KIPP has been making a lot of news lately. KIPP stands for Knowledge is Power Program – a network of schools in US for kids from underprivileged communities that aims to train them to be outstanding leaders and most importantly find the otherwise unavailable door to college admission and a better future.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell compares KIPP to the rice paddies of China. Rice paddy workers in China, he says, devote a mind-numbing 3000 hours of work every year in their fields to cultivate the rice crop. And this hard work does not go unrewarded. It has eventually made the families of those workers prosperous - “No one who wakes up before dawn 360 days a year will fail to make his family rich.”
The notoriously disciplined, high-stress atmosphere at the tuition-free, open-enrollment KIPP school with longer hours of study and shorter vacations is doing to the low-income inner-city kids from Bronx what the 3000-hour work schedule did to the rice paddy workers in China. It is making them prosperous, is opening doors to a better education and better lives.
When are we going to see a KIPP in India?
June 9, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Where is the data that backs up the claims of what KIPP is doing? This is not a given, there are many people that dispute the claims of success of KIPP.
ReplyDelete