In my first book ‘Reluctant Disciplinarian’ I made a big deal about how it is risky for a teacher to be too nice or too fun or, in some ways, too ‘human’ as it might cause students to lose respect for the teacher and lead to discipline problems.
But that was 25 years ago and over the years I have found opportunities to lighten up. Now my reasoning is that some fun can actually increase teacher effectiveness — just don’t over do it. So each year I make a spectacle of myself with involved halloween costumes which the students at my school really seem to enjoy usually.
About three weeks ago, the Stuyvesant student union announced there would be a faculty talent show on April 19 after school. When I was in 4th grade I started playing the trumpet and that was a big part of my identity all through high school and even college. For the past 20 years I have been messing around on the piano. I never got very good at it, though I do like playing Billy Joel songs a lot. As far as singing goes, I have never practiced singing.
So I thought maybe I’d play some kind of Scott Joplin ragtime song. But then I thought that students wouldn’t find ‘The Entertainer’ so entertaining so I decided instead to play a Billy Joel song and to do my best to sing it too. But once I got comfortable with the idea that I would sing in public for the first time in my life, I thought about what other song might I sing that would be fun for the students to see. And in a flash of insight I came up with either the best or the worst (you will have to decide) song I could think of, Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’ about a really bad ex-boyfriend. If you are not familiar with the song you might want to listen to it here first.
So for about two weeks I set to practicing. I knew it would never be ‘good’ but the plan was to be sincere in my effort and not just try to make a joke out of it. For about 3 hours a day I worked on this. I also got coaching from various musicians I know including some of my students. By the day of the performance I had the lyrics and the chords down and the tempo and all that.
When it came time for the actual performance I was feeling confident. But then I made a little mistake in the first verse and then in the first chorus I skipped a chord so the music was off. I still powered through so it ended up generating a lot more laughs than it was intended to. After I started to relax, the last half of the song was about as good as I was capable of doing it.
The original song has some curse words in it, so I used her ‘clean’ lyrics though you will see at the end I made it almost seem like I was going to give them the opportunity to hear a teacher say a curse word. That ended up being the best moment of the performance and I think it will excuse all the musical mistakes.
I do hope that I gave students a memorable experience seeing their nerdy math teacher attempt this power ballad.
[Note: This post draws from an interview I conducted with an anonymous source who identifies as a KIPP alum from the late 1990s. I consider this person credible based on the evidence they provided. Additionally, the post relies on publicly available legal documents supplied by the same anonymous source. (https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/Login) It’s important to note that I am not a lawyer or, technically, a journalist and that my access to legal documents related to these cases may be limited. I welcome input from anyone, including KIPP officials, former KIPP students, or readers who have researched the cases, to provide additional context if needed.]
Until recently, I had only heard about this disturbing case in passing, choosing not to delve into its specifics, assuming that the judicial system would thoroughly investigate any potential involvement of the school or others implicated.
However, a few days ago, I received an email from an anonymous individual claiming to be a KIPP alum from the late 1990s, shedding light on an unreported aspect of the scandal. According to this source, there are allegations involving another former orchestra teacher, Charles Randall, preceding Concepcion. Randall started the KIPP orchestra program and was the leader from 1995 until 2000. According to a New York Times profile from 2001, Randall was actually Concepcion’s music teacher back when Concepcion was in 6th grade.
There seem to be three pending cases in the South Bronx involving KIPP Academy. The legal case that led to Concepcion’s imprisonment was identified as Jane Doe One v KIPP Academy Charter School. While I lack legal expertise, additional documents implicate Randall for similar offenses against Jane Doe 2 and 3 vs KIPP Academy. Notably, these latter cases were redirected to the New York Department of Education due to the timeframe predating KIPP’s official charter approval.
The source, claiming to have firsthand knowledge, alleges that multiple witnesses, including numerous KIPP teachers and leaders, observed Charles Randall’s misconduct but did not report the egregious behavior exhibited by both Randall and Jesus Concepcion.
One account from the source states, “Randall would frequently arrive at school intoxicated. He kept a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black in the orchestra room and even offered us shots.” Additionally, the source mentioned, “He would often make sexually suggestive remarks about our bodies, accompanied by licking his lips, and the teachers witnessed this behavior but never intervened. It seemed as though no one cared until he began harassing the teachers. It was only then that he was eventually removed from KIPP Academy and reassigned to a national position.”
Charles Randall left his Orchestra leader position at KIPP Academy in 2000 and was placed in a new position where he interacted with a larger number of children within the KIPP network to establish music programs at newly established KIPP schools. The music program at KIPP gained significant attention and funding for the organization. Part of Randall’s new position also included him visiting KIPP alumni at their high schools or at college. My source says that they were visited by Randall at college.
Despite Randall’s inclusion in subsequent lawsuits against the New York City Department of Education, my source asserts with certainty that any pursuit of justice for Randall is now impossible, as he reportedly passed away at his Florida residence roughly two months ago.
Success Academy is the largest charter school network in New York State. Starting in 2006 with one school, there are now around 40 Success Academy schools with around 20,000 students. And with a recent $100 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, it might seem that Success Academy will continue to grow at an exponential rate. But there is some evidence that growth at Success Academy is slowing down. In one case it seems that one of their schools, Fort Greene Middle School has shut down completely.
According the New York State public data site, in 2022-2023, Success Academy Fort Greene was a middle school on Park Avenue in Brooklyn with 180 students from 5th to 8th grade. In classic Success Academy fashion, the 27 eighth graders is significantly fewer than the 55 fifth graders.
But when you look at the December 2023 enrollment data, suddenly Success Academy Fort Greene is no longer a middle school, but an elementary school located at 3000 Avenue X in Brooklyn. The enrollment of this school is 75 kindergarteners and 41 1st graders. I know that Success Academy is supposed to be capable of miracles, but turning 180 middle schoolers into 116 elementary schoolers is not one of them.
On the charter institute website, they say that Success Academy Fort Greene was chartered to enroll 253 students. On the recent charter renewal application, it said that the school had already moved Fort Greene’s elementary school students to merge with another school and had brought the middle school students from one of their other schools into Fort Greene for the 2022-2023 school year. So it seems that if a charter network like Success Academy has enough schools to shuffle students into and out of, they can hide their attrition patterns pretty easily.
So what seems to have happened is that Success Academy had to close down their Fort Greene school because of low enrollment. Why in the New York database, they let the new elementary take the name of the old middle school, maybe this is something they have to do for the charter cap, but I wouldn’t know. Still, any Success Academy school closing down is something that seems pretty newsworthy considering that they thrive on a reputation that they have cultivated that they must continually expand because of the demand for their schools.
Strangely, the Fort Greene middle school that no longer exists had their charter renewed last July. It’s all very confusing, some very basic information about this very famous and powerful charter network is unclear. They say they have 48 schools but in the state database, there are only 33 listed. If Success Academy can move kids around from school to school and change the locations and the grade levels, how is anyone supposed to keep track of whether or not Success Academy is thriving or if it is struggling to attract and retain families?
Special thanks to Leonie Haimson who provided much of the research used in this post. She provides even more detail in her own recent post on this topic here.
Success Academy is a charter network with about 40 schools in the New York City area. They are known for their high standardized 3-8 test scores. Though it has been proved that their test scores are somewhat inflated by their practices of shedding their low performing students over the year and also by, at some schools, focusing exclusively on test prep in the months leading up to the tests, they still have these test scores to show their funders and the various charter school cheerleaders.
In June there was an article on the website of something called Albany Strategic Advisors, some kind of consulting firm about how well middle school students at Success Academy performed on four of the New York State Regents exams: Algebra I, Living Environment, Global History, and English. The last sentence of the second to last paragraph explains that these results are important because “Taking the exams in middle school allows students to take more advanced college preparatory courses in high school.”
These ‘more advanced college preparatory courses in high school’ include 10 other courses that have Regents exams including Geometry, Algebra II, Chemistry, Physics, US History, and Spanish. The minimum requirements for getting what is called ‘a Regents diploma’ in New York is one math Regents, one science Regents, one Social Studies Regents, and the English Regents. But to get an ‘Advanced Regents diploma’ you need all three maths and all three sciences and one foreign language Regents. Most competitive high school have their students take these other Regents which are known to be fairly straight forward tests with very generous curves.
Well, Success Academy has spent eighteen years carefully cultivating their image. They want families to think that they have the highest expectations and that families should trust them to educate their children because those higher expectations will lead to those students learning the most. And we all know about their 3-8 state tests in Math and ELA. But it is pretty ‘odd’ that their students don’t take the more difficult Regents. The most likely reason for this is that Success Academy only wants information public that makes them look good and avoids any action that could reveal public data that reveals that they do not live up to their reputation. So I believe that they don’t allow their students to take the Regents because they believe that the scores on those Regents won’t be as impressive as their 3-8 state test scores compared to other schools. If I am right then this is an example of Success Academy choosing to preserve their inflated reputation over giving their students the opportunity to challenge themselves on these competitive exams.
This is important because Success Academy is held up as a model network that gets so much media attention every time ‘100%’ of their seniors are accepted to college and every time state test score results come out. It is kind of like the Lance Armstrong of charter schools. And when it was revealed that Lance Armstrong was actually not as good as he pretended to be, it was a big deal for sports writers to write about. But a thing like Success Academy’s lack of Regents scores is not something that any inquisitive professional writer about education in New York thinks to investigate. Perhaps there is a good reason that Success Academy does not have their high school students take the advanced Regents. We won’t learn that reason if nobody asks about it.
The New York Regents data I studied for this post can all be found here.
Success Academy is the infamous charter network of New York. Founded in 2006, and featured in Waiting For Superman, its growth was fueled by high standardized test scores. But as people, like me, looked more closely at the publicly available datapproa we found that there are some shady ways to achieve high standardized test scores.
The biggest factor inflating their test scores is student attrition. By putting pressure on the families of struggling students and by threatening to force those students to repeat a grade or two, Success Academy ends up only graduating about 25% of the students who begin there. And though they do take some students off the waitlist to replace some of the students who leave there, many of those ‘backfill’ students struggle there and are also forced to repeat a grade or have to transfer out.
With all the research I have done about Success Academy over the years, it is always strange for me when I find myself in the presence of an actual Success Academy student. It’s like being a paleontologist and seeing a live dinosaur. But a few weeks ago I got the chance to meet a child and his mother while taking my own son for a haircut.
I was waiting on the bench they have at the barber where my son was getting his haircut in the back of the shop when I overheard another boy at the front of the store talking about math with his barber. ”Ask me to count by 5s,” he said. ”Now ask me to count by 10s.” His barber started quizzing him, “How many 5s do you think are in 100?” and when the boy figured out that it was 20, the barber asked “How many 20s do you think are in 100?,” which was quite a good follow up question, I was impressed.
The boy’s mother was seated next to me and she told the barber that he was excited because he had just come back from math tutoring. She said that the extra tutoring was $60 an hour and she already paid up for a session a week until June. The barber said, “I’m in the wrong business.” She said that it was a lot of money but he needed it because his new school is really hard. I already suspected the answer but I had to ask what school is was and she told me Success Academy. Her son transferred in this year as a second grader and was not doing well, especially considering he has a learning disability.
“They teach some crazy math over there,” she said and then proceeded to take out her phone to show me some pictures she took of some of his assignments.
You don’t hear much about what they actually teach at Success Academy. I know about the test prep in the spring but it seems like it would be to their advantage to have a good, developmentally appropriate curriculum, or would it?
Looking at the phone, I had to take a second to process what I was looking at. While second grade is a time to get familiar with numbers and learn ways to add and subtract and to get some ‘number sense’ and do some basic problem solving involving adding and subtracting and even some informal multiplication (counting by 5s for example), what I was looking at was, without doubt, Algebra.
The question on the phone was to solve for c in the equation:
17+10+c+2=19+30
Algebra is when you solve for a variable by adding or subtracting equal things to both sides of an equation. In 6th or 7th grade, you would solve this by turning it into c+29=49 and then subtracting 29 from both sides of the equation to get c=20.
For this second grade class, they made the question so that a student might notice that you could put the 17 and 2 together on the right and turn this into 19+10+c=19+30 and then you can get rid of the 19s and turn it into 10+c=30 which would mean that c=20. It still is Algebra and not something that I’d advise teaching to second graders. It’s too abstract for kids that young who are just getting comfortable with numbers and adding and subtracting. So why does Success Academy think this is a good thing for second graders to learn?
The mother said that even though Success Academy is hard for her son, she wants to keep him there because “They get their students into Ivy League schools. And they help them get scholarships too.” I did not have the heart to tell her that only a very small percent of Success Academy students even make it to 12th grade there and the students who get into the Ivy Leagues are generally not the ones who transfer in during second grade.
“I heard they sometimes make students repeat a grade?” I felt bad about saying it, but I knew how she was going to respond. ”They already told us he may have to repeat,” she said and then said “You ever hear of a kindergartener having to repeat?”
“No,” I lied and she said “My friend’s son had to repeat kindergarten there.”
I didn’t pry anymore. I’m hoping that maybe her son can catch up and can thrive there and maybe be one of those 25% who graduate from there and get a scholarship to an Ivy League school. Which brings me back to the question: Why are they making second graders do Algebra?
That math is so developmentally inappropriate, there can’t be a good pedagogical rationale. It can’t be that students rise to meet the ‘rigor’ of the 6th or 7th grade math. The only reason I can speculate is that this math is designed to break kids like this boy, to use as a weapon to weed him out. If you want to make struggling second graders and their families miserable, there is no more sinister way to do this while simultaneously saying that you are doing them a favor by keeping your expectations high.
My son’s haircut ended and I said goodbye to the mother and wished her and her son good luck. It felt a little strange knowing so much about what they are likely going to suffer in the coming years but not really being able to warn them. Maybe it will work out for them, I hope so.
KIPP NYC College Prep High School was started in 2009 to serve students graduating from KIPP middle schools. In 2013 they moved into a new facility that was part of a $100 million project.
According to the latest 2023-2024 rankings, the top two charter high schools in New York City are Success Academy Charter at #12 and KIPP Academy Charter at #20.
In my most recent post I explained how Success Academy’s standing is inflated by their use of the ‘fifth year of high school’ lowering their less important graduation rate statistic while raising their college readiness statistic.
Now for KIPP, there are some notable things just based on this abbreviated view of their results on the U.S. News site. For one thing, the name of the KIPP high school is not ‘KIPP Academy Charter School’ but ‘KIPP NYC College Prep.’ The other thing is that their Enrollment is listed as 276 instead of the 1000 students they actually have. And, yes, they have the all important College Readiness score of 100 which means that all of their seniors take and get a 3 on at least one AP exam.
The mystery gets stranger when you search for KIPP high schools in New York and two schools come up, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity.
So there is the other KIPP high school in NYC according to U.S. News and that school has 4 times the number of students and in that under performing sibling of the 20th ranked school they don’t have any students passing the AP test. How can this be?
The answer is that there are not two KIPP high schools but only one. These schools, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity are actually middle schools. Even in the New York State data, there is not an official KIPP NYC College Prep school but these middle schools have as part of their enrollment the high school students. I don’t know why New York State allows them to do this and why they can assign all the students and only the students who pass an AP exam to KIPP Academy middle school and the students who don’t pass an AP to KIPP Academy Infinity middle school.
According to the KIPP website, over 90% of the over 1000 students at the (one and only) KIPP High School take an A.P. course.
If 90% of the students take the test but only 25% of those get a 3 and are put into the KIPP Academy middle school numbers, that means that 75% of those students (which is about 70% of the students at the actual KIPP high school) take an A.P. but don’t get a 3 on it. So if the two schools were accurately listed as one school in the U.S. News rankings, the combined college readiness score would be around a 25 which would put them not at #20 in New York State but more like #300.
Now one way to defend KIPP on this is to say that this is New York State’s fault. They are the ones that allow KIPP to assign the students from their one high school into two middle schools depending on whether or not they pass their AP tests and that New York State reports the data to U.S. News who have no way of knowing that these are really just the students from one high school. But certainly it would be ethical of KIPP to let U.S. News know about this.
But I’m not going to put the blame on New York State entirely. Because U.S. News should have been aware of this as the same thing happened six years ago. Back then they had four different middle schools categorized as high schools. I discovered this scheme back then and blogged about it and a few months later KIPP was disqualified from the list, possibly because word of my post got back to them. But not before the ‘school’ was celebrated in places like The74 for being, at that time, the fourth ranked high school.
For sure they should be disqualified again like they were in 2017. Then this loophole should be closed by New York State. There is just no reason why a high school in its own $100 million building has students assigned to two different middle schools depending on how they did on the AP test. If New York State won’t fix the loophole then U.S. News can check for this with the KIPP NYC schools especially since they have done this before. And KIPP could do more than just hope nobody will notice what happened again.
Here is the list of the top 13 New York High schools on the list:
1
High School Math Science and Engineering at CCNY
2
Townsend Harris High School
3
Queens High School for the Sciences at York College
4
Stuyvesant High School
5
Staten Island Technical High School
6
Bronx High School of Science
7
High School of American Studies at Lehman College
8
Brooklyn Technical High School
9
Brooklyn Latin School
10
Eleanor Roosevelt High School
11
Manhattan/Hunter Science High School
12
Success Academy Charter School-Harlem 1
13
Jericho Senior High School
Over the years, U.S. News has tweaked the way they weigh certain categories, but the primary component has always been what they call the ‘College Readiness’ index, which counts for 30% of the overall score. The way the College Readiness index is calculated is that they take the percent of students at the school who took at least one AP test and that counts for 1/4 of that score while 3/4 of the score is the percent of students at the school who took and got at least a 3 on at least one AP test.
The AP test is graded out of 5 and colleges often give credit for a score of 3 or better. But this ranking does not do anything to distinguish between schools where students take multiple AP tests and where they get 4s and 5s on them. So a school that has 100% of the students take exactly one AP and they all get 3s on it would be ranked higher than a schools where 98% of the students take an average of four APs each and they get an average of a 4 on them. But still, the ranking system does seem to put schools where graduating students are successful in college nearer to the top of the list. In the New York list, the schools in the top 13 are mainly the specialized New York City high schools.
When you go to the top schools list, they feature three statistics on the main view: Graduation rate, college readiness, and enrollment. Enrollment isn’t part of the ranking calculation but Graduation Rate, which they define as the number of students who enter 9th grade and graduate 4 years later, is 10% of the ranking.
For all the schools in the top 80 in New York state, the second lowest graduation rate was 92%. The first lowest was Success Academy with a 75% graduation rate.
On this graduation rate statistic, Success Academy is actually in the bottom 10% in the state and also in the bottom 10% in the country. Nationally it is number 16,468 out of 17,680.
As I’ve written about before, only about 25% of the students who start Success Academy as Kindergarteners end up graduating from the school in 12th grade. More amazing is that only about half of the students who make it to 9th grade also stay to graduate from there in the 12th grade. And among those who do graduate, at least 25% of those take five years to graduate. So this 75% graduation rate is somewhat misleading if you think it meant that the students drop out since the other 25% likely graduate the next year.
Success Academy explains that this is a feature of the school. In their family handbook they explain that they ‘holdover’ students who they think need to repeat a grade and they also ‘skip’ students (skip a grade) who they think are advanced. You would think that most of the holdovers would happen before 9th grade and that once a student completes 9 years (or 10) of school there that they should be in pretty good shape to do the last four years without needing to be a ‘holdover’ either again or for the first time.
But it seems that Success Academy often has students take the fifth year of high school after they have finished 12th grade. On their site they describe it as ‘a fifth year of high school.’
Reading into this explanation there are some things I notice. One is that some ‘previously skipped’ students get eventually left back which must be a kind of strange thing for them. Also notice that one of the benefits of the fifth year of high school is that those fifth year students can now take AP courses. In other words, the 75% four year graduation is directly related to their 100% college readiness index. So if they were not to have the 5th year of high school maybe their 75% four year graduation rate would turn into a near 100% four year graduation rate but their college readiness index might go from 100% to 75% and since the readiness index is 30% of the ranking and the graduation rate is just 10% of the ranking, that change would move the school way down on the overall ranking.
My feeling is that this fifth year of high school, like most things that Success Academy does, is something that benefits the organization more than it benefits the kids. It helps the school get 100% of their students into colleges, it helps the school get some of those students into better colleges than they might have gotten into if they didn’t do that ‘fifth year of high school.’ And, in this case, those extra AP tests help them inflate their position on the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Over the past 11 years, since I entered the education reform debate on social media, I have had a lot of ‘debate opponents.’ The first was actually business tycoon Whitney Tilson, but others have come and gone, they are a blur to me. Joel Klein, John White, Cami Anderson, the list goes on. There was once even a TFA communications director named Juice Fong, if I remember correctly. Generally these opponents run out of steam or interest and they fade away. The thing that causes them to run out of energy is also the reason that I’ve been able to basically destroy them in all the debates — they are not fully invested in their cause the way I am.
One aspect of Twitter that is hard to avoid is ‘trolling,’ which is when someone responds to a tweet with some kind of pointed comment. It is a bit of an art form to do this sometimes in 140 characters, the ‘classic’ Twitter limit. I have actually done my share of trolling, sometimes I can’t resist. It’s just part of the medium. And if you can dish it out you should be able to take it in, so I expect to get trolled sometimes myself. In a strange way, it’s a kind of complement when you get trolled since it means that you are perceived as somehow important enough to attack.
Of all the Twitter opponents I have ever sparred with, there is no doubt that the relationship that had the most energy in it was my experience with Chris ‘Citizen’ Stewart. Now I know that many of my blog readers have a very negative impression of him, and maybe by now you’re blocked him on Twitter and maybe he has blocked you too.
Chris Stewart is a parent of five children. He was an elected school board member in Minnesota. Over the years he has been a blogger, a podcaster, and, yes, a Twitter troll. I don’t remember when I first interacted with him, but it was likely around 2015 during the height of the ed reform movement. At that time, the influence of Waiting For Superman and rock star reformers like Michelle Rhee caused an anti-teacher’s union, pro charter, mania. I joined in on the ed reform skeptic side and helped use data to combat ed reform propaganda. So Chris would sometimes comment on my Tweets and we would go back and forth. Back in those days I found it fun to do the Twitter debates though sometimes things would get personal. I did try to be careful what I would say, you can go through the archives and check if you want, I never deleted any of my Tweets. Though I sometimes did not like his style on Twitter, I had a sense that unlike the Whitney Tilsons and the Joel Kleins, Chris Stewart’s passion for what he was doing stemmed from a genuine place. I felt like maybe he was naive because he wanted to believe some of the ed reform propaganda, but it wasn’t because he had to be right and everyone else had to be wrong but because he truly wanted education to improve in this country, particularly for Black children.
Though the education wars continue on so many fronts, my area of expertise — using data to combat charter school propaganda — isn’t needed as much as it used to be so you may have noticed that I don’t blog as often as I used to and I haven’t been involved in a lot of Twitter fights either. It’s actually nice to not have ‘nemeses’ that I have to worry about challenging my tweets.
But I’m still a public school advocate and public school teacher advocate and as part of that, I’m going to the NPE conference in October and participating in a few panel discussions. One of them is about how the ed reform debate has changed and what the new sorts of arguments and messages might be coming from the reformers. So a few weeks ago I listened to a few episodes of Chris Stewart’s new podcast and was pleasantly surprised by what I had heard. In the past year and a half, it seems, Chris Stewart has evolved in his thinking. And I know some people who have endured some Stewart barbs on Twitter are not going to buy it, but I listened to these podcasts and from my perspective I was hearing thoughtful nuanced analysis of big education issues. And the cohost Ravi Gupta, who I had not known much about before, is also someone who sounded reasonable to me even though he once was in charge of a ‘no-excuses’ charter chain in Tennessee about 10 years ago. So I listened and wrote up a positive review, which included a correction about something inaccurate they said about me, personally.
A few days after I posted the review, Chris Stewart reached out to me to invite me to be a guest on the podcast. A few years ago he had invited me on another podcast but I did not really trust him at that time. But this time, my gut told me that ‘yes’ I want to do this. So I did.
I was pretty nervous, like maybe this was a trap and it was going to be two against one and maybe they had found some things I have written or Tweeted and were going to take them out of context, I didn’t know what was going to happen. But we talked for almost an hour and their team edited it into a very accurate 40 minutes of what we talked about and the tone and sentiment of why it was important for us to do this. The two hosts were very welcoming to me and treated me like a valued guest. I’m pretty happy with the way it came out. I did not ‘win’ all the points I might have wanted to if this were a few years ago. Maybe not needing to prove I’m so correct or so smart is good for my blood pressure anyway.
So while this was a good thing for me to do, and I think for Chris Stewart also, I’m not certain that it translated into riveting podcast entertainment. I hope it did. You’ll have to judge for yourself. You can listen to it here. It is also on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify.
Maybe some people will think that I’ve ‘sold out’ and was fraternizing with ‘the enemy’ and by ending the feud I’ve somehow given up the fight. Don’t worry about that. There are still plenty of fights to be fought, like what’s going on in Houston with the state takeover and there are still crazy ed research reports that convert the 50th vs the 51st percentile into so many ‘days of learning’ or even ‘weeks of learning’ and I’ll be around to examine the issues and interpret the numbers when needed just like before.
As far as other former Twitter opponents, this does not indicate I’m doing a blanket reconciliation with all of them, so don’t get any ideas Campbell Brown.
Teach For America’s teacher training has always been the weakest spot of an organization that has no shortage of weak spots.
Ask any teacher what the most useful part of their training was and they will tell you that it was their student teaching experience. You can read about and discuss the theory of teaching and about how what students do and don’t respond to, but until you are standing in front of an actual class, it is all just theory.
Back in the early 1990s when TFA was a new organization, they had the sense to know the value of student teaching so in the seven weeks of training, they tried to make it so each teacher got to do five weeks of student teaching for three hours a day, a total of 75 hours of student teaching. Yes, this wasn’t enough, but it was at least a good faith effort to maximize the institute time.
When TFA nearly ran out of money in the mid 1990s they moved the institute from Los Angeles to Houston. In Los Angeles there was year round schooling so there were many opportunities to do student teaching in an actual school. But in Houston all they could do is the limited enrollment summer schools. The institute was shortened, I think to five weeks, so there were just four weeks of student teaching. To make matters worse, there were so few students at these summer schools that instead of trainees getting their own class, you would have four teachers teaching a class, sometimes of about 12 students. Each corps member would get only one fourth of the time to be the ‘lead teacher’ so the number of hours as lead teacher was reduced from 75 in the early 1990s to then about 15 hours (4 weeks=20 days, 20 days * 3 hours = 60 hours, 60 hours / 4 = 15 hours). And this is how it was from about 1994 until 2019, so for 25 years. I was annoyed by this reduction of student teaching and spoke up about this a lot over the years.
And the organization has adjusted its training and onboarding process. TFA spokesperson Natalie Laukitis said in an email that corps members now receive three weeks of virtual training focused on teaching content, classroom management, and how to create an equitable and inclusive learning environment. Then, corps members undergo at least three weeks of practicum, in which they work directly with students under the supervision of a TFA employee.
Also ironic that TFA has adopted a hybrid training model where three weeks of the institute is done virtually. Especially with all the ‘learning loss’ hysteria as a result of pandemic remote school, you would think that TFA would want to avoid virtual training as much as possible.
When TFA corps members only get 11.25 hours of student teaching, their chances of being effective teachers is quite low. And when a corps member is an ineffective teacher, there are two main categories of people who suffer. The students of that corps members are complete innocent bystanders in this dynamic. They have to suffer through a teacher who does not know how to properly manage a class. But the other one who suffers is the TFA corps member themselves. They are the ones who will go through the trauma and the guilt of failure and the regret of trusting that TFA cared enough about them and about their students to at least attempt to help them prepare to be in charge of the learning for dozens, if not hundreds, of children.
One thing I wonder is if TFA is not, in some way, violating the contracts they signed with school districts who they provide corps members. In some of those district, they pay TFA a hefty finders fee for the privilege of hiring untrained teachers who only have about an 80% chance of making it through the first year and a much lower chance of having a positive impact on their students.
With around 200,000 students, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the 8th largest school district in the United States. For years there was talk about the state possibly taking over the district and this finally happened on June 1, 2023. The board was fired and replaced by Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointees. Mike Miles, who founded a charter school network called Third Future Schools and was previously the head of Dallas Schools for three years, was hired as the new HISD superintendent. While most people new to a job like this would take some time to get the ‘lay of the land,’ Miles instantly proposed some radical, and in my estimation, terrible, reforms which I will outline in this post.
He identified the three lowest performing high schools in HISD: Wheatley, Kashmere, and North Forest. Those three schools together with the 26 middle and elementary schools that feed into those high schools were to become part of a new ‘New Education System’ known as NES. This NES is the latest ‘turnaround’ district. Over the past 20 years there have been several of these, the most prominent are the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2003 and the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee, created in 2011 with Race To The Top money. There was also Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA) in 2011 as well as a few more that have popped up around the country. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful takeover of this sort in the history of this country. The EAA has been shut down, the RSD has been merged back into the New Orleans school system and the ASD has floundered, never having any success at all in improving the test scores of the schools it took over. It is funny/sad to see this hopeful panel discussion by the leaders of these districts before it was known how badly they would fail. (I’ve written a lot about the ASD, but here is something I wrote summarizing the history of these turnaround efforts.)
These turnaround efforts sometimes have school closures or staffs at schools having to reapply for their jobs and often have the schools converted into charters. For the HISD NES model, the schools are not getting taken over by charters but teachers do have to reapply for their jobs. Teachers at these schools will get raises and opportunities for bonuses with test score based merit pay. Other changes that will happen at these 29 schools are a restructuring of the teacher role where the teacher is like a ‘surgeon’ doing the most important part of the job while other tasks like grading, lesson planning, and discipline are done by others. Also, you may have read about elsewhere, libraries at these schools are converted into discipline centers where students are sent to watch a live streamed version of the lesson on a computer screen.
The reason that no turnaround effort like this has ever worked is that it is based on faulty assumptions about what the cause of the low test scores are at those schools so any solution based on those assumptions is doomed to fail. It is like trying to treat a broken leg by giving a patient a complete blood transfusion.
As someone who has been teaching since 1991 – and my first four years were in HISD actually, looking at the list of changes makes me shudder. Anyone who ever taught can see how most of these changes will make the schools worse but I want to summarize some of them here.
All teachers have to reapply for their jobs – When students come back and learn that many of their favorite teachers were not hired back, this can be very traumatic. There is no guarantee that the teachers who replace those who weren’t hired back, even if those teachers have been successful at a different school, will necessarily be a good fit at this school. This uncertain improvement coupled with guaranteed disruption is a pretty big risk. Why not first see how the current staff does with these new supports?
Discipline handled by administrators – In every school the most competent teachers handle their own discipline problems and at these schools it will be no different. When the teacher, building on the relationships they formed with the student and the families, handles discipline in class it is a lot more effective. When administrators do the discipline, it involves a student having to leave the class and fall behind. So in a way this is like every school where the administrator handling discipline is the last resort. But I think they are implying that the administrators are going to be so tough on the students, sending them to a detention center (in the room that used to be the school library) to watch the lesson on a live feed, so the discipline will be so much more efficient that teachers will choose to go right to that rather than ‘waste time’ doing discipline by building relationships with the students. So when the students are all in the former library watching a lesson on a video that they were struggling to concentrate on in the actual classroom, they will have even more trouble watching it on the video where they can’t even ask questions if they have them. These detention centers will surely be places where students suffer and don’t learn much and I just don’t see this model working. It will depend on whether or not teachers really believe that they don’t have to deal with discipline anymore since they can just send the kids out right away as it is no longer their jobs to do the discipline. If that is the case, those former libraries could get really full really quickly and they might have to find another room, maybe the band or art room, to convert to an overflow room.
Lesson plans and materials provided by curriculum developers – It sounds like teachers at these schools will be mandated to follow scripted lessons and pacing schedules. It is so unlikely that these scripted lessons will be good enough and the pacing schedule so perfect for all classes. There are times where a concept takes more time than you thought it would and especially if the next topic builds on that one, you cannot just go on until you finish the first topic. If you are forced to stay at a pace produced by someone who does not know your classes, it can be a very miserable experience for students and for the teacher. Creating your own lessons based on standards maybe, is one of the most important parts of teaching. There is no way a scripted lesson can be as good as a teacher made lesson tailored specifically to their student. I wonder how much flexibility teachers will have in adapting the lessons, at least, to make them more appropriate for their students. In my experience, bad lesson plans lead to discipline problems. And even if administrators are handling those discipline problems, it still is frustrating if you are forced to use bad lesson plans that are almost guaranteed to result in this.
Differentiated assignments copies made by support personnel – Yes it would be nice to have someone make copies for me, but I’ve been at schools where the materials have to be submitted a week in advance and teachers cannot touch the copy machine. I’d be concerned that with all the copies made by the support staff, the copy machines might be off limit and potentially if you want to make copies of something that is not part of the scripted curriculum, maybe you will not be able to.
Papers graded by support personnel – Grading is a time consuming process. And, yes, there are times where my ‘grading’ is little more than glancing and seeing if any effort was put into the assignment. But grading is also an integral part of the teaching process. It is where you see what the students produce and get to assess if they learned the concepts. With math, the end result of grading is not just what percent of the final answers did the student get correct, but what are the common errors that I’m seeing. So if someone else is being paid to do my grading for me and I don’t even have the time to do the grading myself because under this model maybe my day is filled with the other teacher responsibilities, then I’m not able to teach as effectively since I don’t have all the information I need. Logistically speaking, I can’t see how this would work. What is the ratio of people whose job it is to ‘grade’ to the number of teachers. I think that one ‘grader’ could probably only help about four teachers a day so this would be a pretty big staffing issue. And who would ever want to be a full time grader? The thing that makes grading a tolerable task for teachers is that the teacher is invested in the results. The teacher wants to know how the students are progressing and how the lessons were received. Just grading a stack of papers from kids that you don’t know anything about would be extremely tedious to do all day. Are these graders expected to write feedback on the papers? Or is the net result of the grading merely to get a numerical grade on the assignment. This is one of those that sounds good on paper but doesn’t work so well in reality. It’s like saying that assistants will eat lunch for the teachers.
Four periods of duty in a month (75 minutes each time) – Once a week doing something for the school seems reasonable, it happens in a lot of schools. But I’d want more details about what they have in mind, what if you are manning the library/discipline room?
$10,000 stipend – For sure they have to offer something to compensate for the frustration teachers are going to experience in these schools. I suspect that many of them will find that it wasn’t enough money to make it worth it.
$3,500 incentive pay – Usually these are based on some very opaque ‘Value Added’ algorithms leaving some of the most talented teachers not getting the bonuses. There is not evidence of this kind of merit pay having any impact on student achievement..
A bizarre recent development is that in addition to the 29 NES schools in the Wheatley, Kashmere, North Forest feeder pattern, a whopping 57 schools have volunteered to become NES ‘aligned’ schools (NESA) where they will get some of the financial incentives if they agree to follow the NES blueprint. I was sad to see the school I used to teach at, Furr High School, on this list, especially as it was so recently reformed by the XQ superschool program and was featured in the three network simulcast funded by Laurene Powell-Jobs. I am not sure why any school would voluntarily apply for this. I don’t know that those schools get the $10K stipends, probably not. Maybe they like the idea of other staff members planning lessons and grading papers, I can’t say what motivated them, but I expect that many of the staffs at those schools are going to regret this being foisted on them when they weren’t even targeted for it.
Turnaround efforts like this have never worked and they have even gone out of style in recent years since there have been so many failures. I would like to do some updates with anecdotes from actual teachers at these schools throughout this turnaround process. If you have any information, go to this form if you want me to write about it. I will keep your names anonymous and even which school you are at can be suppressed if you are worried that you will get in trouble for reporting this stuff to me.
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