Firing Teachers: Readers vs. Me

Merely repeating the tired assertion that KIPP and other charter schools are self-selective in a way that changes the characteristics of their student body simply does not make it true. As Jay says, there exist no data to confirm that accusation, and the data that do exist, like the recent SRI study, show that KIPP schools specifically are NOT selective; that is, they are not getting more educated students. Furthermore, you assert that the gains KIPP schools get are illusory, because their low-performing students leave. If you actually read the study, though, they tested the students who stayed, to see if they made unusual gains in their time at KIPP. And they did.

-- Socrates11

You are very wise, Socrates11.

I understand your point -- that according to socioeconomic data and test scores, many charter schools have similar student compositions to those in the public schools. However, my point is that these comparisons do not measure critical student attributes like family support, motivation, and student behavior and discipline problems. I've also read that many charter schools do not accept students with learning disabilities (who are often mainstreamed into general education classes in public schools, and can make teaching more challenging). For example, I've read that KIPP requires parents to attend pre-enrollment seminars at the school. Parents who are not able to attend cannot enroll their students in the school.

-- AttorneyDC

Those are two more myths. Thanks for giving me a chance to address them. Charter schools must take anyone who applies. It is in the laws that govern charters. If they have too many applicants they must select from a random lottery, and cannot exclude students with disabilities. If you spend some time talking to the most successful charter school educators, you will find them eager to teach kids who have been written off elsewhere as un-teachable. Please tell me where you read about these alleged KIPP pre-enrollment seminars. I have never encountered them. I don't think they exist. Such a method is anathema to the desires that brought the KIPP educators I know into teaching.

Though the concept with such freedoms worked at KEY, due to their principal's good judgment and teaching experience, this plan will be doomed to fail to create a better school system unless certain flaws and loopholes are addressed. One is the possibility of corrupt principals creating a 'boy's club' out of their teaching staff, firing those who are not sycophants and keeping those who are. The way to remedy this is to create a new position at each school that is hired directly by the city who is an experienced teacher who can genuinely assess each teacher and relay the information to the principal. Along with this new position, create a new standard for hiring principals, which requires a moderate degree of teaching experience (and this is not limited to grade school), to make sure the principal, along with the evaluator, can give a fair judgment. The ruling if the teacher is fired will result from multiple genuine discussions about the teacher in question and when it is confirmed the teacher is not teaching, they are promptly fired. This process should take one to two months of arduous consideration, and involve at least one conference with the teacher about his/her performance, but this system is much faster than the one currently employed by many cities/counties and will be much more effective. Of course, problems will never be completely remedied in every school, but this should destroy most kinks in the system.

-- John Parks

I have a much simpler idea. It will save a lot of red tape. Hire a principal in whom you have confidence and see how well the students do. You may decide a school is full of sycophants, but if it gets its kids above grade level on independently applied assessments that the staff can't corrupt, I would say please send me more of those sycophants. If the students don't improve, even if the principal is on the shortlist for sainthood I would get rid of him.

As you noted, many of the students who left KIPP did so because they were in danger of failing. KIPP has the option of requiring students who do not achieve the required level of academic success to leave the school. Hence, a whittled-down pool of students remain by eighth grade.

-- AttorneyDC

You are really helping me here. This is sort of a mini-myth, a half truth. KIPP retention rates appear in many cases to be higher than those of regular schools, who have all kinds of methods of getting rid of kids they don't want. It is true that some KIPP parents withdraw their children because they think the work is too hard, and their child will get better grades at the local regular public school. If you find even one KIPP school that has required a student to leave because the student failed to achieve the required level of success, let me know and I will write a column about it. The data show that KIPP schools on average appear to expel one or two kids a year, much lower than the expulsion rates in their neighborhoods. The reasons always have to do with behavior, and only extreme circumstances -- such as refusal to pay any attention and do any work, repeated harm done to other children -- bring expulsion in the KIPP schools I have studied, and only after months, and sometimes years, of trying to help the child learn.