Schools Matter: Nashville Mayor Comes Out Swinging for More Segregated KIPPs

Schools Matter: Nashville Mayor Comes Out Swinging for More Segregated KIPPs:

Nashville Mayor Comes Out Swinging for More Segregated KIPPs

 Mayor Karl Dean, who has been a private and public patron of KIPP, Inc. over the years.  In 2012, Dean committed almost 25 percent of Metro's 4-year school improvement budget to one KIPP school.  


Today Dean has an op-ed in the Tennessean decrying the courageous vote by Metro school board to say NO to more KIPPs in Nashville.

My comments following Dean's angry op-ed:

Jim Horn · 

KIPP, Inc.'s Mr Dowell is part of a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to show only the high test scores and smiling faces at KIPP. Obviously, Mr. Dean is a part of that campaign. 

What the KIPP Foundation or the media never present are the dehumanized segregated children, Amazonian working conditions, and the marginalized parents whose voices are squelched beneath the PR wheel.

The public never hears about 100 children packed into classrooms for a week sitting on the floor until they are KIPPnotized, and the Mr. Dean probably never heard about problem students who are sent to the basement of the school when VIPs are in the building. Links here:
http://www.alternet.org/.../kipp-forces-5th-graders-earn...

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/.../kipp-puts-up-to-30...

And parents have never heard, I am sure, about KIPP principals sitting on children to restrain them, as a former KIPP teacher recounted to me two nights ago. A clip from her audio transcript:

"Q: . . . who are the people who are doing the restraining, and what did it look like? 

A: It happened any time a child was so out of control behaviorally. Um, I don't actually know what their measure was for restraining a child because sometimes they would let a child destroy a classroom and just walk around, and other times, in my mind, [restraint was used] for a Schools Matter: Nashville Mayor Comes Out Swinging for More Segregated KIPPs:

KIPP Administrators Sitting Atop Kindergarten and 1st Grade Children

I talked with a 28th former KIPP teacher last evening to hear her story, and she was as eloquent and upset as any of the rest.  

Mandy spent a year in a West Coast KIPP, which was in its first year of applying KIPP's punishing penal-style pedagogy to segregated kindergarteners and first graders (60 percent Latino and 40 percent African-American). 

Until a month ago, Mandy thought she would be returning to this KIPP school that she had learned to dread, but she landed a teaching job in a public school in July.  

Mandy is now dealing with what she describes as PTSD-like symptoms, and she is re-learning what it is like to have rights and choices and that precious commodity, time--time to take care of herself and to have relationships with family, her boyfriend, and friends.  Time once more to enjoy life and work.

Over half the KIPP teachers and support staff that began the year with Mandy left, too.  Mandy described a micro-managing, demanding, and ruthless school leader who was inflexible, out of touch, manipulative, and without empathy.

Like many other former KIPP teachers, Mandy's health suffered while she was there, and she became an alien to herself--willing to go along with ways of teaching and treating children and parents that ran counter to her deepest values.

Mandy's story will be shared in depth at a later date, but for now I wanted to share another element of "No Excuses" charter school teaching that no one hears about in the media.  

We have heard about KIPP's isolation chambers for children, but we have not heard about adult 

KIPP Administrators Sitting Atop Kindergarten and 1st Grade Children