(From Albany Times, October 6th, 2010)
By Scott Waldman Staff Writer
ALBANY — Students file into the cafeteria in neat lines for a lunch of a sandwich on wheat bread, carrots and an orange. The building becomes quiet, almost eerily silent, as the children shuffle between classes and into their seats as soon as the teacher raises her hand into a closed fist.
By the numbers, KIPP Tech Valley Charter School is Albany’s best public school. Virtually every eighth-grader passed the 2009 English and math exams. The fifth-through-eighth-grade school sends graduates on full scholarships to some of the nation’s top boarding schools, as well as to the advanced classes at Albany High School. The minimum passing grade on an assignment is 70 percent.
Students like Harvey Robinson, 14, say KIPP makes them work like nowhere else.
“The teachers push us more than other schools,” he said. “They give us their phone numbers to call if we need help.”
Despite solid test results, critics point to a different number — an attrition rate of more than 50 percent — that they say is evidence the school hasn’t changed public education but is instead cherry-picking the best students and sending the rest back to the Albany district. Eleven KIPP students have returned to Albany schools since the end of the last school year, and the school does not enroll new seventh and eighth graders.
“The point is to educate every kid,” Albany school board President Dan Egan said. “When you set up a different funding system and different rules, it’s a diversion from what ought to be our main effort.”
KIPP Tech Valley founder Dustin Mitchell isn’t fazed by the political battle over charter schools that has raged for a decade in New York. He wants to talk results, which he tracks for every student every week. Through regular exams, he maintains, student learning is transformed into a series of data points to target improvement. Teachers, too, are measured by these results.
KIPP should have the best scores, Mitchell said, because students spend more time in the classroom than at any other schools in the area, public or private. On average, a KIPP student is in school for 600 more hours in a school year than other students, according to Mitchell. School starts at 7:30 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. and classes begin in August. On a recent week, students had school or activities on Saturday and Sunday.
“Nobody works the hours our staff works; we should be better,” Mitchell said.
KIPP Tech Valley is the type of school the Obama administration wants to see more of. In August, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $50 million to the KIPP Foundation, which has 99 charter schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia, to double the number of its schools over the next decade.
Last week, President Barack Obama said he wants to increase the school year for all American children, part of Washington’s initiative to infuse traditional public schools with some of the changes that charter schools adopted years ago.
For those who advocate charter schools as the way to close the achievement gap between white and minority students, the first two years of the Obama administration have been nothing short of a revolution.
The $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition brought significant reforms to many states, especially in New York, which raised its charter school cap from 200 to 460 and now includes student test scores in teacher evaluations. Groups like the Democrats for Education Reform are now infusing school board and state political races with cash, as teachers unions have done for decades. They are pushing for more change once considered unthinkable, including the end of teacher layoffs based on seniority.
A documentary now in theaters called “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” about struggling public districts has generated a buzz, including an entire episode onOprah Winfrey’s show. The movie, by the director of “An Inconvenient Truth,” portrays charter schools as a solution to a public system that leaves many minority students behind but does not explore the vast differences in charter school quality.
Albany’s KIPPsters, as the students are known, have a stream of incentives to strive toward as well — some 41 events and prizes this year alone, including pizza parties, movie nights and Amazon.com gift certificates. Discipline is enforced at the school, and students earn imaginary money in a paycheck system that allows them to participate in field trips.
Nationally, more than 85 percent of KIPP graduates have gone on to college, according to the Foundation. KIPP Tech Valley is billed as a college preparatory middle school, and university pennants adorn classrooms, hallways and even the restrooms. Students have earned field trips to Georgetown, New York and Boston universities in recent years.
Teachers, who are not in a union and typically earn about 15 percent more than their public school counterparts, have come from New York City, California and New Jersey to teach at KIPP on Northern Boulevard. Phuong Trinh, 27, left a public school job to teach history there, even though it meant longer hours, because of the opportunity to work in an innovative environment in which teachers have more freedom to try new approaches than they do in a typical public school. She also wanted a job where “it’s not about how long you’ve been there, it’s about what you’re going to put in.”
“If you’re going to change education, it’s a movement, it’s not just a job,” she added.
Mitchell admits that KIPP has to improve its attrition rate, though he claimed the number is somewhat skewed because the school is less likely to promote students who are not ready to move to the next grade level and that the school loses a number of students because they move. He said officials are unwilling to change their high expectations and don’t worry about whether that makes it possible to accurately compare the school with those in the Albany district. He said they are focused entirely on pushing the kids who want to be there toward college, including some who would be the first in their families to receive degrees.
“It’s a lot like an entrepreneurial business where you focus on the outcome,” KIPP Tech Valley board chairman John Reilly said. “Our mission is not egalitarianism; it’s about getting kids where they need to be.”
District administrators have resisted working with KIPP, claiming charter schools siphon much-needed funds from their buildings, making true reform of urban districts that much harder. Egan said the real work is to improve the public districts rather than promoting a small group of charters at the expense of the schools that educate a far greater percentage of America’s students.
“If we believe there are rules that should be changed, that makes schools better, then public schools should be able to do the same thing,” he said.
Reach Waldman at 454-5080 or at swaldman@timesunion.com