Learning About KIPP: Lesson 1
After Valerie Strauss at WaPo posted yesterday D. Ravitch's sweet talk to the execs of KIPP, Inc., I thought it potentially useful to post some excerpts from my chapter on KIPP that recently appeared in an edited volume from Routledge. After all, if Dr. Ravitch's top-flight reeducation has left her with such huge blind spots when it comes to KIPP, what must the general public think?
The chapter is "Corporatism, KIPP, and Cultural Eugenics."
The chapter is "Corporatism, KIPP, and Cultural Eugenics."
. . . .If threats, punitive measures, or wishful thinking (in any combination applied by liberals orconservatives) would have worked in the public schools to bring about the closing of the achievement gap between black and white, or rich and poor, then the children of the poor over the past twenty years may have been spared, perhaps, the continuing steroidal remedies and monstrous ministrations[i] that are now accepted practice in many urban schools trying to keep pace with the demands of NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress decree. And even as sanity insists that poor children will find the more rigorous national tests (now on the drawing board) even harder to pass than the less-rigorous state ones that they now fail in droves, the next likely tough-love chapter in the reform-schooling of urban America appears to be