Q: Is a fundamental change of this sort going to come within the public school system or is it going to come from alternatives to the public school system?
A: Well the ideas for change—does a longer school day make a big difference, can team teaching make a big difference, can computers help?—that experimentation can’t come from a regimented system, and that’s what most public schools are. But if you want to have broad impact you’ve got to take those best practices and move them into the public school system. The most optimistic view is that high-performance charter schools—they’re getting good results but they are less than two per cent of U.S. schools today —could grow in a decade to be 10 per cent. Some states [and most provinces] don’t allow them at all. So even that 10 per cent would require massive political enablement. That would be hard to achieve. KIPP, the leading chain of charter schools, with about 100 schools, grows its number of schools about 20 per cent a year. There are 13,000 public schools so even if all high performance charters could grow as fast as they can, it’s not that big an impact.
So charters can mostly show us the way: you’ve got to have the evaluation system, more flexible work practices, better use of technology, common standards. They’re not perfect but they show us that it can be done. Whenever I get discouraged I go meet with some KIPP students and teachers and I’m reminded that’s what everybody deserves. It is possible economically. They’re taking kids from the worst circumstances and sending them off to four-year colleges.
Q: There are examples of charter schools like KIPP which produce phenomenal results, but there’s still a lot of controversy around whether or not charter schools as a whole outperform public schools as a whole.
A: There are several controversies. One is charter schools as a whole do not outperform public schools. If you take chain charter schools, the ones that replicate, they do outperform public schools. But then there’s another debate, which is, if you have to volunteer to do something, then you are different than the people who don’t volunteer, and people volunteer to go to charter schools. Let’s say we wanted to test pink textbooks. Take all the textbooks and paint their covers pink. And say, kids, who wants to volunteer for the pink textbook test? We will show a phenomenal effect of pink textbooks. We know that in charter schools the teachers volunteer, the kids volunteered, and they smash the non-volunteer system. But we’ve had our guys look at the data and it shows that if you take the whole charter school phenomenon, the kids who volunteer for charters and get in have one set of results, and the kids who volunteer and don’t get in have another set of results, and the kids who don’t volunteer and don’t get in have another set of results. You have perfect tiering of these things.
Q: And the results go from good, to not as good, to worse.
A: Complete separation of results. That’s the high-performance charters. So we’re not saying that if every school was a KIPP school you’d get KIPP-like results, because it is true the pool is slightly special to the overall pool if for no other reason than the volunteer effect. But when you have a public school where four per cent of the kids are going to a four-year college, and that’s because they are tracked into an honours system that is actually a school within a school, and you have 90 per cent [going to college] at a high-performance charter, that’s significant. And the difference isn’t just in math and reading scores. You look at the behaviours of these kids, the collaborations of these kids, the dreams of these kids, the willingness to vote—any measure you like. You like sculptures, honestly, the KIPP kids are better at sculpture. It’s a huge difference.
Q: Some of the kids at charter schools spend 80 per cent of their waking hours on learning.
A: It’s a high commitment. They use chants, they use iconography, they have all these banners of the colleges that kids have gone to. They’re overcoming a deficit, they’re competing with another sort of way of looking at the world where education is less important. It’s fun to talk to kids about it—what did your friends think when you volunteered to go to a charter school, and now you’re in a different social group, on a path that will take you to a vastly different place.
Q: How would you have done in such a school?
A: Well the school I went to was a lot like that. Not the chanting or the iconography but I sat in on the physics course, the calculus course. But now is a much better time to be a student. We didn’t do robots back then—nobody did robots back then. I didn’t have Wikipedia to look something up when I was confused. If you’re a motivated student, it’s way better to be learning now than at any time in the past. You want to have an Internet connection and you want to have adults who, when you get confused, can straighten you out and can tell you what learning might connect to your curiosity, your job opportunities, those kinds of things. I envy those kids in KIPP. I’d never want to use the capacity because KIPP goes to inner-city kids but if my kids had to go to a KIPP school, it wouldn’t be that different from the great private schools they are going to now.
Q: You talked about math books as a symbol for educational failure in America. Explain that.
A: We have huge textbooks—300-page math books. Because they’re designed by committee and everybody wants things to be in them, they are very intimidating. I thought, maybe the Asian textbooks are [going to be] twice as big because they do so much better than us and our kids are going to have to do some weight exercises to carry these books around so we can be in their league. In fact, the Asian textbooks are half as big. Their textbooks are little but they are really drilling in concepts in particular grades and then they don’t go over that again. We do all of it again and again and again.
That’s what happens when you have such different experiences of people in the classrooms, you don’t have good ways of knowing where different students are. If somebody’s behind what tools do you have? There are some of these things where technology is going to help with individual progress, and there are a few places this stuff is being tried now and the material is getting online. We’re funding a lot of people. There are innovators like Salman Khan showing up doing websites that are great.
Q: What has to happen in order to put students first?
A: If you just say that the bottom 10 per cent of teachers goes away because they don’t measure up, then the U.S. goes back to being one of the best in the world. It’s pretty dramatic.
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