The "Knowledge is Power Program" (KIPP) (the website is here) was founded in 1994 by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two Teach for America alums in Houston.
I have come across frequent references to KIPP over the past five years as I read articles about the charter school movement. They now have 66 schools in 19 states, most (all?) of which are charter schools.
KIPP's educational philosophy tracks, quite closely, the philosophy of Nativity Prep and the other Nativity schools: an emphasis on family involvement (memorialized in the form of a contract signed by parents), long school days (plus half-a-day every other Saturday, similar to Nativity's Saturday field trips), lots of homework, rigorous discipline (including the teaching of social skills like continuous eye contact with someone to whom you are talking (I love this!)), and an emphasis on the basic skills of reading and writing.
KIPP has always struck me as an excellent operation and I have been heartened when I read about their expansion into different cities.
Yesterday, though, Sara Mosle wrote in Slate (the article is here) an interesting critique of KIPP. Her article takes the form of a book review of Jay Mathews' new book "Work Hard. Be Nice." - which she portrays as a glowing, overly laudatory examination of the KIPP approach to education.
Mosle claims that KIPP has intentionally limited the number of its schools in most cities (typically, opening just one school in each city) so that it can dramatically highlight the performance of students in its schools versus the performance of students in traditional public schools in the same city. The core of Mosle's argument is that KIPP has yet to show that it can replicate -- on a broad scale -- its successes with those urban students who are fortunate enough to enroll in its schools and, moreover, that the students/families who seek out KIPP are self-selecting (therefore, comparisons with traditional schools are flawed from the get-go).
Mosle is on to something here. In my article about charter schools in '04, one of my major concerns was that charters would reach only the families who were predisposed to seek them out and would be prevented from reaching all students because traditional public schools satisfy an economies-of-scale problem.
That said, I think she is a little bit too negative about KIPP, particularly in light of their steady expansion over the years -- I think the people involved with this program do view it as something that can be replicated on a broad scale, and I am not as pessimistic as Mosle about their potential to effect systemic change.
