A few weeks ago there was some fantastic, in-depth reporting by Avi Wolfman-Arendt (WHYY) on Philadelphia’s KIPP schools that is particularly relevant for the current educational moment in Camden. Because in Camden, “no excuses” schools are in vogue. They were explicitly chosen through the political process as a way to try to improve the schools system.

That piece does a great job getting into the logic behind KIPP’s approach and “no excuses” more broadly: 

KIPP seemed both old school and radical. Kids learned through repetitive drilling and chants. School days lasted 10 hours. The school year began in mid-Summer. And if students stepped out of line — even a little — teachers came down hard.

Schools like KIPP would become known as “no excuses” charter schools. In time, this model would spread across the country.

And touched on what that meant day-to-day within the Philadelphia school: 

KIPP actually had chairs, but students had to earn them. Students had to behave. They had to follow the rules.

Students got paychecks every week based on their behavior. Finish your homework, help a classmate — you get something called a KIPP dollar. Talk out of turn, chew gum, leave your shirt untucked — lose a KIPP dollar.

Students who finished the week above a certain dollar threshold went to a party. At the end of the year, the well-behaved students went on a big, out-of-town trip.

But with the carrot came a stick, a punishment for students who didn’t earn the requisite KIPP dollars.

And if KIPP’s goal was to make sure those 90 students made it to and through college, that stick is very important to understand.

It was known as the Personal Improvement Plan. Everyone called it PIP.

If the flag on the mountain represented the goal, PIP was the footpath at the base. It was a punishment system designed to keep kids on the climb, to build the habits of a student who could prosper in life.

But it was also kind of extreme.

PIP students sat in a separate part of the classroom, in smaller, less comfortable chairs than everyone else. They had to write letters of apology based on whatever infractions got them on PIP — reminiscent of Bart Simpson standing at the chalkboard after school.

Students on PIP also had to wear a yellow shirt over their school uniforms. Lots of the students we interviewed had strong reactions to the memory of these shirts — they did not, apparently, smell good.

“Why are these kids sitting on crates with dirty yellow shirts? This is weird.” — Jayuana Bullard

“I might have had, you know, somebody’s shirt from the day before — who forgot to put deodorant on. We’re growing boys! Now I’m sitting here smelling musty. You know it was just a lot. It was mentally a lot.” — Jesse Oyola

“You can’t wear your KIPP t-shirt anymore because you were stripped of that right. You wasn’t a KIPPster, you’re a PIPster.” — Shakoor Sanders

“You couldn’t hide from it. You wore this bright yellow shirt. Sometimes there were stains on it. Sometimes they stunk, I’m not gonna lie.” — Zuleika Roman

PIP students couldn’t talk to other students for any non-academic reason — not in the hall, not in class, not at lunch. That particular punishment, Mannella said, was “like hell on earth for an 11-year-old.”

There’s a lot more to the article. It does a great job getting into both positive (“crazy, in a good way”) and negative stories of students’ experiences both before and after the school. It’s well worth reading the whole thing. 

But at a basic level, the “no excuses” model is built on what one student called behavior “against my human rights.” In a heartbreaking section, the article dives into this dynamic: 

He accepted the yellow shirt and, in time, came to see himself as “bad.”

“If anything it made me more angry with myself, with those around me and I kind of carried that stigma going forward,” Jesse said. “Because then I was just like, ‘Well I didn’t do good here so I’m not going to do good anywhere. It doesn’t matter what I do.’”

Jesse compared PIP to prison — even solitary confinement. He wasn’t the only former student to draw that comparison. Even some students who adored KIPP worried about the effect of its discipline system on classmates. They wondered: Does constant policing of small infractions begin to change how a student views him or herself?

Why does that matter in Camden? Because a key part of the Renaissance School expansion was to explicitly increase the number of seats in “no excuses” schools because of research that said they marginally raised test scores — something considered important because generally, charter schools perform no better than traditional public schools. KIPP, Mastery and Uncommon were explicitly picked because they had adopted this approach.

Of course, that was only part of the Renaissance School coalition. As I touch on in my piece “They’re not Building it for Us” there was also a part of the coalition that explicitly wanted to create new schools for those working at the hospital, or downtown, or at new companies to send their children to, something I witnessed first hand at a tour by the Cooper Foundation for Rutgers graduate students: 

He talked about nurses and doctors moving into the neighborhood, and mentioned that now there was a school for ‘your’ kids to go to if you moved to the neighborhood.

These two ideas, and indeed, the idea that “no excuses” schools are elite education, are often in tension. A few years ago, Avi Wolfman-Arednt wrote a piece that dove into Mastery’s struggle to move past the “no excuses” model: 

Two years ago Mastery ditched “no excuses” for a new approach it dubbed “Mastery 3.0.” Strict disciplinary policies gave way to restorative justice practices that focus on making amends. On the teaching side of the ledger, Mastery pivoted toward conceptual learning. It wasn’t enough anymore to teach students a formula. They needed to understand the underlying mathematics. 

In essence, Mastery wanted to emulate the type of learning environment a kid might find at a great private or suburban school. 

But the experiment didn’t work, and when test scores cratered, Mastery was forced to readopt many of the “no excuses” principles. 

Reconsideration of “no excuses” is happening across Camden, and indeed, across the country. Mastery has been all over the map with it (I’ve lost track of Mastery “3.0” or “2.5” or wherever the schools are now). KIPP has vastly different reputations in different cities. Some adhere strictly to the model, while others have adopted elements of restorative justice and deeper learning rather than drill-and-kill. I’ve heard some positive things (comparatively) about KIPP in Camden. Uncommon, to my knowledge, has kept truest to the “no excuses” model. 

In Camden, the stakes around “no excuses” are high. And that’s because they affect the system around them. We know from Philadelphia’s budget challenges that when dollars shift from the public system to the charter system it leaves the school district crippled. And the “no excuses” model has long depended on the ability to kick out students that don’t buy in. Talk to district teachers here, and you’ll hear buzz about how many students they absorb from these schools throughout the school year. 

The WHYY article gets into that as well, and I’ll leave you with its comments on attrition at that first KIPP school: 

Of the 90 students who showed up on the first day of school, ten were gone by mid-November. As the months went by, enrollment kept dropping. Mannella estimates the school lost 25 students in its first year.

Sometimes, a parent would say, ‘I’m sick of this intense school. It’s not working. I’m pulling my kid out.’ And Mannella wouldn’t fight them.

Other times, Mannella would sit the parents down and suggest the child leave.

“We started the school thinking, ‘KIPP is an opportunity, KIPP is a privilege,’” Mannella said. “And if students can’t thrive in this environment — and if they choose to leave or frankly if they just can’t get it right — I’m going to look at the mom and I’m gonna say, ‘Mom, it’s time to go.’”

It makes you wonder what’s happening with attrition in “no excuses” schools in Camden.

 

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