Ravitch in Houston Challenges KIPP and TFA

In Houston, Diane Ravitch challenges school reformers face to face

October 15th, 2010 8:32 pm CT http://www.examiner.com/education-reform-in-houston/in-houston-diane-ravitch-challenges-school-reformers-face-to-face

“You send out a false message,” Diane Ravitch, the nation’s premier education historian, told school reformers on Thursday night at Rice University. The event hosted by Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, Teach For America (TFA), and the Rice Educational Entrepreneurship Program gave Dr. Ravitch the opportunity to speak directly to school reform leaders. Dr. Ravitch began by saying public-school teachers across the country were highly demoralized because school reformers were placing the blame for under-achievement entirely at their feet. “Please stop claiming Teach for America can close the achievement gap,” Ravitch urged. “Nobody who teaches for two or three years can close the achievement gap.” She asked them to think about their long-term impact on public schools, and recommended they “practice humility.” Dr. Ravitch said the “civic narrative” of traditonal public schools, rooted in neighborhood social networks, were under threat from a “market narrative” popularized by charter school financiers who want to privatize K-12 schooling. “Don’t compete,” Dr. Ravitch urged, “collaborate with public schools.” Questioning statistics used in the pro-charter documentary, Waiting for Superman, Dr. Ravitch picked up on that movie’s comparison of Finland’s educational success to our own relatively poor performance. She pointed out Finland has fewer tests, stronger unions and four times the level of social service spending for children as in the United States. Neither Dr. Ravitch, nor KIPP CEO Mike Feinberg who joined her in a panel discussion, addressed KIPP’s plan to recruit 20,000 students from the Houston Independent School District (HISD). While Mr. Feinberg lauded competition as the solution to urban education’s dilemmas, he failed to address why KIPP’s financiers have sponsored four successful school board candidates for the HISD Board of Trustees, or why they are currently backing a fifth candidate, which would give them a super-majority on the board. With the support they now have on the school board, and their influence in the community, KIPP’s backers, which include John and Laura Arnold, the nation’s youngest billionaire and his wife, and Leo Linbeck III, the scion of a local patrician family, the school reform coalition--if they wanted to improve rather than replace public schools--could win passage of any policies they desired. If John Arnold told the HISD board and Superintendent to jump out a second story window, the majority would probably do it; so why not fix the public schools now when we can, instead of replacing them with private charters unless they are doing this as a bizarre ideologically motivated experiment. This is the central issue underlying much of what Dr. Ravitch had to say--how if we as a community give up on an institution as central to neighborhood life as a public school, then can we maintain any sense of being part of a local, or a national community? What does it say about the United States, or at least about our cities, if we are the only wealthy nation that cannot create and manage good community public schools? Are we so divided on lines of race and income, and distrustful of elected leadership, that the only way to make progress in Houston is to shut down public schools and farm those services out to isolated, privately run entities? If we turn our public schools over to KIPP, who will be running them in twenty or thirty years after Mike Feinberg retires? The public has no say over these so-called public schools which receive taxpayer money, and there is no provision in their charters for public election of governing officers. So far, charter expansion, and HISD’s response to it, has been entirely under the table. We at least owe it to the notion we are still a democracy to have an open debate on the pros and cons or the long-term consequences of contracting out educational services for 20,000 of our public-school students.