More Grit Musings: KIPP Through College
Posted: January 31st, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 15 Comments »
You’ll like this Ed Next story out today by my friend Robert Pondiscio. Captures the whole “College readiness” thing pretty well.
There is also at least a bit of cognitive dissonance that must be acknowledged: if KIPP and others are successful in turning out academically prepared, resilient, and optimistic graduates, shouldn’t they need less support, not more, on college campuses? If students need an army of college advisors and KIPP staff to act in loco helicopter parentis, just how gritty can they be?
(Richard) Barth sees no disconnect. If KIPP kids get “X” support on their journeys to and through college, he says, “middle-class kids get 50X,” much of it simply baked into their lives in the form of educated parents who are not intimidated by college and financial aid applications. College tours, SAT test-prep help, and tutors? Been there, done that. There are siblings, relatives, and even consultants to advise kids on where to apply and what classes to take. The safety net is deep and broad. Perhaps most importantly, there is a baseline expectation among the children of the well-off and well-educated: they grew up simply assuming they would go to college. Middle-class kids, says Barth, get all this “without consciousness of it. It just gets done.”
Emphasis mine. Three reactions.
1. Collaboration
At Match we’ve learned a lot communicating with the other charter school networks, as well as scholars who’ve studied college success for all types of populations. It’s exciting! A whole bunch of thorny questions, but as college completion data becomes more transparent, we’ll make headway together.
2. Extraneous thought
I’ve been pondering for awhile: the ed reform discussion frequently mis-describes what a “middle class” parent is like.
I remember Angela Duckworth a few weeks ago cracking a joke along the lines of “A kid twirls in the kitchen, and we sign her up for dance class…” and I smiled b/c that had just unfolded with our 2-year-old. But that’s not typical for an American. The typical education pundit, reporter, or charter school leader is urbane, hyper-educated, and highly atypical for an American middle class parent. The median American middle class parent does not visit a lot of museums in early childhood, nor drive their young kid to lots of private lessons; for older median kids, no SAT or ACT tutor, no college admissions consultant, etc.
But this is a small point about the species of trees in the forest; the forest is that middle-class American kids have many hidden advantages which affect college success.
3. Test scores, college success, life success
The typical charter school does not have high growth on state tests. I repeat that a lot because I don’t think charters have delivered enough on quality.
But there are some charters where kids consistently do make HUGE gains on state tests. A new Stanford study yesterday singled out Uncommon and KIPP precisely for this phenomenon. The response of some charter critics is to say even these handful of charter schools are bad, and one reason is because they’ve narrowly “taught to the test.”
One contradiction here is that, for the most part, narrowly teaching to the test does not raise test scores! Which charter critics often acknowledge in other discussions. That is, if it were true that test prep raised scores, and many traditional public schools and many of the so-so charter schools do a lot of test prep, then we’d expect to see their scores race upward, not just those of students at schools like Uncommon. But that does not happen.
A new wave of scholarship will track charter school lottery losers and winners. Will it show that test score gains do predict good “life things” to follow?
That is, we’ll know empirically whether, in fact, kids who attend these charters with unusually high improvement as measured by state tests grow up to have other things that we all value: higher college graduation rates, higher employment, higher lifetime income, higher civic participation, and fewer “bad things.” I predict: yes.
Read Pondiscio’s whole thing. It’s good.
Thanks for noting that the typical middle class family doesn’t provide extensive “curating” of their kids. What they do provide, mostly, is a stable home environment and an (at least somewhat) future orientation. This topic of how to help disadvantaged kids in going to (and completing) college is a very important one. Some educators seem to think that unlimited hand-holding and nudging is an OK strategy; I can see that some of that is needed (I have friends whose kids have been helped by such programs). But at some point what we want for kids is to be their own hand-holders and nudgers; if we provide too much of that right through the college years, kids emerge as not-fully-adults. After all, plenty of middle class kids try college and drop out — that is an accepted pattern in our world and it pretty much has to be if we presume that all HS grads will enroll in college. Charter schools have to be ready for this to happen to some of their grads too, as long as they retain an exclusive focus on 4-year college and don’t encourage 2-year or technical options after HS.
Hi EB,
Yep, we’ve wondered about the 2-year community colleges too. That is
a. Enroll in community college, save a ton of dough, if you complete 2 year degree that by itself has value, and in MA they’ll automatically allow you to transfer to a 4 year state school with GPA decent.
I.e., maybe a better way to simply pursue a 4-year degree, with backup plan built in at the 2 year mark.
b. However, fear is the culture at the community college….so few complete the degree on average, does that wash over a Match alum who, if she’d simply attended state college in the first place, would have persisted?
Could you link to the Stanford study? Is this related to CREDO?
Michael, same dynamics apply in Illinois. I think that, despite the money saved, for students who really show academic drive the 4-year college is better if only because of better completion rates (although I’d like to see a study that matched students at entry and compared completion rates; 4-years have high dropout rates for disadvantaged kids that are hidden by their overall higher grad rates). But for students who will do the academics when they’re closely monitored but don’t seem to truly buy into them (you’ve seen these kids; we all have; there are plenty in the middle class too) I think a technical 2-year program should be looked at very hard.
I think this is the most interesting quote…
“What we’ve found with the ‘whatever it takes’ or ‘no excuses’ mentality is that it was very teacher-driven and less student-driven,” says Kametz, acknowledging this is a controversial line of thought in his own halls. A typical No Excuses approach might involve giving demerits or detention for missed assignments or turning in work that’s not “neat and complete.” Kamentz questions whether this tough-love approach helps create the self-advocacy in students they will need to be successful in college. “It’s the largest gaping hole with our kids in college,” he says. “They will constantly say, ‘You structured my life so much that I had to do very little thinking and structuring myself.’”
“Academic preparation is absolutely foundational,” says Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of Blackstone Valley Prep in Cumberland, Rhode Island. “But what education looks like, to be truly prepared for college, probably is not the routinized learning that makes many of these schools, including us, really successful on standardized tests. I don’t think that’s the academic rigor that any of us want for college prep. I think it’s much deeper, much bigger,” he says.
…because it gets at what I think is the next big issue for hard-driving, hard-achieving charter schools: there is some dissonance between “winning the test” and the issue of long-term academic success. And it comes from the transfer (or lack thereof) of putting the hard work and drive on kids, instead of on ourselves (working 80+ hours a week, tutoring on weekends, and hours and hours after-school, etc.)
For those of us who have been around longer and have greater perspective on the field, our schools and the trajectories of our former students, it is easier to find balance between short and long-term gains. For newer teachers who need to prove themselves on the most obvious here and now metric (interim and year-end state testing), it may be harder to prioritize the long-term. Not out of malice or ill-will, but because of “first things first.” (I need to get these kids to pass this test; I need to prove that I taught them something). The first priority needs to be content for the newbie teacher (well, after management). For one, it’s more obvious and it’s frankly easier to do. Putting ownership of learning on kids is a black-belt move…
And I don’t think that No Excuses schools are all or even mostly test-prep to get those results, but I do think there could be more conceptual teaching (and Brooke, I think, is a leader in this realm). But more importantly, I think the question, as I’ve written here before, is how to manage the scaffolding of support and independence. “Whatever it takes” I think works for the short-term, but perhaps not as much for the long-term.
How do we transfer the drive and urgency we have for our kids to the kids themselves?
1. Dylan, yes, CREDO.
2. Paul, 3 thoughts.
a. The big U of Chicago review of “drive and urgency” showed that while not entirely static, these personality traits are very very hard to move.
b. I agree, getting it just right is black belt move. How many black belts are out there?
Many teachers I know in schools that specifically dialed back on “pushing kids” report this: a few kids found independence, but much more commonly kids did less.
School was forced to choose b/w lowering academic standards or having more kids fail for the year.
c. There’s external phenomenon that affects charter school choices on how much to “let kids become independent, even if it means failure.”
It’s that district schools tend to automatically promote kids who fail in a charter.
Our most typical departure has long been a 10th grader who didn’t meet teacher standards, aced MCAS, and the district school offered an automatic ticket to 11th grade. While district officials quietly apologize for essentially attracting our students with the offer of the low bar, critics seize on any transfer to argue just the opposite — that we pushed out a kid, rather than the reality, which is that kid would have stayed if district didn’t offer automatic promotion to a kid our teachers say failed for the year.
What it means for a grade level team of teachers: if you dial back support, and a kid fails, he is likely to accept this backhanded offer of “free promotion” in another school.
Mike,
Can you link to the “big U of C” study of dive and urgency. Wonder if this contradicts the Tough-Duckworth-Seligman meme that “we know what to do”
thanks
Hi Matt,
The link is here.
No, it builds on Duckworth-Seligman, doesn’t argue with it. That is, Duckworth-Seligman would agree that grit has not historically been a particularly malleable trait.
To the best of my knowledge, and I saw Duckworth speak 2 weeks ago, she does not claim “we know what to do.” Instead, I think she offers — as does the U Chi paper — that we have some promising ideas on what to do.
In that way, it mirrors my views on teacher prep. Empirically, teachers have not been particularly trainable. I think while acknowledging that the field has struggled here, there are some promising ideas on what to do.
Well, doesn’t it seem that the whole goal of what we all do is to take the black belt moves and spread them to the masses?
I think the challenge that we all (charter schools, district schools, ed schools [the research kind and the teacher prep kind], etc.) need to take up if we are to see change in this realm is to figure out how to spread out the change over all the years the kids are in school. I think it needs to be the imperative of schools that have figured out how to get kids to achieve on MCAS to figure out how to gradually (over many years) help kids shift their motivation from teacher/parent driven to kid driven.
Left this comment on Robert’s piece, thought I’d share it here too:
Robert, thanks for the thoughtful article which along with the NYT article about the three students from Galveston just before Christmas is one of the best pieces I’ve seen on the issue of college completion for low-income students recently.
What strikes me in following this topic is that people tend to assume no structural change. We’re talking about a problem that is deeply structural on both the demand and supply sides of the market without addressing the structure.
Like Mike G., I really hope that individual schools can improve students’ non-cognitive skills in big ways, but we don’t really know yet. And even if we succeed, the deck is still stacked against them — they just have a somewhat better chance of competing with the stacked deck and overcoming setbacks.
On the demand side, in addition to thinking about how we prepare individual students, we need to be thinking about two kinds of structural change (only the first of which is mentioned in the article):
1) Clustering students at the subset of colleges that do a better job of getting students to graduation. Posse does this, and some colleges (like F&M) and school networks (like KIPP) are trying to build on this strategy deliberately, but it needs to be more widely and aggressively pursued
2) Aggregating ‘organizational’ demand – rather than each KIPP or YES Prep building its own ‘get through college’ machinery and negotiating individual partnerships with colleges like F&M, the schools (esp. networks/districts) that are producing large numbers of talented low-income students should be aggregating their ‘purchasing power’ by creating a consortium that exerts its leverage on colleges. This kind of consortium could get more colleges to take the kinds of steps that F&M has by telling them that it will encourage its member schools’ students to consider a shortlist that includes only colleges who do the right kinds of things. This kind of consortium could also provide some kinds of student support to member schools’ alumni during college, rather than having all schools build their own alumni support functions.
Maybe even more importantly, we need the kind of entrepreneurship and new school creation on the supply side that we’re seeing in the K12 world with charter schools, innovation/pilot schools, etc. We already have 4500 colleges but very few of them are designed (cost, support structures, flexibility of schedule, etc.) with low-income students’ needs in mind. There are a tiny number of examples of this kind of from-scratch college startup (eg, Portmont College) but we need a lot more to shake up the system.
When the system is screwing students, let’s look to the system as much as the students.
You’d think that the revelation that the KIPP kids’ SAT scores are dismal, relative to their goals, would get some news. RP compares them to the overall average, but the overall average includes black and Hispanic kids. The goal was to close the achievement gap, and it’s clear that KIPP and YES and the rest aren’t doing anything approaching that. Their scores are still much nearer the black/Hispanic mean than white or Asian.
Meanwhile, they are pushing top flight colleges to take their kids? Then they’re wondering if the kids don’t have enough “grit”, when in fact, it’s pretty clear the kids don’t have the academic ability.
Cal,
At my school, our kids are tops on MCAS but get their rear ends handed to them on SSATs…when you look at the “SSAT percentile.” Against the nation as a group, they often project in the 85th percentile and above.
It’s a different kind of test – timed, more strategy, etc. However, it also reveals our kids are behind in vocabulary (which starts at from day 1 at home) and the ability to read challenging text quickly. It doesn’t mean that our kids can’t read. We’re working on it, but I think we feel confident that our kids are getting more and more prepared for college each year.
Vocab doesn’t really start at home; it’s a function of cognitive ability (pace E.D. Hirsch). When you say your kids are “tops” on the MCAS, are you saying that the average score of African Americans or Hispanics is equal to the average of whites and Asians, or that you have similar percentages of kids scoring proficient, advanced, whatever? If the former, I don’t believe it’s ever occurred without substantial selection bias in elementary school (creaming, skimming, etc), and never occurred in high school.
If the latter, that’s still an achievement, but it would explain the gap in SSAT scores, which only operate on scores, not categories.
I’m not saying that the kids aren’t prepared for college (an average SAT score of 550 per section will do), but rather that KIPP and others are touted as having “succeeded” in closing the achievement gap because they did so in elementary/middle school. But there’s no evidence that KIPP has done that at the high school leve, even given the selection bias.
If we abandon the notion of closing the achievement gap, then we can still prepare the strongest kids for college.
If low-SES kids get through college by dint of academic preparedness, grit, or some combination of both and take degrees, we might not say the “achievement gap” has been closed, if their standardized tests scores are still lower. But they will have closed the “attainment gap,” which perhaps leads to a certain amount of upward mobility. If you’re playing the long game and see upward mobility as the real endgame of education (I certainly do), then it’s exactly the outcome we want.
Can we do that for EVERY kid? Dunno. I’ve never lost a lot of sleep over that. Can we do it for more — even a LOT more. I have no doubt.
Cal, I have to disagree with you about vocab. My 3 year old uses vocab that some of my 7th graders wouldn’t understand. And, they’ve been at our school since first grade and many of them are quite voracious in their reading.
In any case, at my school (K-8, 98% black and/or Latino, 80% low-SES), many of our grades are scoring at the highest level (somewhere between #1 and #10 in the state) in terms of proficient or advanced percentage on reading and math MCAS. By that measure, they are closing achievement gaps and surpassing performance with any subgroup you’d choose (white, asian, etc).
But I agree that it’s not enough.