In his new book, Work Hard. Be Nice., Jay Mathews claims that the Knowledge Is Power Program is the "best" program serving severely disadvantaged, minority-group students in America today. Let me begin—before I'm denounced as a traitor to the cause of educational reform—by saying that I'm inclined to agree. The improbable story of how KIPP was founded in 1994 by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two young Teach for America alumni in Houston, is thrilling and worthy reading. KIPP's mission has been akin to putting the first man on the moon: an all-out education race, requiring extraordinary, round-the-clock dedication from parents, students, and teachers alike. But the program is not the proven, replicable model for eliminating the achievement gap in the inner city that Mathews imagines, and this distinction is crucial. KIPP may be something more important: a unique chance to test, once and for all, the alluring but suspect notion that there actually is an educational panacea for social inequality. As of yet, the evidence for such a thing doesn't exist.
There have always been model school programs that work. There have even been some that have been successfully replicated in different parts of the country. But no program has shown it can work for all, or even most, disadvantaged children within a single city or neighborhood. Instead, as critics point out, such model programs tend to skim off those kids who are already better positioned (thanks to better home environments, greater natural gifts, savvier or better-educated parents, etc.) to escape the ghetto. Meanwhile, regular public schools are left with a more distilled population of struggling students. Similarly, model programs tend to attract young, talented, and adventurous teachers, who are willing or able to work long hours for low pay. (Model schools also tend to attract the most philanthropic dollars, which effectively boost per-pupil expenditures, even as such programs can still brag they use no more tax dollars than traditional public schools.) Indeed, Mathews likens KIPP to a cult "without the dues or the weird robes."
There is a lot to be said for cults. A fair amount can be accomplished by developing an espirit de corps based upon some explanation for why we are superior to them, no matter whom we or them happen to be. The French Foreign Legion, for example, has been turning German criminals on the lam into war heroes for generations.
But by definition, a cult is a fringe movement. To date, no one—including such mighty players as the Gates Foundation—has figured out how to take an educational cult and make it the predominant religion within any urban system. ...
For decades, educators argued that disadvantaged children could succeed if only they received the same education as more advantaged, middle-class students. Many, if not most, of the nation's best public and private schools are decidedly progressive, with less emphasis on test scores and more on critical thinking skills, with rich arts, music, sports, and other extracurricular programs. Why shouldn't poorer children enjoy the same?
But KIPP is not the same. The program has usefully changed the debate by acknowledging the obvious: Kids who grow up poor, with no books or with functionally illiterate parents, in crime-ridden neighborhoods, with destructive peer influences and without access to basic medical care (such as glasses to help them read), need something significantly more than—and different from—kids who grow up with every economic and educational advantage on which to build. For one, the academic program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day every other Saturday.
There is a lot of rote learning and test prep, born of the program's emphasis on demonstrable results.
Basically, KIPP is nonstop boot camp. This is an important point. What works best for poor people is order, discipline, shame, repetition, and all the other uncool stuff that liberals have worked for decades to remove from our societies. White liberals have done a great job of liberating themselves, at great expense to the poor.
As a result, KIPP teachers typically work 65-hour weeks and a longer school year. Recognizing that students need more out-of-school aid to supplement their educations, the program also requires its staff to be available to students by phone after hours for homework help and moral support. For this overtime (which represents 60 percent more time in the classroom alone, on average, than in regular public schools), teachers receive just 20 percent more pay. Unsurprisingly, turnover is high. The program has relied heavily on the ever-renewing supply of very young (and thus less expensive) Teach for America alums, whose numbers, while growing, are decidedly finite. Indeed, it's unclear whether KIPP would exist were it not for TFA (and its own philanthropic investment in recruitment and training, which has not come cheap). ...
One obvious question that I've never seen asked is whether America as a whole would be getting a better return on investment if it was pouring these kind of resources into high potential kids instead.
After all, in every other field, we assume that the best teachers will want the best students. For example, I've never heard anybody criticize Barack Obama for teaching very smart, mostly highly affluent young people at the University of Chicago Law School, instead of choosing to teach struggling law students at a fourth tier law school, of which Chicago has several. Everybody just assumes that that of course it's best for all concerned that a radiantly beneficent being like Obama should exude his ineffable influence all over tomorrow's leaders at the U of C rather than over some fourth tier law students who probably won't even pass the bar exam.
For example, many of KIPP's now-lauded approaches were first developed not by Levin and Feinberg but by a career public-school teacher in Houston whose methods they admired back when they were TFAers. Levin and Feinberg tried to recruit their mentor to help launch KIPP, but as a middle-aged single mother, she felt she couldn't afford to join their revolution.
Basically, it's not that hard to find people who will slave for the betterment of other people's children ... until they have children of their own. The usual solution down through history has been celibacy for teachers (e.g., "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.") What KIPP is doing is using up the primes of energetic young women, much like law firms do.
Parents or guardians, too, must be hardy souls at KIPP. They have to sign a contract saying they agree to KIPP's exacting schedule, which serves, intentionally or not, to eliminate kids from less involved or determined families.
Of course, it's a good thing that the most determined parents and children have a way to distance themselves from the slacker masses.
Finally, even with such gargantuan efforts, KIPP helps to close, but does not remotely eliminate, the achievement gap in the inner city.
How big would the gap be if they ran KIPP programs in the suburbs? If somebody proved that a KIPP school in the suburbs raised test scores even more than one in the 'hood, thus making society even better off, would that be hailed as good news or bad news? I suspect it wouldn't be hailed at all.
... Given this, what mystifies me about KIPP is that it has scattered its resources across the country—opening just a few schools in any one state—instead of trying to concentrate its resources more fully in one community.
Because KIPP is skimming the cream. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's a good thing. If you were a hard working kid in some ghetto school, it would be great if KIPP provided you an alternative.
... But since the biggest debate about KIPP, on both the ideological left and right, is whether or not its methods can work for all disadvantaged children (instead of just a handful of self-selecting families), why wouldn't it—and its financial, ideological, and media backers—have a strong interest in answering this question once and for all by taking on an entire urban area or even, for that matter, a single neighborhood as, say, Geoffrey Canada has tried to do in Harlem with his Harlem's Children's Zone?
There's something perversely evasive about KIPP's opening up just one school in Dallas, one school in Albany, N.Y., one school in Oakland, Calif., one school in Charlotte, N.C., one school in Nashville, Tenn., and so on—as if the program recognizes that its best chance at success is to be the exception rather than the rule in any city where it operates. ... Until KIPP tries to succeed within an entire, single community, it is, for all its remarkable rise and deserved praise, just another model program that has yet to prove it can succeed with all—or even most—disadvantaged children.
Okay, let's answer that question. It can't succeed with all—or even most—disadvantaged children.
But, so what? How come Harvard hasn't opened Harvards everywhere? Because they wouldn't be Harvard.
KIPP is doing a good job for a tiny percentage of the nation's schoolchildren who are way above average in diligence. Good for them.
The problem, I guess, is that KIPP is sold not as a way that can help a small minority of poor people undo the damage done by liberalism, but as The Way to Prove Charles Murray Wrong.
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56 comments:
great post
actually, I have to agree with you on this one. There is a problem with liberal white teachers coming into black innercity classrooms. I have been a teacher and mentor and have seen it in action.
The main problem is that, however well-meaning many teachers are, the students don't see someone that they want to model themselves after.
Black students respect someone who comes in, dresses professionally, has their hair styled, etc. That, to them, is a symbol of success.
The cool young hippie liberal teacher will lose control of the classroom because they are too much like a "friend" to the students.
The grumpy old white lady who dresses in frumpy clothes will be thought to be mean or racist.
Image means a lot when teaching to innercity kids. Of course, the best situation would be to have educated, PROFESSIONAL black teachers who know how to be stern, dress professionally, and have high standards. They will get respect from their students.
But black professionals don't want the low wages that teaching pays.
Also, it has been my observation that many poor parents WANT the teachers to be "strict," because that represents someone who is "doing their job."
Also, a lot of poor kids have a lot of chaos at home, so it is good for them to come to a school that is strict because it gives them a different experience than what is happening at home.
Yep, good post. Still, it DOES improve things on net for its students to an unusual extent. If techniques that could deliver comparable improvements for other kids were developed and tested in randomized trials, that would be fabulous.
Actually I think Harvard should replicate itself. Half a dozen little Harvards scattered across the South and Mid-West would be good for the country and the cause geographical equality.
There is one academic program that does produce consistent improvements in low-SES kids. That program is Direct Instruction. Back in the 1970's, the Feds ran a longitudinal study to compare the effectiveness of various education methods with at-risk kids, called Project Follow Through. Direct Instruction basically was the only man standing at the end, with clear results as a superior curriculum.
As you might imagine, it featured ability grouping, repetition in instruction, scripted curriculums, and an emphasis on actual instruction of students.
Of course, all of the above would put progressive educators out of business, so the education bureaucrats that ran the study decided to bury the results. And in a very clever fashion too - instead of breaking out the results by curriculum, they just summed the results from all the programs, compared that normal real world results, and concluded that curriculum has no positive effect on low-SES kids. Genius! Mix 7 lemons in with 1 peach, and you get a pretty bitter brew.
A decent overview of Direct Instruction is available here:
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/grossen.htm
You'll have to google around for the full story, but it's out there.
But as good as Direct Instruction is, it admittedly could do nothing to close educational gaps between the races. Kids of all intelligence levels had similar levels of improvement across the scale - so no "gaps" were closed.
No surprise for the regular iSteve reader in that, to be sure.
Basically, KIPP is nonstop boot camp. This is an important point. What works best for poor people is order, discipline, shame, repetition, and all the other uncool stuff that liberals have worked for decades to remove from our societies. White liberals have done a great job of liberating themselves, at great expense to the poor.
Not so sure about the shame part (I think adults need more shaming than kids, in general). Otherwise it sounds good. Of course, we have to reintroduce gender roles to do it right.
Perhaps shame works better with girls. Boys just get confused and depressed when you shame them. In fact, I think shame might be a catalyst for violence in boys. This may be the reason boys in single mother households have higher rates of physical aggression -- women use shame and humiliation more than structured discipline.
As a boy, what would make you feel worse: dealing with a temporarily angry dad or hearing your mother tell you to your face you're a drag on her and she regrets ever having conceived you? Single mothers frequently do resort to this, BTW.
"For one, the academic program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day every other Saturday."
That's less than the boarding school I attended in Northern Ireland aged 11-13. Including meal breaks & sports, teaching & study time ran from 7.45am to 7pm or so every day, 6 days a week, with an hour's recreation time before compulsory bedtime. Sunday was church and letter writing.
Hi Steve. Regarding educational assessment, have you heard of the Collegiate Learning Assessment? This fairly recent series of tests was specifically designed to estimate the "value added" that you are always requesting, for about 100 colleges that participate. Results are only for internal use, so a university's value added percentile is just released to that university's administrators. It could be interesting if some of the high scorers ever to decide to leak.
What KIPP is doing is using up the primes of energetic young women, much like law firms do.
Whoa. Someone else. Who. Finally. Gets. It.
I sincerely hope for this country's sake that a lot of young professional women read this particular paragraph in this particular post today.
Steve-o, you ought to register a false account on match.com, or get your wife to do it. Every social trend in the Steve-osphere laid out in numbing detail. Thousands of high income women with exotic hobbies, hyper-extended social contacts that somehow never generate a spouse, visa stamps on every continent and sub-continent, 40 years old, and "definitely want kids," some day.
Effing surreal.
--Senor Doug
"Basically, it's not that hard to find people who will slave for the betterment of other people's children ..." Oh yeah? Try out your statement on the indigenous populations of Asia, Africa, and most of the world - even here. Have you ever seen Buppies concerned about Rumanian orphans?
"As a result, KIPP teachers typically work 65-hour weeks and a longer school year." Some time back, status-seeking whites used to also put much time into a laborious pursuit in order to garner social riches. They called it alchemy, and the success rate was astounding.
I'm so tired of the "Knowledge is Power" phrase. You can have vast knowledge on many taboo events of the world's past and present, yet if you don't toe the party line, you end up being relegated to posting in "leave your comment" sections of blogs (and most likely end up censored on those blogs). Knowledge is not power. Mao, unconcerned with slaving for other people's children, aptly pointed out where power comes from.
The discipline story is consistent with the core finding of the econometric lit that Catholic schools outperform other private and public schools at teaching poor kids when taking selection bias and differential resources into account [cf. Coleman or Altonji] Changing schools so that more of them were strict and focused wouldn't produce Black Harvards, but it would be extremely beneficial for lower income kids of all races, and by lowering crime and increasing productivity, benefit all of us as well. Of course it would go against all the trends in modern education since the 1950s.
Boys do better in school when there is an adequate number of men to teach them. One of the reasons for the disproportionate number of boys dropping out in Quebec Province is deemed to be the almost-completely female teaching staff. That problem is exacerbated for young black boys by the insidious effects of affirmative action. Young black men with college degrees have so many doors 'automatically' opening before them, they'd have to be saints to choose the teaching profession. When college is a ticket out of the ghetto, why go back there, even if it's just for work ?
How big would the gap be if they ran KIPP programs in the suburbs? If somebody proved that a KIPP school in the suburbs raised test scores even more than one in the 'hood, thus making society even better off, would that be hailed as good news or bad news? I suspect it wouldn't be hailed at all.
We already know the answer to this.
As a previous commenter already noted, the DI intervention pretty much ran the board on academic gains for all demographic groups.
KIPP is basically a cruder version of DI, but with more marketing savvy and with the financial support from the foundation of the founders of The Gap, as Mathews points out in the book.
In Project Follow Through, they did a study disaggregating the results by IQ groups. I guess this wasn't as unfashionable as it is today.
Gersten, R., Becker, W., Heiry, T., & White. (1984). Entry IQ and yearly academic growth in children in Direct Instruction programs: A longitudinal study of low SES children. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 6(2), 109-121.
And see this post as well showing graphs of the results for reading and math. Bear in mind that the progress of the higher IQ children was often sacrificed so that the lower IQ students could be brought up to speed. They were given the best teachers, were given more instructional time when needed, and often the higher performing kids could not be placed in a homogeneous classroom of peers because there weren't enough of them in the school so they were placed with a lower group.
It's pretty clear that using the more efficient instructional techniques in DI (and KIPP) in the suburbs will serve to widen the gap since the more cognitively able students will be able to run even further ahead.
Here is what Zig Engelmann, the ceator of these instruction techniques has recently said about this phenomenon:
Surprisingly, I chose the unattractive direction. I pretty well cut ties with the middle-class road and focused on working with at-risk kids. Why? Because they needed effective education, while the middle-class kids would be okay without it. I drew this conclusion one afternoon when Carl Bereiter and I were going over the results of our preschool effort. The at-risk kids gained a lot. The middle-class kids that were in the same group learned a lot more. It seemed pretty evident that if both groups received high quality instruction, the gap between middle-class kids and poverty kids would be even greater than it already was. On the other hand, if the at-risk kids received high quality instruction and the middle-class kids received only the current status-quo instruction, the gap could be narrowed greatly.
I’ve tried to be true to the cause of narrowing the gap, but my resolve has decayed somewhat recently. The reason is simply that educators are doing a horrible job with middle-class kids, and school systems are designed to fortify this crappy effort.
DI and KIPP will not serve to close the achievement gap. Once suburban parents realize that their children are capable of leaning more using similar programs they will start demanding their use.
And none of this is in conflict with Murray's views which are largely accurate, I believe. His only mistake is not being aware of how little in the K12 curriculum is cognitively demanding and that a good curriculum designer, like Engelmann, can break down almost any concept taught in K-12 so that most children can learn it. Murray also underestimates the effects that low IQ parents have on the language skills of their children. See the first six minutes of this video for a good explanation of that problem.
I don't agree with Steve on a lot of things, maybe most, but I think with respect to education he is far more right than wrong.
This realization is largely due to actually having a child. When you have one, THEN you pretty quickly have to deal with reality, not with admittedly white liberal/progressive ideas.
I think all schools need more structure, discipline, factual rigor, and possibly some gender segregation. I have begun to despise alleged progressivism at schools, because as Steve points out, that just benefits richer white people (of which I am one).
In fact, this issue could conceivably make me lean Republican, despite my tremendous animosity to that party. But I have never heard a Republican running for national office state things up front. Given their current predicament, what have they got to lose? They could easily steal this issue from Democrats if they were serious about it.
Someone once showed me the KIPP daily schedule. KIPP is essentially an orphanage. KIPP's administrators admit that it has to be an orphanage because black parents are too stupid and incompetent to make their children do their homework.
Even with all this attention, three times the educational hours per day, and four times the cost, it only brings its black students' average close to the white average.
Furthermore, troublemakers in KIPP are kicked back to the public school system, thereby raising KIPP's averages artificially. A luxury the pubs don't have.
That's how the achievement gap is going to be narrowed -- dumbing down white schools while "KIPP"ing up black and Hispanic ones.
'through history has been celibacy for teachers'-
I thought the Greeks had pedophilia for pedagogues. The gay rights movement is missing a trick?
Stirner said: "As you might imagine, it featured ability grouping, repetition in instruction, scripted curriculums, and an emphasis on actual instruction of students."
Sounds like good, ole-fashioned edumacation! (Like I had back in parochial school.)
Definitely needs to be brought back everywhere, not just to inner-city classrooms. Then maybe more Americans would be able to find their hometown on a map or be able to do basic arithmetic.
As a 4th tier law grad I can attest that the places are littered with 1st tier Obama types (albeit usually white and, oftimes, womyn who love womyn) that would have lasted 2 minutes behind enemy lines in a 4 person Insurance Defense sweatshop, instead making plenty o' money off the fevered middle class aspirations of the not too smart.
To keep employed all said prof. has to do publish legal articles of no great import in Law Journals that no one really reads (which thanks to the proliferation of 4th tier schools there are plenty of); and 2) show up to teach. That's it. It's a cozy sinecure, for sure.
As an aside, how Obama got to be president of the Harvard Law Review without publishing (or at least submiting an article or note) is such a violation of the obsessive credentialist mentality of lawyers and law schools - tiers 1 -4 - well, it boggles my tiny little 4th tier mind.
I see one thing in KIPP that should be tranferable to most schools and that is the oppsion of 8am to 5 pm schooling.
"For this overtime, teachers receive just 20 percent more pay.
Parents or guardians, too, must be hardy souls at KIPP. They have to sign a contract saying they agree to KIPP's exacting schedule, which serves, intentionally or not, to eliminate kids from less involved or determined families."
Once again, the liberal establishment has found a way to persuade young white people to sacrifice their own interests (marriage, children, their own family) for the "other" - i.e., for brown people.
Funny - the snotty liberals over at slate, would have no problem condemning the catholic church, for it's convents and nuns, and the ethic of self-denial it tries to instill in it's women parishoners. But somehow, this form of servitude (i.e., servitude to liberal delusions) is righteous.
Perhaps shame works better with girls. Boys just get confused and depressed when you shame them. In fact, I think shame might be a catalyst for violence in boys. This may be the reason boys in single mother households have higher rates of physical aggression -- women use shame and humiliation more than structured discipline.
Another way to put this is that girls in a group can be controlled by a facial expression while boys in a group need the threat of boot to butt.
Boys can be motivated by shame though when the honor is the honor of the group.
simon:
Think how much more discipline sub-Saharan Africans need than Irish.
Interesting how KIPP is closing in to Gingrich's proposal for boarding schools for underclass children. Or how the Army works, at least in my immagination. Lots of structure, scripted social interactions, slogans drilled in to their heads, fed decently on a schedule, little management of their own lives.
Skimming the cream may account for part of why whiter people think the underclass is more functional than it actually is. When they do interact with the underclass, it's typically a highly selected sample.
The dominant strains of thought in the US refuse to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor. That leads to pilot programs of selected poor people showing positive effects that are a) what would have happened to the selected people anyway or b) not replicable to most of the underclass, being extended to unselected people. Moving housing project people to the suburbs fits this model.
If the government/whiter people would recognize that there are undeserving poor, they would at least focus uplift on those who can be helped.
What KIPP is doing is using up the primes of energetic young women, much like law firms do.
Perhaps the most important reason why bio-conservatives are not and should not be particularly in favor of social welfare programs. As pointed out on an earlier thread, the plan is to send smart, decent,( and largely white) women into the ghettos during their most fertile years. KIPP-like programs may also give them an unappealing and inaccurate view of how they will have to raise their own children.
Bill: Boys just get confused and depressed when you shame them. In fact, I think shame might be a catalyst for violence in boys... As a boy, what would make you feel worse: dealing with a temporarily angry dad or hearing your mother tell you to your face you're a drag on her and she regrets ever having conceived you?
I think you're confusing shame with humiliation [denigration/belittling - an intentional intellectual assault intended to strip another person of his ego].
Part of the effectiveness of having your Dad beat the living daylights out of you is [in addition to the obvious benefit of putting the fear of God in you] the sense of shame which comes from realizing that you failed to meet your father's expectations of you.
Of course, years later, you look back on it all so fondly because you now understand that the reason your Dad beat the living daylights out of you was because he actually cared about you in the first place.
" dealing with a temporarily angry dad or hearing your mother tell you to your face you're a drag on her and she regrets ever having conceived you?"
Phrased that way, what's to choose? Yeah--your style of anger would be of the fleeting sort, quickly forgiving sort I'm sure. Temporarily angry my ass. And words do not fail men when they want them, as one can see from a any cross-cultural study of cursing.
There is a difference in the way violence plays out in matri-dominated enviornments as opposed to patriarchal societies, starting with school discipline--read St. Augustine's bio, or Winston Churchill's, Hitler or many a German of his day. That being said, in patriarchal society the violence tends to be controlled and contained by a certain authority figures and a commonly recognized code of behavior, channeled to a certain purpose. In dysfunctionally matri-dominated environments (there have not really been any genuine matriarchies in recorded history), the violence is not channelled to a great or more organized cause, except for gangs. It is more random, and the adult males have no sense of having an authorized place in the social structure.
Steve,
I'm disappointed again that you have failed to use your movie reviewer perspective to cast some light on a social phenomenon.
Surely the same animus that has created a chain of "important" and inspiring movies about charismatic teachers in troubled classroos (e.g. From Sir With Love, Dangerous Minds, etc...)
is also that which continues to create new and "innovative" school programs. Surely every teacher who volunteers for one of these grisly teaching jobs has visions in their head of all the movie stars who once faced similar challenges.
The real story with these kind of programs is not rational, it is mythic. We like to see tough, charismatic classroom teachers and/or football coaches who transform a bunch of vicious, surly punks into loveable and sympathetic rascals.
Roll credits.
"That's less than the boarding school I attended in Northern Ireland aged 11-13. Including meal breaks & sports, teaching & study time ran from 7.45am to 7pm or so every day, 6 days a week, with an hour's recreation time before compulsory bedtime. Sunday was church and letter writing."
Let me guess, you also walked to school, uphill both ways, in snow storms in July!
Interesting point Albertosaurus.
"What works best for poor people is order, discipline, shame, repetition, and all the other uncool stuff that liberals have worked for decades to remove from our societies."
Not so sure about that. I grew up poor. I don't know that this protocol would have been more effective with my peers than with richer kids. If anything it seems like it would make them hate school at push them away.
For the most part, what difference does it make how good the average education is?
Even if everybody was a 1300 SAT kid, there are, and always will be, more jobs in construction, sanitation, food service, etc, than there are in, for example, analysing Paradise Lost or working at Google.
If everyone was well educated we'd have to import an underclass of Mexican's to do the jobs Americans won't do.
What would be nice is if schools taught classes on statistical reasoning. Our educrat overlords could use it.
I've posted on isteve about this before but I think it's important to reiterate: the pressure on young white women who are nurturing and good with children to forego our own interests in favor of wasting our youth and vitality in the helping professions is UNCEASING.
I really want you men to reflect on what this does to our self-image. Remember this when you are irritated by some PWT mom with her hellspawn in public. Her selfrespect is being eroded by nearly every message directed at her. She has nothing to build on, outside of certain religious subcultures. A respectable adult *has a job* in our culture. If a woman is strongly feminine-identified, then the message is even more twisted: all the self-sacrifice that a motherly woman naturally is driven towards will be rewarded in professional helping careers, but mocked, belittled, and undermined when expressed towards her own family.
However, another really important thing to remember is that very few women would go work in nasty places if they were offered marriage by a truly desirable man. So you guys need to shape up.
When college is a ticket out of the ghetto, why go back there, even if it's just for work?
"Welcome back, your dreams were your ticket out...."
Of course, years later, you look back on it all so fondly because you now understand that the reason your Dad beat the living daylights out of you was because he actually cared about you in the first place.
Or some of us just don't speak to the old fool anymore, and are happier for it, even though he doesn't even understand what he did wrong.
Which conclusion do you think your kids are gonna come to?
For my niece ( SAT 1380 at age 12 ), when she was 3 her parents used Direct Instruction and she learned phonetic reading in 6 weeks
Meaning DI also works great on the gifted
"Anonymous said...
I've posted on isteve about this before but I think it's important to reiterate: the pressure on young white women who are nurturing and good with children to forego our own interests in favor of wasting our youth and vitality in the helping professions is UNCEASING.
If a woman is strongly feminine-identified, then the message is even more twisted: all the self-sacrifice that a motherly woman naturally is driven towards will be rewarded in professional helping careers, but mocked, belittled, and undermined when expressed towards her own family."
What you say is quite true. When I was young and foolish I would have looked at a motherly woman - not with scorn and contempt - but still with a sense of (ironically, patronizing!) pity for her that she was wasting her life just being a house-wife. There are some men whose view of such a woman would be harsher still, but even my more benign form of disdain was pretty rotten. After having lived in the work-a-day world, one realizes how much work is really just BS, and that the really important thing in life is to take care of your own kin and to raise decent children - your own children.
And my hat's off to those women who do.
However, one also has to admit, that a lot of that social pressure of which you speak is applied by women.
" very few women would go work in nasty places if they were offered marriage by a truly desirable man."
Women teaching have college degrees. What men do they find desirable in an economy where men do not have access to steady, long term employment?
Women who teach think of themselves as noble, but they expect Daddy or Hubby, who are probably engaged in ugly, grubby, money-making jobs, to take care of the menial stuff like bills.
In any case, refer yourself to the game. The guys can get the milk and let the cow pasture as she may. I wouldn't say the onus is on the men.
"Remember this when you are irritated by some PWT mom with her hellspawn in public. Her selfrespect is being eroded by nearly every message directed at her. She has nothing to build on, outside of certain religious subcultures. A respectable adult *has a job* in our culture."
1. What is a PWT?
2. We live in a culture that respects individual choice. If you want to have kids but can't stand being thought of as an uncool, Sam's club shopping, beat-up Oprah watcher, that's the choice you have to make. Don't expect anyone else to feel sorry for you.
3. "She has nothing to build on" Huh. Speak English por favor.
RE: Anonymous who stated "...the pressure on young white women who are nurturing and good with children to forego our own interests in favor of wasting our youth and vitality in the helping professions is UNCEASING."
The wisest women will ignore the pressure to do what is in her own best interests (and frankly, I don't think there is that much pressure. I live in expensive, blue state SoCal and know many full time mothers).
Google the Opt Out Revolution by Lisa Belkin (NY Times 10/26/03) about high powered women dropping out of the work force to raise their children.
I'm an electrical engineer with a 20 year career who gave it up five years ago to stay home with my three kids. I have a friend who is a CPA and another who has a PhD in economics from U of Chicago who are currently full time moms. We all earned big money but felt juggling full time work and babies was not a good lifestyle and we wanted to fully experience raising our children. (We're all Catholic so our religion offered us no support) There are numerous support groups for stay at home moms.
That is not to say that the 50s model of women getting married at 18 and having kids at 20 will ever come back. A woman should go to college and work at least a few years. At the minimum, it provides a safety net if something should happen to her husband or marriage. It also gives a man a reason to marry her, knowing that she brings something to the table besides her womb.
A local KIPP principal admitted at an open house for prospective teachers I went to that they screen families for commitment. And of course, that's screening from the pool that applied in the first place. Yet he said they "do not cream," by which he meant no screening by grades or aptitude tests.
I was extremely impressed by the teachers whose classes I sat in on.
And yes, those teachers were all young. Mostly but not all women. (They weren't all white, only a slight majority) (this was Crown Heights, Brooklyn).
I was really struck by the level of discipline. It was like an old boarding school movie.
"Anonymous said...
In any case, refer yourself to the game. The guys can get the milk and let the cow pasture as she may. I wouldn't say the onus is on the men."
The onus is still on men to act like men, and not like puerile creeps who practice "game".
"Anonymous said...
2. We live in a culture that respects individual choice."
No matter how destructive to society that individual choice may be? This rampant individualism - spawn of the 60s counter-culture - is part of the problem with our society.
The lady you two lads tried to stomp all over in your posts was making a good point, if you had bothered to reflect on it. For those of us who want a return to a more traditional society, we need to honor the traditional (and essential) roles that women played.
And if you're not interested in such a return, well, then I for one don't much care about your opinions. Just go back to your "game", and enjoy your dotage as lonely, senile hipsters.
It might be advantageous to emulate India's school system, as most Indian kids seem to do pretty well when they immigrate to the U.S. Even the more marginal IA immigrant kids easily outdo the average.
"A respectable adult *has a job* in our culture."
The measure of everything by economic efficiency is *the* Achille's Heel in Anglo-Saxon societies. The "business uber alles" mentality is incredibly stupid and pig-headed at its extremes, because it opposes biological imperatives like motherhood and political imperatives like continuity of culture.
"However, another really important thing to remember is that very few women would go work in nasty places if they were offered marriage by a truly desirable man. So you guys need to shape up."
Social scolding amount to nothing in Darwin's universe. Nature doesn't care if you have a good job or even if you are illiterate - so long as you produce viable offspring.
Fit women have kids because it is a biological imperative. Everything else, including "self fulfillment" and other ephemeral ego gratification amounts to nothing.
"That is not to say that the 50s model of women getting married at 18 and having kids at 20 will ever come back."
It will come back and then some. 20 is a little late by some standards. The question is only *who* will bring it back.
We'll see about all that. Women manage this husband-optional lifestyle because of massive state subsidization of education and childcare if they need it. That is the safety net they think they have... for now.
As the "economically efficient man's" greed crisis combined with the demographic mediocrity crisis gets deeper, all that free public money will dry up. The desirability of marriage is all about opportunity costs - or lack thereof.
"We all earned big money but felt juggling full time work and babies was not a good lifestyle and we wanted to fully experience raising our children. (We're all Catholic so our religion offered us no support) There are numerous support groups for stay at home moms."
For a religion to be an effective evolutionary strategy, it must establish a ingroup-outgroup boundary. If Catholicism is failing at that and instead psychological orienting its flock towards the "mainstream," then it is kaput evolutionarily.
Even atheism is a better religion (you heard me) by that measure, because atheists see themselves as bitterly opposed to a "world dominated by superstition and religion." (Atheism fails by other evolutionary strategy criteria, though).
What's funny is that Evangelical Christianity is also a better religion because Evangelicals see themselves as bitterly opposed to a "world dominated by secular atheism"!
Bottom line: establish that psychological ingroup-outgroup barrier. Otherwise your religion is just a bunch of inconsequential platitudes, which is what most Western Christianity has degenerated into.
Anonymous: It might be advantageous to emulate India's school system, as most Indian kids seem to do pretty well when they immigrate to the U.S. Even the more marginal IA immigrant kids easily outdo the average.
Oh, come on - this iSteve for goodness's sake.
When you skim the Brahmin graduates of the ISIs off the top, of course it looks like the subcontinent is populated by super-geniuses.
But what you miss is the fact that back home in the Jewel of the Crown, the other 1+ Billion peasants have an average IQ of 81, which, believe it or not, is even lower than the average IQ of 82 that we're importing with the legal Central American aboriginals [although surely the illegal Central American aboriginals have much lower IQs than that].
Anonymous: I've posted on isteve about this before but I think it's important to reiterate: the pressure on young white women who are nurturing and good with children to forego our own interests in favor of wasting our youth and vitality in the helping professions is UNCEASING.
Yes, I remember that thread very well.
Anonymous: I really want you men to reflect on what this does to our self-image. Remember this when you are irritated by some PWT mom with her hellspawn in public. Her selfrespect is being eroded by nearly every message directed at her. She has nothing to build on, outside of certain religious subcultures. A respectable adult *has a job* in our culture. If a woman is strongly feminine-identified, then the message is even more twisted: all the self-sacrifice that a motherly woman naturally is driven towards will be rewarded in professional helping careers, but mocked, belittled, and undermined when expressed towards her own family.
Well, I'm torn between offering you words of encouragement, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, chastising you for even giving a damn what the nihilists think of you in the first place.
You're not still feeling the tug of nihilism in your heart, are you?
Good God - I certainly hope not - for your children's sake, if for no other reason.
But if it's just something as trivial as having to deal with the smirks and giggles and eye-rolling which come with cocktail party banter, then get out there in the real world and find yourself some new "friends" [or ditch the idea of "friends" altogether - it's very difficult for me to imagine that your children wouldn't be giving you a surfeit of friendship already].
"That is not to say that the 50s model of women getting married at 18 and having kids at 20 will ever come back."
I'm always a fan of bold, completely ahistorical statements like this. Your oddly termed "50s" model, which most people at this site would call the "biological model for homo sapiens", hasn't gone away for most of the world. Go take a look at the post Steve put up a couple of days ago regarding population data.
You're on your way out at the group level, no matter if you and a few edumacated pallies have offspring.
many young SWPL types like teaching at KIPP - Teaching at KIPP brings status in many social circles (generally not the social circles HBD believers hang around in)
Never forget that the many of the wealthiest people in America encourage their children to go in to the ghetto to try to make a difference. Google Gerald Levin - he sent his son in to a dangerous situation to try to teach NAM's. His son was murdered.
While some families in the red states have a tradition of sending their sons to the military to die defending America in foreign wars, similarly some families in the blue states have a tradition of sending their children in to dangerous situations to try to help the NAM's
I suspect the desire to risk your life doing something noble is present at all points on the political spectrum and all points of the class spectrum.
If you call the sacrifices SWPL types make to help the NAM's "competitive altruism" do you also have to call the sacrifices military families make "competitive altruism" as well?
Basically, KIPP is nonstop boot camp. This is an important point. What works best for poor people is order, discipline, shame, repetition, and all the other uncool stuff that liberals have worked for decades to remove from our societies. White liberals have done a great job of liberating themselves, at great expense to the poor.
Not poor, but dumb, or more precisely, the 80-100 IQ range.
For those with IQ less than 80, full-time institutions work best. For IQ 80-100, the low-normal range, boot camp schools. For IQ 100-120, liberal "progressive" schools. For IQ 120+, unschooling and individual mentoring.
Of course, these are only guidelines that must be tailored to the personal needs of the individual.
'"Individual choice?" HA.'
Seemed to work for Carolyn. Not everyone is up for free will I suppose.
"It might be advantageous to emulate India's school system, as most Indian kids seem to do pretty well when they immigrate to the U.S. "
Their school system is so great that its products can't wait to get out of the country.
Garland:
The selection bias thing happens with Catholic schools, too. My son's school requires a fair number of volunteer hours (or you pay extra to cover them), and in order to volunteer for activities involving children, you have to get a criminal background check. This has two effects:
a. Parents who can't or won't do the volunteer hours, and don't have the extra money, don't send their kids there.
b. Having kids in the school is much easier if both parents have clean criminal records, and very hard if both parents have criminal records. (Though it is possible--there are some volunteer slots which only involve interacting with adults.)
Along with that, even with scholarships, tuition costs something for all the parents. A willingness to cough up your own money to get your kid a better education is strongly correlated with a willingness to make your kid do his homework.
But if it's just something as trivial as having to deal with the smirks and giggles and eye-rolling which come with cocktail party banter, then get out there in the real world and find yourself some new "friends" [or ditch the idea of "friends" altogether - it's very difficult for me to imagine that your children wouldn't be giving you a surfeit of friendship already].
Are you offering to babysit so I can experience this "real world?" Didn't think so.
Nobody has cocktail parties anymore.
Moses,
When my new religion brings arranged marriages back, you're the type I want for my daughter. Seriously. Great comments.
Let me clarify the comments about the Indian school system
The public school system is abysmal
and in 50% of the public schools the teachers dont show up
Public teacher jobs are sold on basis of corruption
The middle class sends its kids to private schools
The middle class is well aware thanks to AA, unless their kid does well at school, they will have a bleak future
and end up washing water buffalos at the village pond
In the US, the kids dont know that there will be severe consequences in later life if they dont do well at school
So the Indian middle class push their kids academically
In Indian hindu middle class - upper caste culture, getting academic awards is cool
There is no cheerleading , and drugs fornication and hippy lifestyle is strongly discouraged for middle class upper caste teenagers
BTW, the US Indian diaspora is not the cream of India
It is a high-middle grade blend
And only 25% of the US Indian diaspora is brahmin
rec1man said...
Public teacher jobs are sold on basis of corruption
Wow, it seems the case for abolishing the Indian school system is as strong as the case for abolishing the American school system. Homeschooling really is the best solution.
For those with IQ less than 80, full-time institutions work best. For IQ 80-100, the low-normal range, boot camp schools. For IQ 100-120, liberal "progressive" schools. For IQ 120+, unschooling and individual mentoring.
THIS IS SO TRUE
And you know what? Any experienced nursery school teacher can tell you where to place a boy along that continuum from an hour of one-on-one interaction, two days of observing him function as part of a group. Girls are harder to place but conveniently girls are easier to test at a younger age.
OMG! Some common sense (that proves fruitful -- surprise, surprise) on education in Denmark!:
Teaching according to ability proves popular
Tuesday, 31 March 2009 14:21 RC News
"Schools are reporting good results from splitting primary school students into groups according to ability, but some worry about the social affects of the policy"
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