Fact checking Bill Gates and his statistics about KIPP Charter schools.

According to a post at Schools Matter, Bill Gates made an error about KIPP charter. The blogger suggests the Harvard Gazette do the research and correct it.

Dear Harvard Gazette: Please Fact Check Bill Gates



Here is Gates' statement he made there at Harvard:



Gates is apparently quoting what Jonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek in 2008, which was true then and is not true now.



Here is more on the debunking done previously by Caroline Grannan of the SF Examiner.

Debunking yet another false claim about KIPP alumni and college



She actually contacted the KIPP spokeman and got the facts. Yet Bill Gates is expanding on all those untruths from Newsweek in 2008. That's a shame.

In fact as Schools Matter points out as well today....if a public school had that record it would be to their shame.

KIPP Delta's Student Loss Rate 3 to 4 Times Higher Than Helena Public Schools

He quotes the Arkansas Times:



Charter schools get only the best coverage from the big media. Public school positive coverage is limited to a handful of bloggers.

How in the world did that happen?

I am going to kick it myself because there are not 95% going to college from KIPP.

Truth matters even if it is Bill Gates.

http://www.examiner.com/x-356-SF-Education-Examiner~y2010m1d17-Unjustified-press-exaltation-of-a-mediocre-San-Francisco-charter-school

"If only charter operator Envision Schools were half as successful at educating students as it is at persuading the press to print flattering articles about its schools, our education challenges would be solved.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle Insight section carries a pair of puff pieces praising Envision's City Arts and Technology (CAT) for its "remarkable results."

Dose of reality: While I'm not blasting CAT as a failure, its achievement ranks 12th out of the 17 general- education (non-continuation) high schools in the San Francisco Unified School District"

More:

"But more reality: CAT ranks 10th of SFUSD's 17 general-ed high schools in the percentage of low-income students it serves, and it ranks 15 of SFUSD's 17 general-ed high schools in the percentage of limited English speakers it serves. And of course "education reform" advocates never let public schools get away with justifying low achievement based on demographics -- that's "excuse-making" -- so CAT doesn't get to either.

Fuller's articles don't mention the odd policy at CAT and Envision's other SFUSD schools, Metro Arts & Tech, of giving no grades below a C. That would be called "grade inflation" or "lowered standards" at a public school, and would certainly give graduates a nice boost at getting into colleges. I know lots of kids at other fine SFUSD high schools who sure wish their schools had such a policy."

Boy, what a pleasant thing that would be to give no grade below a C

Regarding Alter's Newsweek article.

http://www.sri.com/news/releases/091608.html

In most grades, Bay Area KIPP students make above-average progress compared with national norms, and four out of five KIPP schools outperform their host district. At the end of fifth grade, KIPP students at the three Bay Area KIPP schools with available comparison data outperformed their matched counterparts who attended other schools in the same districts on the California Standards Test; statistically significant differences between KIPP and non-KIPP students ranged from 6 to 33 percentile points. Students who joined KIPP in the sixth grade also saw positive effects by the end of their first year, with KIPP students outperforming non-KIPP students by 9 to 34 percentile points.

KIPP schools’ higher-than-expected test score results draw both attention and claims that they “cherry-pick” high-achieving students from poor neighborhoods. This is the first report to closely scrutinize the praise and criticisms associated with KIPP, as well as key challenges facing Bay Area KIPP schools today.

In the three KIPP schools where they were able to draw comparisons, SRI researchers found that students with lower prior achievement on the CST were more likely to choose KIPP than higher-performing students from the same neighborhood, suggesting that, at least at these schools, cherry-picking does not occur.

As researchers analyzed the student achievement data and KIPP’s approach, they also identified challenges facing Bay Area KIPP schools, including high student attrition rates, teacher turnover, and low state and local funding. For example, 60 percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools in 2003-04 left before completing eighth grade. Annual teacher turnover rates have ranged from 18 to 49 percent since 2003-04. Moreover, with less than $6,000 in state and local revenues, Bay Area KIPP school leaders need to raise anywhere from $400,000 to $700,000 annually to close the gap between the state and local funds that they receive and their true operating costs.

corporate kings of America? This makes me wonder who is giving Bill Gates his "facts". Is he being fed misinformation by an underling or is he deliberately making up lies? For some reason, my guess is that he is getting information from elsewhere since I can't imagine that Bill Gates is going to concern himself with tracking down statistics.

Not meaning to defend Gates, just stating an hypothesis.

ON EDIT: I'd also like to follow up on the tax breaks mentioned in the OP. These tax breaks for hugely profitable corporations are one of the big reasons we are having to borrow Trillions of dollars to meet our nation's financial needs. Will our Democratic party ever have the will to make corporations pay their fair share?

Good question.

little of it to make products that are easy to trust (Virus-wise), or easy to use for purposes of innovation?

because for their own personal gain they willingly and aggressively made the United States of America weak and vulnerable to computer attacks by (a) vending inferior, buggy, worthless software operating system(s) and (b) willfully acting to stifle competition from other operating systems even where their own has the world's most egregious history of vulnerabilities. That evil cynic also said they have consistently acted to interfere with the development of secure, advanced, dare we say competent computer systems that would have put and kept America in the absolute forefront of technological superiority. Instead of putting their worthless, buggy, insecure piece of crap operating system to an early death and saving trillions of dollars for the United States in costs and labour to deal with it's endless crappiness, it has been said that they aggressively pushed their piece of crap OS onto the United States government and military. Think about it, citizen.. do you want your entire country dependent for it's security on a piece of crap operating system that a one-eyed ten year old Chinese hacker punk could crack and hack in about ten minutes, tops?

Oh ya, those were the evil words of some vile evil cynic. Don't listen to 'im. Can't be true. Must only be a vile rotten canard and filthy lie based on envy of Gates' and Ballmer's magnificent wallets. Must be. Gotta be. Don't repeat this awful lie. No, don't. Really. Go and wash out your brain with soap. Lie soap. Good old fashioned lie soap. Yeah. That's it. That's the ticket. Im gonna go wash mine out right now.