Reply to Why aren’t KIPP schools popularity on this board

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Why aren’t KIPP schools popularity on this board "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Yes, there are poor families who have the internal structure of UMC families, but they are in the minority in DC. KIPP is targeting those kids whose parents don't ask about homework, aren't conditioned to sit and pay attention to a teacher, who don't know the "soft skills" that UMC kids learn. They are in the business of filling gaps. [/quote]

This is unbelievably racist. You think that the white UMC kids of DC have the soft skills that make them "conditioned to sit and pay attention to a teacher"? No, they have parents who will argue that it's not developmentally appropriate for them to sit still and that they need a yoga ball or fidget or ability to move during lessons or... any number of things. It is the white parents I know who don't ask about homework and argue for less of it. Sheesh.[/quote]

OFFS. All this stuff is well documented.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html

In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are
consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop.
Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so
they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the
classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences
translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on
standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.
Taken together, the conclusions of these researchers can be a little unsettling.
Their work seems to reduce a child’s upbringing, which to a parent can feel
something like magic, to a simple algorithm: give a child X, and you get Y. Their
work also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren’t
primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having
more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes
it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages
that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that
their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure
child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and
the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages.

...

When students enroll in one of these schools (usually in fifth or sixth grade), they are
often two or more grade levels behind. Usually they have missed out on many of the
millions of everyday intellectual and emotional stimuli that their better-off peers
have been exposed to since birth. They are, educationally speaking, in deep trouble.
The schools reject the notion that all that these struggling students need are high
expectations; they do need those, of course, but they also need specific types and
amounts of instruction, both in academics and attitude, to compensate for
everything they did not receive in their first decade of life.

...

Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for
classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs
them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes. When
I visited KIPP Academy last month, I was standing with Levin at the front of a music
class of about 60 students, listening to him talk, when he suddenly interrupted
himself and pointed at me. “Do you notice what he’s doing right now?” he asked the
class.
They all called out at once, “Nodding!”
Levin’s contention is that Americans of a certain background learn these
methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP
students, he says, need to be taught the methods explicitly. Middle-class
[b]Americans know intuitively that “good behavior” is mostly a game with established
rules; the KIPP students seemed to be experiencing the pleasure of being let in on a
joke.
[/b]
[/quote]

So interesting. So in a way they are teaching upper middle class white CULTURE, in fact, for the purpose of getting ahead in the system. Which truly could have that effect, I suppose.

This is kind of stomach turning except for the fact that they might actually be somewhat self-aware about it. If the kids kind of "get" the joke, or get that it's a game, all the better to play it with. I wonder if any so inclined Howard students or classes have analyzed this. [/quote]

It's not white culture, its middle class culture. UMC black children learn this stuff at home too. Don't make everything about race.[/quote]

I never know for sure. Because if it's made about class, someone on here will then complain it's really about race. You can't win.

Anyways, I think this answered OP's question.

These schools are well-versed in good research and try to help teach these various intangibles which MC/UMC and so forth kids are already absorbing at home. Therefore, not of much interest to those on this list (who are mostly from those classes). I would even venture to say, leave these intensive programs for those who most need them/will benefit. It's not a bad thing. Or don't, go there, but don't complain that few others of your demographic are considering it.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics