When education scholar Howard Berlak paid a
visit to a Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter school in San Francisco he was shocked. Berlak, an education reform skeptic, found a school that reminded him of a “humane, low security prison or something resembling a locked down drug rehab program for adolescents run on reward and punishments...” Berlak reported that the KIPP school resembled the scene out of Nathaniel Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter, in which students “...who resisted the rules or were slackers wore a large sign pinned to their clothes labeled 'miscreant.'" Other researchers have noted the authoritarian nature of a KIPP education. Instead of fostering a life-long love of learning the KIPP model promotes an atmosphere of compliance, conformity and reverence.
KIPP, a chain of about 100 charter schools, and its affiliated Educational
