A charter high school called KIPP Academy is moving its campus from a temporary space in Oak Cliff to Paul Quinn College, and Dallas ISD trustee Maxie Johnson is having none of it.
Johnson, along with DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, staged a media event on the street in front of Paul Quinn Tuesday to protest the move and to say, rather splenetically, “KIPP, we do not want you here!”
That message was abundantly clear. What’s less clear is whether DISD’s opposition will lead to better education for students in southern Dallas.
Statewide, charter schools outperform ISDs in college readiness, dropout rates and discipline. In the neighborhood where KIPP Academy currently operates, it keeps pace with DISD’s South Oak Cliff High School, both with 35% of students at or above grade level, just ahead of Roosevelt High School at 31%. In 2018-19, the Texas Education Agency gave KIPP and Roosevelt D ratings and South Oak Cliff a C.
But fair comparisons are difficult to make. Charters generally serve more economically disadvantaged populations. That’s true in this case with 96.4% of the KIPP population considered disadvantaged, according to KIPP Regional Superintendent Anthony Smith, compared with 94% at South Oak Cliff and Roosevelt, according to 2018 TEA reports. Adding to the confusion is the fact that KIPP is a new school that enrolled only ninth graders in 2018-19, the last time TEA released ratings. KIPP added a second grade level this year, but the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the state’s rating system.
At the press event, Johnson decried KIPP’s efforts to establish the campus without conducting community meetings. His logic seemed to be that families in the community should have some agency, some voice in the educational landscape of their neighborhood. We agree. So we were puzzled that in the next breath Johnson opposed the creation of a new school that would give families more agency and another choice about where to send their kids to school.
But what was most surprising about yesterday’s event was an admission by Hinojosa that charter schools have made DISD better. Hinojosa said the number of underperforming campuses in his district has plummeted from 43 to four since 2013. Over that same span, charter school enrollment has grown significantly so that now 17% of children who live in DISD’s borders attend a charter, a higher percentage than any other major city in Texas. When asked if those two things are connected, Hinojosa said, “I don’t deny that. They made us step up our game.”
So a competitive market promotes better outcomes for all students, which is why it’s puzzling that DISD leaders oppose such competition in this case.
Let’s be clear about two things: First, educators of every stripe deserve our respect and support. Public school teachers contribute more to the health of our society than is reflected in their paychecks.
And second, 35% at grade level is unacceptable for any school, public, charter or private. Dallas kids deserve better. Smith acknowledged that, saying, “We’re fighting over mediocrity when we should be focused on how we all get better. We should be collaborating to say, ‘How do we get those numbers up to 70, 80, 90%?’”
Dallas has had this debate before. In 2016, DISD trustee Joyce Foreman tried to block a zoning permit for Uplift Education to establish a middle school in southern Dallas. She lost that fight and Uplift now operates a K-8 school that outpaces its nearby DISD neighbor W.H. Atwell Middle School in TEA ratings.
What’s vexing to us this time around is that student outcomes seem to factor so little into DISD’s objections to the KIPP campus. When DISD objectives focus more on market share than on student outcomes, the time is right for just the kind of refocusing incentive competition brings.
