Newsweek recommends that Obama do a little teacher-bashing to win fans

July 13, 6:58 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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I guess Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter hasn’t been clinging to my every word, judging from the teacher-bashing column he wrote in this week’s Newsweek.

The column is headlined “Obama’s No-Brainer on Education/Moderates would respond to a Democrat willing to slip the ideological stranglehold of a liberal interest group.” By “liberal interest group,” Alter means those foul fiends teachers (K-12 public school teachers, of course), and the evil unions that represent them.

First of all, Mr. Obama, please don’t listen to Alter. Please don’t bash and blame teachers, whether to woo moderates or for any other reason.

A few weeks ago I posted here:

The unrealistic but pervasive notion that teachers can fix all the ills of society – and should be blamed and punished if they don’t – tosses a huge obstacle in front of efforts to genuinely improve public education. Often that idea is promoted by folks who spend no time in diverse classrooms or around high-need children.

Meanwhile, Alter got one fact so wildly wrong in the column that we readers should wonder how he feels about performance-based pay for journalists, of the type he advocates for teachers.

Alter praised the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools, a San Francisco-based, nationwide chain of charter schools. My view is that KIPP achieves success with a select subset of low-income students – probably akin to what any school could do with that same select subset and the massive extra funding KIPP gets – while more-starry-eyed observers are less nuanced, merely hailing KIPP as a miracle run by saints.

Alter, one of the starry-eyed, enthuses that “more than 80 percent of (KIPP’s) 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college…” That would be 12,800. But actually, according to KIPP itself, the number of its alumni who have gone on to college so far totals 447 (four hundred forty-seven).

The explanation: KIPP runs schools that are grades 5-8, and most of its schools are fairly new. Only two KIPP schools have been around long enough to have alumni who have progressed through high school and on to college. KIPP has grown rapidly in recent years, and now runs 65 schools serving around 16,000 students – but of course its alumni have to get through high school before they reach college.

Here’s how KIPP staffer Debbie Fine explained the college matriculation figure in a memo that found its way to me:

“We have been tracking KIPP middle school alumni (i.e. KIPP students that completed the 8th grade at KIPP) since the fifth grade class that entered KIPP in 1995. Since that time, 546 students have completed the eighth grade at KIPP, and 447 of those students have matriculated to college for an average college matriculation rate over five years of roughly 81
percent.

“This number only includes students who attended the original two KIPP schools in Houston and New York since those are the only KIPP schools that have been in operation long enough to have kids progress from eighth grade to college freshmen. Kids from the next generation of KIPP schools that opened this decade will not matriculate to college until 2009.”

Also, it's not truly fair or accurate to call KIPP students "randomly selected,” though they are presumably randomly selected from among those who pursue the application process all the way through. The KIPP application process, as has been extensively discussed, aggressively self-selects for motivated, high-functioning and compliant students from motivated, high-functioning and compliant families. So the implication that KIPP students are a random cross-section of low-income students is wildly off the mark.

As part of Alter’s teacher-bashing theme (at least bashing of public-school teachers), he writes that “KIPP isn’t fully replicable (not enough effective teachers to go around)…”

Yet I’ve been following KIPP for several years, and even KIPP doesn’t try to claim that its teachers are superior to teachers in traditional public schools. Alter isn’t the first befuddled journalist to leap to the assumption that some kind of magically superior teachers are KIPP’s secret, but there’s no evidence or even PR claiming that he’s right.  (And leaping to assumptions isn’t such great journalism, either.)

The actual reason KIPP isn’t fully replicable is that it isn’t going to work with the unmotivated, low-functioning, disengaged and oppositional students from unmotivated, low-functioning, disengaged and oppositional families who are the true challenge to public education. Education researcher Richard Rothstein writes: “If schools can select (or attract) a disproportionate share of lower-class students whose performance is above average for their social class, those schools can appear to be quite successful. … But their successes provide no evidence that their instructional approaches would close the achievement gap for students who are average for their social class groups.” (From Rothstein’s book “Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.”)

It could be that Alter doesn’t agree with that viewpoint, but it’s far more likely that he doesn’t know it exists. His column breathes no hint that he does.

“We know what works to close the achievement gap,” Alter declares confidently. “Every low-income school should be measured by how close it gets to (KIPP’s) model, where kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and part of the summer, and teachers are held strictly accountable for showing student achievement.”

Well, running a school for longer hours and days costs a lot of extra bucks (and KIPP has lots more of those than traditional public schools). So Alter wants to judge schools based a standard they can only meet if they get extra funding. And again, I follow KIPP fairly closely, and I haven’t seen that KIPP attributes its successes to a notably high degree of teacher accountability. Alter’s cocksure comment isn’t based in reality.

Alter concludes with a series of recommendations for Obama, all of which stick with the blame-the-teachers theme.

I suspect that anyone more familiar with the inside of a diverse urban classroom than Jonathan Alter is (it’s evident that such a setting is as familiar to him as the surface of Mars) would have the same reaction I did: Send that man to teach in an overwhelmed inner-city school for a few months, and then let’s see how he feels about blaming and bashing teachers for the challenges such schools face.