Saturday, June 27, 2009

KIPP Schools: Where Bulls--t is an Art-Form

How to lie with statistics, as explained by Jim Horn
... in five Bay Area KIPP schools, researchers found that 40 to 60 percent of KIPPsters in the five schools "chose" to leave KIPP between grades 5 and 8, and that most of the students who were ridden out were the low scorers who could have damaged the KIPP brand if they had stayed.
Our Scores went up!

It's the same old refrain - you can't improve schools without improving the students in them and one of the best ways to improve your averages is to eliminate the bottom half.

If you need quality wood, you go to the lumber yard and sift through the construction quality 2x4s, tossing aside any split or knotted wood. The average quality of the pile was low and priced accordingly, but your minimal time and effort in selection raises the average quality of the wood in your cart.

The analogy is quite strong to education. The ethics part of this "weeding" can only be justified in a private school setting.

KIPP Schools: Where Bulls--t is an Art-Form

2 comments:

  1. What is a KIPP school?

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  2. Rather than try to answer that fully, I'll give you the five-cent tour.
    www.kipp.com

    It's a charter school that claims extraordinary successes and credits its program, teachers, and methods. Most of the success comes, however, from selectivity in enrollment and a very rigorous weeding out of any student who might drag down the averages.

    There's more but I'm not ready to put it here!

    ReplyDelete