KIPP Schools-Brainwashing the Disenfranchised
What does it take to reach an inner city child? Teach them to nod on cue.
Paul Tough of the New York Times wrote an article entitled, “What It Takes To Make a Student”, in which he discusses, among other things, charter schools. He focuses on KIPP schools which were founded by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two former Teach For America teachers who taught for a few years and decided to begin their own school. Their mission, according to the article is to teach low income and minority students.
At the time that the article was written, there were 52 KIPP schools across the country, educating 12,000 children. Tough explains that the schools are run “on a franchise model.” (Surprise, surprise)
KIPP schools have been getting a great deal of publicity, for their supposed success with low income and minority children, who have historically done poorly in public schools. Although the validity of their results remain to be seen, it is their methods that are far more interesting to me.
Lynn Rosellini of US New explains that students who enter the fifth grade at a KIPP school, spend their first week being introduced to “Kippnotizing.” Doesn’t that give you the chills? You can’t make this stuff up.
Kippnotizing involves, among other things something referred to as “Slant” which stands for “Sit up straight Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head, and track the speaker.”
Paul Tough explains that Levin believes that Americans of a “certain background” know how to do this “instinctively.” (What background would that be, I wonder?) Minority children, on the other hand, need to be taught such behaviors as nodding your head when someone speaks, “explicitly.”
I for one, had no idea that minorities didn’t know how to nod. Did you?
Tough gives the following example of this practice when he visited a KIPP classroom,
When I visited KIPP Academy last month, I was standing with Levin at the front of a music class of about 60 students, listening to him talk, when he suddenly interrupted himself and pointed at me. “Do you notice what he’s doing right now?” he asked the class.
They all called out at once, “Nodding!”
So, teaching children to nod, along with chants and slogans are apparently what Levin feels will help to “penetrate poorly educated brains very quickly.” Wow. Who knew?
Now, if we could just get them to smile when working a minimum wage job, or going off to fight a war, we’d be all set.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
I don’t get how you equate KIPP’s college-focused culture with preparation for military service. Do you believe that sitting up straight and acknowledging the speaker is something that we shouldn’t be teaching kids to do? Have you ever been to a KIPP school? I’ve visited a few of them. If you haven’t, I recommend you do so, and try to keep an open mind. I think you’d see way more things that you really like than things that you dislike.
Hating KIPP is the popular thing to do these days, and lashing out against the unknown is a fairly typical response, but it’s disappointing to see such a dramatic mischaracterization of what KIPP does.
Socrates’s last blog post..Tragedy in Harlem
I find this part of the NYT article very odd.
“To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting. But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn. (They may also like the feeling of having their classmates’ undivided attention when they ask or answer a question.) When Levin asked the music class to demonstrate the opposite of Slanting — “Give us the normal school look,” he said — the students, in unison, all started goofing off, staring into space and slouching. Middle-class Americans know intuitively that “good behavior” is mostly a game with established rules; the KIPP students seemed to be experiencing the pleasure of being let in on a joke.”
@Jose- what is making you sick exactly? Just curious.
For some reason, LearnersInherit’s comments, are coming up as mine.
Anyway, Socrates, I didn’t know that it is popular to hate KIPP nowadays, because I really have nothing against charter schools. I’m one of the few public school teachers I know who actually likes them because I feel that our large school systems are too bureaucratic to be efficient.
However, it was because of your comments to our posts as well as other blogs that made me want to know more about KIPP and to suspect that something was off. That’s when I started reading up on the subject.
Something about your stubborn adherence to spout the same rhetoric over and over sounded like an advertisement and is honestly a little bit creepy.
Here’s another gem about the subject:
http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/07/teaching-elephant.html
What makes me sick is that this business model of dealing with our children has seeped into K-12 when we really need less Stepford-ing and more individualized and more caring and nurturing environments for our children. When I see things like “Kippnotizing” and “those children vs. minority children”, it makes me envision children on a little assembly line getting pumped out like a modern-day Geppetto and Pinocchio. And it makes me sick because administrators on the higher level will find every excuse in the book not to actually fix the problem head-on. I don’t want to get into it at length here, but that’s my thinking.
jose’s last blog post..Short Notes: Square Dance
I would like to see the KIPP’s graduation rate based upon incoming ninth graders. Not the graduation rate based upon the senior class. I bet they would be enlightining.
Chaz, ask and you shall receive. Lucky for you, Jay Mathews answered that very question in his latest article!
“KIPP spokesperson Debbie Fine said staffers at the two original schools, and at the KIPP to College program, have been keeping track of all 546 students who have completed eighth grade since the two schools began in 1995. (The first year of KIPP, 1994-95, was an experimental program inside one Houston elementary school, most of whose students did not continue in the program.) Of those students, 447 have matriculated to college, for an average college matriculation rate over five years of roughly 82 percent.”
Illuminating indeed. Now that your suspicion on that front has proven unfounded, what will you come up with next? There’s got to be some reason these schools don’t work, right? Otherwise, the public schools really are failing!
Socrates’s last blog post..The KIPP Debate Redux
Jose, I agree. I find the whole thing very creepy and BF Skinnerish. Instead of finding ways to help children to learn to think for themselves, it’s creating little automatons.
I was also very shocked by the way that the author of the article, and similar articles talked about low income and minority children as if they were specimens in a petri dish.
AVIW, having never been to your house, I can say with certainty that it’s messy. Why? Because that fits my world view. People who get all breathless over the status quo have messy houses. You could show me pictures to the contrary, but that’s what I choose to believe so it must be true.
Jose, you seem more reasonable, if a bit taken with AVIW’s analysis. The schools you seek that care for kids are out there in the charter world. Go to a KIPP school, visit Uncommon Schools or Achievement First, stop by the Icahn School, and then come back and tell us what you think.
There’s really no excuse for all this speculation and fabrication when it is very easy to visit schools in all 3 of these networks. I realize that it’s easier to sit behind the curtain and complain about what you think is on the other side than it is to peel back the curtain and run the risk of having to admit you were wrong, and I also realize that when you guys finally do visit you’ll be on the lookout for any little problem that you can inflate into a national human rights tragedy, but at least you’ll know what you’re talking about.
Making stuff up based on the clumsy language of a journalist lays transparent your real goal, which is to discredit a truly effective reform with your cynical, empty jabs.
Socrates’s last blog post..The KIPP Debate Redux
“Go to a KIPP school, visit Uncommon Schools or Achievement First, stop by the Icahn School, and then come back and tell us what you think.”
Tell “us” what you think?
Who is “us”?
I’m assuming there’s more than just me reading your blog, but if your analytics are telling you otherwise… oh, I get it, you were trying to play the little game of “gotcha, you’re not a public school teacher, ‘us’ means you and your BFF Michael Bloomberg.”
Sorry I’ve been sloppy. “Come back” means in this case “return”, as in, “return to this blog forum” (not “return to City Hall where you never were”, but I see how it could be confusing), and “tell us what you think” means “tell the readers of this blog, who I’m assuming number more than just me and you, what you think about the school or schools that you visited, whichever organization they are from, be they KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, Icahn, Village Academy, or some other esteemed charter management organization.
I’ll try to be more clear in the future so you guys don’t start thinking I’m doing covert propaganda for Joechal Kleinberg or Moel Blein (come on, that’s better than Bloomklein, right? That’s our pet name for our two-headed hydra-boss around here at Tweed) or whatever other nefarious conspiratorial name-combo is paying me to work on my Spring Break.
We have to get back to our hunt for more bloggers who are bashing my beloved boss. (*GASP* Did I say “we”? What does that mean?!)
Socrates’s last blog post..The KIPP Debate Redux
[...] A Voice in the Wilderness talks more about this here: “Kippnotizing involves, among other things something referred to as “Slant” which stands for ‘Sit up straight Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head, and track the speaker.’” Humorlessness: there’s no humor involved until the process is complete. The humor then serves as a way to celebrate and seal the deal. [...]
Wow. This was overtly racist. This a reoccurring theme like the theory that black people have smaller brains. Why are we so quick to imply that race determines behavior? Why is that st a society we completely ignore whole groups of people, and then when we finally do pay attention, we jump to the other extreme and try to control them. Never at any time do we feel it necessary or prudent to teach people to succeed on their own. We carve out acceptable niches for people and then demand that they remain there.
Oops-sorry. I didn’t realize that you responded, so I responded on another post.
Hey, you’re not the Houston guy!!
I’m only replying to the Houston guy from now on; he’s so much more pleasant.
By the way-big fan of Texas. Spent a week there at an educational conference and didn’t want to come home. Great place.
You mean me? Same guy, unfortunately. You know how it is living a life on the lam, never two nights with the same IP address, jumping from proxy to proxy so the Feral Blog Investigators can continue their search, and the Department of Internet Conspiracy Knowledge Seekers can remain hot on my trail.
Socrates’s last blog post..The KIPP Debate Redux
So what you’ve done is proven:
1) Paul Tough is not PC enough for your liking (or mine)
2) Some bloggers don’t like what they’ve seen at one KIPP school
3) KIPP is one of those rare organizations with a disgruntled employee
What next? Will you find out that a couple of kids don’t like their time at KIPP either? Or that one day it rained on a KIPP school? Or the air conditioning broke?
Signing off from Dallas…
Socrates’s last blog post..The KIPP Debate Redux
I’m only responding because you’re coming up as Houston again. Like I said, big fan of Texas.
Anyway, “PC” is a horrible term-it implies that one doesn’t say what one truly feels because one knows it will be taken offensively. It also implies that one probably feels differently inside, but knows that it would be rude to express such.
It’s kind of like pretending to adapt behaviors like nodding one’s head on cue, but not really internalizing an interest in what is being said.
Luckily, though, the world has individuals like you and the folks over at KIPP to domesticate all of the “feral” creatures of the world.
How about now? Still in Houston? Trying to work out the kinks of my disguise (no, not the hood you’ve basically accused me of wearing; more a cloak of invisibility, Harry Potter-style).
I can’t imagine what your classroom looks like if you’re so opposed to kids sitting up straight and listening to the teacher. I expect my kids to be respectful and attentive, and if Paul Tough showed up in my classroom he might describe it in much the same way as he described the KIPP classrooms. That doesn’t mean that’s how I, or my students, view it – we get along pretty darn well, thank you – but I guess it would be enough for you to form an opinion about my class.
As if I needed any more proof of your biased predisposition to hate KIPP, just a quick question: in your imminent and unlimited trust of the media’s and the blogger’s depictions of KIPP, why do you only trust those who write things that seem negative? Why not believe the journalists and bloggers who describe KIPP as completely different from your description of it? I know, it’s because that doesn’t fit the KIPP Myth you made up long before, and irrespective of, seeing any evidence one way or the other. In that way, you are the Fox News of blogs.
Socrates’s last blog post..The KIPP Debate Redux
Actually, the funny thing is that I NEVER thought about KIPP schools until the other day when I started researching how to start a charter school. I actually looked into KIPP because I thought it may be something that I wanted to be a part of.
I was wrong.
Thinking about starting a charter school? You should hook up with your pal Randi. Hers is going really well! Looks like even the UFT isn’t such a fan of teacher protectionism after all! http://www.nysun.com/news/uft-charter-school-leader-will-leave-after-clash-teacher
Socrates’s last blog post..The KIPP Debate Redux
[...] more I learn about KIPP, the more it sounds like a cult; chanting and slogans, kippnotizing, SLANT-(Sit up straight Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod your head, and track the speaker), [...]
“KIPP principals purposively took steps to recruit lower-performing students by targeting specific feeder schools or the local Boys and Girls Club. Also, two of the principals who believe that exposure to diversity is important are trying to recruit students from a range of neighborhoods.” – SRI Report on KIPP schools in the Bay area
If you’re suggesting Edgar Allen Poe as your example of the kind of happy, well-adjusted person who would have turned out otherwise at KIPP, I find that a curious example to choose. Surely you could’ve found someone who wasn’t famously deranged, alcoholic, etc.
As for KIPP’s squashing of all things creative, how do you explain this:
http://edreform.blogspot.com/2006/04/pictures-and-video-from-last-nights.html
Or this: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/events/2002/kipp.html
Now, I am certain that you will find a way to spin the KIPP orchestra, capoeira group, poetry club, dance teams, and all their other artistic groups into further proof of the failure of KIPP to meet the needs of their budding Edgar Allen Poes (I mean, if Hillary can spin her current deficit as surmountable, anything is possible.), but maybe you should just take an open mind here and admit that you know not whereof you speak? I’ve heard that the KIPP NYC students spend more time in music than they spend in math class.
Socrates’s last blog post..Sucks to be U…FT
You’re driving me crazy with this IP address you’re using-it keeps kicking you into my spam.
I never said that Poe was happy or well adjusted-I think you just skim what you read.
From what I’ve read he was not. What he was, however, was a creative genius who made enormous contributions to the world of literature.
The fact that you define him as “deranged” says a great deal about you.
By the way, historians are now disputing the whole drunken, alcoholic image as hearsay.
And don’t tell me you knew him and saw it first hand. I don’t buy it.
[...] I’m looking through some of the recent posts and comments on this blog and I’m starting to see a pattern. When writing about Paul Tough’s article about KIPP schools, I quoted Tough as explaining that KIPP Founder Levin believes that minority children need to be taught to nod when someone is speaking “explicitly.” [...]
[...] frighteningly sterile approach to education that KIPP schools seem to have as well as the bizare brainwashing techniques that Feinberg seems to advocate. We’ve also discussed Feinberg’s strange, elitist view [...]
[...] serves a purpose that extends far beyond simply educating the forgotten population. KIPP creates conformity but this is only part of the [...]
I wish they had kipp when I was a kid. I’m a minority gifted and talented child. they sent me to gate instead. i didn’t like it very much…everybody was the smartest kid in the room. i liked my regular school where there was only a handful of smartest kids that did all the showing off. but anyhoo…i did finally learn to smile and nod on cue. it took becoming deaf for me to learn that. happened round about the age of 12 for unknown reasons. my deaf professor when i tell him i went deaf overnight he tries to explain something called psychological deafness…which I am sure I do not have–but he likes telling me about it anyway. back to the point at hand…i smiled and nodded my way through a mainstream school where no one ever spoke to me again. I even got a cochlear implant to hear environmental sounds…and still talk to myself. all those friends and things i had when i could hear and sing and dance and act and learn to play ridiculous instruments like accordions and win spelling bees and just get on stage all damn day…they all disappeared so I could be a lonely deaf girl at a really uncool mainstream school(we moved from my old school and old friends right around the time i popped up deaf at the new school). that was called my middle and early high school years. then I skipped the last 2 years of high school to go to community college and be laughed at by all the adults in the class taking night classes with me. they thought i was telling a joke. the teacher turned or something and I missed when he said name a great president. i thought he wanted the name of the current president…bill clinton. still think he was a great president, by the way. who’s laughing now huh? after that…I was a faceless girl in this book called “who’s who” among high school students. don’t know why I was picked…certainly I was not in any clubs or any class politics. i was just invisible. but they picked me anyway. then i went to a private university school with 30,000 kids and i went to the “disabled student” office and I said, ok i came to a very large university…do I have any deaf friends here? they said, “no ma’am.” just you…again. always just me being a miraculous invisible deaf girl. dirty trick that was. I thought i’d go to college and make some friends. nothing of the sort happened. i dropped out over and over again. boy am I great at it. I smile and nod and write a letter or an essay and pass a test without ever reading a book…things of that nature. it’s terrific…it’s called the smile and nod approach. all you do is go to class and pay attention and then find a kid that takes notes for you. i’m a clever one. I hired somebody to do my note taking so i could smile and nod and ask and answer questions with the teacher so I would not have to go home and read the book. teacher already read it. why would I want to read it again? everybody should go make a deaf friend. and then teach a kid how to smile and nod. whoops…half the country’s deaf these days. you guys keep talking louder for their sake and turn up the tv and all that. they will keep smiling and nodding and pretending they have any idea what you just said. *shits and giggles*
oh and p.s. in my deaf classes…note taking is explicitly forbidden. we must all maintain eye contact with our professor. he puts the notes up on the powerpoint and then you can go home and see the notes again if you need to do that before the test which is multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank, and matching. somebody knows how to do one of those sections right. and then after that the teacher grades you on a curve. after the easiest test in the universe…you get a curve grade that bumps your score. i love deaf professors. then only 3 of the 4 tests you took actually count on your final grade. one gets to mysteriously disappear and be called…day i showed up hungover and forgot about the test date. actually in deaf classes they make up the test date…the syllabus doesn’t include pre written test dates. we all decide on it…but if you weren’t in class to get the test date decision you are out of luck. the teacher teaches us and sees if we are learning at a reasonable rate. that’s my kind of teacher…he listens to your questions to see how much of what he has said is actually making sense to you. AND after he does all that… you get a bonus for showing up every day. bumps your score for not being absent. and then at the end of the semester you get extra credit to make a test for the kids that he’ll teach next semester. i got extra credit to save my teacher from making the same test. haha. i love it. he said what did I leave out from the last test. anything i should add? and i said…well remember that day you talked about that thing. i thought it was way cool. let’s put it on the test next time. TRUE STORY
oh and p.s.s. i was studying to be a teacher. not sure that pays enough though. might do it for a little while so i don’t have to pay back all those student loans though. it makes me sad that all the inner city schools look like maximum security prisons. athen white kids walk into schools with lots and lots of guns and shoot em up. true story. you sure you got the security at the right place there??
I am a teacher in an inner city elementary public school. I have taught for over 12 years grades k to 5th. One point stands out to me as the strongest support of the SLANT method – you can not teach if a child does not know how to learn. By learn we are not referring to brain capacity or I.Q. we are simply referring to, yes a conditioned behavior of giving the presenter of information your undivided attention – not dividing your attention with tapping your pencils, holding a conversation with the student next to you, slouching at your desk and maybe drifting of to sleep. That is purely what the SLANT method allows to happen. A body that has been conditioned to allow itself the best chance possible to use that good brain and to focus 100% on the information that his or her teacher is presenting – which is all the SLANT method is attempting to do – has a better chance of learning the concepts presented by his or her teacher than a child who is distracted by not knowing how to learn. As I tell my students, I can’t go over to you, tip your head to the side, pour my words into your ears, shake your head up and down and say, “There you’ve got it!
P.S. Revise and Edit – in my haste to present my opinion I did not revise and edit as carefully as I needed. (off replaces of in the third sentence, ending quotation mark in last sentence) Please forgive my errors, teachers are only human, too!
I am seeking a dialogue with current and past Teach for America teachers. I have taught for 14 years in inner-city Houston. When I started teaching, I saw myself as a reformer, as some of Teach for America teachers do. I had some pretty serious success with AP students, and some serious frustration with our regular students. So my experience, to be honest, has been mixed. I want a dialogue about the political behaviors of the Teach For America elite.
In our city, a former TFA official, now a school board member, has led the charge for beginning to fire teachers based on student test scores. She also opposed allowing teachers to select a single major union representative. After a little research I found this appeared to be a pattern with TFA’’s leaders. There seems to be a close relationship between conservatives and the TFA elite.
This goes back to its origins, when Union Carbide sponsored Wendy Kopp’s original efforts to create Teach For America. A few years before, Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything it could to avoid and minimize responsibility after the event.
A few years later, when TFA faced severe financial difficulties, Ms. Kopp wrote in her book she nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved by their financial assistance. The Edison Project, founded by a Tennessee entrepreneur, was an effort to replace public schools with corporate schools. Two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, then joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was vital to Bush, since as Governor he did not really have any genuine education achievements, and he was trying to prove he was a different kind of Republican. I then read the popular magazine articles about Michelle Rhee’s firing of teachers and closing of schools, and then her admission she had gone to far too fast.
I think you do great work. Ironically, my former mentor works for Ms. Rhee. He saved me in my first year as a teacher in Houston. He was a terrific teacher. I respect and honor your work, as I do my own.
But your leaders seem to attack the public sector and blame teachers for student failure in order to curry favor with rich conservatives. To be up front, I grew up in a low-income housing project in Mississippi and eventually became a good student, and I am a social democrat. I believe school reform must include better schools, but also health care, stable employment, long-term unemployment benefits, a revitalized union movement, a higher minimum wage, freedom for alternative lifestyles, and affirmative action. Stable families are more able to be ambitious for their kids than economically or emotionally unstable families. Better schools are part of this, but only one part of it. Your leaders seem to have gotten in bed with people who believe the market solves all issues—and that makes the money flow faster. Yet your hard work gives them credibility with the media.
Ms. Kopp claims to be in the tradition of the civil rights movement, but Martin Luther King would take principled positions—against the Vietnam War and for the Poor Peoples March—even if they alienated powerful people. I would like a dialogue about what I have written here. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.
[...] discourse. In today’s schools of “drill and kill”, scripted nightmares like KIPP are all the rage. Putting in the necessary resources [human and structural] and utilizing solid [...]
This makes me sick. No really. Off to the lavatory I go. KIPP schools: brainwashing our children. :: shakes head::
jose’s last blog post..Short Notes: Square Dance