Tag: Charter Schools

Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig African Americans, Charter Schools

How does KIPP charter really treat parents?

A KIPP parent sent me a disturbing story today! I am more and more convinced that we need a national website like Yelp for charter schools, I was thinking we could call it Chelp.com. It would be a website where parents can do to get help when they run into the charter school buzz saws that I have blogged about often here on Cloaking Inequity. This is not my first tangle with or blog about KIPP Houston (See more posts here). I actually started Cloaking Inequity because of KIPP’s deceptive response to a  peer reviewed research study about charter attrition that we published in the Berkeley Review of Education.

Here is her story:

Mary Courtney has been trying to get basic Special Education services for her son at KIPP for three years. When her son did not receive the Special Education services he should have received by law, she advocated for her son. When KIPP would not provide the support her son needed, she found therapeutic support for her son on her own outside of school. And she continued to advocate for her son and other students with disabilities, filing complaints whenever KIPP regularly broke state and federal laws.

Originally a strong charter school advocate, even speaking at the State Capital seeking more charter funding, she became increasingly discouraged by the KIPP charter school chain. In 2017, When she found out that parents like her were charged hundreds of dollars per parent in school fees, she complained to the state of Texas which later required KIPP to stop charging these unallowable fees.

KIPP retaliated against her son, filing over thirty discipline referrals against him, hoping that the family would remove him from KIPP and their problem family would disappear. But her son liked the school and given his disabilities- cognitive delays, autism, ADHD and epilepsy- his mother was committed to providing as much stability as possible. So she kept her son at KIPP.

Two weeks ago on February 27, 2020, KIPP expelled her son from school for trumped up charges, in the process violating a long list of federal Special Education laws. This expulsion came after KIPP had filed two lawsuits against the family. Only one month before the expulsion, KIPP’s attorneys offered Mrs. Courtney $10,000 to leave the school.

Using unprincipled techniques ranging from lawsuits to bribery to expulsion, KIPP was more committed to getting rid of a Special Needs kid than serving his needs.

Mary Courtney and her family moved to Houston from Louisiana in 2013. While her family is low income, she has always been determined that her son will receive the education they need to be successful in life.

When Mary brought her son to KIPP in 2015, she had high hopes. At the time, she did not know that KIPP disproportionately  suspended  African  American  students. Even though its schools were only 33% African American, the out-of-school suspension rate was 60%, nearly twice that. In 2015, she also did not know that KIPP and charters like KIPP tended to “counsel” parents of children with special needs to return to their home school.

Her son was identified as a Special Education student in February 2017. The school started with the usual speech. The Special Education Director of KIPP Texas, Andrea Sampy, stated, “I’ve seen this before. Based on my experience, I’m looking at a child that is emotionally disturbed.” KIPP gave her son an “emotionally disturbed” label with no formal evaluation whatsoever.

Mrs. Courtney disagreed emphatically and asked for a formal outside evaluation of her son. Her son was identified with autism and expressive and receptive language delay. The child’s doctor also diagnosed him as having ADHD and epilepsy.

KIPP did not like this diagnosis that contradicted their informal assessment and they refused to pay. Mrs. Courtney won a due process lawsuit against the school because they delayed her son’s evaluation. Thus, KIPP was required to pay for the original evaluation.

However, the agreement reached in early 2018 allowed the school to re-evaluate her son. The school determined that her son qualified for services under the emotionally disturbed (ED) label, other health impairment (ADHD and epilepsy) and learning disability in written expression and math calculation. The autism, ADHD and epilepsy labels were determined by a medical doctor and Mrs. Courtney supported the diagnosis. She continued to disagree with the school’s emotionally disturbed label because it was not based on any formal diagnosis of outside evaluators, just the opinions of three staff members.

The only disability services her son consistently received the three years at KIPP was bus transportation to school. Her son has not consistently received many of the other services stipulated in his individual educational plan (IEP). During a 2019 investigation, “TEA found that social skills development have not been provided in accordance with the IEP (for her son).” This academic year, her son has not received counseling services 30 minutes per week nor has he received psychological services once per month as stipulated by his IEP. And he has not had consistent paraprofessional support for specialized instruction in mathematics and reading since the previous school year. A charter school like KIPP receives public funds and, as such, is required by law to provide Special Education services.

But it gets worse. Mrs. Courtney stated, “The more I advocated about his lack of services and how the ED label was incorrect; the more they began to give office referrals for discipline. Then they started suing me and trying to get me to leave the school.”

In April and Fall 2019, KIPP filed due process lawsuits against Mrs. Courtney to defend the appropriateness of their evaluation, specifically the emotionally disturbed label that Mrs. Courtney disputed. KIPP eventually withdrew both lawsuits, likely because they did not have a reasonable claim. Instead of providing services for her son, KIPP used discipline referrals and unnecessary protracted litigation over issues that should have been, as a matter of public policy, solved through mediation. Pure and simple, they filed lawsuits against the Courtney family to bully them into leaving KIPP.

Her son, is a helpful son, very soft-spoken and caring. While he got in some fights in elementary and middle school, it was a result of his autism and communication deficits rather than his disposition. Since KIPP did not provide any services at all for her son, Mrs. Courtney found an organization that provided free applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy two years ago. Since then, her son has learned strategies to manage his autism and has not gotten in any more fights.  He is truly a gentle giant but, unfortunately, because he is tall and large for his age and Black, some of his teachers judge him as intimidating.

On Valentine’s Day this past month, her son, an autistic student, and his new girlfriend got off the bus and went into the cafeteria. His previous ‘girlfriend’ with whom he had never kissed or even held hands was unhappy and insulted him. He moved to another part of the cafeteria using a strategy his ABA (applied behavior analysis) therapist had told him to manage his autism and responses. Later, after breakfast, his former ‘girlfriend’ yelled at him and he yelled back. Both cursed at each other. Then he started walking to class. The two students were sent to the main office, she tried to hit him and a teacher stopped her. She then punched a wall and the students waited in the office for the administrator.

The former “girlfriend’s” mother arrived and the school leader asked her son to come to the office and sit down. Her son said he was not comfortable going in the office without his mom. Mrs. Courtney arrived at the school and took her son home having been told by phone that her son was suspended for three days. When he returned to school, he was placed in in-school suspension and then he was expelled on February 27, 2020.

Federal law requires that the school must take into account a student’s disabilities when making a discipline referral. Students with autism have social and communication deficits, so his outburst is highly likely to be a manifestation of his disability. The school is required to hold a hearing called an manifestation determination and review (MDR) before a student can be expelled or have more than 10 days of suspension in a school year.

Her son is a child with autism, cognitive disabilities, ADHD and epilepsy. He never received services as required by law. His expulsion is a violation of the law and is retaliatory.

Charter schools like KIPP think they can violate parent’s due process rights like they did to Mary Courtney with impunity. It is time to hold charter schools accountable. They get public funds and should be publicly accountable for how they are used. They must be held accountable for what they are doing to her son.

Sincerely,

Mary Courtney

March 1, 2020

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For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charters click here.

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Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig Charter Schools, Wisdom

Going from Entertaining to Precise about RCT and #RIPKobeBryant

In 2018, I was invited to a mock trial entitled Public School System Charged with Fraud: Guilty or Not Guilty? about public education at Freedom Fest, a Libertarian conference that is held yearly in Las Vegas. Which basically says that if you have a conference in Vegas— I will say yes to just about any opportunity to speak. 🙂 I was asked by the Freedom Fest producers to add a little levity because the audience wouldn’t be very interested in hearing academics argue about effect sizes and other statistics. During this mock trial I brushed off questions about the so-called “gold standard” of research— Randomized Controlled Trials, or RCT.

The education reform trolling has been particularly intense the past few days on Twitter likely because of the release of Diane Ravitch’s new book Slaying Goliath. I hope to read it soon and post my review. Anyways, there is a video of me making the rounds on the internet from the Freedom Fest “trial” where I flippantly comment about RCT that is taken out of context because it does not describe the desired entertainment value of the event. I would like to mention we did hang the jury about the “fraud” of public education at a Libertarian event— which itself was entertaining. Anyways, I’d like to take this opportunity on my blog to be more precise about our thoughts about RCT and its role in school choice research.

Citation: Vasquez Heilig. J., Brewer, J. & Adamson, F. (2019). The politics of market-based school choice research: A comingling of ideology, methods and funding, In M. Berends, A. Primus and M. Springer (Eds.) Handbook of Research on School Choice, 2nd (pp. 335-350). New York, NY: Routledge.

I have taken this excerpt from our chapter in the Handbook on School Choice that I blogged about when it was published. You can the entire chapter here.

In the quest to determine if, and to what extent, a policy is effective, there remains the possibility that the types of questions, methods employed during research, and the funding of that research can be ideologically tainted. The first decade of the 21st century revved the quantitative and qualitative debate that has divided the social science community for decades. More precisely, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reified a commitment towards quantitative ‘objective’ scientism while relegating qualitative and contextual understandings to a subpar practice. The National Academy of Sciences held that,

Federal and state agencies should prioritize the use of evidence-based programs and promote the rigorous evaluation of prevention and promotion programs in a variety of settings in order to increase the knowledge base of what works, for whom, and under what conditions. (Boat & Warner, 2009, p. 371).

That is, educational research and social inquiry are to be approached in systematic experiential trials (often with the so-called “gold standard” of Randomized Controlled Trials, or RCT) that create the foundational for universality and generalizability. There has long been a push to assert RCT or the “gold standard” in research as the pièce de résistance in educational research as the most ideal setting as it represents “random assignment” to the treatment or control group and eliminates selection bias (Mosteller & Boruch, 2002).

For example, in the quest to determine whether school choice models such as vouchers “work,” researchers (largely funded and supported by ideological organizations such as EdChoice and the University of Arkansas— a point we take up below) have increasingly proposed the use of RCTs to compare variance of outcomes among students receiving the school choice treatment and those remaining in public schools (Abdulkadiroglu, Pathak, & Walters, 2015; Barnard, Frangakis, Hill, & Rubin, 2003; Bitler, Domina, Penner, & Hoynes, 2015; Chingos & Peterson, 2015; Cowen, 2008; EdChoice, 2017; Greene, 2001; Greene, Peterson, & Du, 1998; Howell & Peterson, 2002/2006; Jin, Barnard, & Rubin, 2010; Krueger & Zhu, 2004; Mills & Wolf, 2016; Rouse, 1998; Wolf et al., 2013). Though, despite the glaring possibility of bias developing as pro-charter organizations like EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation) and the University of Arkansas (heavily funded over the years by the Walton Family Foundation) promoting such research, there remains a considerable level of skepticism surrounding the unwavering power of RCTs in educational research (Lubienski & Brewer, 2016) and the elevation of quantitative over qualitative methods in general (Berliner, 2002).

In the age of hyper-accountability and assessment, policy makers have increasingly linked funding to the results of evaluations. Given the rampant existence of the “Protestant Work Ethic” dispositions outlined by Max Weber (1930) that has informed the myth of meritocracy, it has become commonsensical in our rhetoric and practice that one should be held accountable for the practices and monies to which they have been made responsible. In education this is manifested as students being held accountable for their grades, teachers for the production of good and better grades, administrators for the reduction in documented discipline problems, and school districts being expected to do more despite having less money. And if everyone is to be held accountable, everyone must be evaluated by test scores. In turn, these various outcomes serve as a guiding example— or exemplars— of “best practices,” or to the contrary, become negative examples. This myopic quest for certainty can be seen in school choice research that seek to ignore contextual factors in favor of generalizability across contexts.

Yet, while statistical inquiry can provide legitimate insight into some social phenomena, it stands little chance of drowning out the realities of contextual factors that are, to be sure, the most important factors in the development of lived realities and shared understandings.

The practical consequences of scientism in education are that it will institute a notion of the curriculum as “cookbook,” teaching and learning as “proven method” or “best practices,” research as “funded enterprise,” and educational inquiry as only “what works” (Baez & Boyles, 2009, pp. 51-52).

In sum, the quest for a-contextual certainty lies social inquiry that not only acknowledges context but also understands its powerful force in shaping outcomes. Given the political foundations and rationales of school choice, there remains an insatiable requirement to conduct experimental and non-experimental research that justifies school choice expansion. The expansion effort has required significant levels of funding to create a body of quantitative research and an appearance of a predominance of objective observation.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to also honor #24 and #8 Kobe Bryant. Sad, sad times for his family and fans. In 2009 I had my only opportunity to see Kobe play in person in Los Angeles, and he scored 40! on my Detroit Pistons. I’ll have to admit, I was a Kobe hater. He was just soooo good. Not as good as Jordan— which it pains me to say as a Pistons fan— but probably a clear #2 to the GOAT. Anyways, we can argue about that later.Screen Shot 2020-01-26 at 9.21.13 PM

Not only was Kobe a good basketball player, but he had some wisdom too.

RIP Kobe.

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For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charters click here.

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Twitter: @ProfessorJVH

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Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig Charter Schools, Wisdom

Wanted: Chapters About No Excuses Charters

Much has been written about “No Excuses” charter schools and their deleterious impacts on student of color (See for example Colonizing the Black Natives). Amber Kim is leading a groundbreaking new book project entitled,  Inexcusable: Contemporary Counter-Narratives that Expose the “New Face” of No Excuses Schools. You may remember Dr. Kim from the Diane Ravitch episode of Truth for America podcast.

Here’s the link to the call for chapter proposals and the questions the book seeks to address.

  1. Were you associated with a high-compliance school that promised a rigorous education and college acceptance but demanded compliance, obedience, and silence?
  2. Did you find yourself at odds with the methods, policies, curriculum, and/or testing?
  3. Do you feel like your experience and concerns were unwelcome, shamed, discredited, or silenced?
  4. Do you feel a need to describe your lived experiences in writing or in art?

Amber Kim has an extensive background studying and critiquing “No Excuses” charters. She writes,

We want you to propose a chapter! We are collecting counter-narratives that expose the rougher side of high-compliance schooling, the side that is often hidden from the public and we need authors who are present/former students, educators, or family members of high compliance, “No Excuses” schools to tell their stories. in writing or another art form. No writing experience necessary! No minimum length. You only need first hand experience in No-Excuses-like schools.

By publishing a collection of counter-narratives validation and healing can take place for those impacted by NES. Additionally, people who are considering creating, attending, promoting, and/or working in No Excuses schools will have access to a fuller truth about them and their costs to students, staff, and families. This volume unmasks the new face of NES, exposing its existence, methods, and impacts. Knowing the  contemporary face of NES allows for accountability, repair, and systemic solutions.

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For all of Cloaking Inequity’s posts on charters click here.

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Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig Charter Schools

NCES Releases School Choice in the United States Report

A new report the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) “finds that charter school and public school students have the same academic performance in testing conducted at the fourth- and eighth-grade level.” (See Charter School and Public School Students Have Same Academic Performance, Report Finds)

I went through the report this morning on the plane and here are a few interesting tables I thought you might want to check out.

Ravitch responded to the last tweet with:

Dr. Benson argued,

Carol Burris discussed the study on Ravitch’s blog,

She stated,

The charter school sector can produce as many biased studies not subject to peer review as they like, but studies from objective sources consistently produce the same results–charters, despite their creaming of students and “freedom” do no better than true public schools. Ironically, this one was commissioned by the US Department of Education led by Betsy DeVos.

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Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig African Americans, Charter Schools

NEW study released: Are charter schools more intensely segregated?

We are honored today to release a new study entitled Choice without inclusion?: Comparing the intensity of racial segregation in charters and public schools at the local, state and national levels that examines segregation in the entire universe of US public and charter schools.

In its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 [1], the United States Supreme Court powerfully concluded that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ had no place. Further, “separate educational facilities,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court “are inherently unequal.” It has been over sixty years since the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown to abolish the separate-but-equal legal doctrine and Jim Crow segregation by race. Yet, since that time, courts have allowed de factosegregation to flourish [2]and, as a result, schools in the United States are more segregated than they were at the time of the Brown decision [3].

The resegregation of the United States, in contravention of Brown, has occurred as a result of judicial retrenchment, but also due to other factors such as lax executive enforcement and White flight [4]. Not incidentally, during the past two decades, schools in the United States have become increasingly segregated by race and class. According to the national data, nowhere is the problem more acute than in the nation’s charter schools [5]. While public schools have generally acknowledged the problem and have usually agreed to remedies to address segregation [6], some charter supporters have sought to downplay the issue, emphasizing the need to provide greater choice to low income and minority students as a means of achieving an educational equity in outcomes regardless of the racial composition of the school [7]. In fact, some charter advocates have suggested that racial segregation within schools is acceptable if that comes as a natural by-product of parental choice [8].

Established nearly a quarter-century ago, the first taxpayer supported, privately-operated charter schools were conceived of as learning laboratories that might inspire curricular innovation [9]. In the past decade, proponents have reimagined charter schools as institutions of learning dedicated to providing poor and disadvantaged students with greater access to a high-quality education [10]. These viewpoints mask the serious issues of inequity that remain outstanding, even after the Supreme Court first declared that segregated schools were inherently unequal. More than 60 years after Brown, research confirms that charter and public schools servicing predominately poor students of color still do so with reduced resources, less academic rigor, in the form of limited access to advanced coursework, and largely untrained or inexperienced teachers [11].

Purporting to address the educational opportunity gaps in the U.S., school choice proponents have linked market-based educational approaches to the legacy of the Civil Rights movement by framing their movement to foster “education choice” as the greatest Civil Rights issue of our time [12]. However, substantiation on the claims of academic excellence proffered by charter advocates is mixed [13–15]. Opponents have been quick to point out a number of flaws in the rhetoric including the high degree of segregation within such schools [16]. They see the charter movement as a betrayal of the Brown decision in abdicating, through privatization and private-control of education, an essential function of government to provide education to citizens as a public good [17]. Critics have also been disapproving of the way in which the proliferation of charters has redirected crucial funding away from traditional public schools while, in many cases, reproducing and perpetuating the same racial imbalance Brownsought to correct [11].

According to US Department of Education, charters currently makeup only a small percentage of U.S. schools, approximately 7% [18]. Prior research using national data has found that they are the most segregated of the nation’s schools, especially for Black and Latinx (We use Latinx as an attempt to decolonize the Spanish language and neutralize gender [19]) students [20]. Many of the nation’s charters can even be classified as “apartheid schools”—a term coined by UCLA Professor Gary Orfield for schools with a White student enrollment of 1 percent or less [21].School choice supporters often point out that while neighborhood segregation is out of their control—although in some states charter schools can use neighborhood borders to fix enrollment—the reality is that most charter schools have not prioritized or experienced desegregation as a desired outcome [22].

While geography and residential segregation patterns contribute to the segregation in charter schools, in reality the schools with the most flexibility, hypothetically, to achieve significant diversity, have instead apparently chosen not to address the problem [23,24]. Are charters more segregated than public schools at the local, state and national levels? If so, does local demography explain why charter schools feature more racial isolation than public schools?

We conduct descriptive and inferential analyses of publicly available Common Core of Data (CCD) to examine segregation at the local, state, and national levels. Nationally, we find that higher percentages of charter students of every race attend intensely segregated schools. The highest levels of racial isolation are at the primary level for public and middle level for charters. We find that double segregation by race and class is higher in charter schools. Charters are more likely to be segregated, even when controlling for local ethnoracial demographics. A majority of states have at least half of Blacks and a third of Latinx in intensely segregated charters. At the city level, we find that higher percentages of urban charter students were attending intensely segregated schools.

In summary, what did we find? National, state, and local data indicate that the charter industry has a segregation problem in the US and it is not simply explained away by locality or demography.

Reference: Vasquez Heilig. J., Brewer, J. and Williams, Y. (2019). Choice without inclusion?: Comparing the intensity of racial segregation in charters and public schools at the local, state and national levels. Journal of Education Sciences, 9(3), 1-17.

(See the paper for the numbered citations)

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Twitter: @ProfessorJVH

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Also, today is Cloaking Inequity’s 7th Anniversary!

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