Here’s a new version of my subscriptions to different blogs through Google Reader in OPML format. Please feel free to download this and edit as you see fit. 99% of these blogs are related either to technology or educational technology and all of them are relevant to teachers. You should be able to import this file into your own feed reader without difficulty.

Download file here

Here is the email I’ve just send to George Abbott, our new education minister in British Columbia. Let’s see if he responds.

Dear Mr. Abbott,

Here’s a presentation I’m giving this Wednesday to the teachers at my school on Connecting your Classroom. After viewing William Eaton‘s presentation last Friday at the CUEBC conference I decided to present on a similar topic to my own staff, using a couple of his ideas (which I’ve referred in the presentation). The idea is that every classroom can be connected in various ways, and I’m showing 5 of the ways we can connect based on the domains of curriculum, community (in this case experts), student work, and the world. Check out my presentation below.

I’m just using this page to store book recommendations I’ve been getting through Twitter. Feel free to comment and add your own suggestions if you don’t see them in my list.

• Different by Youngme Moon
• Lost at School by Ross Greene
• Fair Isn’t Always Equal by Rick Wormelli
• Mindset by Carol Dweck
• The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk
• Iconoclast by Gregory Berns
• Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin
• Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner 
• An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger
• Catching Up or Leading the Way by Yong Zhao
• Making Learning Whole by David Perkins
• Better, Complications by Atul Gawande

Here’s the first quote that really grabbed my attention from the study I’m reading on KIPP Schools:

"On average, KIPP middle schools have student bodies characterized by higher concentrations of poverty and racial minorities, but lower concentrations of special education and limited English proficiency LEP) students, than the public schools from which they draw." (Gleason et al. 2010, p14)

This suggests to me that KIPP schools are being selective. As soon as there is a statistically significant disparity in the enrollment policies of a school, one begins to suspect if the students are being chosen. The fact that the student population is poorer and more diverse than the typical public school is good but the fact that the KIPP population has fewer special needs and ESL students is worrisome. Common sense dictates that these students are more expensive to educate and will require more resources.

Here’s another quote which drew my attention because the study fails to draw a really important conclusion from this inference they make.

"By year three, half of the KIPP schools in our sample are producing math impacts of 0.48 standard deviations or more, equivalent to the effect of moving a student from the 30th percentile to the 48th percentile on a typical test distribution. Compared to national norms during this grade span, a 0.48 effect size after three years represents 1.2 years of accumulated extra growth in mathematics over the three year period (Bloom et al. 2008). For comparison, the black-white test core gap in math is typically estimated as approximately one standard deviation at fourth grade and eighth grade. (Bloom et al. 2008)" (Gleason et al. 2010, p17)

What serious omission are they making at this point? Observing that KIPP students spend much more time in school than do their counterparts is pretty important here, particularly when comparing them on scales which are largely dependent on how much time learning the material students spend. In fact, given that the typical KIPP student spends an extra 2 hours in study each day and 1 extra month in school (1600 hours) compared to the typical public school student (1080 hours), we might hope to see a larger improvement than 1.2 times.

The study does point out that most KIPP schools are doing better than their local counterparts. This isn’t too surprising to me if you look at the previous two quotes: they are selective in their choice of students, students spend way more time in their schools.

I wonder how KIPP schools would fare if students spent the same amount of time as a typical school, or if every student was equally likely to be accepted to their programs. I also wonder what would happen if we measured the success of schools on a broader set of standards than just their performance on some standardized test. What would the creativity index of a typical KIPP student be, I wonder? 

References:

Bloom, H., Hill,C., Rebeck Black A., & Lipsey, M., (2008). Performance Trajectories and Performance Gaps as Achievement Effect-Size Benchmarks for Educational Interventions, MDRC Working Papers on Research Methodology.

Gill, B., Gleason, P., Nichols-Barrer, I., Teh, B., Tuttle, C. (2010) Student Characteristics and Achievement in 22 KIPP Middle Schools, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., June 2010, retrieved from http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/kipp_fnlrpt.pdf on October 17th, 2010

Our school has a great program we’ve been working on developing for about 5 years and which finally got off the ground last year. One of our parents was travelling in Kenya and while in Mombassa she met a man who told her she absolutely had to look at this school he was developing. So the story goes, she went to the school he was working on which was in a poor area of town called the Kipevu district, and then she came back to our school and told us we had to help his school.

For five years we raised money, sent letters to and from the school, and worked on planning on a trip to the Kipevu Primary school ourselves. Last year we sent some students, a parent, and two staff members to the school. The experience was amazing! Our students blogged about the experience on our Kipevu website here.

Here’s a video one of our students produced about the experience. You can tell that this was a powerful learning experience for these students; probably the most powerful learning experience of their lives.

Karibu Kipevu.