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To Jasmin Johnson,

Your tribute to KIPP is very meaningful. Hurray for teachers and a school culture who change their student’s lives emotionally as well as academically. Much of what is done at KIPP can be incorporated into all schools. I wish you the best. We need to hear from more of the KIPP students.

I should add that KIPP schools do require incoming students to take a test, to assess the student’s academic level. The question is whether it’s widely believed in the community to be a test that students must pass to be admitted.

I initially started taking a closer look at KIPP schools (as an education advocate/blogger) after a KIPP parent posted proudly on our local school discussion listserve here in San Francisco that his daughter had “tested into” KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy.

And the mom of a child with autism has discussed in the community how she applied to KIPP Bayview Academy for her son, who was required to take what the family believed to be the “entrance test” in a crowded, noisy area. The mom said that setting is particularly difficult for a child with autism, so she objected, and the principal ended up ordering her and the boy off the property. The fact that the mom believed the test to be an “entrance test,” as did the proud KIPP dad mentioned above, is a side issue in the greater story, of course. Just those two anecdotes illustrate my point, though.

Caroline,

What’s your answer to the problems that KIPP tries to tackle?

You seem to be pushing the point that there is a whole set of unmotivated, anti-intellectual, dysfunctional families out there in high-need communities. If I were KIPP, and forced to accept that narrative, I would probably say, “Well, then if those families are leaving our school in droves, then at least we are exposing their social problems.” Because all the commentators, anti-, pro- or indifferent to KIPP, seem to agree that these issues need to be addressed for schools to be successful. Or am I wrong on that point?

According to my reading of your words, Caroline, only Geoff Canada can save us with his soup-to-nuts, pre-natal-to-elderly, round-the-clock social services schools.

Thanks for your comment. You have made your point clearly and I think it’s a good one!

Thanks for the link to Elijah, I will check him out. I noticed on your blog that all of the charter school posts since May 2008 are about KIPP. Not every charter school is a KIPP school – and some go out of the way to attract kids who are troubled.

I am not affiliated with Opportunity Charter School in Harlem in any way, but this is a school that practically trolls the streets looking for middle school and high school dropouts to enroll. They have abysmal test scores but an inspiring mission. This is an extreme example, but there are countless charter schools taking a proactive approach and a student population that is truly exemplar of, or even more disadvantaged than, the surrounding community.

Here’s another anecdote: in Harlem in particular, where there are now 23 charter schools, some parents sign up for charter schools without even knowing that it’s anything different than a regular public school! You can learn a lot about a charter school’s approach to the issue you point out by looking at its application–how many pages? Available in other languages? Small print? How much information is requested? Is special education info requested (this is probably illegal but may very well be practiced)?

I support the charter school movement, but a big side of the movement that too often gets ignored is accountability. If charter schools are doing bad things, they are supposed to be brought to light of day and stamped out. And there are mechanisms.

I would love to see someone collect a representative sample of charter school applications, for example, and try to draw conclusions based on my questions and others.

Thanks again for a thought provoking comment.

Thanks for your comments, Jay. I haven’t read the book yet (I think it’s only been out a week or so) and have it on order!

I’m an unpaid volunteer and a working mom, so unfortunately my ability to spend time and effort researching KIPP schools is limited. I did the research that I’ve cited by going over enrollment figures on the California Department of Education website, but I don’t know how to find equivalent figures for other states, and my time for doing this research is limited. As noted, I’ve visited a KIPP school only once, with my then-middle-schooler, in an undercover effort to get into about the entrance criteria.

I would hope that the Mathematica study and the seven other KIPP studies also researched attrition — I know one of them did (after I had already done it), but I’m not sure about the others. If they did, their findings on attrition never got any attention, while mine got quite a bit. It seems pretty lame of the other researchers not to have studied that, if indeed they didn’t.

Two points: Not all KIPP schools have lotteries, as not all of them get more applicants than they have openings. The San Francisco KIPP schools struggle to fill the fifth grade.

But that aside, the second point is that it would be key to compare students who apply to KIPP schools, and their families, to students and families in their communities who do not apply to KIPP schools. THAT would bear out or disprove the question of whether the application process creams for higher-functioning, more-motivated students and families.

Meanwhile, everyone discussing this should read Yale sociology professor Elijah Anderson’s “Code of the Streets.”

Some further response to Jay:

I haven’t checked whether new attrition/retention figures are available (again, being an unpaid working mom — however, the journalists and researchers who ARE paid to do this should be all over it and I shouldn’t have to do it, but I will). Why is it that all those paid researchers studying KIPP entirely failed to notice the attrition issue until I did the research?

Jay did interview me and sent me a draft of the chapter in which he quotes me, and I appreciate it. The reason I was responding to Elizabeth’s comments and not commenting on the book itself is, needless to say, because I haven’t read the book yet.

I also haven’t kept up on the latest studies (same reason; unpaid layperson working mom), except for the SRI study released in Sept. 2008 of Bay Area KIPP schools, which I blogged about here:

Study: Local KIPP schools lose 60% of their students
A new study of the five Bay Area KIPP schools by the respected research firm SRI International confirms what we already knew: KIPP students overall perform well academically, usually outperforming their peers in other schools.

But it also confirms what those who look beyond the test scores have found: Those KIPP (two in San Francisco, one in Oakland, one in San Jose, one in San Leandro) schools suffer from very high student attrition.

Sixty percent of the students who enter the Bay Area KIPP schools in fifth grade leave before the end of eighth grade (page ix of the study, repeated in several places throughout). And the study also confirms what some might suspect — it’s consistently the lower performers who leave:

http://www.sfschools.org/2008/09/study-local-kipp-schools-lose-60-of.html

Again, it’s true that I’ve only been to a KIPP school once and have not interviewed KIPP staff. But again, my research has focused on the attrition figures. It’s not really valid to point out gaps in my research since I’m an unpaid volunteer; my research was done to fill the gaps in the PAID researchers’ work, which are pretty glaring.

Jay, I have spent extensive time in regular schools, as my kids attend diverse urban public schools and I’m a regular volunteer. What I see in San Francisco is that as we are an all-choice district and families either choose a middle school or get assigned to one by default (whatever has openings after the families who chose are placed), the two KIPP schools are viewed as among the middle school options. There are some middle schools that get few requests and wind up with a disproportionate number of the students who were assigned by default — the lower-functioning, less-motivated kids from lower-functioning, less-motivated families. All traditional public middle schools wind up with some of those kids. Those are the families who would not wind up at KIPP schools. So I’m not saying that ALLl motivated families are jumping to KIPP, obviously. But I’m saying that the families who choose KIPP are all motivated, and the unmotivated families do not choose KIPP.

I’m completely ready to accept that the students from those more-motivated families will do better in KIPP schools than they might have in some traditional middle schools, for a number of reasons. (KIPP schools can afford a WHOLE lot more resources for them, which traditional public schools don’t have the funding for, for one thing!)

I don’t know of any schools that are more responsive to requests for info than KIPP. I researched Edison Schools in their heyday, and they refused my requests for info. The press was often kept out of Edison schools too — when I toured our local Edison school as a parent/community member, a Los Angeles Times reporter who had been turned away when she asked to visit came with me as a crasher. I also don’t know of any groups of schools that get as much positive, unquestioning publicity as KIPP. The San Francisco Chronicle’s entertainment editor, for example, has been pushing her staff (entertainment writers and columnists) to promote KIPP schools — I have no idea why that would make sense, but it is the case. The copy desk at the last minute struggled to insert a tiny bit of balance into a gushing entertainment feature on a KIPP spelling bee — written by an entertainment feature writer with no background in education — a friend who works there tells me. You get the picture.

On my one visit to a KIPP school — when I took my daughter to KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy in September 2007 to ask about the application process — the door was locked and there was no response to a bell, by the way. A passing student from the high school that shares the building eventually let us in.

Yes, Kitchen Sink, I’ve addressed this question before. It’s definitely true that schools serving low-income students tend to have high mobility rates. But the difference is a crucial one: When students leave traditional public schools, they are replaced by other students (likely those with similarly high mobility rates, who tend to be the more-challenged students).

When those same students leave KIPP schools — at least the Bay Area KIPP schools that I researched, with SRI confirming my findings) they are NOT REPLACED. That’s why the 8th grades are much, much smaller than the 5th grades. (I mentioned this to a charter school principal who had just visited KIPP SF Bay Academy. He said, “I WONDERED why the 8th grade seemed so much smaller!”)

So, students who are likely to be low-achieving leave traditional public schools, but are replaced by other students who are likely to be low-achieving. Students who are likely to be low-achieving leave KIPP schools, but are not replaced, so the KIPP schools retain only the students who are more likely to be high-achieving. (The SRI study confirmed that the students who leave are more likely to be low achieving.) As you can see, that puts the KIPP schools in an entirely different and far more advantageous situation when they’re compared to traditional public schools.

Seth, I can only speak for San Francisco schools and the situation in California. San Francisco non-charter public schools do not require any of those processes for enrollment, and simply could not get away with it.

(There are two exceptions — Lowell High School, which OPENLY admits based on academic achievement criteria, and School of the Arts, a high school that both my children now attend, which OPENLY admits based on artistic criteria. Other than those, there are no selective admissions criteria for San Francisco public schools.)

Charter schools are mandated to admit by random lottery here too, but since they get essentially no effective oversight, they can do whatever they want if they so choose. However, I’m not claiming that the KIPP schools engage in improper selectivity in admissions. I’m saying that the admission process results in strong selection bias — this is self-evident.

The attrition figures for KIPP, meanwhile, are not debatable, and are in no way parallel to anything that occurs in traditional public schools here in San Francisco, or in Oakland either (since I’ve also researched the figures for KIPP’s Oakland school).

Here’s a new blog post addressing that issue, which quotes an actual professional academic researcher (I’m a volunteer layperson, as noted).

http://aplacetorespond.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-uncritical-adulation-of-kipp-in.html

A question is whether the New York schools you mention OPENLY engage in these selective admission process, or whether they pretend to admit by blind lottery while covertly picking-n-choosing. In either case, other New York public schools are obviously accepting their rejects. Then, are the public schools that accept the rejects being unfairly compared to the public schools that engage in selective admissions? Because that’s the case with KIPP schools and public schools, needless to say.

Yes, the difference is replacing students who leave vs. not replacing students who leave. The study cited in the blog post I linked to also found that at the San Francisco Bay Area KIPP schools, it’s consistently the lower-performing students who leave AND ARE NOT REPLACED.

As researcher Michael Martin says, quoted in that same post:

“It is fundamentally fraudulent to take any group of students to form a base level of test scores, remove the unsuccessful students, and then claim success on the basis of improved test scores …”

Comparing the outcome for students who attend the school vs. those who entered the lottery but did not get selected will show the effect of the school on THOSE students — the subset who entered the lottery to begin with.

But the only way to determine self-selection/selection bias would be to compare the students who entered the lottery with those who didn’t enter it at all — see what I mean? So basically comparing the “winners” vs. the “losers” is irrelevant to the point at hand.

(This is a moot point regarding the San Francisco KIPP schools anyway, because they don’t get enough applicants to need to hold lotteries for their starting grade, fifth. So there are no “losers” and “winners” to compare. I know it is often said that “all KIPP schools have waiting lists, but it’s not true.)

I’ll quote researcher Michael Martin again on the impact of the KIPP attrition on test scores:

“It is fundamentally fraudulent to take any group of students to form a base level of test scores, remove the unsuccessful students, and then claim success on the basis of improved test scores…”

The SRI study also said that the impact of the KIPP program on individual students could not be measured because the high attrition so biased the sampling.

Well, regarding the first thing, we’re looking at different things. My point is that charters self-select, and that’s not addressed by your point. It’s self-evident that they do, in my opinion.

The second question that grows out of that is: If the same students do better in a charter than in a traditional public school, IS THAT BECAUSE OF THE SELF-SELECTED STUDENT POPULATION — would the effect be the same if the public school had the same student population as the charter?

The attrition at the Bay Area KIPP schools went down somewhat — not significantly — and that was after they were under sudden national scrutiny. It could be that they are outliers — I haven’t seen figures for other KIPP schools. Personally I think it’s suspiciously coincidental that the only schools I have the wherewithal to check on (after this issue has been ignored by academic researchers and the press) have such astounding attrition, and then the KIPP defenders all leap to insist that they’re outliers… maybe so, maybe so.

Straw man, Socrates. I’ve never said KIPP is a sham.

But the attrition (once again, uncovered by an unpaid layperson after the press another professional researchers somehow forgot to check into it) raises questions about some aspects of how KIPP achieves success.

Why avoid the truth? To enroll a child in a charter school definitely requires a degree of forethought, effort, research and consideration on the part of the parent. This pre-condition would undoubtedly make the population of charter school families a self-selected one.

The more enterprising inner-city parents move their kids out of the public schools and into charters because they think the charters provide more opportunity. They are the type of inner-city parent who monitors their children closely. Of course, one of the main opportunities charter schools offers is the ability for each subgroup to self-segregate, the impetus of which seems to be human nature.

The current mode is creating a situation where kids who don’t have anyone to advocate for them, because they have weaker educationally-minded parents, are ending up isolated together in the regular inner-city public schools, without peers from any other groups to associate with. Our nation is becoming more and more segregated along class lines. It’s almost time to order more of that razor wire and chain link fencing.

On the current course, the public schools will become exclusively filled with “untouchables” that nearly every other family doesn’t want to be around, or even bother to care about. This scenario has parallels to the incarceration situation for Blacks that currently exists.

So the obvious question for our nation one day soon will be, “What are we going to do with all those children next?”

Another straw man, Kitchen Sink. Nobody is doing this:

<<>>

You’re contradicting yourself here:

<<>>

…since you said that disinterested parents ARE putting their kids in charter schools.

Visiting a charter school will tell you zilch about the enrollment process or about the students who are NOT in a charter school. I did something that WILL give you that information, which is to visit a KIPP school and “try” to enroll my daughter. Your response is that this KIPP school works differently than other KIPP schools — gosh, I just happened to pick the unique one? I don’t think that’s a very valid response.

I teach at a KIPP school, and there are some points about attrition rates that Caroline and the other posters don’t know about.

Our biggest time for attrition is between 6th grade and 7th grade, because students want to go to the neighborhood schools so they can play sports. (We don’t have much time at KIPP for afterschool sports programs.) However, we lost about 20 students last summer from 6th into 7th grade, but we gained 15 new students, who are at a variety of academic ability levels. So the issue of losing poor performing students and not replacing them doesn’t exist at my school.

Second, we have had some attrition during the school year as well. This year we’ve lost students because their families moved away, or they couldn’t work out the transportation to KIPP anymore, or they moved their student back to the neighborhood school. We have also asked a few students to leave because of behavioral or academic issues, although the majority of the students left for other reasons. Of the students who left in my grade level, at the time they left 2 had A’s, 1 had a B, 2 had C’s, 2 had D’s, and 1 had an F in my class. So we aren’t just losing poor performing students. And we have also gained several students mid-year.

I think that Caroline should either do some real research into why students leave KIPP schools or she should stop talking about things she doesn’t know about.

The “academic issues” in one case were that the student needed special services that our school didn’t provide but another public school did. In another case, the student was failing every class and had no intention of working hard enough to pass. The parents took the student out of KIPP rather than continuing to let him fail himself out. We do everything we can to get every student to learn, but we can’t force them to learn if they refuse.

The Perimeter Primate
http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/

Dear Dr. Anderson,

I hope this note finds you well and staying warm enough!

Perhaps you remember our few exchanges by email last April. Since that time I have continued to spread the word about your work because of its extraordinary value.

Today I am writing to you to seek your opinion. I have been trying to process an idea, and I hope that you will give me your perspective.

For the past several years, I have become increasingly involved with trying to understand inner-city issues as they relate to the current education reform movement, as well as to the situation at my local public schools. From the research and thinking I have done, I have come to believe that the most recent reform approach, one of NCLB penalties and the installation of charter schools, will never be enough to get to the root of the problem for the young people in those communities.

In discussions about “what is wrong,” the profound impact of decades of underemployment, as well as the extent of the damage and suffering which it has caused to families, are nearly always ignored. The focus of the current crop of education “reformers” has been narrowed exclusively on the supposed inadequacies of inner-city public schools and their teachers, and this is where the blame is most often assigned. I have come to believe that teachers and schools are being made the scapegoats to avoid discussion or correction of the true, enormous underlying issues.

One reason “Code of the Street” was so fascinating to me was because of your insights about “decent” and “street” families. I recognized the two types immediately. Here in Oakland, I suspect the charter schools are being sought out by decent-oriented families in part in an attempt to provide their children an escape from street-oriented school mates and the havoc at school which they often cause. The resulting effect is the increasing stratification of students, school by school.

My notion is that the low-income Black parents who seek out charter schools for their children are a specific type, the type who is more likely to stress the importance of education to their children and to support the mission of the school in their homes (= “decent”). I believe that their children are more likely to end up with greater academic achievement than the children who happen to have been born to parents who lack enough of that focus.

To enroll a child in a charter school requires more forethought, effort, research and consideration on the part of the parent. This makes the population of charter school families a self-selected one. Charter schools prefer to deny this, but I know for certain it must be the case. I have learned from personal experience that some parents, through no fault of their own, have very extreme limitations in regard to supporting their children’s educations and complying with the mission of their children’s schools.

Once the parents who are willing to invest the energy in seeking out a charter school are separated from those who won’t, there are additional features about charter schools which separate the nature of their families even more. Many charter schools are permitted to have stricter policies which require minimum levels of parental involvement and compliant student behavior. Families must sign contracts and their obligations are monitored.

Also, some of the schools are known to place pressure on students with low-performance or problems with behavior, sometimes just before state testing. Sometimes this pressure is so great that students will leave the charter school, in which case it is justified as not being “a good fit.” Then those students arrive at the regular local public school to enroll. Those schools are required, by law, to accept every child despite any poor academic and/or behavior records.

There is no reciprocity between charter and regular public schools. The regular public schools must accept and serve all students, even the most-difficult-to-educate ones, but charter schools are not required to do the same. In addition, regular public schools cannot require parent involvement, and have no teeth for enforcing it either.

So, I am beginning to envision an inner-city school landscape where charter schools appear more and more successful simply because they collect and concentrate the children of “decent” families. Additionally, they become the recipients of large donations from philanthropists because they appear to be educating inner-city minority children more effectively than the regular public schools. It is rarely admitted that the charter schools and the regular schools have an increasingly different population of families.

While all this is happening, the regular public schools end up becoming less and less successful, because the concentration of the more challenging “street-oriented” kids is getting higher and higher. And as the percentage of challenging students grows, these schools appear to become worse and worse. Discipline problems and truancy percentages increase, and any remaining “decent” families who use the school begin to reject them. Community support for these schools languishes.

So, Dr. Anderson, these are my concerns. I greatly hope you will have time to respond to me, and confirm, rebut, or expand upon them from your point of view. Feel free to reach me by email or by phone.

Gratefully yours,
S. H.

—– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —– —–

IMPORTANT UPDATE!!!

Within two hours I had received a call from Dr. Anderson. We talked on the phone for nearly an hour.

From his perspective as a sociologist who has spent a lifetime studying the inner-city Black community, he confirmed my notion on this post.

According to Anderson, it is the more enterprising parents who will move their kids out of the public schools and into charters because they think the charters provide more opportunity. They are parents who monitor their kids closely. Of course, one of the main opportunities charter schools also offer is the ability for each group to self-segregate, the impetus of which, he explains, seems to be human nature.

This is bound to create a situation where the kids who don’t have anyone to advocate for them – and who have weaker educationally-minded parents – will indeed all be stuck together in the regular inner-city public schools, without peers from any other groups to associate with. I described a potential situation caused by the current mode where the public schools will become filled with “untouchables” that nobody wants to be around or really cares about. We discussed how this scenario has parallels to the incarceration situation for Blacks that currently exists.

So it is obvious that one day, the question will be, “What is this nation going to do with all those children next?”

Anderson is so wise about these issues. He sees layers and layers of racial dynamics. By that I don’t mean just the usual ones that people generally talk about (black vs. white), but the many ranges of black group vs. black group dynamics in between.

He does see great hope with Obama being president, but also sees how everything Obama does is totally loaded with complex, and potentially politically-deadly racial booby traps. Obama has to proceed so very carefully.

I urged him to consider writing some of his thoughts about the way that racial and educational reform issues tie together, and if he does so, to please let me know.

(E.A.: If you read this, I hope it is okay. It is important to me to keep extending the conversation for everyone, so I wanted to reveal a few of the things we talked about.)

With regards to KIPP Fresno’s recent issues…

Caroline, why are you so sure that the district’s report is entirely factual? I am familiar with KIPP Fresno’s situation, and many items in that report are exaggerated or outright false. For instance, no student was ever forced to crawl and bark like a dog. When Mr. Tschang told a student to do that, he was using the phrase metaphorically to show how ridiculous the student’s behavior in the classroom was. As for why the students were protesting, to them Mr. Tschang was a wonderful principal, giving them educational opportunities that they never would have gotten at their neighborhood schools. KIPP Fresno really is about team and family. The students felt safer at KIPP and were thus able to learn more. Students have said that if they weren’t at KIPP, they would likely be gang members or drug dealers by now (at the age of 12). In addition, there isn’t a stigma to “being smart” at KIPP – everyone is expected to achieve.

As for why there were so many complaints against KIPP Fresno, I think Norm’s post above has the answer: charter schools generally get the most motivated parents. These parents found something to complain about at their old school, so they enrolled their children at KIPP. When everything isn’t perfect at KIPP, they complain again. And things definitely weren’t perfect at KIPP, but then, what school is perfect? I bet if the district investigated the other 20 or so middle schools in Fresno they would find even more examples of mistakes on the part of teachers and principals. KIPP Fresno is under fire because this particular school district doesn’t like schools that make waves and suggest that lower income students can achieve as much as middle class students if they are placed in a highly structured environment with dedicated teachers.

(When students enter KIPP Fresno, they are typically very low academically – the average 5th grader reads at a 2nd grade level. However, the students quickly come up to grade level at KIPP and continue to make progress through 8th grade. My point is that even though KIPP gets the more motivated parents, the neighborhood schools are still failing to educate these students to the level that they are educated at KIPP.)

Caroline,

Do you have an example (or examples) of KIPP people “heatedly” denying it? Also, can you offer evidence that they do get more motivated parents other than an old study of the SF schools?

The sun going around the earth was “obvious logic,” too. I’m interested in seeing the data on KIPP schools’ overall incoming student population.

And I’ve never seen a KIPP person make any bold claims at all, so no, I won’t go hunting on a wild goose chase for the comments you claim are out there. I haven’t seen a KIPP employee post on this blog, to my recollection, so I know where you should NOT start in your search.

It’s strange for you to make an accusation about how “KIPP folks” talk about their students and then claim it’s up to me to disprove it. Does that mean that if someone comes on here and says that once, long ago, they saw a post wherein you claimed that pigs can fly, it’ll be up to you to disprove the existence of such a quote?

OK, Soc, here are two points from the original post here. The first sentence after each number is portrayed as a “myth,” and the rest of the paragraph is the rebuttal from Jay Mathews’ book, as described by Elizabeth Green.

6. KIPP kicks out misbehaving or low-performing students. The book describes student attrition that stems from parents who do not want their children to continue with the rigorous, time-consuming demands — not children pushed out by their teachers.

7 – KIPP students come from families that are more active in their lives than the families of traditional public school students. Mathews says the case on this so-called “creaming” effect is so far inconclusive. Though some data from the Bronx and Baltimore suggest students arrive with more family support, other data provided by KIPP disputes that conclusion. Mathews also argues that the reverse argument is possible. “KIPP I think draws some lazy parents who like having a free afternoon daycare,” he said.

Caroline again — so, we can see that Mathews is disputing the creaming effect, though more mildly than some. That’s one example close at hand.

John, no, I know that charter schools do NOT show higher achievement overall than traditional public schools, despite the self-selection effect. But they still harm traditional public schools because of the effect of siphoning out students who are predisposed to be more motivated, from families that are by definition more focused on their kids education. KIPP schools do show higher achievement than traditional public schools, though, and a question I have is how much of that is due to the self-selection effect (and, where applicable, to the sky-high attrition).

The September 2008 SRI International report on the San Francisco Bay Area KIPP schools — which I’ve mentioned before; it’s the one that showed that they have 60% attrition — found that the high attrition so confounded their research that it was impossible to study the “KIPP effect” on the few remaining students.

Here’s my blog post on that report, which links to the report itself.

http://www.sfschools.org/2008/09/study-local-kipp-schools-lose-60-of.html

On creaming. As the Perimeter Primate points out, there is a self sorting mechanism at work. If i told me kids I would give every one who did all their homework for a month would get a prize, I didn’t cream but pre-set conditions as to which kids would get the prize.

I guess you “retired” from your 30 year NYC teaching job. Which one of your 10 ip addresses that you used to avoid detection are you using today?

Do they pay you for piece work on weekends Socrates or is this part of your regular gig?

Caroline,
I think you’re starting to realize, as so many of us have over the years, that after accusing you of not reading enough on KIPP, you can expect Socrates to comment on the fact that you read everything about KIPP as being a sign of an obsession and that you must have an agenda. You never will win when you deal with people on the payroll.