KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program)

I read this in a book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a middle school. Classes are large: the fifth grade has two sections of thirty-five students each. There are no entrance exams or admission requirements. Students are chosen by lottery, with any fourth grader living in the Bronx eligible to apply. Roughly half of the students are African American; the rest are Hispanic. Three-quarters of the children come from single-parent homes. Ninety percent qualify for "free or reduced lunch," which is to say that their families earn so little that the federal government chips in so the children can eat properly at lunchtime.

KIPP Academy seems like the kind of school in the kind of neighborhood with the king of students tat would make educators despair---except that the minute you enter the building, it's clear that something is different. The students walk quietly down the hallways in single file. In the classroom, they are taught to turn and address anyone talking to them in a protocol known as "SSLANT": smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod when being spoken to, and track with your eyes. On the walls of the school's corridors are hundreds of pennants from the colleges that KIPP graduates have gone on to attend. Last year, hundreds of families from across the Bronx entered the lottery for KIPP'S two fifth-grade classes. It is no exaggeration to say that just over ten years into its existence, KIPP has become one of the most desirable public schools in New your city.

What KIPP is most famous for is mathematics. In the South Bronx, only about 16 percent of all middle school students are performing at or above their grade level in math. But at KIPP, by the end of the fifth grade, many of the students call math their favorite subject. In seventh grade, KIPP students start high school algebra. By the end of the eighth grade, 84 percent of the students are performing at or above grade level, which is to say that this motley group of randomly selected chosen lower-income kids from dingy apartments in one of the country's worst neighborhoods---whose parents, in an overwhelming number of cases, never set foot in college---do as well in mathematics as the privileged eighth graders of America's wealthy suburbs. "Our kids' reading is on point," said David Levin, who founded KIPP with a fellow teacher, Michael Feinberg, in 1994. They struggle a little bit with writing skills. But when they leave here, they rock in math.

"They start school at seven twenty-five," says David Levin of the students at the Bronx KIPP Academy. "They all do a course called thinking skills until seven-fifty five. They do ninety minutes of English, ninety minutes of math every day, except in fifth grade, where they do two hours of math a day. An hour of social science, an hour of music at least twice a week, and then you have an hour and fifteen minutes of orchestra on top of that. Everyone does orchestra. The day goes from seven twenty-five until five p.m. After five, there are homework clubs, detention, sports teams. There are kids here from seven twenty-five until seven p.m. If you take an average day, and you take out lunch and recess, our kids are spending fifty to sixty percent more time learning than the traditional public school."

On Saturdays they come in nine to one. In the summer, it's eight to two. By summer Levin refers to three extra weeks of school in July. These are precisely the kind of lower-income kids identified as losing ground over the long summer vacation, so KIPP's response is simply to not have a long summer vacation.

The beginning is hard by the end of the day they are restless. Part of it is endurance, part of it is motivation. Part of it is incentives and rewards and fund stuff. Part of it is good old-fashioned discipline. The kids know what the words "grit" and "self-control" mean.

A 5:45 wakeup is fairly typical of KIPP students, especially given the long bus and subway commutes that many have to get to school. A seventh grade music class of seventy students when asked for a show of hands on when the students woke up. A handful said they woke up after six. Three quarters said they woke up before six. Almost half said they woke before 5:30. One student said he sometimes wakes up at three or four a.m., to finish his homework from the night before, and then goes to sleep for a bit.

Marita is twelve-years old. She says, "I wake up at five-forty-five a.m. to get a head start. I brush my teeth, shower. I get some breakfast at school, if I am running late. Usually get yelled at because I am taking too long. I meet my friends at the bus stop and we get the number one bus.

I leave school at five p.m., if I don't lollygag around, then I will get home around five-thirty. Then I say hi to my mom really quickly and start my homework. And if it's not a lot of homework that day, it will take me two to three hours, and I'll be done around nine p.m., or ten-thirty p.m.

Sometimes my mom makes me break for dinner. I tell her I want to go straight through, but she says I have to eat. So around eight, she makes me break for dinner for, like, a half hour, and then back to work. Then usually after that, my mom wants to hear about school but I have to make it quick because I have to get in bed by eleven p.m. So I get all my stuff ready, and then I get into bed. I tell her all about the day and what happened, and by the time we are finished, she is on the brink of sleeping, so that's probably around eleven-fifteen. Then I go to sleep, and the next morning we do it all over again. We are in the same room. But it's a huge bedroom and you can split it into two, and we have beds on other sides. Me and my mom are very close."

She spoke in the matter–of-fact way children who have no way of knowing how unusually their situation is. She has the hours of a lawyer trying to make partner, or a medical resident. All that is missing are the dark circles under her eyes and a steaming cup of coffee, except that she is too young for either.