About Kipp: A response to the promotional video at http://www.kipp.org/about-kipp

After hearing so much praise about the Kipp School model and how it shines in comparison to other charter school models, I decided to become a parent-consumer of education myself and so I visited the website to see what I could “buy” into as a parent of a child.  I first explored the About section in which I found an overview of the main elements of the school model: History, Students, The Kipp Foundation, FAQs, the Press Center and Videos and a Search Engine. What was highlighted, however, in this section, was a promotional video that presents some of the Kipp students, teachers and leaders of the school model. As this video was meant make me a believer in 8 minutes and 5 seconds, I would like to take some time to give my first impressions of this video before moving on to other parts of the website which will likely give more detail about the specific claims made in this video. Whilst 8 minutes and 5 seconds seems like a quite lengthy promotional video, I was surprised to find that instead of the video being packed full of different and wonderful aspects of the school, it quite heavily emphasized a few main takeaways that I will describe below.

Set goals higher: The Kipp School Model makes sure that each class is learning “on or above grade level” and that “everyone works together to make sure that the kids can achieve their goals in life”. This assumes that other schools for kids in this demographic set their goals low; the way that this is phrased “to set goals higher” implies that other schools set goals for students that are below standard and that the intention of these schools is to make students perform poorly by sabotaging the possibility for success for students from the get-go. I find this assumption a bit problematic as a selling point.

No excuses to learning: A student in the video states that her teaching gives out her cell phone number to students because “there are no excuses to learning”.  The student has learned this mantra by rote and later on in the video, we see it again posted above the blackboard as a constant reminder to students that there are no excuses. Similar to the previous point, this mantra seems to assume that students who attend Kipp are likely to want to give excuses to learning and that their previous school(s) allowed them to do that. No excuses as a selling point seems to respond to an ‘I can’t attitude’ that is associated with and perhaps responsible (according to Kipp) for the 85% of Latino and African American students who read below grade level in the ‘under-served communities’ from which the school draws its population of attendees.

College graduation for all students: This is what Kipp claims its overarching mission to be. This is a fantastic selling point, but, I ask, how feasible is this in reality? Kipp is not promising high school graduate or middle school graduation which would fall under their terms of responsibility. Kipp is promising college graduation—a promise that is very alluring, but very questionable in terms of how plans to fulfill this promise. While there has been research to show that school can prepare students to assume a college-ready mindset, this is not the only reason that children cannot attend or complete a college education. From a parental point of view, I would wonder how Kipp plans to provide my child with the necessary funds to accomplish this lofty promise. Does Kipp have the funding to help every student accomplish this dream? And how effective is Kipp at ensuring its mission? Instead of showing college graduation rates, Kipp states that 3,100 Kippsters are currently in college and predicts that there will be 10,000 Kippsters in college by 2015.

The video concludes with endorsements from the NYTimes, Oprah and USAToday stating that Kipp is “influential” and “an urban triumph”. Were I not a research-oriented consumer, I might feel persuaded by the recommendations of such powerful media influences. However, instead, I feel like I’m missing big pieces of the story and I am eager to dig in to the rest of what Kipp wants to offer me upon further exploration of its website in an attempt to fill in those gaps.