KIPP Orphanage Comes to St. Louis

KIPP “Academy” (really, orphanage) to open near St. Francis de Sales in South City soon. Before you get too excited, and before you flame me asking why I call it an orphange, read this post to American Renaissance from December 2007, by a poster named Jill:

Exactly! That’s what I think every time I read about some “miracle” after-school/summer school program that has managed to bring a select handful of poor blacks up to white standards through intensive remediation. Journalists and teachers rave about how they’ve finally found the key to educational equality, but never mention that the same effort applied to whites would have turned out college-level students and not just mediocre “average” students.

I read an article a year ago about an experimental charter school KIPP academy, I think, that had increased the test scores of poor black 6th & 7th graders close to white average levels. I wish I had saved the link, but I remember the article quite well because it made me want to throw my laptop across the room. The journalist proudly recounted their class schedule:

7am – full breakfast served to ALL students free of charge (thank you tax-payers!). Bacon, eggs, toast, orange juice, etc. No expense spared since the educators believed a heavy breakfast made the kids smarter.

7:30 – 2:30 – regular school day with intensive focus on basic skills in reading, writing, math and science. Class sizes were small and the school had strict discipline requirements with mandated class participation, uniforms, etc. Trouble makers were kicked back to the public school system. School provided free lunch, of course.

2:30 – 5:00 – mandated after school programs on campus. Worst students spent this time in one-on-one tutoring with teachers, better students did sports or art.

5:00 – school-provided dinner in the cafeteria. Yup, you read that right! The educators didn’t trust the parents to feed the kids, and wanted to keep them on campus all day.

Rest of the evening up to 8:30pm or so – SUPERVISED homework. All the kids had to sit at tables and do their homework under the watchful eyes of their teachers. The educators openly admitted that these kids would never do their homework if they weren’t forced to, and the parents wouldn’t make them do it either.

The kids in this school ate all meals at the school free of charge during the week and only went home to sleep at night. Last, but not least, was SATURDAY school!! A half-day of intensive one-on-one tutoring with teachers and community volunteers, and free breakfast and lunch of course!

The journalist admitted that this program was very expensive, but never mentioned that this program involved 3 to 4 times as much teaching time as a regular school. Plus, it was basically an orphanage without bedrooms.

Rather than tweaking standard public schooling, it merely proved that the only dependable way to “close the achievement gap” was spending 4 times as much time and effort, and to take parental duties away from their families and raise the kids under intensive care! Any yet, this was clearly supposed to inspire whites to dump more money into this educational boondoggle.

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