Knowledge is Power -- but only for the gifted under twenty

In his book "How Children Succeed," Paul Tough talks a lot about KIPP, which is successful and highly vaunted in educational reform circles.    When Josh was teaching at Roberto Clemente, it was all the TFA set talked about.    Friends talked lovingly of quiet lines of kids walking down the hallways, of silent classrooms, of perfectly lined paper, of a single-minded focus, all steering towards the ultimate goal of college admission. 

KIPP is the anti-free school --- a highly rigorous environment, aimed at college success, but also crucially designed to foster a strong sense of community   (to recreate the classroom as a safe space).    That's a good premise, but doesn't work if kids continue to need the highly structured environment in order to succeed.     Tough talks about how KIPP students struggle, once they get into college, and lack the full context and community driving them to keep up in a new and different context.

On the other side of the socioeconomic spectrum, the Thiel Fellowships!   "Intended for students under the age of 20, [Thiel Fellowships] offer them a total of $100,000 over two years as well as guidance and other resources to drop out of college and pursue other work, which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement."    Selection is tight -- it's harder to get one of these fellowships than it is to get into Princeton.   

As excited as I am about motivating students to think critically about whether college is right for them, monetizing self-directed learning seems like, well, kind of an asshole thing to do.    As Will said to me the other day, "You don't need money to drop out of college -- you need money to go.   That's the whole fucking point."

Both programs make me incredibly angry -- KIPP, because it misses the point that middle-schoolers are themselves autonomous, thinking humans, and Thiel, because it uses venture capital as the benchmark for success.   The high-profile "success" marketed by both programs makes assumptions about kids, and how kids learn, that seem deeply troubling when thinking about diversity, access, and equal opportunity.      

What does an alternate world look like?    It takes that $100,000 and divides it between 10 kids, giving half to gifted dropouts, half to first-year college students --- with the explicit goal being to fund students who would otherwise be getting shitty service jobs to pay for their education.    It would involve making KIPP less about gifted teachers, more about creating environments that teachers want to teach in --- not holding their jobs hostage to outward-determined measures of success.    It would involve focusing on mental health, rather than academic success, and trying to create safe spaces in classrooms, where kids and grown-ups can work on being full humans, before they work on being "successful" ones.