"Disaster Capitalism," "Kids in Prison Program" Justified?

Once the storm-surge waters receded after Hurricane Katrina plowed through New Orleans, the city has since experienced another flood, one that rushed in to fill the vacuum created by tragedy in order to reap profit: Disaster capitalism.

While the impoverished struggled under the natural disaster intensifying the social disaster that had characterized their lives, the Commons were ripe for disaster capitalists to create their predatory market, notably in the person of school CEO-as-superintendent Paul Vallas. The Recovery School District accomplished the privatizers’ dream of dismissing public school teachers, rendering teachers’ unions impotent, and then flooding the city with “no excuses” charter schools (often Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP] charters or KIPP-clones) staffed primarily by Teach For America (TFA) recruits.

As Sarah Carr has documented in Hope Against Hope, mostly minority families already overburdened by poverty and nearly frantic lives as working-poor and working-class parents have been eager to enroll and support the “no excuses” sales pitch.

“The children were more reluctant KIPP converts,” Carr cautions, explaining:

Many of them enjoyed the trips (those who violated KIPP’s rules too many times were barred from excursions, however), spoke enthusiastically about at least one or two of the teachers, and experienced some degree of academic growth after starting at KIPP. But they chafed under KIPP’s rules and long hours, and all but a few had some story of an unfair benching [1] or other punishment. “Mr. Dassler says we won’t have bench at his high school, which is a good thing,” said fifteen-year-old Moira, just days before starting at KIPP Renaissance. “The kids call KIPP Kids in Prison Program because we don’t get out of school until late,” she added. “I joked to one friend, ‘Next years I’m going to be there at KIPP Renaissance with a lot of convicts.'” (p. 97)

Yet, The Washington Post, home of Jay Matthews (who authored a tribute to KIPP’s founders, former TFA recruits) has rushed to declare, “KIPP doubters proven wrong,” based on the recent Mathematica report.

The Ends Don’t Justify the Mean(ness) [2]

Amputation is an instant and effective weight-loss strategy, but I don’t recommend it.

Mathematica Policy Research released a new report on Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools February 26, 2013: “The new KIPP evaluation covers 41 KIPP middle schools in 13 states and in the District of Columbia.”

Let me state for the record, and using a George W. Bush-style pre-emptive strike, that regardless of Mathematica’s conclusions about whether or not KIPP middle schools are succeeding, regardless of the myriad data points, metrics, or outcomes upon which the report bases those conclusions, I remain steadfast in my rejecting KIPP charters, along with their relationship with Teach for America (TFA), their obsession with college-readiness grounded in test-prep, and their most corrosive commitments to “no excuses” and zero-tolerance practices.

I welcome reviews of the Mathematica study, and I anticipate that Mathematica, KIPP, and the media will offer less credible conclusions from the data than the reviews (and I suspect those reviews will receive far less coverage by the media). But, all in all, I cannot support KIPP and KIPP-like “no excuses” charter schools anymore than I can recommend amputation as a weight-loss strategy.

And while my skepticism bordering on cynicism about what political, public, and media perception of the KIPP report will entail is firm, I also see a tiny glimmer of hope on the horizon of education reform. So let me offer here a few hints that the tide may be turning, a tide away from “no excuses” and school-only reform discourse and policies (and the disaster capitalism that feed them) and toward a recognition that a free people must commit to equity for all if any of us are to remain free.

(1) Equity is now on the public, media, and political radar. And with that recognition, some headway is being achieved in also acknowledging that social inequity contributes to education inequity, and then educational inequity is both a reflection and a perpetuation of that social inequity. Consider a few points related to equity:

• In “The Case for Investing in Disadvantaged Young Children,” James J. Heckman offers some evidence-based and sobering realities:

“Families play a powerful role in shaping adult outcomes. The accident of birth is a major source of inequality….About 50 percent of the variance in inequality in lifetime earnings is determined by age 18. In shaping adult outcomes, the family plays a powerful role that is not fully appreciated in current policies around the world.” (pp. 49, 56)

• In Equality of Educational Opportunity: A 40-Year Retrospective, Adam Gamoran and Daniel A. Long reinforce that the inequity identified in the Coleman Report remains today:

“Forty years on, the findings of the Coleman report hold up remarkably well, in some ways distressingly so….First, policies could be enacted across the board that have greater benefits for disadvantaged students than for their more advantaged peers. Second, policies that have similar effects on all students could be focused mainly on disadvantaged students.”

• Report: U.S. should focus on equity in education, by Valerie Strauss at her The Answer Sheet (Washington Post), and For Each and Every Child represent a media and political recognition that education reform has failed to address social and education inequity.

• Research is revealing a powerful pattern showing that community schools tend to reflect the inequity of the community they serve. As disturbing, however, is that education reform committed to charter schools, TFA, and new standards and high-stakes testing tends to replicate and even intensify where traditional public schools are struggling.

(2) “No excuses” and zero-tolerance practices, implemented almost exclusively in urban and majority-minority schools, are being exposed as classist and racist solutions fit only for “other people’s children.” The Mathematica report is a quantitative-data-orgy of the type that I tend to loathe. Numbers can be useful, but often they aren’t. Stories, however, better help us to confront the means regardless of the outcomes:

• Hope against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children by Sarah Carr gives those stories voices, faces, and lives as she details the rise of “no excuses” charter schools in the wake of disaster capitalism in post-Katrina New Orleans.

• In Police in the Hallways, Kathleen Nolan examines how zero-tolerance policies reinforce the school-to-prison pipeline but also create schools-as-prisons (and helps lend credibility to why KIPP students often refer to themselves as “kids in prison program”).

• Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom and “Multiplication Is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children, by Lisa Delpit, present a scholarly response to policies aimed only at “other people’s children,” practices that in fact fail the populations they claim to serve.

(3) High-stakes, standardized testing is being unmasked as not only a failed solution to social and educational inequity, but also a key mechanism in contributing to inequity. Maybe, just maybe, the wheels are starting come off the corporate scam that is high-stakes testing.

• Garfield High teachers have awakened a national consciousness about the misguided power of testing, but much work is left to be done to help political, public, and media voices recognize that testing is more than flawed as a high-stakes mechanism for education reform (note Campbell’s Law).

• High-stakes testing creates inequity, but few will admit this; in fact, many progressive and social justice activists remain convinced that the problem is how tests are used, not testing itself. For example, on Twitter, Michael Roush offered support for addressing the equity gap, but then stated: “But an eye test didn’t give me astigmatism.” This comment makes a false analogy because an eye exam identifying astigmatism is a direct observation of a condition, and thus is analogous to taking attendance, not administering a test. Tests are approximations of learning, and often very poor ones at that. As long as most people continue to ascribe to testing qualities it doesn’t achieve (objectivity, perfect validity, perfect reliability), testing will both quantify and contribute to inequity, as Hickman warns: “Currently, public policy in the United States and many other countries focuses on promoting and measuring cognitive ability through IQ and achievement tests. A focus on achievement test scores ignores important noncognitive factors that promote success in school and life.”

So as I noted above, I am not deeply influenced by what the Mathematica report on KIPP claims—although I will not ignore that or the reviews of how credible those claims prove to be—but I do look for how we all respond to the report as another step either toward failed reform narratives or another glimmer of hope that many are starting to see that inequity is the primary problem that we are not addressing, but should.

At no point, however, am I willing to allow the ends to justify the meanness.

Mathematica Study Reveals KIPP Cures Cancer! [3]

No it doesn’t. [4]

But the Press Release, filled with italicized boldface reminded me of the Sniffling Accountant episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine champions the exclamation point.

Among the dramatic claims of “x months of additional learning growth,” I felt there was an underlying sense of “Methinks they doth protest too much”: “KIPP’s gains are not the result of ‘teaching to the test.’”

And while KIPP benefits regardless of how accurate the report is about their accomplishments—because KIPP and other “choice” charters are compelled to pursue branding and the media will report often and inaccurately based on the Mathematica press release and almost none at all on the reviews to follow—I have stated directly that the outcomes and data-fetish surrounding KIPP cannot justify for me the “no excuses” policies that also characterized the charter chain.

“No excuses” policies are often called a “new” paternalism, as David Whitman explains in an article praising KIPP and KIPP-style schools in Education Next:

By paternalistic I mean that each of the six schools is a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance….But many paternalistic programs remain controversial because they seek to change the lifestyles of the poor, immigrants, and minorities, rather than the lifestyles of middle-class and upper-class families. The paternalistic presumption implicit in the schools is that the poor lack the family and community support, cultural capital, and personal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse.

The numbers and statistics (inane claims such as “months of learning growth” that are as pointless as identifying a book as being on the 4th-grade reading level) used to justify and praise KIPP charters are as accurate a portrayal of what happens to the students, parents, and teachers involved with those schools as Game of Thrones is realistic, with its inordinate amount of clean white teeth and topless women that make the airbrushing in Playboy seem rather shoddy.

I am more compelled by the stories drawn from KIPP and other “no excuses” charters in New Orleans as portrayed by Carr, notably one comment included from principal Mary Laurie:

“I think we’ve done good work, but I don’t know that the numbers (test scores, attendance and graduation rates) will always reflect our good work because of the kids we take on,” said Laurie, referring to the fact that the school accepts some of the city’s most challenged and challenging students….“Walker’s a twenty-four-seven school. We believe we’ve got to find a way to give kids a safe place to be,” Laurie said. “And that’s not spoken for in these numbers.” (p. 115)

I believe Laurie’s concern is the comment of our time related to how we misunderstand and misrepresent every aspect of schooling because we keep the political and public gaze on the numbers and not the people involved.

We have become a people obsessed with the ends justifying the means when those means involve the least among us, specifically children, and disturbingly when the means impact children of color living in impoverished homes and communities.

And I also remain troubled that KIPP along with other highly segregated “no excuses” charter schools and Teach for America are tolerated and even empowered to flourish because they are experimentations with “other people’s children,” again mostly of color and mostly from poverty.

It is easy now to look back at something like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and feel horror and disgust because of the dramatic details but also because of the luxury of this seemingly being something of our dark naive past.

And is also easy to focus on the inexcusable details of Tuskegee or to assume that prisoners are somehow less than human [5], thus deserve indignity, and fail to recognize that “missionary zeal,” [6] deficit views of certain people, and an “ends justify the means” mentality all lurked beneath decisions to perform medical experiments on those prisoners.

But it is often much harder to pull back the veil when the details are contemporary and not nearly so dramatic.

A “missionary zeal,” deficit views of impoverished children and their families, and an “ends justify the means” mentality characterize KIPP and TFA, and thus, I am cautioned, I am concerned, I am deeply skeptical.

Because of the Mathematica report, KIPP will be announced as doing something many have refuted: Succeeding with high-poverty students.

While that may prove to be technically true (although I doubt that), few if any will note that KIPP has achieved those results through advantages that do not exist in public schools and have been categorically rejected by the exact same people who will praise KIPP—much higher levels of per-pupil expenditures, lower class sizes, higher teacher compensation for more experience and qualifications (see Bruce Baker). Not to mention selectivity, attrition, under-serving ELL and special needs students, options public schools do not, and should not, have (see more from Baker).

And those advantages of KIPP, not their “no excuses” policies, may very well be at the core of why they have raised test scores. But who will examine that? Who will ask that? Who will report that?

What remains most disturbing of all, however, is that almost nothing will be said about the inherent classism and racism running through how KIPP functions and why KIPP is so widely embraced.

Those of us who do ask these hard questions are likely to be attacked instead.

While I expect and welcome more lucid discussions of what KIPP has achieved, I believe above all else we must have a frank discussion of how that has been achieved. Or as Elaine would prefer, let’s discuss how KIPP achieves the scores they do, and then face frankly whether any outcomes can justify the lingering legacy of racism hidden behind the slogans of disaster capitalism!

[1] The “bench” is a type of time-out or in-school suspension used by KIPP, explained by Carr: “Students who seriously violated one of the school’s six values—responsibility, perseverance, integrity, empathy, courage, and community—found themselves isolated from their peers in classrooms and at lunch. They also had to cover the KIPP name on their uniforms with a piece of tape or a jersey, a symbol of their temporary estrangement from the school community. The humiliation underlying the controversial approach dismayed many parents, particularly middle- and upper-class ones.”

[2] Originally posted @ the Chalk Face

[3] Originally posted @ the Chalk Face

[4] See the Press Release, In Focus, and Full Report

[5] If you assume that criminals and crimes are obvious, read The Reader.

[6] If you are not skeptical of “missionary zeal,” read The Color Purple and The Mosquito Coast.