Don’t like KIPP hours? Teach elsewhere…
That’s roughly the headline from this commentary posted on the Baltimore Sun’s site (thanks to Whitney Tilson for pointing this out). As my previous posting explained, the teachers union in Baltimore forced the successful KIPP school there — a school making a huge difference for hundreds of inner city Baltimore studens, especially boys — to cut back on teaching hours, a key element of the KIPP formula.
In my upcoming book (don’t neglect the pre-purchase link at the top of the page!) I track a boy through a year at a KIPP school in Washington. In calculating KIPP outcome data on boys, however, the Baltimore school was included.
Tags: kipp
July 25th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Two things. First, the law is the law, unions are unions, and labor law is labor law. The tradeoff that the commentator suggests is not very likely going to happen. Unions are not about to sanction, much less look for, volunteers to make less money per hour and help destroy the union. If the KIPP model requires the amount of hours the teachers have been putting in, and the local laws require KIPP schools to pay the per hour costs of union teachers, then the KIPP model is not really valid in that context. Money matters. Either the KIPP school needs more money to pay the teachers at the required legal rate or they have to change the model, which is what they are doing. The idea of having a large extra number of hours is a fairly reasonable idea, and seems to be producing a great deal of success, but why stop there? Why not have the students sleep over a couple of nights and have 12 hours of classes a day? That should be even more successful. Charter schools in general, in most places, manage to some extent because they are exempt from otherwise required local union contracts. In general, that is not a viable model. The regular schools could presumably do better if they weren’t bound by union contracts. If all the people involved truly want to change the rules under which schools and unions operate, then repeal labor law. We can go back to the days when miners were dying by the hundreds in the mines and Pinkerton agents were gunning down anyone involved with union organizing. Second, I can understand that you want to sell books, but it would be very helpful to the overall discussion to have that description of the life of a KIPP boy available now rather than wait until next year. Overall statistics give us an idea of what is working but, usually, not why. Case studies give insight into the why.