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[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
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.

[/quote]

Theres lots of videos of this [b]type of school [/b]and teacher posts online, quite frankly this is not the school I want to send my child to and I'm black. If it's for you, go for it...[/quote]

That attitude is part of the problem. The assumption that all schools successfully educating students of color are all exactly the same, and/or doing something radically different than other schools.

I grew up middle class (and white), and learned in school to "track the teacher" (it was even in my early elementary report cards that I spent too much time daydreaming!), and we always lined up and walked quietly when we changed classrooms or went to recess. Why? Because when a class of 25-30 kids is walking from one room in the building to another, the teachers have a few things they need to accomplish: Not Lose Anyone and Not Disrupt Other Classes.

The article copied above seems to assume that these skills are NOT taught in schools that are largely UMC. It's not true. They are. Teachers, no matter the school, don't allow children to run between classrooms (they walk quietly, usually in a line), and all teachers have tricks to get kids to pay attention and make eye contact during lessons. I personally know several UMC parents (white, in NOVA fwiw) who have been told that their early elementary child is working on paying attention instead of daydreaming, and is learning to be quiet during circle time. This is part of school, whether the schools have a name for it or not.

Schools have been teaching this stuff for YEARS. Sure, in middle schools that are trying to turn around struggling students that traditional schools simply gave up on, they do this in middle school. My child, and many others, have now been at KIPP since PK3. They have been learning it since then (the same way most kids learn it in PK and early elementary). In middle school I'm sure the teachers will use the same name for it that the early childhood and elementary schools did, but it won't be as much of a focus as it was in the early years. Same way it won't be as much a focus in "UMC" middle schools - the kids learned it in PK and elementary school. Middle school teachers STILL have tricks to keep their students attention though - they have to - kids get distracted/daydream/bored and the teachers need to be able to bring the class back - no matter the SES.

The KIPP middle school at our campus is not as rigid as people think, and probably is less rigid than it used to be. My child's class getting to middle school will mark it being "fully grown" through KIPP though - meaning the 8th graders that year will have been at KIPP when they were in PK as opposed to transferring in later years. That seems to only help the school culture, and has relaxed the structure in our grade and the lower grades. [/quote]

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