The Charter School Revolution Continues
May 28, 2009
At KIPP academies, the school day is longer than the typical adult workday. It includes Saturdays and a month over the summer. Their students, parents and teachers all sign a contract, and the students are required to complete two to three hours of homework every night.
Sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear about at an elite private school, or maybe a reform school for wayward students. But KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) academies are public schools"public schools of a new breed.
There are over 60 KIPP middle and high schools, and thousands more "charter schools" with different names and philosophies popping up around the country.
What binds the many charter schools together is the fact that they are all different. They don't have the same rules about curriculum or class size as other public schools. Given the freedom to innovate, they say, they're going to find something better.
Robin Lake is the associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a charter advocacy organization. She says KIPP schools are among a group of charter schools that "appear to be doing extraordinarily well academically and are showing great success in closing the achievement gap." By achievement gap, she means the difference between how students from high-income, white families perform in school compared to lower-income minority students.
For decades, school administrators have tried to close this gap. Schools like the KIPP academies claim they're finally succeeding. A study of two KIPP schools showed that more than 80 percent of their students come from low-income families, and about the same percentage of students from the two original KIPP schools go to college. Nationally, only about one in five students from low-income families go to college.
But critics, like the American Federation of Teachers, the country's second largest teachers union, say the wider statistics tell a different story. They say nationwide studies show charter school kids don't really do any better than kids at regular public schools"and sometimes they do worse.
Jeffrey Grove, a researcher for the Southern Regional Education Board, wrote a report calling for accountability in charter schools. He says, like all schools, charter schools can succeed if school leaders have a clear vision and set of goals, if parents are engaged and participate actively and if there's someone to oversee the school carefully. "Without even one of these key elements, it becomes much harder for a charter school to succeed," he says.
But in low-income public school systems, where administrators are dealing with issues in all their schools, and parents are working long hours to support their families, this kind of total commitment isn't always possible.
When charter schools fail, it often means the school closes entirely, leaving their students in limbo. They can go back to the traditional public schools"but often the poor performance of a public school is the reason the charter school started in the first place.
Lake says parents and students need to do careful research to make sure the philosophy and style of a charter school is a good fit. Grove says the same could be said for teachers, who are also often asked to apply the school's mission to every aspect of teaching.
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Are charter schools part of the solution or just part of the problem? How can we use the parts that do work to benefit all students?
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