In this episode, Susan Pendergrass is joined by Steven F. Wilson, senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research and author of The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, to discuss the rise and decline of the “no excuses” charter school movement.

They examine how once high-performing urban charter networks lost their focus on academic achievement, why ideological shifts around DEI and anti-racism took root, and what it will take to re-center public education around effective instruction. Wilson also explains the importance of urgency in school leadership, the evidence behind student outcomes, and more.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Transcript: The Lost Decade – Steven F. Wilson with Susan Pendergrass

Download the Transcript 

(00:00) Introduction and background

Susan Pendergrass: Well, Steven Wilson, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. We were just speaking before we started recording about how long you and I have been kind of working in the—you completely in the charter space and me somewhat adjacently in the charter school space—and have just seen things change and evolve over time in ways that… some are great and some are less great.

You have a new book out, The Lost Decade: Return to the Fight for Better Schools in America, which is fantastic. You know, 20 years ago, I thought charter schools were going to be part of the answer—to competitively spur non-charter schools to do better and to give parents options and lifeboats in some of our worst urban districts. There were so many high-flying charter school networks emerging, like KIPP—the Knowledge is Power Program—that were like, “Look, it’s not the kids.”

These kids can do as much as any kids—even if they’re poor, even if they are in an urban district, even if their mom is single and has two jobs. We’re not going to give them excuses. We’re going to have high expectations and we’re going to instill discipline. And they started this whole “no excuses” thing. And I thought that was such a great thing for kids. Then… I don’t know. Please, you tell me. I’m sure you know more than I do.

(01:10) The shift away from academic excellence

Steven F. Wilson: Well, first of all, Susan, I’m delighted to be with you—and I’m even more delighted that you’ve read the book. That’s thrilling.

Yes, I think your introduction really nails it. We had found a once-in-a-century educational intervention that had extraordinary effects: the so-called “no excuses” school. (Terrible name, by the way—maybe we should clarify that for listeners.) Around 2000, or in the few years leading up to that, urban charter networks were posting extraordinary effects. They were beginning to show a way out of educational inequality in this country—and then they lost the thread.

They turned away from the North Star of achievement—of great instruction—which is what drove them and their success. And they began to embrace another ideology, another purpose, that I think has been quite destructive. That’s the theme of the book. I refer to it as anti-racist education or social justice education.

Look, we all thought we were doing social justice, right? We thought we were doing anti-racism. We thought that by providing an instructionally effective path—where children could enter the middle class and not be consigned to a life of the minimum wage—we were addressing inequality in America. But we’ve unfortunately turned away from that.

I called the book The Lost Decade because we are now exactly halfway through it. We need to make a sharp pivot back to what was working. My book is really a call to action—a call to return to what works, and pick up where we left off.

(03:47) Mislabeling structure as racism

Susan Pendergrass: So when you say the anti-racist movement, I think what I remember hearing is… making kids stand in line is racist?

Steven F. Wilson: Yeah, that’s right. So a whole lot of things were labeled racist when, in fact, they were just creating the conditions under which children could be safe, respected, and have an opportunity to learn—conditions where teachers could teach.

People forget what the urban classroom looked like 30 years ago when all this began. There’s a book called Let the Lady Teach by Emily Socker. She was an education journalist who taught for a year and took stunning photos. You see New York City classrooms with graffiti-covered walls, broken desks—a scene of abject neglect and contempt for students.

The founders of the no-excuses schools did two things. First, they established order. Children needed to feel safe from gangs, violence, and low-level disorder. The balled-up paper no one picks up, the broken pencil, the kids talking over the teacher—all that had to stop. That was the foundation for joyful, effective learning environments.

Second, they adopted the pledge of no excuses. As professionals, we agreed to stop blaming poverty, racism, or lack of resources for why students weren’t learning. Those challenges are real—but we cannot let them prevent us from doing our job: educating children. That was an ennobling cultural decision—and it drove the successes that followed.

(06:38) School uniforms and equality

Susan Pendergrass: I also remember how those high-performing charter networks were some of the first public schools to require uniforms. At the time, people said, “You can’t make low-income students wear belts,” and yet… they did. Schools helped them. They found a way.

Steven F. Wilson: Exactly. Uniforms did a couple of things: they created a sense of order and purpose and they eliminated status anxiety about clothes or sneakers. They created a level playing field where all kids could feel safe and focused.

(07:54) Why charter schools changed

Susan Pendergrass: So why did things change around 2005 or so? Why were charter schools so susceptible to this shift?

Steven F. Wilson: Good question. My view—and it can be contested—is that charter schools were uniquely susceptible because of their reliance on young, novice teachers, and because they experienced higher staff turnover than traditional districts. So you had more new teachers arriving, often from elite universities. These teachers had been acculturated in anti-racist ideology and brought it with them.

With 20 to 25 percent staff attrition over four years, you can essentially have a whole new faculty. These new teachers weren’t part of the early TFA generation who felt called to close the achievement gap. Instead, they came in animated by the ideas of Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and more radical voices like Tema Okun—who claimed that objectivity and love of the written word were traits of white supremacy.

So teachers began to question whether enforcing discipline or holding students to high standards was racist. Some networks—like Success Academy and Brooke Charter Schools—held their ground. Others capitulated. They didn’t make the case for their methods or explain how they aligned with a true liberal arts education.

(11:35) Parental demand and satisfaction

Susan Pendergrass: And these were the very things that parents wanted, right? The structure, the discipline?

Steven F. Wilson: Absolutely. These schools conducted annual parent surveys—Ascend, KIPP, Achievement First. Satisfaction rates were consistently above 90%. I’ve never heard of a parent asking for more anti-racist programming. What they wanted was a better education and a secure path to college and career. That path has eroded horribly over the past five years.

(14:52) Test score declines

Susan Pendergrass: So what were the actual outcomes of the shift?

Steven F. Wilson: In New York City—the nation’s largest market—urban no-excuses charters used to dramatically outperform traditional schools on state tests. That performance premium eroded by two-thirds over five years. Now, many of them perform just slightly better than the city average. But the networks that stuck with their methods—Success Academy and Classical Charter Schools—have either maintained or improved their results.

(16:29) Can “anti-racist” schools succeed academically?

Susan Pendergrass: And you couldn’t find any high-achieving schools that had adopted the anti-racist framework?

Steven F. Wilson: I looked, and no—I couldn’t find any.

(17:24) What should we do now?

Susan Pendergrass: So what now? How do we turn this around?

Steven F. Wilson: We need to have honest conversations—conversations that have been avoided for too long. And then we need to win the contest of ideas. The no-excuses model works. RAND found that students who attend KIPP middle and high schools have nearly the same college completion rates as white students nationwide. That’s an astonishing result.

There’s growing recognition that the ideological shift hasn’t worked—but fear still dominates. I think that will change within the next year.

(19:47) DEI and illiberalism on both sides

Susan Pendergrass: Meanwhile, terms like “equity” and “DEI” have been politicized. What’s your take on that?

Steven F. Wilson: I support DEI—when it’s done right. Diversity, equity, and inclusion should foster a sense of belonging. What doesn’t work is dividing people into affinity groups or pushing a worldview of oppressors versus oppressed. That’s deeply harmful.

And the answer isn’t to fight illiberalism with more illiberalism—banning concepts, censoring teachers. That’s not how we solve the problem.

(22:24) Accountability, data, and racism claims

Susan Pendergrass: In Missouri, we’ve got very low accountability. Our state system gives almost every district an “A.” When we created our own school grading system, we were told assigning D’s and F’s is racist—because those schools mostly serve Black and Brown students. But parents know when their child’s school is bad. They want a way out.

Steven F. Wilson: Right. The claim that it’s racist to report poor outcomes is a distraction—usually from the teachers’ unions or anti-reformers. They say schools are just reproducing structural poverty and racism. Horace Mann would roll over in his grave.

We need competition. In many communities, the majority school systems are unreformable. The faster path to success is to build new schools around them.

(26:05) Urgency and action

Susan Pendergrass: I hear “fix the schools we have” all the time. But people have been trying that for decades. If your house is on fire, don’t just stand there—build something next door.

Steven F. Wilson: Exactly. People cling to the existing system out of habit or emotion. But it isn’t working. And as you said, we need urgency. That’s another value some now call “racist.” But if your kid is in a broken classroom, you feel that urgency.

High-performing charter schools acted on it. They made staffing changes midyear. They reopened quickly during COVID. They didn’t let failure sit.

(28:22) Conclusion

Susan Pendergrass: Yes, and that urgency made a difference. Our unaccredited districts have been that way for so long a child could attend from kindergarten to 12th grade without any improvement.

The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America couldn’t be more timely. Steven, thank you so much for coming on.

Steven F. Wilson: Such a pleasure, Susan. Great to see you.

Susan Pendergrass: Same. Thank you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Lost Decade of Education Reform with Steven F. Wilson appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Ron C. Rice has over 15 years of public policy experience in the fields of education, urban development, and community empowerment initiatives as an executive state government appointee and two-term local elected official.

Prior to joining the National Alliance, Ron served as the Special Assistant/Chief Policy Analyst for the Chief of Staff to the Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education, and as a city councilman for two terms in Newark under Mayor Cory Booker where he created his ward’s Education Support Committee and consistently supported charter school facility needs and their growth and advancement throughout the city, specifically working with KIPP (TEAM Rise and SPARK Academies), Uncommon Schools (North Star Academy), and community charters such as Marion P. Thomas Charter School, Lady Liberty Academy, and Adelaide Sanford Charter School.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on Sticher 

Listen on SoundCloud

The post Podcast: Charter Schools in America with Ron Rice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study examined 13 KIPP middle schools that had more applicants than seats available, so researchers were able to track the kids who got into the KIPP schools and those that didn’t. The groups of students are comparable because they all applied to KIPP schools, and thus have similar qualities like motivation and parental support. The results show that students enrolled in KIPP middle schools were 13 percent more likely to enroll in a 4–year college than students who did not. The study states that “the impact of attending a KIPP school would be almost large enough to erase the nationwide racial disparity in college enrollment rates.”

Nationally, KIPP has 242 schools and serves more than 100,000 students. St. Louis currently has six KIPP schools, including two middle schools and a high school. Kansas City has just two, including one middle school. There are so many more disadvantaged students outside of St. Louis and Kansas City who could benefit from a high-performing charter school like a KIPP school. Under Missouri’s current charter school laws, only the three percent of Missouri students in the St. Louis City or Kansas City school districts even have the option to apply for lottery admissions to KIPP schools. Charter school expansion could bring effective schools to students all over the state, giving students in urban and rural areas access to quality education.

The post Charter Schools Can Help More Students Get to College appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Charter schools are not the perfect solution—some fail to meet expectations and close—but they are the only thing that currently gives kids a chance to attend a better school within Kansas City. When the stakes are simply too high for students stuck in failing schools, charter schools must be part of the response to our public school woes.

While charter schools cannot magically transform public education for all students, they are already helping thousands of children in Kansas City by giving them alternatives to failing neighborhood schools. Even more students could have this opportunity if we allowed new charter schools to open, helped successful ones expand, and closed those that perform poorly. But for charters to reach their full potential, they need equitable funding for capital costs and access to empty school buildings in the city.

Judging by enrollment numbers and waiting lists, it appears that parents in the area are ready for more charter schools. While enrollment for Kansas City Public Schools continues to decline, charter school enrollment in Kansas City grew 17 percent between the 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 school years. And that doesn’t account for the students on waiting lists—at University Academy, the waiting list was 700 students long last year.

Unfortunately, there are major obstacles to charter school growth. When KIPP KC needed to buy its building, it had to raise the $2.3 million privately. When Crossroads Academy sought to use the historic Attucks School in the Jazz District for a high school, the city instead sold the building to the Zhou Brothers to be opened as an art center. The district also has resisted efforts to reopen Southwest High School as charter or innovation school. 

In a recent article, the editorial board of the Kansas City Star correctly pointed out that performance varies among charter schools—some scoring 100 percent and some less than 50 percent on the Annual Performance Report. What they fail to mention, however, is that charter schools shut down when they fail. The latest example is Benjamin Banneker Charter Academy, which will close unless it can find another sponsor. Closing unsuccessful schools is a strength of the charter school model, not a weakness.

Moreover, the variation in scores seen between individual charter schools is also seen in traditional public schools. Looking at 2016 scores, school performance ranges from 100 percent (at Lincoln College Prep, James Elementary, and Pitcher Elementary), to below 40 percent (at Longfellow, Benjamin Banneker, and Satchel Paige Elementary schools).

Charter schools are held accountable in two ways that traditional public schools are not: by their sponsors no longer authorizing them because of poor performance, and by unsatisfied parents choosing to leave. When the Kansas City School District closes schools, most of the time it is for low enrollment numbers, not performance. Many families have left the district, but many others who cannot afford to move are left behind. Should they be forced to keep their kids in failing schools? 

If we are serious about making the needs of students our top priority, the answer should be no. We should not expect kids to sit tight in their desks—all while losing valuable days of learning—as their districts make modest, if any, gains each year. Far too many students in Kansas City have no other option than their failing neighborhood schools; they deserve the opportunities new charter schools can offer.

A version of this op-ed appeared in the Kansas City Star.

The post Charter Schools’ Accountability Is Their Strength appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When you have always come to expect something done one way, it can completely rock your world when you see someone doing it differently. That was the case when I visited KIPP Delta, a charter school in southeast Arkansas, midway through my doctoral program. I spoke with a staff member who told me about their mission to get students to, and through, college. The school was using business software to manage contacts with graduates and ensure that each student would have a KIPP staff member following up with them periodically post-graduation. Graduates within a certain distance would even receive a visit from someone from KIPP.

When I heard this, my first thought was, Why hadn’t my school done something like this?

Recently, The 74 reported that just 9 percent of students from the bottom fourth of the income distribution graduate college within 6 years. For a number of charter school networks, however, that figure is significantly higher. Nationwide, 38 percent of all KIPP graduates go on to graduate from college within six years. That’s more than four times the national average!

I’m sure it isn’t just KIPP’s post–high school follow-ups that have led to this dramatic increase in college graduation; KIPP schools also appear to provide their students with a firm K-12 foundation. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working.

Yet, in Missouri we continue to restrict where charter schools can open. Both my experience visiting KIPP Delta and the evidence presented here suggest that we would be wise to remove these unnecessary restrictions. Doing so could help more of our students from low-income families get their college degrees.

For more information, read: “Charter Schools: Do They Work?” by Michael McShane. 

The post Charter Schools Boost College Completion appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

if the legislative body allows charter schools to expand into the Central School District, taxpayers within the community would have no say in whether a charter school is needed and, furthermore, money would be consequently removed from classrooms due to increased overhead and operating costs.

So how likely is it that charter schools will start appearing in communities whose residents see no need for them? Not very. Charter operators seek to open schools in areas where there is a clear demand, to ensure that the schools have enough students to enroll.

In my recent paper on charter school expansion, I referenced a survey of high-performing, national charter management organizations which examined their approaches to expanding into a new area. The report containing the survey explains:

These CMOs [charter management organizations] learned that networks must deeply and meaningfully engage a new community to understand its needs and concerns, build partnerships from the ground up, and be prepared to repeatedly explain the work of the organization. This often requires a long window of time to build relationships and establish credibility. Otherwise, many communities view national operators as outsiders and a threat to the local education ecosystems.

Even if HB 634 passes, charter schools are unlikely to appear in districts like Central, Columbia, and Hickman Mills before charter operators gauge the interest in those communities.

Those who are satisfied with their public school and district should not worry about a charter school “invading” their community. But neither should they assume that because they are satisfied with their public school, charter schools are unwanted or not needed elsewhere in the state. Far too many kids in Missouri are stuck in failing schools and deserve the opportunities new charter schools can offer.  

For more information:

“Student Selection, Attrition, and Replacement in KIPP Middle Schools.” Available here.

“Is there Empirical Evidence Consistent with the Claim that Charter Schools ‘Push Out’ Low-Performing Students?” Available here.

“Charter School Funding: Missouri.” Available here.

“A Closer Look at the Charter School Movement: Charter Schools, Students, and Management Organizations, 2015-2016.” Available here.

The post No, Charter Schools Won’t Take Over Your School District appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

From the report:

• In Math, after 3 years in the school, students have learned 1.35 years more material than their peers, moving on average from the 36th percentile to the 58th percentile in achievement.  Those gains represent 57 percent of the gap between white and black students in Kansas City.
• In reading, after 3 years in the school, students have learned 1.29 years more material than their peers, moving on average from the 39th percentile to the 55th percentile in achievement.  Those gains represent 45 percent of the gap between white and black students in Kansas City.
• The results for the Kauffman school are better than the average results for the much-vaunted Boston and New York City charter schools as well as the successful KIPP charter school network.

This is great news, and it’s not like the school is cherry-picking some privileged subset of kids.  Eighty-six percent of the students at the school qualify for free or reduced lunch (compared to a KCPS average of 92%). Seventy-nine percent of the students are black (compared to 59 percent in KCPS). Twenty percent had even been suspended at least once by 4^th grade (compared to 17 percent in KCPS). 

The Kauffman school puts to lie the notion that the black kids of Kansas City cannot learn. They can. What we need to do is work to create more schools like Kauffman, and allow charter schools like Kauffman the freedom to operate outside of the narrow KCPS district boundaries to give our children and their families more and better options city-wide.

The post The Kids Are Alright appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

IFF, a nonprofit community development financial institution based out of Chicago, released its latest widget last week. The widget is an interactive map, which allows St. Louisans to directly manipulate variable layers like educational attainment, non-English speakers, poverty, and age. The most stunning layer is zip code rank.

The zip code rank layer shows which St. Louis City zip codes have the most need for quality schools—the lighter the gray, the higher the need. Need is based on what IFF calls the service gap, or the difference between supply (capacity of districts designated as “Accredited” or “Accredited with Distinction”) and demand (students enrolled in district and charter schools). IFF found that St. Louis needs 18, 987 more seats in accredited schools to serve all of its K-12 students. IFF also found that 63 percent of the service gap was concentrated in six neighborhoods. With support from Mayor Francis Slay and St. Louis Public Schools superintendent Kelvin Adams, the institution made a few recommendations, including: Encourage district partnerships with charter schools like KIPP.

This is a recommendation we support. Research points to the effectiveness of quality charter schools in urban areas, but simply saying “we need quality charter schools” isn’t enough.  The next step is to identify what a “quality charter school” is.  Harvard economist Roland Fryer points to five qualities: frequent teacher feedback, data driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and relentless focus on academic achievement.  Schools like KIPP echo Fryer’s findings (KIPP teachers work Monday through Friday from 7:10 am to 5:00 pm and every other Saturday).

Studies like Fryer’s and real world examples like KIPP serve as a road map for building quality charter schools, but the path to quality education starts with parents.  Parents need the right tools to make the best choices for their children, and IFF’s interactive map is one of those tools.

The post IFF Provides Map for “Quality” Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Simply putting a SAB in charge is not a long-term solution. Failing schools are a result of systemic problems in the public school system. If new management does not change the fundamental structure, then districts are likely to lapse into their old ways once local boards regain control. In that case, SB 125 effectively shifts unnecessary power to the state, which could be bad news.

However, when a SAB takes over a district, it has the opportunity to make systemic changes. For example, the SAB in Saint Louis recently chose to diversify its portfolio of schools by forming a partnership with KIPP. Decisions like these that promote school choice are forward-thinking, lasting solutions. If the state uses its new authority to expand school choice, then SB 125 is good news.

Though there is hope that SB 125 could lead to better options for students, it overlooks an important issue. Too much time is spent focusing on district accreditation, when the spotlight ought to be on the individual school. More on this in my next post.

The post Part 1: Expanding School Choice Is A Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Previously, KIPP and SLPS operated as separate districts, or Local Education Agencies (LEA), with separate funding, buildings, and evaluations. Under the new partnership, KIPP will get access to vacant SLPS buildings; in exchange, KIPP’s student achievement results will be counted as part of SLPS’s as if they are one district. Unfortunately, Missouri does not evaluate public schools individually; evaluations are conducted by district. Therefore, KIPP’s high achievement scores will likely inflate SLPS’s evaluation and buoy underperforming public schools. Nevertheless, the new partnership between SLPS and KIPP should be applauded because it marks a step forward in how Saint Louis operates its school system.

In the book The Urban School System of the Future: Applying the Principles and Lessons of Chartering, Andy Smarick writes:

The world increasingly, and accurately, thinks of a city’s K-12 education system as a collection of diverse schools, not a single, dominant administrative unit. This is the reason why the term “portfolio of schools” has become a staple of the education lexicon. It is also the reason why more and more leaders are drawing a distinction between a “school system” and a “system of schools.”

The portfolio model acknowledges that there is no one-best way to educate kids. The new partnership between KIPP and SLPS recognizes that charter schools and traditional public schools can cooperatively co-exist. When they do, everyone wins. I hope this new relationship between the district and charter schools will be the first of many. By adding quality charter operators to its portfolio of schools, Saint Louis can redesign its educational landscape and continue to improve the “system of schools.”

The post Saint Louis Public School District Adds Blue Chip To Portfolio appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Mathematica, a leading education research firm, recently released an impressive evaluation of KIPP middle schools (the Missouri schools were not included in this study). Using a rigorous gold-standard research design, the researchers explored the impact of KIPP schools on student achievement.

What they found was not surprising to me: “KIPP middle schools have positive and statistically significant impacts on student achievement across all four academic subjects examined . . .”

I have written fairly extensively about KIPP schools on the Show-Me Daily blog, in Phi Delta Kappan, and in two pieces that are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals (Social Science Quarterly and The Rural Educator).

KIPP’s success is often chalked up to hard work. While that is certainly a large part of it, I believe there is a bit more that we can learn from KIPP schools. In the Phi Delta Kappan piece, which I penned with Bob Maranto, we wrote:

What distinguishes KIPP is not just hard work, but thoughtful work linking the daily processes of schooling to the goals of schooling, in this case, success in college. Day-to-day tactics reflect broader themes: having a clear mission and hiring staff who support the mission, building student culture to sup­port the mission, ensuring consistency, building rela­tionships, empowering principals to lead, and using frequent measurement of success to motivate teach­ers and students.

Not all schools will share the same mission as KIPP or be just like KIPP, nor should they; but every school leader can learn from KIPP and apply these lessons to their schools.

The post Lessons From KIPP Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Public education is an idea. It is the idea that all kids, whether wealthy or poor, deserve to have access to an educational system that will equip them for life; a system that will enable them to achieve to the highest levels. Yet for some reason, we have come to equate the idea of public education with the standard system of delivering public education, traditional school districts.

Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure of attending a breakfast event at KIPP Inspire Academy. The featured speaker was Mike Feinberg, one of the founders of the original KIPP school in Houston (see him here on Oprah). Feinberg pointed out that the traditional method, where we draw attendance zones around schools and assign students to those schools, is not “god’s gift to public education.” We have not miraculously found the very best way of delivering public education. Traditional school districts are only one method of delivering education to students and that method leaves families with very few options.

All schools, whether public, charter, homeschools, or private can be part of the idea of public education. Because all schools that educate students are contributing to the public good.

Some people want to pit school choice against “public education.” The truth of the matter is that school choice is liberating public education. School choice is about giving the public more say in where their kids go to school. It is about making schools accountable to families, not the government. After all, the idea of a high-quality public education should not be limited to attendance zones.

The post What Is Public Education? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Below I display a graph of KIA student achievement in math and communication arts. Please note, the graph has two separate figures for each subject, cohort and overall. The overall figure contains all students tested in a specific subject. The cohort figure follows one group of students as they progress through the grades. Thus it contains students in fifth grade in 2010, sixth in 2011, and seventh in 2012. I display the cohort figure because Kelly and others involved with KIPP believe students continue to grow the longer they stay with KIPP.

As it turns out, the cohort of KIA students have shown impressive growth in both math and communication arts for the past two years. As always, one must be concerned about selective attrition, where lower performing students leave the school at faster rates. Without having examined the attrition rates, I could not address that directly. Nevertheless, the test score results are improving not only for the cohort of students, but for all students.

It seems safe to say, at least from this snapshot, that KIA has a positive impact on student achievement. I hope to see these numbers grow even more in the coming year.

The post KIPP Inspire Academy: Steady Improvement in Student Achievement appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Francis de Sales, where KIPP Inspire Academy is located.

Photo Credit: (CC) Phillip B. Roussin

At the corner of Lynch Street and Ohio Avenue in South Saint Louis stands one of the city’s most beautiful buildings, St. Francis de Sales Oratory. Walk just past the church’s exquisite edifices and I believe you will see something just as wonderful: students learning.

In the adjacent building, students of KIPP Inspire Academy are working hard to “climb the mountain to college.” The school, part of the national network of public charter schools known as Knowledge Is Power Program, opened in 2009 and is now in its fourth year. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting KIPP Inspire Academy. The school’s executive director, Kelly Garrett, took me on a tour of the renovated facilities, pointing out upgrades that KIPP has made and introducing me to faculty. We popped into several classrooms and saw students and teachers hard at work. As is characteristic of KIPP schools, classrooms were well-managed and full of learning.

After our tour, I had a chance to sit down with Mr. Garrett. He had been pouring over recently released achievement data from the state. I have yet to examine these data myself, but he showed me numerous graphs he had made and noted on several measures that the students of KIPP Inspire were outperforming state averages. Though, he always paused and reminded me of the long road ahead and how the school must continue to improve. That constant desire to evaluate, celebrate success, and continually improve is also a hallmark of every KIPP school I have visited.

Today, KIPP Inspire serves students in fifth through eighth grades and is the only school from the nationally renowned KIPP network in the Saint Louis area, but that may change because Garrett has plans to expand. The biggest obstacle to growth, as he sees it, is finding talented individuals to staff the classrooms. Hopefully, the success of KIPP Inspire will inspire more individuals to take up the mantle of education and will increase the pool of talented teachers in Missouri.

The post KIPP Inspire Is Truly Inspirational appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The National Center on Time and Learning reports that more than 170 schools around the country have extended their school year to more than 190 days, including at least two schools in Missouri. Both schools in Missouri and the majority of schools across the country that are opting for longer days or longer years are charter schools. For example, the renowned national charter network Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) lists “more time” as one of their strategies for delivering a high-quality education to their students. Students at KIPP Inspire Academy in Saint Louis attend school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every other Saturday. Additionally, students are required to attend summer school. Having visited several KIPP schools, I commend their efforts to improve education outcomes for disadvantaged students. Nonetheless, I do not believe their strategy should be mandated everywhere.

As Hess notes, many families are able to provide enriching activities for their children in the summer, like vacations and summer camps. For these families, summer school may stifle their learning. On the other hand, some students may benefit from the additional learning time. Too often, researchers and policymakers develop a “we know best” mentality. When they believe a program or solution will benefit individuals, they attempt to mandate that strategy for everyone. In reality, people are different and need different solutions.

When we mandate solutions, we stifle innovation. Rather than dictate how, when, and where students must attend school, we should give families the ability to choose the school that best meets their needs.

The post Extending The School Year: Good Strategy, Bad Public Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I am optimistic about the future of K–12 education, because certain schools and education innovators have proven that what researchers and education administrators thought was impossible is, in fact, not.

For example, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools have been especially effective in reducing, if not eliminating, the achievement gap:

Students in at least half the KIPP schools Mathematica studied gained the equivalent of 1.2 years in mathematics and 0.9 years in reading three years after enrolling. The results effectively cut the racial achievement gap in half.

Another example of what is possible are the incredible gains made in Harlem, N.Y., by educational advocate Geoffrey Canada. He chose to attempt to “change the odds” of low income children in central Harlem — an area the New York Times reported had a poverty rate of more than 60 percent, and where three quarters of students were scoring below grade level on state aptitude tests. Today, we know Canada’s education nonprofit as the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ).

HCZ reports that 90 percent of its high school seniors were accepted into college this past year, and that those students received more than $6 million in scholarships and grants. HCZ also reports that of the four-year-olds that entered one of its programs, nearly one in five were initially achieving educational scores so low that they were classified as “delayed.” By the end of one year in the HCZ program, none of those students were delayed, and the percentage of students in that class that were classified as “advanced” had doubled, to more than 40 percent.

Canada was featured extensively in Waiting for “Superman.” Besides showing the struggles of students, the documentary’s broader message is about the big failures of traditional public education — including rapidly increasing education costs with no change in student academic achievement, the extreme difficulty of firing an incompetent teacher, and the seemingly endless bureaucracy that impedes educational innovation. The documentary’s strength is that it juxtaposes the flat-lining of student academic achievement in traditional public schools with what education innovators, like Canada, have been able to accomplish.

After watching the movie, the panelists took questions from audience members. About halfway through, Chris Guinther, the president of the Missouri National Education Association (the state’s largest teacher union), stood up to rail against the movie. I could write a series of blog posts responding to the statements she made — but space is limited, and you, reader, can only take so much.

I was most disturbed by Guinther’s objection to Canada’s success, because he had, according to her, made money by running the school. Now, after some brief research, I can’t find any indication that Canada has made outsized profits from HCZ, especially because the organization is a nonprofit. However, for the sake of argument, I’ll grant Guinther’s claim that the man who turned around student achievement in one of the most dangerous places in Harlem made a lot of money doing so.

I would be ecstatic if Canada were one of the most wealthy people in the United States. He has unarguably helped some of this country’s neediest children — in an area with extremely high foster care rates — gain an appreciation and mastery of education. I am more excited about Canada potentially reaping financial rewards for his risk taking and success than I am for almost anyone else. Why would money invalidate the success of the HCZ program? If the only criticism of Canada and his work encouraging low-performing Harlem children to succeed academically is that he might be making more than the average teacher, then that’s really no criticism at all.

In fact, I wish there were more potential for great rewards for people who work hard and take risks to vastly improve K–12 education. That might encourage more people to work to solve some of the shortcomings we are seeing in U.S. schools.

The real scandal is that, although educational innovators can make great strides and perhaps be begrudged for their relative financial success, teachers who fail their students can be nearly impossible to fire. For example, New York City’s school system has managed to fire only three teachers during the past two years. Or, as Waiting for “Superman” director David Guggenheim illustrated, in Illinois, only one in every 2,500 teachers lose their credentials, while the disbarment rate for Illinois lawyers is roughly one out of 100. Florida has difficulties firing bad teachers, too. Missouri, at least, appears to have a slightly higher rate — about 2 percent.

The post I Would Be Thrilled if Geoffrey Canada Were the Richest Man in the United States appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

First, they’re good, solid — indeed very ambitious — academic standards for primary and secondary schooling, at least in the two essential subjects of English and math. Students who attained them would be better off — readier for college, readier to get good jobs, readier to compete in the global economy — than most are today.

Students might be better prepared if they attained these standards, but it’s not clear that adopting the standards would achieve that result. Adopting standards on paper doesn’t, by itself, bring students up to a high academic level. In fact, the more ambitious the standards are, the less likely it is that U.S. students could meet them unless more significant changes were made to the public school system.

Second, they respect basic skills, mathematical computation, the conventions of the English language, good literature, and America’s founding documents.

This is faint praise. It would be pretty pathetic if the standards made fun of America’s founding documents. Nor is this a reason for states to agree to the standards. Anyone can have respect for basic skills and literature without uniform standards.

Third, they emerged not from the federal government but from a voluntary coming together of (most) states, and the states’ decision whether or not to adopt them will remain voluntary. Each state will determine whether the new standards represent an improvement over what it’s now using.

If states fail to adopt the standards, they lose their chance to receive some kinds of federal funding. The federal government approves of these standards and is using its power to get states to agree to them. That’s enough evidence that the federal government is imposing the standards on states. Where the standards originally “emerged” from is irrelevant.

Fourth, they do not represent a national curriculum — though to gain traction they’ll need to be joined by solid curricula, effective instruction, and quality testing.

In other words, if states adopt the standards, a national curriculum is sure to follow. For what would be the point of standards that don’t “gain traction”?

Fifth, one little-noted benefit of properly implemented common standards is a better-functioning education marketplace, in which parents will be able to make choices about schools on the basis of more accurate information about how school A’s performance compares with that of school B — not just within communities and states but also when considering a move from state to state. Entrepreneurial school operators (such as KIPP and Edison) will also be better able to gauge and manage school performance in locations across the land.

Give me a break. It’s the old “standards will help the charter schools” argument. I don’t know how standards alone could give people more information about their limited educational choices — unless states also agreed to tests that match the standards, and then published the scores. Sounds like No Child Left Behind all over again.

The post Chester E. Finn Jr. on the Common Core Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Here are a few of the criticisms of charters that come up time and again, each followed by my answers:

Charter school students’ gains are a result of their intrinsic motivation, not superior schools.

I don’t want to dismiss hard work on the part of students; obviously, learning can’t be forced on anyone and the children should rightly take credit for their own accomplishments. However, we observe that some schools allow children to succeed through hard work and others do not.

This is from an article about KIPP:

Typically students are two or three grade levels behind when they enroll at KIPP as fifth graders. A KIPP study shows that the average fifth-grade student beginning in KIPP scores in the 40th percentile in math and the 32nd percentile in reading based on norm-referenced exams, which compare a student’s performance to their peers nationally. After four years in KIPP, the youngsters tend to score in the 82nd percentile in math and 60th percentile in reading.

If KIPP’s success could be attributed solely to motivation, why were those extremely motivated students so far behind to begin with? The motivation was probably there in fourth grade as well as in fifth grade, right? So the traditional public schools could have taken that motivation and run with it, before these students ever set foot in KIPP. And not every city has KIPP schools, so we should see large groups of traditional district students making sudden, large gains during middle school in the cities where KIPP can’t siphon off the motivated children. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen.

You don’t have to take my word for it — researchers like Roland Fryer and Caroline Hoxby take the motivation problem into account. When they look at student achievement, they compare students who attend charters with other students who entered charter lotteries, but who randomly were assigned to traditional public schools. Their studies find that students who attend charters do better than students who were equally motivated to apply to charters. The only difference between the two groups is that some had the luck of the draw.

It is possible that attending a school your family chose increases your motivation over time. Maybe at the beginning of the study, the charter school kids are no more motivated than their counterparts who lost the lottery. But after a few years in a charter school, they feel a sense of ownership about their schools. They could always choose to go back to their assigned district, so there’s no attitude of “I have to be here, but I don’t have to like it.” Instead, students may think, “My family made this choice, and now it’s up to me to follow through and do my part.” If it turned out that charter school students actually have extra motivation stemming from this reason, that’s an argument in favor of more charters and choice.

Charter schools can be super-selective and set strict rules, while traditional public schools have a disadvantage in that they must accept all comers.

Charter schools are public schools, and they don’t do anything that public schools can’t do. Remember the Clyde C. Miller Career Academy? I wrote a post about how wonderful this “charter” school is, only to find out it’s a district school. If the Career Academy can make students write essays and do interviews before they’re admitted, other district schools could do that too.

Traditional districts like SLPS have the talented people they need to succeed, but political forces just don’t allow them to realize their potential.

I agree completely. As competition with the charters heats up, we’re going to see more district schools like the Career Academy that are just as good as charters. SLPS has the necessary raw materials; choice is the catalyst. The district should view charter schools as its partners in battling political inertia — they’re not enemies.

The post Answers to Charter School Criticism appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I think he’ll learn that the only way to compete with KIPP is to beat it at its own game. Parents are impressed by KIPP education, not by promotional materials. The pictures in the article show the KIPP principal advertising the school by just walking around with a signup sheet and talking to people — hardly cutting-edge marketing. (I know, KIPP puts out advertisements, too, but its work canvassing neighborhoods is what really gets parents involved.)

The fact that advertisements alone won’t work doesn’t mean the district’s hands are tied. There’s nothing to prevent SLPS from starting its own KIPP-style school, accepting fourth graders. It could offer long hours, accelerated academics, and Spanish classes— like this KIPP elementary school in Houston. If families like it, they can stay on for fifth grade — no need to switch to the “real” KIPP middle school.

SLPS actually has an advantage over brand-name charters — it accepts students at all grade levels. The charter school startups are limiting enrollment to a few grades: KIPP is only taking fifth graders, and the language immersion schools are accepting kindergartners and first graders. SLPS just has to open comparably themed choice schools for a wider range of student ages, and the charters will be left scrambling to catch up.

I know SLPS can do it — I was so impressed by its Career Academy that I unquestioningly believed a report that it was a charter. District schools that look and act like charters won’t have trouble competing, because no one will be able to tell the difference.

The post How to Compete With Charters appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The first year went well. They doubled the number of students passing the state tests. But they were denied permission to expand the program at Garcia.

KIPP is now one of the most successful charters out there, and it’s coming to St. Louis this year.

If this doesn’t make people reconsider teachers’ good ideas that don’t have research (yet) behind them, I don’t know what will.

The post Knowledge Is Power appeared first on Show-Me Institute.