September 14, 2011

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. 

11 comments:

Harry Baldwin said...

Obviously, the whole point of KIPP is for middle class white people like Mr. Levin to beat some middle class white values into the heads of lower class blacks and Hispanics.

Yes, amazing how the SWPL crowd ALWAYS denies this. They embrace diversity while insisting that the objects of their devotion adopt SWPL values; in their own way they're no different from 19th-century missionaries. They can't accept, for example, that blacks would vote for California's Prop 8 because they're really not that crazy about gay people. Or that Michael Vick's enthusiasm for dog fighting really doesn't bother underclass blacks or Mexicans. Or that misogyny and vulgarity are what blacks LIKE about rap music. Or that black kids do not aspire to be architects and engineers despite Nice White Lady teachers constantly insisting that they should.

Anonymous said...

The resilient character traits matter a lot than most people here would acknowledge.

Anonymous said...

"The resilient character traits matter a lot than most people here would acknowledge."

"Resilient character traits" being...? Genetics?

Anonymous said...

Dude, this was one of the more interesting "help all kids get an education" piece of yours and i was still pretty damn boring. You're usually a great read but you have a real hardon for sports and a raging hardon for education. Hey, write what you want but I gotta wonder how many of your readers are similar to myself as being cerebral non-fathers who don't give a shit what either a bunch of maladjusted negroes do on a sportsfield or what anyone's kid is doing anywhere.

Obviously with high school progeny your mileage will vary but I'm gonna guess that there's a whole lotta 30-something white guys like me out there reading you who roll our eyes when yet another piece on "education" hijacks 3/4 of our screen.

Anonymous said...

Resilient character traits are probably determined by genetics and environment, just like IQ. One reasons for the weaker than expected IQ-income correlation is likely that it doesn't factor in these other traits. I'd bet if self control, industriousness, and everything else were factored in, the correlation would be pretty high.

I've never noticed that smart people are especially successful, but it does seem like those with drive and self-discipline go pretty far. Environment matters less than liberals will acknowledge, but growing up in the ghetto with bad parents or being brought up in the third world can have a detrimental effect more severe than many here would think. However, if the comparison were between a middle class and upper middle class American kid with functional families, environment might only make a small difference.

Anonymous said...

I gotta wonder how many of your readers are similar to myself as being cerebral non-fathers who don't give a shit what either a bunch of maladjusted negroes do on a sportsfield or what anyone's kid is doing anywhere.

If you care about HBD, you should care about kids as well.

JSM said...

"Hey, write what you want but I gotta wonder how many of your readers are similar to myself as being cerebral non-fathers who don't give a shit what either a bunch of maladjusted negroes do on a sportsfield or what anyone's kid is doing anywhere."

Hey, 30-something White guy who doesn't give a shit what the kids are doing:

When you are 80-something and you can't find anyone qualified to change your soiled bedsheets, much the less change your catheter or change your chemo regimen, DO think back with fondness upon your wonderful 30-something devil-may-care attitude.

Meanwhile, us cerebral extremely NOT non-parents, are scrambling to get our gifted kids educated at a price that won't leave us destitute in our old age nor sentence our offspring to live in school-debt peonage.

Bob Arctor said...

It's absolutely stunning, jaded and cynical as I am, that someone would have the utter lunatic nerve to come onto someone else's site to imperiously and haughtily dictate what the author should and should not write on, as if we paid for any of this and are entitled to make demands.

Bob Arctor said...

"Obviously with high school progeny your mileage will vary but I'm gonna guess that there's a whole lotta 30-something white guys like me out there reading you who roll our eyes when yet another piece on "education" hijacks 3/4 of our screen."

No, there's certainly not a "whole lot" of high-IQ men in their mid to late 30's (and older) without children. By age 39 only 10% of professional class men are childless.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0410/p18s01-lifp.html

gwern said...

Conscientiousness/Grit is often underestimated, though it's so valuable and Duckworth is not the first to find that it adds a lot to IQ's predictive value (http://www.gwern.net/About#fn34).

The Duckworth paper introducing Grit: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/Grit%20JPSP.pdf

> Resilient character traits are probably determined by genetics and environment, just like IQ. One reasons for the weaker than expected IQ-income correlation is likely that it doesn't factor in these other traits. I'd bet if self control, industriousness, and everything else were factored in, the correlation would be pretty high.

This is very true, according to the Terman study. Once you factor in Conscientiousness and Extroversion, you've captured a ton of lifetime success. (This is distressing news for introverts like me.)

See http://www.iza.org/conference_files/CoNoCoSk2011/gensowski_m6556.pdf or http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/04/earnings-effects-of-personality.html if you don't like PDFs.

bjdubbs said...

KIPP schools sound an awful lot like the stricter Catholic schools. Next they'll be teaching Latin. There's a billionaire called Robert Wilson who gave a big gift to Catholic schools in NY for precisely that reason, because Catholic schools are the best at this sort of thing.

http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/article.asp?article=1621

"Catholic schools were brought to Wilson’s attention by what must be history’s most outrageously successful direct-mail fundraising letter. “I got this letter from Susan George, the executive director of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund,” Wilson explains. “It was just a form letter from a mass mailing. It pointed out how little Catholic schools cost per student—and how superior their results are.”