The problem with comparing public schools to private/charter schools is that they are not working under the same set of conditions. Private and charter schools do not have to continue to provide services to every student regardless of the student's behavior, and cannot mandate/enforce involvement or follow through by parents. No amount of internal reform in the world can overcome that reality. Of COURSE schools with involved parents and enforceable behavior codes are going to look better than schools without. But how do you transfer that to the public school system? If public schools were able to kick out kids who consistently misbehave or whose parents did not play their role in the educational process, those children would go....where? Compulsory education in this country began in part to keep kids out of the workplace (where they would work for cheaper than adults) and off of the streets (where they could get into/cause trouble).
Given the sifting and winnowing that comes with parents being involved/invested enough to seek out alternate educational settings, these institutions would be FAR outperforming their demographically equivalent public counterparts if their methods were actually as superior as some would like to suggest.
As to KIPP schools....extended day, extended week, extended school year=extra money. On a relatively small scale, it is possible to fundraise to supplement what is available through public school funding, but there is ample evidence that most American tax payers are unwilling to support the school system as a whole at that level, and unrealistic to think that fundraising could make up the difference if there were multiple schools in the same city competing for those dollars. I also found it interesting that according to one of KIPPS Q&A sites, they only report acheivement scores for students who are in a "matched cohort". They don't promote students to the next grade who have not met the grade level requirements:
"When we calculate achievement gains at KIPP schools in our annual Report Card, we only track gains of those students who are part of a �matched cohort' of students. For example, in the 2008 KIPP Report Card, we reported the gains of students who started KIPP in fifth grade and finished KIPP in eighth grade."
http://www.kipp.org/faqIsn't that sort of like only reporting the test scores of proficient students?
I think that KIPP is doing great things for a lot of students and I hope they will continue to do so--however, I think it is unfair to use their successes as a way to denigrate public schools (as is often done in the press) when public schools are unlikely ever to be afforded the conditions or funding that allow KIPP and other successful charters to operate as they do.
