‘Work Hard, Be Hard’ and ‘Work Hard, Be Nice,’ dueling takes on KIPP
Cambridge College education professor Jim Horn presents his new book, “Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through ‘No Excuses’ Teaching,” as a necessary antidote to my 2009 book, “Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.”
We are polar opposites on the issue of KIPP, the nation’s largest charter school network, and charters in general. He says, correctly, that he and I “have maintained a prickly relationship over the past ten years by writing from contrasting perspectives about corporate education issues and education reform schools.”
The reasons for our differences are illuminated by the way we handle the same material in our books.
[More from Jay Mathews: As a KIPP supporter, this new book about charter schools is hard to believe]
My book describes two young teachers, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, who through trial and error and the guidance of a magical Houston elementary school teacher named Harriett Ball found a way to raise the academic achievement of inner city children. It is a story of bottom-up school reform.
Horn offers the opposite, a top-down story in which “venture philanthropists and philanthrocaptitalists through equity bundlers, bond investors, and hedge funds” poured billions of dollars into “charter management organizations.”
For instance, Horn is suspicious of my account of the first major news article in 1994 about the new KIPP program in Houston. It was a 2,799-word story on the front page of the Houston Post. “Mathews offers no details as to how an obscure little program in its first year with forty-seven students was chosen for such coverage,” Horn said. He suggests the rapidly growing national Teach For America program, which Levin and Feinberg were a part of, pulled some strings.
This is puzzling because I explained in detail what produced the Houston Post article. Reporter Susan Bezse Wallace, then 24, had gotten a grant from the national Education Writers Association to do three stories — not about charter schools or TFA, but about male teachers in urban schools. The headline of her KIPP piece was “FEW GOOD MEN.” The other stories in the series were about a male state teacher of the year and a charismatic coach.
Another mystery not explained by me, Horn said, was “how KIPP cofounder, David Levin, who in 1995 was a third-year teacher from TFA without ‘Work Hard, Be Hard’ and ‘Work Hard, Be Nice,’ dueling takes on KIPP - The Washington Post:
