Passing Notes

US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has plans to obtain a special federal appropriation to open a new urban middle school in Rhode Island. His office has examined the problem of low achievement in urban schools, and determined a significant part of the challenge to be our struggling middle schools. Bravo, we all agree. Further, his team looked around for successful middle school models, and discovered that KIPP is achieving tremendous results with its children. Again, completely agree.

So, armed with this knowledge, what would you do? If you were senator, you might use your position of influence as a leader of the Democratic party in Rhode Island to 1) overturn Rhode Island’s long-standing and ill-advised moratorium on public charter schools, or perhaps 2) revise the state’s charter law to provide equitable funding so that schools like KIPP could open here in a fair manner equal to the way we fund district schools, or perhaps 3) support and expand alternative certification programs like Teach for America, since successful schools like KIPP are founded and operated by TFA alumni (yet TFA is not allowed in RI), or perhaps 4) ensure that Rhode Island receive funding under the existing Federal Charter Schools Program, a $200 million per-year federal grant program that has been unavailable to Rhode Island participation due to our moratorium on new charters. Perhaps you would call up Dave Levin, founder of KIPP, or a similarly modeled “No Excuses” school such as Achievement First or Uncommon Schools, and say, “Hi, this is US Senator Whitehouse calling. I want to help you bring your school to the Ocean State. What can I do?”

Nope.

Instead, Senator Whitehouse plans to get some federal money, which his office would then issue in the form of a grant (or similar) to an urban district in Rhode Island that emerges as the “grant winner” through some sort of request for proposals (RFP) process, whereby districts would apply to the Senator’s office in a competition to determine which one would win the money to open the KIPP-modeled school. The program is being designed with the help of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, the union that represents teachers in most urban schools in our state. So, at the end of the day, you would get one new school, in an urban district, subject to the same type of collective bargaining agreement as the failing district schools already there, subject to the management of the same district bureaucracies already in place, and staffed by the same people.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

It would be good for kids if a KIPP middle school came to a Rhode Island urban community. Anyone who has visited a KIPP school, or something similar like Harlem’s Democracy Prep Charter School, can attest to the overwhelming success of these programs. We need something like this in Rhode Island.

But the approach taken by Mr. Whitehouse is one optimized to appease powerful adult special interests like the AFT rather than to maximize the potential benefit to kids of a no-excuses styled education program in our urban communities. If we thought his plan would result in a KIPP-like school coming to Rhode Island, we would support it. But most of the core guiding principles that make KIPP successful (such as giving school leadership the ability to hire, evaluate and if necessary, remove staff largely on the basis of quantifiable student achievement results; or the expectation that teachers work to provide kids with 70% more time in school) are anathema to Whitehouse’s partners in the project, as demonstrated by their consistent opposition to the use of student outcomes in evaluating teachers, or contracts like the AFT’s in Central Falls that define a secondary teacher’s workday as 4 hours and 12 minutes long (KIPP students are in school from breakfast through 5 pm).

If Mr. Whitehouse believes middle schools are the problem, and that programs like KIPP are the answer, the solution for the Senator is simple: call KIPP. Richard Barth is KIPP’s CEO and his telephone number is 415-874-7383, or email: rbarth at kipp.org. And while at it, call Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, too! A call to ask Speaker Murphy and Leader Fox to end the ban on new charter schools in Rhode Island wouldn’t hurt, either. In the meantime, voters should encourage Sen. Whitehouse to support the expansion of charter schools in Rhode Island by attracting the genuine article to our high-need districts, rather than an ill-conceived, watered-down knock-off.