Kindergarten For Some

Yet another way charter schools work to manage their student load in ways actual public schools cannot: enforcing their own Kindergarten entry cut-off dates.  Private schools do this too, officially or unofficially.  I've been told that some local public schools strongly encourage their own cut-off dates to some parents, but even if that's true it's not something they can enforce.

That said, I'm still leery of the new Kindergarten entry cut-off points - especially as TK disappears, I don't see any evidence that the earlier cut-off will lead to more socially and academically ready students.  I think they'll be bigger, but another year with nothing than more aging is not a panacea to Kindergarten readiness.

Disrupting the System

I was reading this Tim Wise essay and thinking about the endless conflict between reform from the inside and pressure to reform from the outside.

There are all kinds of things about public education that aren't good, although they're not really the ones that education reformers are worried about.  It's a system set up by the dominant culture to serve itself; while it may not actively conspire against the oppressed, it is at best apathetic towards them.  Education assumes many white norms; we assess for things that aren't necessarily that important (and are sometimes contrary to civic wellness) in ways that prioritize and prize certain ways of learning and doing over others.

I know people who are involved with charter schools because they believe the system cannot be repaired; if all children are going to be educated, it will have to happen from outside pressures.  It's a radical view, I suppose.

Of course, on the ground it's remarkably less radical.  High STAR test scores don't correlate with healthy societies or even high-needs children going to college and getting white-collar jobs.  Nor is it really outside: few charter schools are upending the system to teach different material in different ways.  Moreover, it's a scorched-earth policy.  For those children who are in the public schools, the charters that may someday make everything better are currently making everything worse.  Charters conspire with the corrupt and oppressive systems in public education to make the situation worse for most.  Even if their goal is to eventually succeed with every child and to create a anti-racist education, a lot of learners will be sacrificed before that happens.  And those learners will not be knowingly, willingly sacrificed: education battles are in the end fought not only about our children, but on and by our children.

Generally I believe that reform from the inside is unsuccessful, and if I push myself I have to admit it's probably unsuccessful here, too.  Some of the things that make my classroom a good place for the children in it support a system that prevents systemic change.  For instance, at this point my classroom is almost entirely stocked by the goodwill and private dollars of strangers.  The materials available are good for my students; the acceptance that public financing is secondary isn't.

In some ways, teaching Kindergarten makes it easier to remove oneself from the system.  I don't give a standardized test.  Kindergarten isn't even a legal requirement for children in California; while there are standards I must teach, I have remarkable leeway in how I choose to do it.  And showing up to work each day and doing my job means that I can't look at my class and think about PreK to prison pipelines very much; hopelessness is real and not productive when you're in the thick of it.

So sometimes I feel like the battles we're having about education - about how to teach reading, about funding, about teachers and their unions, etc. - are sugarcoating helping us avoid the real argument about what school is and what we want it to be.

But I'm pretty sure that the outside pressure of charter schools aren't going to make that conversation happen.

Ahem.

I know people involved with the Rocketship schools, and I don't doubt their good intentions.

I doubt their understanding of children.

Any schooling that requires a nine-hour day - which Rocketship does - will be successful on standardized testing.  I have no idea why this is a question, really.  Anything that gets drilled enough will get memorized and regurgitated at the appropriate time and location.

I just don't consider that learning.  I don't consider it child-centric, or a good test of whether technology in the classroom works or if teachers should just work twelve hour days by contract.

If your goal is high test scores, it's a working model.  If your goal is high-achieving students who write well, are confident, read with ease and discuss it with depth, it's not.

Neither is our current public education system, really - not because it's not a long enough day or technologically advanced enough, but because it is not intended to be so (and is certainly not funded to be so).

Ultimately, I think it comes down to the fact that too many of the people running charter schools don't think much of their fellow man, especially the poor, and aren't really interested in an active, informed citizenry.

“I can study Vygotsky later,” said Tayo Adeeko, a 24-year-old third-grade teacher at Empower Charter School in Crown Heights. She was referring to another education school staple — Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet theorist of cognitive development who died in 1934. “Right now,” she added, “my kids need to learn how to read.”

Sure she can.  The problem is that while those kids may learn to read, they will be pulled, pushed and prodded into shapes not meant for young children.

Charter schools like KIPP spend a lot of time taking the child out of childhood.  Silent halls, enforced eye contact, upright posture and lots of drills - all done in uniform - may make for an excellent test-taker.  The student may be able to parrot back any number of reading strategies.  The child will have limited ability to get along with peers in unstructured environments, intuit rules for social conduct in new situations, and play imaginatively.

The problem with not studying Vygotsky is that the merry KIPPsters and their ilk don't understand childhood.  They see deficient, not different communities.  They see disorder, not youth.  And they have no business teaching kids to read until they've been taught what a kid is.

I'm not a fan of charter schooling in general, but as it enters more elementary and ECE environments the more nervous I get.  It's too easy to forget that children aren't little adults.  Even the most experienced Kindergarten teacher is going to need to remind him or herself of this over the year, because the teacher is an adult and operates within an adult world.  The child's world is different.

And the current approach to education is destroying it entirely.

ETA: Just because Vygotsky was a "Soviet...who died in 1934" does not mean his work is invalidated.  Also dead: Maria Montessori, Loris Malaguzzi (Reggio Emelia), John Dewey, Marie Clay and Jean Piaget.  They all had something important and true to say about children.


Similarly, I believe that those tired, dead old guys like Euclid, Plato, Einstein, Darwin, etc. are still considered relevant to their fields.

Cherry Picking and Legality.

Whenever one gets to the brass tacks of charter school enrollment and retention, charter advocates immediately point out that charter schools are blocked from outright selection of a student group through admissions: no testing, etc.  So those concerned with charter schools enrollment have to explain other, legal methods of restricting the student population.

The fact that charter schools have been gaming the system for years generally doesn't come up.  But now that even the New York City Public Schools - who've never seen a charter they don't like - are having to discipline their charters for illegal conduct in enrollment.

I don't think you can put this down to CHOICE.

In other news, I went to school yesterday and had my first how-will-this-ever-look-like-a-classroom freakout.  I decided to stick with two cubbies rather than cleaning out a closet that has cubby hooks and fixed the pegboard on the workbench.  Then I grabbed everything I had laminated and went home to cut it.

Why Selection Matters

I've been reading a lot of material online about charter schools and selection.  Some points should be unquestionable at this point:

• Charter schools use a variety of methods to self-select incoming students;
• Charter schools generally have free, far-reaching expulsion policies;
• Charter school attrition is more severe and more lasting than public school attrition;
• Charter schools enroll a student group not like surrounding regular public schools.

Given this, the focus of articles is generally on exposing the lie: in the end, KIPP and its ilk probably aren't that exciting.  (Full disclosure: given the low-quality, test-first KIPP pedagogy and their long hours, their test scores don't surprise me.  I find it interesting that their actual rollout is so poor they can't "transform" SIGgy schools.  I have to assume this is due to their extraordinarily low teacher retention.)

What you don't see is attention paid to the schools that take everyone else: the regular public schools.  I teach at one of those schools.  And the charter school enrollment problem negatively impacts us.  It isn't okay to say that the charter schools are helping a self-selecting bunch of kids, because they are actively making good education harder for everyone else:

• Those kids expelled go somewhere, like my school.  Not only do they bring whatever challenges their charter chose not to deal with, they have suffered real emotional harm from the expulsion experience.  I don't care how tough that eleven year old looks: it's still an ELEVEN year old child who's just been told that he or she is not good enough to stay.
• Cherry-picking high performing students with motivated parents means the students left behind are a more concentrated bunch of high-needs children.  Our class loads become more challenging because there are more high-needs students.
• Those very high-needs students tend not to test well, and there are lots and lots of sticks associated with bad test results.
• Nor do we receive more money, in general, because we now have a more difficult student population.  Even the Weighted Student Formula SFUSD uses doesn't have metrics that cope well with this.

What I'm saying is that what KIPP does harms the schools around it.  This isn't even "for the greater good", it's "for the good of a very few with lots of hot press...at the expense of everyone else."