Class Struggle Asks: Is Recess Necessary?

At the Class Struggle blog, Jay Matthews asks Is Recess Necessary?

A survey said 70% of Americans believe recess is important. But Matthews thinks that KIPP founders Levin and Feinberg are right on to want to eliminate recess.

The notion that recess might be a detriment to learning is lost on many of the people surveyed by Robert Wood Johnson and Sports4Kids, as well as the people who wrote the survey news release. It says: "The new findings come at a time when many schools and school districts are making the difficult choice of cutting back on recess to make more time for standardized test preparation, as outlined on a report this fall by the Center for Public Education. Cutbacks to recess tend to be concentrated in schools serving the highest number of minority students or students in poverty, making underserved children the least likely to get this valuable playtime."

See that little dig about standardized tests? A less-biased writer would have acknowledged that conscientious educators like Levin and Feinberg might have good reason to cut back recess in order to give their students more time to learn.

Matthews will henceforth stop taking a lunch or bathroom break to increase his own productivity.

Thanks to AVITW

Ed Reformers Urge Vow of Celibacy for New Army of Teachers (spoof)

In a new initiative, new teachers would be required to renounce marriage in order to devote themselves more fully to the task of preparing each and every child to excel in standardized test-taking.

Another brilliant parody. Already there are some Socrates-like idiot comments on this Eggplant post from Tauna at This Little Blog. How dare someone parody KIPP - boo, hoo. Have you ever been in a KIPP school - sniff, sniff! Susan O also has it up on her site.

Tauna is not far from reality as we are seeing in NYC where young urban dwellers without family commitments are preferred over parents who might actually have to leave school on time (often to a suburb with a long commute where they can afford a house) to go home and care for their children. Any stats on how many KIPP teachers have children of their own?

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Jonathan Alter on KIPP: Distortions, Misprepresentations and Outright Lies

This was sent out by Leonie Haimson to the NYC Education Listserve:

Jonathan Alter blusters in a column in Newsweek about what Obama should do to reform our schools:

Here is the response of Caroline Grannam, a SF parent and blogger who is one of the few people to independently assess KIPP’s claims:

In the current Newsweek, columnist Jonathan Alter earnestly claims that 12,800 alumni of KIPP schools have gone on to college. Here's what Alter wrote: At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids. The actual number, according to KIPP itself, is 447.

It turns out that that 80% figure was derived from calculating the matriculation rates at only two KIPP schools.

Alter also omits to mention the self-selection process involved in applying to KIPP, well as the rigorous interview process the school uses that discourages less motivated students from enrolling, including making them promise to attend school six days a week and most of the working day. Nor the high attrition rates, with some schools losing 50 percent of their students over three years.

Yet Alter continues to spin wildly:

[Obama] …hasn't been direct enough about reforming NCLB so that it revolves around clear measurements of classroom-teacher effectiveness. Research shows that this is the only variable (not class size or school size) that can close the achievement gap. Give poor kids from broken homes the best teachers, and most learn. Period.

Where is the research base for this? Don’t bother to ask, as there is none.

We don’t even know how to identify potentially effective teachers, not to mention how to make them more effective once they’ve been hired. Aside from treating them like professionals, giving them a smaller class and persuading them to stick around in the profession longer.

More from Alter:

To get there, Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage "thin contracts" free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure.

What? Surveys, including this one from Education Sector, which generally favors such proposals, show that teachers overwhelmingly oppose basing salaries on performance (read test scores.): “…one in three teachers (34 percent) favors giving financial incentives to teachers whose kids routinely score higher than similar students on standardized tests. Most teachers today (64 percent) oppose the idea, up 8 percentage points from the 56 percent who opposed it in 2003.”

Nevertheless, Alter continues in this vein:

And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.

Good luck with that one. I’m sure the NEA and the AFT are quaking in their boots.

As Grannam points out about Alter’s error in reporting the number of KIPP students that have gone to college that could also be applied to his false claims about teacher surveys and class size:

It's ironic that Alter made that rather significant error in a column mostly devoted to blasting and blaming teachers for troubled schools and calling for getting rid of problem teachers, along with eliminating tenure and increasing "accountability" for teachers. I wonder how he feels about more accountability for journalists.

In case you’re interested, Alter lives in Montclair NJ, where no doubt the class sizes are small, and teacher tenure reigns supreme, along with high salaries, and performance pay is nowhere in sight.

But in a school district like NYC, with lots of immigrant and poor students, it doesn’t matter what overcrowding exists or what class sizes they are crammed into. All will be well and teachers will magically be able to reach all thirty plus kids per class, as long as the people in charge crack the whip loud and hard enough and can threaten them with losing their jobs if they don’t deliver.

A sure fire formula for success if ever I’ve heard it.

Comments? Write to webeditors@newsweek.com; copy to jalter@newsweek.com

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
classsizematters@gmail.com
www.classsizematters.org
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/

Wendy Kopp Blows Up the Bridge on the River KIPP

"What Have I Done?" - Colonel Nickolson (Alec Guiness), says in Bridge on the River Kwai.

You know the story. Brit Nickolson drives the building of an important bridge for the Japanese war effort in a test of wills with the Japanese commandant of the prison camp. When the British send a team to blow it up, Nicholson realizes what he's done as he falls on the dynamite fuse that blows up his loving creation.

So, one day when Nirvana has been reached and every school in America is a KIPP school and every 2 years a corps of millions of Teach for America teachers storm into urban schools as replacement troops for the old guard, some of whom have reached the mandatory 25 year old age limit for teachers, it will dawn on Wendy Kopp that the achievement gap is no closer to being closed.

And she will shout, "What have I done," as she falls on the plunger that will blow up every KIPP school.

And some chronicler will end this updated version of the movie, tentatively titled, "Bridge on the River KIPP," with the comment, "Madness! Madness ... madness!"

Would College Educated People Send Their Kids to KIPP?

Social justice issues and more:
http://schoolinginequality.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-do-we-teach-them.html
http://mizmercer.edublogs.org/2008/05/10/what-do-they-need-part-iii/

Raging Debates on KIPP and Class Size...

.... took place during the week off.

The KIPP/charter school discussion, with a KIPP teacher taking part, came about spontaneously at NYC Educator in this post from Reality Based Educator and has already inspired 56 comments.

The class size debate is part of a series of posts at Eduwonkette, where her able assistant Skoolboy, Leonie Haimson and a cast of thousands deep massaged the class size issue.

Check out 2 of the push-button issues on today's ed/pol pallet.