently among the highest-performing schools in Newark – ninety percent of our students who completed 8th grade have matriculated to college. Yet we know that we have much to learn and are far from having it all "figured out," so we welcome constructive feedback.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kahlenberg's observations on KIPP fall short in providing us with useful information..... I thus write to provide the perspective of an educator and Teach For America alumnus with over a decade of experience teaching, coaching, and leading schools in Harlem, Washington Heights, and, for the last 10 years, Newark.

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A response from KIPP

By Valerie Strauss

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/a-response-from-kipp/2011/06/10/AGXWzRSH_blog.html