KIPP, again

Here are some excerpts from the umpty-umpth article in the NY Times Magazine about KIPP charter schools, which have strict rules of conduct and hard work for inner city minority students, What If the Secret to Success Is Failure? by Paul Tough. KIPP is always pretty interesting, and nobody is terribly frank about how they do what they do, so I give that chain a lot of Kremlinological analysis looking for small clues.

Six years earlier, in 1999, the first group of students to enter KIPP Academy middle school, which Levin founded and ran in the South Bronx, triumphed on the eighth-grade citywide achievement test, graduating with the highest scores in the Bronx and the fifth-highest in all of New York City. Every morning of middle school they passed a giant sign in the stairwell reminding them of their mission: “Climb the Mountain to College.” And as they left KIPP for high school, they seemed poised to do just that: not only did they have outstanding academic results, but most of them also won admission to highly selective private and Catholic schools, often with full scholarships. 

But as Levin told me when we spoke last fall, for many students in that first cohort, things didn’t go as planned. “We thought, O.K., our first class was the fifth-highest-performing class in all of New York City,” Levin said. “We got 90 percent into private and parochial schools. It’s all going to be solved. But it wasn’t.” Almost every member of the cohort did make it through high school, and more than 80 percent of them enrolled in college. But then the mountain grew steeper, and every few weeks, it seemed, Levin got word of another student who decided to drop out. According to a report that KIPP issued last spring, only 33 percent of students who graduated from a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college. That rate is considerably better than the 8 percent of children from low-income families who currently complete college nationwide, and it even beats the average national rate of college completion for all income groups, which is 31 percent. But it still falls well short of KIPP’s stated goal: that 75 percent of KIPP alumni will graduate from a four-year college, and 100 percent will be prepared for a stable career.

A 33% college graduation rate is quite good. I don't doubt that KIPP is skimming kids from the ghetto who are, on average, smarter and of better character, and kicking out those who don't live up to their expectations. But God bless them for doing that. Good kids should get some breaks in life, like getting to go to school away from the knuckleheads.

As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class. Those skills weren’t enough on their own to earn students a B.A., Levin knew. But for young people without the benefit of a lot of family resources, without the kind of safety net that their wealthier peers enjoyed, they seemed an indispensable part of making it to graduation day. 

I doubt if there is all that much diversity in KIPP grads' IQs. They probably run 85 to 110, say. There aren't a lot of high end IQs in the South Bronx, and what there is has probably been skimmed off into elementary private schools already, just as 90% of those who make it through this KIPP middle school get skimmed into private high schools. I did a bunch of volunteer work for a charity in Chicago 20 years ago that skimmed smarter poor kids into private high schools. We were quite happy to find kids who scored at the 75th percentile in the state tests. So, yes, if you have two kids from the South Bronx, both with 105 IQs, the one with a more resilient character is more likely to make it through college.

What appealed to Levin about the list of character strengths that Seligman and Peterson compiled was that it was presented not as a finger-wagging guilt trip about good values and appropriate behavior but as a recipe for a successful and happy life. He was wary of the idea that KIPP’s aim was to instill in its students “middle-class values,” as though well-off kids had some depth of character that low-income students lacked. “The thing that I think is great about the character-strength approach,” he told me, “is it is fundamentally devoid of value judgment.”

Obviously, the whole point of KIPP is for middle class white people like Mr. Levin to cram some middle class white values into the heads of lower class blacks and Hispanics. But, the middle class white KIPPsters have to go around insisting that that's not what they are doing. Heaven forfend that anybody should get any such idea!

It must make everything much more complicated that all the devoted teachers engaged in this must tell themselves that their whole approach is "fundamentally devoid of value judgement" as they slave 80 hours per week at KIPP. No wonder it doesn't scale well. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer