A TYPICAL KIPP SCHOOL DAY
Seventeen years later, with Mr Feinberg in New Zealand this week to extol the virtues of charter schools, he is not entirely sure he did the right thing. He intruded deeper into Abby’s family life than he should have. But Abby got the message. She finished school, won a full scholarship to Texas A&M University and is now a nurse.
SO WHAT, you might ask. Lots of kids go to university. But not people from places like Las Americas. Only 41 per cent of children from the poorest 25 per cent of American families make it to university – and only 8 per cent graduate.
As Microsoft founder Bill Gates put it a few years ago: ‘‘If you’re low-income in the United States you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree.’’
By comparison, 90 per cent of the children from the wealthiest 25 per cent of American families enter university and 82 per cent graduate.
In speeches in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland this week, Mr Feinberg cited statistics showing a similar disparity in university graduation rates here.
About 24 per cent of Pakeha have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Just 6 per cent of Maori and 5 per cent of Pasifika people have equivalent qualifications.
The education systems in both countries are failing the most economically disadvantaged citizens, Mr Feinberg argues.
It is that failure that persuaded Mr Feinberg and friend and fellow teacher Dave Levin to look for a better way of teaching disadvantaged kids.
‘‘It really bothers me that children in too many communities are predestined with the amount of success that they can have simply by the time and place of their birth,’’ Mr Feinberg says.
The Knowledge is Power Programme (Kipp) they devised now has 125 schools spread across 20 US states and has become the poster child for the charter school movement, thanks to the extraordinary results it is reporting.
Here, Kipp has been cited as a model for the charter schools that National and ACT controversially agreed to trial in their postelection confidence and supply agreement.
The first of the schools, which will be able to set their own hours, employ unregistered teachers and pay teachers according to performance, are due to open their doors in the first term of 2014.
The Government says they will offer a new way of tackling ‘‘entrenched’’ educational underachievement.
But teacher unions are suspicious and the Quality Public Education Coalition, headed by veteran protester John Minto, has gone so far as to suggest Mr Feinberg’s visit is part of a secret agenda to privatise the education system.
Those suspicions have not been alleviated by the involvement in Mr Feinberg’s visit of hedge fund billionaire Julian Robertson.
Mr Feinberg’s whistlestop tour of the country has been funded by the Aotearoa Foundation established by Mr Robertson and his late wife, Josie.
Mr Robertson, who has also donated millions of dollars to Kipp in the US, says New Zealand’s late adoption of charter schools offers it the opportunity to learn from successes and failures elsewhere to create something ‘‘that works in the New Zealand context’’. Teacher unions disagree. The New Zealand Educational Institute is the country’s largest teacher union and national secretary Paul Goulter says there is no evidence anywhere to suggest that introducing charter schools will lift the overall standard of education.
‘‘Yes, there are children who are not achieving [but] every teacher knows who those children are and they know pretty much what’s needed to lift that performance.’’
That is poverty reduction and greater investment in education, he says.
‘‘You cannot get a system lift in New Zealand education when children are coming to school tired, hungry and unhealthy.’’
PPTA president Robin Duff says secondary teachers can see no value in importing unproven theories from a country languishing far behind ours in the Pisa tests that compare the reading, mathematical, and scientific abilities of 15-year-olds.
‘‘Our worry is not just the setting up of these schools, it’s the downstream effect.
‘‘If you take 40 or 50 kids from five or six schools, some schools, particularly in country areas, will not be able to sustain that loss.
‘‘What you will end up doing is collapsing some of the very 7am-7.20am: Pupils arrive at school, where they are given breakfast and a morning work sheet containing a logic game that they work on while they eat. 7.45am: Pupils go to their home room where they keep working on the work sheet while their homework is checked. 8am-3pm: schools that will be taking some of your most challenged and disadvantaged youngsters.’’
MIKE FEINBERG never intended to be a teacher. The son of a businessman and a speech therapist, who grew up in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Oak Park, he planned to become a lawyer. However, after completing his undergraduate degree, he realised he wasn’t ready to commit himself to the law.
Instead he opted to join the Teach for America programme, established the previous year, to recruit graduates to work for two years in the US’ poorest schools.
Mr Feinberg liked the idea of ‘‘giving back’’ and figured the programme would give him a chance to work out what he really wanted to do.
Like the other recruits, he was given a six-week crash course in the basics of teaching, during which he met Yale graduate Mr Levin, and then the pair were dispatched to Houston. There, they quickly discovered they knew nothing about teaching kids.
For Mr Feinberg, it was a nasty shock. He’d never been bad at anything before.
‘‘I was absolutely horrible at it – arguably one of the worst teachers in the world. Two months into it, I was crying every day 3pm-4pm: Study hall, where pupils get a chance to start their two hours of homework and have one-on-one or small group tuition with their teachers. 4pm-5pm: Sport, or some other kind of extracurricular activity; snack. 5pm: Home time.
Pupils also attend school every second Saturday morning and for an extra three weeks during the United States’ summer holiday. driving to school because I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the day.
‘‘These 9, 10, 11-year-old children were kicking my butt. They weren’t listening to a single word I was saying. I didn’t know how to manage a classroom.
‘‘I didn’t know how to positively incent[ivise] kids to do the right thing and how to have the right consequences for doing the wrong thing.’’
But despite the tears and frustration, Mr Feinberg discovered he loved teaching.
Mr Levin, with whom he shared an apartment, made the same discovery. Gradually, they improved by observing what Mr Feinberg calls ‘‘master teachers’’ in action. But although they got better, the schools where they were teaching did not.
To Mr Feinberg’s way of thinking, people fall into two categories – those who believe the public education system exists to benefit children and those who think it is a job programme for adults. Too many in Houston thought the latter, and not just teachers and administrators.
There were all the others who depended on the status quo for their livelihoods, right down to the tourism industry which successfully blocked moves to bring the start of the school year forward because it would interfere with their summer holiday revenue.
Mr Feinberg and Mr Levin fretted and stewed. And then they had an epiphany. They would devise their own system based on the best of what they had seen.
They called it the Knowledge is Power Programme after a line in one of the chants the best teacher they had ever observed had her pupils recite. You gotta read, baby, read; The more you read, the more you know, ’Cause knowledge is power, Power is money, and I want it.
At the heart of the Kipp philosophy are five principles: high expectations, choice and commitment, a longer school day, greater power for principals – and an unrelenting focus on results.
By New Zealand standards, the requirements on Kipp’s 40,000 pupils are onerous. While Kiwi kids are relaxing and riding their pushbikes and skateboards after school, their Kipp counterparts are still poring over their books.
The Kipp day starts at 7.30am and finishes at 5pm. In addition, Kipp kids attend school every second Saturday morning and for an extra three weeks during the US summer holiday. In total, they spend about 60 per cent more time in the classroom.
For that, Mr Feinberg makes no apology. ‘‘Our kids are in school longer than other kids but if we are going to have them break their families’ generational cycle of poverty, at some point, a greater effort has to be applied to make that happen.’’
Plus, he says, the kids enjoy themselves. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t come back.
To hold their interest, the days are broken up with sport and other extracurricular activities, and the children are rewarded for good performances with weekly ‘‘pay cheques’’ that can be used to buy books or T-shirts.
Discipline is strict. Pupils are expected to sit up straight, ask and answer questions, ‘‘track’’ their teachers when they are talking, treat their classmates with respect and complete all assignments.
If they don’t, their parents can expect a phone call or a visit.
Failure to adhere to the rules results in pupils being isolated from their classmates in class and at lunchtime, and missing out on the eagerly awaited week-long end-of-year school ‘‘field lessons’’.
Funding comes from state and federal government and private donors, who include some of the US’ wealthiest individuals – the late Gap clothing store founder Donald Fisher and his wife, Doris, the Walton family, owners of the Walmart chain, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Together they, and others, have contributed well over US$100 million (NZ$120m) to the programme since 2005.
Kipp’s figures suggest their investments have paid dividends.
More than 90 per cent of the pupils who complete eighth grade at Kipp schools go on to graduate from high school, and more than 85 per cent of Kipp alumni, known as ‘‘Kippsters’’, go on to university or tertiary education. That is five times the rate of kids from comparable backgrounds and higher than the average across all American schools.
However, critics say the figures do not tell the full story.
They do not take account of the significant number of pupils who abandon Kipp schools before the eighth grade because they find the workload too taxing or because they have been made to feel unwelcome.
KARRAN HarperRoyal, a founding board member of Parents Across America who has been brought to New Zealand by the PPTA, says charter schools have not lived up to their promise.
Communities were told that allowing charter schools to compete with existing schools would give parents greater power.
They would be able to choose between new and existing schools.
However, the power has proved to be illusory.
In New Orleans where she lives, the power rests with the schools. Once, parents could work with the city’s democratically elected school board if they were unhappy with a child’s education.
Now they are told: ‘‘Well, you have school choice, you can choose another school if you don’t like it here.’’ The problem is there are few alternatives. Before Hurricane Katrina, about 10 per cent of the schools in New Orleans were charter schools. Now charter organisations are running about 70 per cent of the city’s schools. Of them, almost 80 per cent have been graded either D or F by state education authorities on a scale that starts at A.
She is no more impressed by Kipp than other charter franchises, she says. This year, two parents have told her of withdrawing special needs children from Kipp schools.
One ‘‘was tired of the daily phone calls from Kipp telling her what her child wasn’t doing well’’.
The other was upset by the school’s failure to honour its promise to improve the reading ability of her child who suffers from cerebral palsy.
Mr Feinberg says it does not surprise him that Ms HarperRoyal found two parents who were unhappy with Kipp: ‘‘Our attrition rate is not zero and our parent approval rate is not 100.’’
However, the ‘‘vast majority’’ of the 2500 pupils who attend Kipp schools in New Orleans love going there and the schools do not discriminate against special needs children, he says.
Mr Feinberg, who left New Zealand yesterday to attend the wedding of one of the first ‘‘Kippsters’’, says neither Kipp nor charter schools are a silver bullet that will magically solve the problem of educational underachievement. They are, however, a ‘‘useful tool’’ to have in the toolbox. In Texas, where he now serves as the executive vicechairman of Kipp’s Houston operations, state educators are introducing many of the innovations pioneered by Kipp – including longer school days and summer school.