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LEARNING CURVE
Back to Basics by David Grann
"Pow! pow!" says one of the kids, his finger pointed like a pistol at another boy's head. "You're a dead motherfucker, you hear me?" The other kid falls back a step as if he had actually been shot; then, ready to strike back the old-fashioned way, he makes a fist. While other students look on, eager for something, anything, to happen, a security guard steps between the two combatants. "Get outta here," he shouts. "Go home." The boys stare at each other in the squalid heat--their baseball caps flipped backward, their hands coiled like springs--and then slowly disperse in the direction of the Andrew Jackson housing projects across the street. It is three o'clock in the afternoon, and the first day of classes at I.S. 151, a middle school in the heart of the South Bronx and one of the lowest-performing schools in the district, is officially over. But, as the kids race through the open metal gates into the streets, another commotion, even louder, erupts on the fourth floor of the school building. "What room is this?" someone shouts. Suddenly two dozen voices cry out in unison:
This is the room
A train rattles by outside the window. The teacher, a tall black man with thick arms and legs, asks, "Is Kipp in the house?" and the students begin to pound their feet against the floor, chanting over the clacking rails:
No need to hope
As the cries filter out the window, there seems to be something slightly unnatural about them, as if they were coming from one of those TV ads for literacy the networks play during Saturday morning cartoons. But the sounds of the Kipp school are so familiar by now that few passersby even seem to notice them. Set in one of the city's worst neighborhoods, and in the same building as I.S. 151, the Knowledge Is Power Program has become an educational oasis, a public school that is defiantly and mysteriously working. Founded by two recent Ivy League graduates in conjunction with a similar program in the barrios of Houston, Texas, the Bronx school, as well as its Texas counterpart, has produced such high success rates that other educators have suspected both schools--despite having absolutely no evidence--of somehow manipulating their statistics. At Kipp Academy in Texas, where nine out of ten students are Hispanic and need assistance for school lunches, only about one-third of the students who enrolled could pass the state's reading and math tests; after only a year in the program, more than 91 percent passed.
In the Bronx, the results have been just as miraculous. In two years, reading scores have jumped by 54 percent. More than 70 percent of the students are now scoring above the national average in math, making the Kipp Academy the highest-performing public middle school in the Bronx for the second year in a row. What's more, it has remained-- in contrast to the Kipp Academy in Texas, which recently became an open-enrollment charter school--part of the public school system.
David Levin launched the original Kipp in 1994 with his friend Michael Feinberg, after they had spent two years as elementary school instructors in the nationwide program Teach for America. It started as a special college-prep program for fifth-graders within the Garcia Elementary School in Houston, initially open to anyone in the school and eventually to anyone within the district. In the first year, 45 students signed up. But school officials were less enthusiastic, and the program was forced to hopscotch from building to building in search of a permanent home. Even during this struggle, Levin decided to expand to New York City. He lobbied the New York authorities, insisting that he could do what most critics said he couldn't: build a successful middle school from scratch in the heart of the Bronx. In 1995, after much resistance, the Board of Education relented and gave him space, but ended up paying only for the faculty, leaving Levin to raise money for almost everything else--textbooks, music equipment, even phone services.
As word of Kipp's success has spread, academics from Argentina to Japan have descended upon it, trying to uncover its secrets. President Clinton recently invited the 29-year-old Levin to the White House. A crew from "60 Minutes" has visited, gathering data for an upcoming broadcast. When I arrive one morning, two journalists from Sweden are roaming the corridors with their microphones. "We could learn from this" in Stockholm, one of them tells me.
The roughly 240 students in grades five through eight are quietly filing into their classrooms, which are named after universities. "UCLA will always meet over here," says Levin. "NYU over here." The students are dressed in bright yellow shirts that read "Knowledge Is Power" on the front and on the back list "The Laws of Success": "self-confidence," "a definite chief aim," "self-control." In the main hallway, students first pass a giant replica of the contract they signed vowing to attend school some 67 percent more than the average student, including on Saturdays and during summers, and then other signs motivating them to a higher order: "Excuses are for losers!" "There are no shortcuts!"
Between classes, the students are required to stand in neat rows, backs ramrod straight and mouths closed, and march along the black lines that bisect the corridors. Everything is monitored, from diction to dress. The boys are not allowed to wear baseball hats, stocking caps, or "do-rags." The girls can't wear makeup or artificial nails. Beepers and cell phones are not permitted. No baggy pants or hoop earrings, either--because, as Rachel Ademola, an eighth grader, tells me, "they may give you an attitude, and if you have the wrong attitude then you might not get a job."
In contrast to the national trend toward multiculturalism, there is a conscious effort at Kipp to transform the students' culture into that of the mainstream. While I sit in on a music class, one of the girls begins to raise her voice in anger at the teacher, her arms folded and her chin cocked to the ceiling. "You're going ghetto on me," the teacher shoots back. "Don't start going ghetto on me."
At Kipp, teachers are willing to do something other schools are increasingly afraid to do: teach morality and decorum. "Everything we do is about building character skills," says Fred Shannon, a 30-year veteran of the New York public school system who now selects and trains staff for Kipp. In music class, when one of the girls sits with her legs spread apart, the teacher assumes a parental role. "When you have a short skirt on," he says, "you must sit a certain way." He instructs the female students on how to keep their skirts from "riding up" and their legs together. If a girl sees her classmate sitting the wrong way, he says, she should quietly inform the person, and, if a boy notices, he should politely tell another girl to say something. "We must all learn to act like ladies and gentlemen," he says.
This Kipp culture is maintained the old-fashioned way, through after-school detention, suspension, and even, on rare occasions, expulsion. (In Houston, miscreants must sit on "the porch" while other students walk past them all day.) The teachers, however, rely less on force than on a kind of reverse peer pressure. When one student misbehaves in class, all the students must stand, leave the room, and reenter in silence. If one student talks on the stairwell, the whole class has to walk back down the four flights and up again.
Along with these punishments, the school offers the students elaborate incentives to behave--to act like "Kippsters." Every week, the students receive points based on their performance and conduct. These are calculated on forms that resemble actual paychecks, which the students and their parents must endorse on the back. The students can then use these "checks" to purchase materials at the school store, including books, t-shirts, even computers. In short, they are paid to study--a fact that many critics consider crass at best and unethical at worst. "You want to inspire them to do better, but you also need to be pragmatic," says Marina Bernard, a slender Haitian-American who is one of the school's original teachers.
While the school uses the "paycheck" system to teach youths to earn rewards and manage their money, it also serves as an introduction to the working world. Every Friday, even the ten-year-olds dress like corporate executives, in suits and ties or full-length skirts, their long cornrows often tucked under their blazer collars, their braids pulled into buns. "The rest of the world goes casual," says Levin. "We go professional."
The results of this unabashed indoctrination are evident at noon each day, when the students from the Kipp Academy and from I.S. 151 flow into the same cafeteria. On the left side of the room, the I.S. 151 students swarm around the tables, screaming and yelling, their baseball caps turned backward, their high-tops unlaced, while a man with a bullhorn walks back and forth, futilely squawking at them. On the right side, the Kipp students--many of them the recipients of glares from the other side of the room--sit neatly across from each other, their shirts emblazoned with "The Laws of Success," their voices hushed. When a teacher wants their attention, he simply claps his hands once and everyone falls silent.
It is this controlled environment, the Kipp instructors say, that allows them to do what is most important: teach. "This removes all the nonsense" that distracts from the classroom, says Shannon. And, in an age of radical new theories of how to teach children, the Kipp curriculum is a return to the "three Rs": reading, writing, and arithmetic. "There is nothing fancy," Shannon says.
Instead, the creativity lies in the lesson plans, which are carefully constructed to keep students engaged from 7:25 a.m. until 5 p.m. In math, the students yell out "Oohahh!" after solving a problem, then clap their hands and chant, "Piece of cake, piece of cake." They learn the multiplication tables as raps. In English, they read Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and then create their own fantasy factory with hand-wrapped candy bars.
Despite all this remarkable stuff, there's something oddly mundane about the school. Rather than by a secret formula, it is governed by the same forces that govern most professions: discipline, accountability, high standards. Which raises the question: Can Kipp work elsewhere? Doubters say that the school maintains an unfair advantage in resources. In fact, though Levin raises private funds, the school's overall budget remains comparable to that of other schools in the city--only it's spent more creatively. Still other doubters say that the school is somehow "skimming"--getting the best students. There is some truth to this. Because parents choose to send their kids to Kipp and sign a contract stating that they agree to the rigorous hours, the students are more likely to come from families with at least a vague commitment to education. Yet applicants for the fifth grade are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis and seem to reflect the neighborhood.
One day after classes, I bump into a wiry kid from the Andrew Jackson housing projects who tells me that his mother has just gotten out of jail and that his father died before he was born. He has already been suspended from the Kipp school four times, he says, for "acting crazy." His pants hang down off his hips as he retreats back into the projects, where, he told me, he recently found an automatic hidden in the grass. Across the street, his friends are listening to music and shooting baskets in the dusk, and he looks toward them as if unsure whether to join in. Then, all of a sudden, Levin appears in the distance and begins to yell at him. "If you want to be famous and talk to reporters," Levin shouts, "you better make sure you wear a belt tomorrow." The boy stops and stares at him for a long moment. He seems to be thinking of something else--maybe the gun, or maybe his mother, or maybe simply his friends playing ball. Then, in an instant, he smiles, turns, and heads straight home.
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
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