KIPPing up with the Joneses?

Conor Clarke at TNR considers whether or not selection bias accounts for KIPP's impressive academic results. The allegation that KIPP and other high-performing charter schools "skim" off higher-performing students from the public schools is pretty much as old as the charter movement itself and a lot of evidence suggests it's far from accurate. But lately an interesting spin on this argument--the assertion that the now well-known success of KIPP and other high-flying charter networks has caught the attention of more engaged parents and resulted in more higher-performing kids applying to these schools--has been popping up in lots of places, and deserves some attention.

First, neither the original skimming allegation nor more recent concerns suggests that the "above average" kids these schools might be attracting aren't still disadvantaged, predominantly minority kids who are generally below grade level academically. We're not talking about affluent kids here. We're talking about kids who may be above the average for disadvantaged kids because they have parents who have slightly more cultural capital and are slightly more engaged in or savvy about their kids' education than the average disadvantaged urban parent. Like Ezra, I'm not sure that's something to get too upset about. Sure we might feel that kids with the least-engaged parents need intensive, high-quality KIPP-style schooling more than those with more engaged parents. But engaged low-income parents are making the effort to send their kids into schools like KIPP because they know many of the other educational alternatives available suck and often present real risks to their kids. Considering all the ways our economy and urban organization make to unnecessarily difficult for engaged, low-income urban parents to raise their kids well, shouldn't we be cheering anything that helps them out?

Schools like KIPP are never going to attract substantial numbers of middle-class or affluent applicants. Partly that's because of where KIPP schools choose to locate and the population of students they currently serve. But it's also a matter of what I call (probably somewhat inaccurately) "aesthetics." I know several education types (all middle-class or affluent professionals) who admire what KIPP does but admit that some aspects of KIPP--the level of disciplinary regimentation, the explicit teaching of visual tracking (sp?)--make them uncomfortable, and that they wouldn't choose to send their kids to a KIPP school. They know that KIPP works, but it's not really to their tastes. I think that's probably going to be the case for most middle-class parents. As Paul Tough wrote in the NYT Magazine, kids who attend KIPP need the kind of discipline and explicit teaching of cultural skills it provides because of differences in childrearing practices and attitudes between middle-class and low-income families. But because KIPP is designed specifically to serve the needs of kids whose families don't tend to practice a middle-class approach to childrearing, it's probably not going to appeal to (or necessarily be a good fit to the needs of) families that do practice middle-class childrearing behaviors.

Finally, imagine that we're not talking about KIPP or a charter school at all, but a run-of-the-mill public school, one which is serving its disadvantaged, minority students so well that middle-class and affluent non-minority families start trying to send their kids there. Would we see this as a problem? I think not. Instead, we'd see it as good evidence the school is delivering a high-quality education. We'd also probably be pleased to see greater economic and racial integration that many folks believe can contribute to improved outcomes for disadvantaged kids. So why would it be a problem if the same thing were occurring in a charter school?