Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, November 27, 2006
Education’s future: Will we do what works?
(Students at the Dayton Early College Academy, an experimental school that borrowed some of its core concepts from the KIPP model)
Poverty is a powerful roadblock to student success, but it can be overcome. To breach the achievement gap, schools need more than typical resources so they can provided extended programs with more hours of instruction.
But it can be done, as demonstrated most notably by the KIPP charter schools around the country. The question is how effectively a KIPP-style model can be replicated on a wide scale in America’s urban areas, and if as a nation we have the will and the willingness to pony up the extra cash it would likely take.
That’s the message of a lengthy but very useful primer on the state of education in America written by Paul Tough in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine called “What it takes to make a student.” (Since the magazine was in print by Saturday, I’ll forgive the Times for ripping off my blog headline from that day: “How to make a teacher.”)
The story already has been dinged by some critics for covering old ground on some of the hot education issues. That may be true for the real policy wonks, but my hunch is the step-by-step explanation of some of the research that Tough highlights on the effects of poverty and parenting styles is news to more general followers of education issues.
And these are important trends. Fairly recent discoveries such as the “word gap” are driving lots of changes in education policy, especially the push for more and better early childhood education. Plus, there’s lots of good practical information for parents, such as how to talk to your kids in a way that makes them smarter.
Tough also makes the argument that charter schools have served their purpose by providing a “laboratory” of sorts through which KIPP and other innovators honed more effective programs. As he states in the story, critics rightfully point to poor academic performance of charters compared to traditional public schools. And I’d add that most charter schools are not especially innovative, using off-the-shelf curriculum and school designs rather than experimenting. But if the KIPP-type models work, perhaps that alone will prove the charter movement was worth the effort?
Perhaps. That may depend on whether those programs are practical for use on a wide scale in public schools. The best charter school I know is the SEED school in Washington, D.C., which removes kids from their troubled neighborhoods and boards them at the school while they learn. It works great — so far every graduate, no matter how low income, has gone on to college — but it’s three times as expensive as a typical public middle/high school education costs. Just because it works doesn’t mean we should pluck all our urban kids out of their homes and place them in public boarding schools.
Or look locally at Dayton’s ISUS Trade and Tech Prep high school, which teachers practical workforce skills to dropouts while helping them reclaim some level of academic success. They also get kids who might otherwise be lost to graduate, but at a cost that requires vigilant private fund-raising. ISUS could never do what it does on the state subsidy alone.
On the other hand, KIPP and like models use some strategies that we’ve already seen copied in other public schools — an emphasis on character, rewards and consequences for good and bad behavior, a heavy focus on math and reading, frequent testing, 24-hour access to teachers by phone.
Still, probably the biggest advantage of KIPP is the longer school day, longer school week and longer school year many of the schools employ. Tough says they provide up to 60 percent more instruction hours than typical schools. KIPP may be right when it argues that much extra time is needed to catch up kids who have fallen behind. On the other hand, many charter schools that employ their model rely on very young, idealistic teachers and the schools have high teacher burnout rate.
Sustainability is a big concern with the KIPP-style approach. Keeping it going on a broader scale is almost certainly going to depend on spending more in high poverty areas, as Tough argues. That’s where the future of this reform gets tough. If we know what it takes to erase the achievement gap but we find it will be very costly, with Americans have the will to go forward with it?
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