KIPP students prove that real consequences can change behavior
Monday, May 17, 2010
Akey lesson in the "no excuses" type of public school, which uses firm measures to raise achievement for impoverished students, is behavior has consequences. The Knowledge Is Power Program, a no-excuses-style charter network, does that by denying some students the traditional year-end trip to Orlando or Utah or New York or other places they desperately want to go.
Does it work? Here comes an unusually qualified expert. Monday night, Kyrien Curtis arrives in Washington as a volunteer chaperon for 60 fifth-graders from the KIPP STRIVE Academy in Atlanta. He is a short, lean freshman at Morehouse College. He grew up in Houston and attended the KIPP Academy Middle School there all four years, from fifth through eighth grade. Because of foul moods and other distractions, he missed the trip every time, so this will be his first.
Denying children cherished prizes is a controversial part of the no-excuses model. The idea is to build self-restraint. It has had an impact. Former KIPP students, now adults, tell me that losing a year-end trip was the most dramatic moment of their middle school years. They are still trying to measure its influence a decade later.
Squashing a student's dream is something that most schools, public and private, rarely do. Some educators think it is cruel and destructive to a learning environment. But KIPP's achievement gains are large.
KIPP's co-founders, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, were appalled at the lack of meaningful consequences for students who misbehaved when they were novice teachers in Houston public schools. When they started KIPP in 1994, they devised a system of KIPP dollars for good behavior and loss of privileges -- such as being prohibited from talking to your friends -- for bad behavior.
Getting a good education and going to college, they said, were the consequences of good decisions. Bad decisions set you back. Some students did not believe that until they lost a trip.
In middle school, Curtis spent much time on the Porch, a KIPP word for the isolation imposed on students who skip homework, interrupt class, insult other students or talk back to teachers. "I never lied, cheated or stole," he said, "but I also was not always nice."
A teacher would urge his class to have a clean week -- no demerits. But by Thursday, Curtis would succumb to a destructive mood, miss an assignment and be back on the Porch. He had to sit separately from others in class and at lunch and could speak only to teachers. Good behavior freed him from the Porch, but that often took a while.
Curtis credits KIPP's nine-hour school days and heavy homework for teaching him how to manage his time. He doesn't think he would have a 3.2 GPA at Morehouse without that.
But as he moved on to KIPP Houston High School, becoming active in student government and eventually student body president, the lost trips stayed on his mind. He was struck by a teacher's observation that so many of the middle school students on the Porch were African American males raised by single parents, just as he was.
Curtis talks like a business leader remembering rowdy days as a prep school student. He learned about rules, but he had to break some. Each KIPP school has a different system. At STRIVE, each student has a chance to get off its version of the Porch in two days and is isolated only at lunch.
But 25 STRIVE students still will miss this trip.
Curtis is a computer science major, interested in robots. But he said he also might become a teacher and help kids like him who get left behind.
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