Re: KIPP

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

On Jan 1, 2007, at 2:39 AM, Kimberly Reeves wrote:

> You'll hear a lot about the Myth of KIPP. The fact is that KIPP is a 
> fine charter school, but it is no better or worse than many other 
> charter schools. It will work for some kids and not for others. (I 
> would have been miserable at KIPP!) I don't care how selfless it may 
> be -- the great noble story of two Teach for America grads pioneering 
> a new way for education -- but the whole "Harriet Ball was our 
> inspiration" (blah blah blah) is, I suspect, some part truth and then 
> just a whole lot of spin. I imagine KIPP has evolved -- they have 
> learned to order the buses, take the grant money, hire better 
> teachers, whatever -- but I never saw any incredible magic at KIPP 
> that couldn't be replicated at a public school with a good principal 
> and concerned parents.


"THE PROBLEM" with education gets further distorted by saccharine 
anecdotes of "the little black kid that could," the kid who -- despite 
the odds -- managed to graduate suma cum laude from Harvard. If you 
counted these little bromides up, they'd probably number in the dozens 
if not hundreds. So there exist in the public discourse uplifting 
stories about poor kids with crack-addicted mothers that made it. The 
moral? If they could do it, any person could. The same Horatio Alger 
story is applied to schools, e.g., KIPP. It goes like this: KIPP 
schools can take poor black kids, raise their test scores, and get them 
into elite prep schools. Moral of the story? If they could do it, any 
school could.

The logic behind these feel-good stories is faulty. On the individual 
level, the logic is faulty because NOT everyone can grow up with a 
crack-addicted mother and graduate suma cum laude from Harvard. If they 
could, these kinds of stories would never be told. We don't tell 
stories about the little kid who drank orange juice and then played 
baseball. Why not? Because most little kids can drink orange juice and 
play baseball. This is an UNREMARKABLE story -- a banal, commonplace, 
everyday event. But the reason we tell stories about poor kids with 
crack-addicted mothers that make it is because they are so incredibly 
rare. We say, "Wow! Did you hear that story about the poor kid with the 
crack-addicted mother that became the president of General Motors??"

Yet, for some extraordinary reason, our brains freeze up when we hear 
these stories. Somehow, we are simultaneously -- and paradoxically -- 
aware that (1) this is very rare and yet (2) if he could do it, anyone 
can. This makes absolutely zero sense logically. But we are inherently 
sentimental beasts, we Americans. So we eat this shit up because we are 
addicted to stories of inspiration. All we really want to do is feel 
good. Believing that this extraordinarily remarkable event is somehow 
reproducible may not make sense logically, but it makes us feel good to 
think that it might be possible. But feeling good is not the foundation 
on which public policy should be based.

Peter C.