There’s a new report out on the KIPP schools, which at least according to the blurb I read at edweek, seems to finally address the question of sustainability. This model, premised upon lawyer-style work days for teachers, has always seen a great deal of turnover.

Edweek, quoting the report:

“Teacher turnover, a result of both ambitious young teachers’ moving on and the demanding nature of the job, poses challenges for Bay Area school leaders and may have implications for the sustainability of the model.”

As James Traub points out, almost eight years ago, ” any method that depends on a Jaime Escalante is no method at all.”

Any teacher can break themselves for a couple of years and have significant success. What can we do to take this success from classrooms to entire schools and then sustained building-wide? How can we address school culture rather than individual heroes?

Desegregation is not and was never expected to be an easy task. Racial attitudes ingrained in our Nation’s childhood and adolescence are not quickly thrown aside in its middle years. But just as the inconvenience of some cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the rights of others, so public opposition, no matter how strident, cannot be permitted to divert this Court from the enforcement of the constitutional principles at issue in this case. Today’s holding, I fear, is more a reflection of a perceived public mood that we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee of equal justice than it is the product of neutral principles of law. In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities–one white, the other black–but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret. I dissent.