SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Schools that beat the odds

In a comment to yesterday’s blog, Andrew asked for examples of schools that are succeeding in teaching basic skills to low-socioeconomic kids. I will plan to give a few more examples tomorrow, but I decided to start with the KIPP schools since there are now 109 of them and all are apparently succeeding. Rather than provide some dull statistics (available on the KIPP website), I thought I would give a couple of excerpts from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. 

• KIPP Academy seems like the kind of school in the kind of neighborhood with the kind of student that would make educators despair - except that the minute you enter the building, it’s clear that something is different. The students walk quietly down the hallways in single file. In the classroom, they are taught to turn and address anyone talking to them in a protocol known as ‘SSLANT’: smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod when being spoken to, and track with your eyes. On the walls of the school’s corridors are hundreds of pennants from the colleges that KIPP graduates have gone on to attend. Last year, hundreds of families from across the Bronx entered the lottery for KIPP’s two fifth-grade classes. It is no exaggeration to say that just over ten years into its existence, KIPP has become one of the most desirable public schools in New York City. (p. 251)
• The student’s name is Marita. She’s an only child who lives in a single-parent home. Her mother never went to college. The two of them share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Marita used to go to a parochial school down the street from her home, until her mother heard of KIPP. ‘When I was in fourth grade, me and one of my other friends, Tanya, we both applied to KIPP,’ Marita said. ‘I remember Miss Owens. She interviewed me, and the way she was saying made it sound so hard I thought I was going to prison. I almost started crying. And she was like, If you don’t want to sign this, you don’t have to sign this. But then my mom was right there, so I signed it.’ With that, her life changed. (pp. 263-264)
• [Marita] has made a bargain with her school. She will get up at five-forty-five in the morning, go in on Saturdays, and do homework until eleven at night. In return, KIPP promises that it will take kids like her who are stuck in poverty and give them a chance to get out. It will get 84 percent of them up to or above their grade level in mathematics. On the strength of that performance, 90 percent of KIPP students get scholarships to private or parochial high schools instead of having to attend their own desultory high schools in the Bronx. And on the strength of that high school experience, more than 80 percent of KIPP graduates will go on to college, in many cases being the first in their family to do so. How could that be a bad bargain? (p. 267)