Hmmm, kind of blows Doug’s philosophy right out of the water, doesn’t it?

Sounds like KIPP is filling a need and creating its own niche market.

Everybody who studies KIPP says the same thing they are creaming their students. Of course they are poor in poor neighbourhoods but they are the “well behaved” and “highly motivated” of the poor and everybody knows it. They are notorious for pushing out bad behaving or poorly performing students on top of this. This is what Creaming is and why Geoffrey Canada would not deal with them. Natuarally this is the KIPP propoganda piece. Everybody sees through it.

The reason only one is unionized is because it takes time and many others are in the process. Their teachers turn over at an incredible rate as they do in the rest of the Charter system.

When you set up barriers that you know will keep out “undesirable” students in advance, applications, contracts etc you are not getting a demographically random sample.

KIPP is a fraud and all serious investigators know it.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2009/03/kipp-fresno-horror-story-that-national.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2009/03/kipp-it-is-not-solution-to-urban-ills.html

Here’s the biggest horror story—an unresponsive public education monopoly.  http://www.thecartel.com

Give me KIPP in Canada any day.

I thought you might be interested in how the world’s strongest education country does it.

http://www.annenberginstitute.org/VUE/summer09/Darling.php

Please Doug, come on,
Finland is a nanny state.
Its system sounds like a lot more work than your union members would ever accept. Good excuse but you membership would burn you at the stake if ?your dream? ever began to see fruition.
So in your precious ?Finland? obviously they are ?creaming? their teachers. ?Only 15% of those that apply are accepted?, although to me that does sound good, weed out the sour grapes before you even train them.
How do you like their ECE policies?

BUT you forget to add that the Finn’s are incredibly anti-social people who are afraid of direct confrontation.
Finland has crippling trade barriers, exorbitant automobile taxes,  Tax and labour costs are high, Finns are reluctant entrepreneurs, so there are too few business startups. Nokia is half foreign owned syphoning off a 3/4 billion dollar chunk of there tax revenues each year…

Just a few of the quotes from respected sources I found floating on the net. First are the ones you would like us to see and I do agree that it sounds good, especially the part where they leave no child behind:

Finland offers an example of how a nation built a comprehensive ?teaching and learning system? that has raised achievement and closed achievement gaps.
Resources for those who need them most
High standards and supports for special needs
Qualified teachers
Evaluation of education
Balancing decentralization and centralization

?Teacher training emphasizes learning how to teach students who learn in different ways, including those with special needs?
?prevention of learning difficulties and exclusion,?

?The egalitarian Finns reasoned that if teachers learn to help students who struggle, they will be able to teach all students more effectively and, indeed, leave no child behind.?

?Most teachers now hold master?s degrees in both their content and in education, and they are well prepared to teach diverse learners ? including special needs students ? for deep understanding and to use formative performance assessments on a regular basis to inform their teaching so it meets students? needs ?

?As is true in many European and Asian nations, nearly half of teachers? school time is used to hone practice through school-based curriculum work, collective planning, and cooperation with parents, which allows schools and families to work more closely together on behalf of students (Gonnie van Amelsvoort & Scheerens 1996). This compares to only three to five hours per week available to most U.S. teachers for lesson planning ? conducted independently, without the benefit of colleagues? thinking. ?

But there is a downside, you forget to add that the Finn’s are incredibly anti-social people who are afraid of direct confrontation. This plus they have also stated that because of their climate they spend more time indoors and learning (reading) does maturely happen out of shear boredom.
Finland has crippling trade barriers, exorbitant automobile taxes and tax and labour costs are high. Nokia is half foreign owned syphoning off a 3/4 billion dollar chunk of their tax revenues yearly.

A few other quotes to consider :

?Again, no surprise, it reads that the poor purchasing power is because?Finland is severely overtaxed and there is very little competition in the consumer marketplace?(in my opinion, the low-competition is a macroeconomic result of both,overtaxation?and inflexible unions). All this with relatively low salaries.?

Finland has 22% regular VAT and 17% food VAT, which make it the second-highest taxed country in Europe when these amounts are combined. Only Denmark is higher.
Automobiles in Finland cost roughly double the German price due to?Autovero;  Many families need two cars.
Overly-high Income Taxation causes a sizable?Tax Wedge?that ensures both, low-Gross and low-Net Salaries. Also, quite astonishingly, Finland publishes the private income information of all its residents for anyone in the world to inspect (verotietojen julkistaminen)!
?To compensate for the loss in profit, tax revenues and productive capital, Finland has dramatic over-taxation which causes an extremely high cost of living when considering a wide range of products and services. But even the over-taxation isn?t enough to keep the Finnish Ponzi scheme economy afloat. It also requires saving money via, e.g.? providing?low-budget healthcare?to the poor and maintaining protectionism schemes via cartels and assorted?ripoffs?like?Autovero?and?Alko?. All exist with the primary purpose of pilfering the last remaining coins out of each Finn?s pockets. And all are significant barriers to savings and investment.

BTW, How do you like their ECE policies?

Sorry, it seems some of my editing went missing when I C&P’ed the above from my word program. Point is still clear.

I think what some forget is that concept of customer satisfaction is also vital. 

The parents and students who use KIPP are getting what they need and despite some gripes the vast majority are happy.

Doug’s Finnish Fantasy wasn’t as easily sold over at Mended recently, where a RetDir pretty much shut down the claim of Finland The Great by reminding Doug that
“Finland is on of the least diverse countries in the western world. 3% of its population are immigrants compared to 18.8% of ours. And their aboriginal population is comparably smaller. “

I guess it’s ok to compare apples to oranges when trying to win an argument, but when it’s to prove that choice works, it’s the first excuse out of the mouths of the usual suspects.

Mark says “nanny state and high taxes as if those are bad things.”

Finland did not always have the powerhouse education system it does today. In the 1970s they realized that they could no longer make a living “in the bush.” They were going to become a Nokia nation. The set out to create the world’s best system maining through their teachers and they accomplished that.

Finland is a great deal more diverse than even a few yers ago but the more diverse it becomes the more progress it makes proving once again that diversity is not a problem in education, poverty is a problem. Do Chinese Canadians have an education problem? No because they are not poor. Do black and native children have a problem? Yes because they are much poorer. Middle class black and native children do not have eucation problems for the most part.

Does Finland’s socialist system and its almost total elimination of poverty help their education results? Of course it does.

Happy customers at KIPP, I guess a few but they have a huge number of dropouts/pushouts because they try to dump every kids who would bring their stats down back to the public system.

Very few of their teachers last more than 2 years. Not what they call a scaleable solution.

I’m a Finnish and a Canadian citizen, and quite frankly, I’m tired of the stereotyping of the Finns; blacks; and poor.
Mark H., Finns are not anti-social; we are not afraid of confrontations.
You have offended me with your so-called expert knowledge about us and if you’ve offended me, how often have you and other bloggers offended the blacks and poor. 
I’ll also say something else:  your blathering would be stopped immediately if you were conversing like this in Finland.  Even the most timid Finn would tell you that we don’t stereotype.  In Finland, I’ve heard North Americans told just that…
Leave race; ethnic groups the poor out of the blogs. Please stick to what you know, and stop assuming you know more than you actually do.

Although I found Mark’s comments a little strange when the “non-confrontational” Finns stood up to the whole Red Army at one point, and fought them to a draw in a winter war, the rest of the talk about the poor and the educational success or lack of success is hardly stereotyping. This language and method of description is used every day in the “politically correct” sociology departments of our universities by the most liberal professors. Most of us are sticking exactly to what we know and what the most advanced experts in the field also produce.

This is a lot of fun but I don’t have the time to site all the sources, too exhaustive, Google charter school fraud. Over 400 000 hits. There is your summer reading.

Doug, have you ever worked at a KIPP school? or even set foot in one?  You say “Of course they are poor in poor neighbourhoods but they are the ?well behaved? and ?highly motivated? of the poor and everybody knows it.” . . . are you serious dude? you couldn’t be more ignorant, judgmental and generalizing.  I work in a KIPP school and 99.9% of the kids are great, likable, hardworking kids but i dare you to spend a day in the shoes of a KIPP teacher and see how “easy” it is . . .

I have been a teacher in mainly poor schools for 32 years. I don’t keep goldfish either but I know you don’t put Mountain Dew in their tank.

I read the experts, do you. Geoffrey Canada Harlam Miricle says “I don’t work with KIPP they cream their kids”. Same with other experts, contract criteria, teacher burn out, anti-union attitude, pushing out misbehaving students, hardly any special ed kids, hardly any ESL kids. KIPP is one big fraud.

you keep repeating your argument, but i really just don’t see the same trends that you are saying the experts suggest. Obviously KIPP isn’t perfect, you’d be extremely hard pressed to find a school that is. Depending on which school you are talking about and which city of course.  In my actual experience working at KIPP with actual KIPP students and teachers(or should i call them experts) i can see the many challenges they face on a daily basis.  If you’ve worked in underprivileged schools for so many years you can probably relate.  Sounds to me like you’re basing your argument on everyone else’s opinion rather than actual experience with KIPP schools . . .did you just read an article and decide to hate on KIPP or what?

No, it’s just the union’s spin.

It’s humorous to see what people think they know because they read a couple of articles. . .

You need to read a lot more about KIPP, Ravitch is just the start. Want some real fun? Google fraud in American charter schools. A few more articles there, LOL.

Charter schools that offer open enrollment displace students by treating them as customers.  In other words, if the student doesn?t like the service the charter school is offering, he can go someplace else.  The problem is that someplace else may be outside his neighborhood, miles from home. 
Parents have a more democratic roll in public schools.  They can run for school board member, or elect school boards who will work in the community?s best interest.  Parents truly have the power to change public schools through their elected officials.  They will not have that power when corporate charter schools grow bigger and stronger.  It will simply be take it or leave it.
There are no monopolies or profit margins in the public school system, but there could be in a charter system.  I don?t want to see the same thing happen to public education that has happened to health care.  Some states have only one insurance provider.  The same could happen with the privatization of education.

@ Phil. . .
are you serious? you speak as if public schools are actually working. While that may be true suburban schools and a handful of city schools. charter schools offer opportunities that the local public schools dont, which is why they are becoming increasingly popular.  Not to suggest that the majority of charter schools are in anyway perfect, but, at least from my humble experience, parents have a lot of say in the experience that their child gets at KIPP.  The larger issue can be actually getting the parents involved. 
School boards are disgustingly political and are often disconnected from the communities their schools serve.  South Philly, Lower Merion, and numbers of school districts across the south to see how “in-touch” school boards are with the schools they serve. . .  And technically, many charter schools are actually part of a larger public school district, they are just operating under their own charter as opposed to the distict guidelines.  Charter schools have board members and parent groups too, so it’s not like these charter schools are the only show out there and kicking students to the curb who don’t comply.  Anyway, public education, particularly urban public education needs an overhaul just as the healthcare system did.  More federal involvment in state school systems would actually improve the chances of a student from Kentucky receiving the same quality education as student from New York. ..

A charter school manager can close a charter school at will and disenfranchise parents, teachers, and students.  He holds all the cards.  The same thing rarely, if ever, happens at a public school.  There?s a big difference between being a customer and a citizen.  Citizens have more rights than customers.

Public schools close all the time. Especially since the enactment of No Child Left Behind. But why would a Charter school C.E.O want to do something like that? It’s not like a business that they can be bought out from.  It’s actually in the school owners best interest to keep the school open and running, at the very least from a financial point of view. . .

Running a charter school is like running any business.  If the manager dislikes the operating environment, he closes the school.  It is much, much easier to close a charter school than it is to close a public school.  While citizens elect school boards that represent them in the public system, charter schools have corporate boards which are not normally controlled by parents.
Several charter schools have unionized.  There have been cases in which charter managers have decided to close their schools rather than meet teacher demands.  It’s their prerogative.  In many states there are laws of arbitration which bind public entities to perform.  For example, if a teachers union and a school district cannot agree on a contract, an impasse is called.  An arbitrator then completes a binding agreement.  A charter school is under no obligation to meet the demands of an arbitrator.  The charter school manager can simply close the school at the end of the year and move on to another city.

If parents become too demanding, the manager can disenfranchise them in the same way.  Close the school at the end of the year and move on.  The charter movement is the brainchild of billionaires (Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Fishers, the Waltons, etc.).  Their first loyalty is to shareholders and profit, not students and parents (AKA customers).  If they feel that a location has gone toxic, they move elsewhere.  Public schools don?t have that luxury.

The charter movement is healthcare reform in reverse.

Very interesting to see both point of views of KIPP. As for me KIPP is very hard, it’s designed to serve low-income and minority children (I was one of them). I am glad that KIPP was founded, they gave me opportunities that I would have never had in a public school. It’s so hard to explain to many people that see KIPP as a fraud or don’t believe in it, but I believe that once someone works or even attended KIPP as a student, they have a different point of view. I am glad that there are people out there that do not believe in KIPP but that gives KIPP reason to prove them wrong.

Millionaires don’t open charter schools for profit.Haven’t looked at this in a while but just to clarify.  The Bill and Melinda Fates Foundation doesn’t exist to make them.money, they already have money. Anyone who.has spent time in one, like KIPP Alum above, knows that at least at KIPP the
“Shareholders” are not the priority, educating is.

Hello KIPP Alum.  It’s good to hear from a KIPP alumni.  Thanks for weighing in on this debate.  I’ve always believed that it’s teachers’ unions who are spreading negative propaganda about KIPP in order to protect their turf

It was my pleasure.

It’s great to hear from a real live person who has been positively affected by the education wars. We tend to get too caught up in the theoretical and abstract, and forget what it’s all about, really.