We’re extremely busy preparing for Thursday night’s fundraiser for Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr. and completing some year-end projects that have piled up on the DFER desk. To help us keep things lively in the mean time, we’ve asked Siobhan Shiels to monitor the blog for a few days. Siobhan was a 2003 Teach for America corps member, and taught 8th grade English for four years at a traditional public school in New York City and a KIPP charter school in New Jersey. Please make her feel at home.
Newsday recently published a story about KIPP Bronx’s retreats to the Bahamas and Caribbean, which has been met with plenty of commentary. One op-ed in the NY Sun today rightly points out New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s perhaps questionable motives in scrutinizing the minutia of KIPP’s bookkeeping.
Not only does DiNapoli’s audit smack of anti-charter bias, it has led to a series of illogical conclusions, a few of which can be found on the NYC Educator website: http://nyceducator.com/.
Here’s one particularly amusing quote:
Apparently the KIPP Academy Charter School in the Bronx, supported by free-market proponents who want to privatize public education in order to bring the efficiencies of the free market to the public education sphere, have taken the whole free enterprise thing to heart and are running the school with “Enron-style accounting.”
Concluding that KIPP Bronx’s leadership makes poor ethical choices because their record-keeping has been less than pristine is faulty, but not as outrageous as this blogger’s attempt to denounce the free-market nature of charter schools by calling their donors “poor suckers.”
KIPP Bronx’s leadership is doing precisely what it takes to counter that old pedagogical imperative (those who can’t, teach). Businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on relationship-building, recruitment, and retention. They throw extravagant holiday parties. They dangle attractive signing and year-end bonuses. They wine and dine new talent. Simply put, the corporate strategy of providing incentive to those you want to attract and keep should be applied to teachers, too. Recruitment and retention strategies should be no different in education.
Study after study shows that the single most important factor in closing the achievement gaps is good teachers. So if KIPP is able to hire and keep teachers who are committed to constant improvement – which I’d wager was the subject of most conversations in the Bahamas – then providing opportunities like 5 days of professional development is precisely what they should be doing.
Another NYC Educator blogger writes,
….when you treat teachers and kids like dogs all year, they need a break. What–the kids didn’t get one? Too bad for them. Well, if they’re gonna grow up to work 200 hours a week with few benefits and no job protection, you can’t train them too early, can you?…My kid goes to a public school where they don’t need to work her or her teachers to death.”
Is that because the students arrive already on grade level? If so, I’m glad for the teachers at your school. I’m glad for the students, too. But when kids have been underserved by the public education system (read: bad teachers), then a little hard work is needed from everyone involved to catch them up.
And no, KIPP teachers don’t have job security. That is, they are not protected if they do a crumby job. Job security is teaching well. So to that blogger, I say this: don’t boohoo KIPP teachers’ lack of a contract – if they wanted to, they could work under a collective bargaining agreement at a traditional public school (in fact, many did before coming to KIPP…and hardly any return after working at KIPP).
Superb teachers (like Frank Corcoran, of KIPP Bronx) could work on Wall Street. They could double, triple, or quadruple their salaries. But they choose to work with like-minded individuals who are committed to true education reform and closing the achievement gap.
Sure, it can be tiring. But don’t jump to the conclusion that just because it is, KIPP leadership doesn’t care about their teachers. If that were the case, their professional development could have taken place in the school cafeteria, like it did when I worked in a New York City public school.