Is KIPP Racist?

It’s difficult to obtain unimpeachable statistical data on how to improve life outcomes for children. But as best we can tell, the average charter school performs about the same as the average public school. Some charter schools, however, are much better than average. And the best research available indicates that the schools affiliated with the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) are extremely successful at improving outcomes for poor kids.

Part of how this came about is that KIPP’s founders and leaders are specifically trying to teach poor kids in cities, which results in the outcome that KIPP schools, much like traditional public schools located in low-income urban neighborhoods, have an overwhelmingly minority enrollment. Meanwhile, though KIPP has consistently increased the number of students it serves, serious questions remain about how far its model can be scaled up. Consequently, KIPP strikes me as a very worth recipient of money from the Obama administration’s now-controversial “i3″ program, which is supposed to bolster educational innovation.

Jeffbinc at OpenLeft not only disagrees, he says that thanks to i3 “tax dollars are being spent on racist education policies,” specifically KIPP.

This is total nonsense. It’s true that, as he says, part of KIPP’s philosophy is that KIPP students need to receive explicit instruction about proper classroom conduct. The allegation that this means teaching them to “act like white kids” seems to me to be the racist contention here. They’re not teaching black kids to “act white,” they’re teaching black kids to act like kids who are going to succeed in school. It’s true that, statistically speaking, an extremely high proportion of successful students in America are non-Hispanic whites but the goal is to change that, not to transmogrify black kids into white ones. You might as well argue that they’re teaching kids to “act Asian.” Whatever. They’re teaching them to be disciplined about schoolwork, which is exactly the way successful students of all ethnicities act.

For a non-silly treatment of why low-SES children may benefit from explicit behavioral instruction that strikes high-SES people as odd, I would recommend Duncan, Kalik, Mayer, Tepper, and Payne “The Apple Does Not Fall Far from the Tree” (PDF) which presents evidence for the hypothesis that role modeling of parental behavior is an important determinant of outcomes. In this case, kids whose parents did well enough in school to go to college learn from them the kind of behaviors that help one do that. Kids whose parents have little education and who live in communities full of adults with little education, by contrast, don’t learn that stuff unless someone explicitly teaches and emphasizes it.