KIPP: The New "Old Boys Network"

If America is really going to be a meritocracy, admissions into elite colleges has to be blind to socio-economic status. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, gifted students from poor families often don't attend the most selective universities.

Part of this seems to that the high achievers who don't have money engage in different patterns of behavior when applying to colleges than the high achievers who do. But there's also the "old boys network." While we regularly hear stories about the waning of prep school influence in the admissions process, the perception remains that who you know matters at least as much as what you know.

Now, one thing I've noted over the years is how certain charter schools love to put on airs that they are providing the equivalent of a prep school experience for the lower classes. Uniforms are the most obvious manifestation of this:

If you only looked at the clothes, you'd think Chris Christie was giving a talk at Delbarton, and not Robert Treat Academy. 

The problem for the charters is that they may have the patina of a prep school, but they don't have the cachet; they haven't built up the alumni connections and network of influence that prep schools carry into the college admissions game.

That's about to change: 

Twenty colleges and universities, including some of the nation’s most prestigious, have pledged in the past year to recruit more students from a prominent charter school network that focuses on educating the rural and urban poor.

The latest are Georgetown and Trinity Washington universities in the District. On Tuesday, they plan to announce partnerships with the charter network called the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, in an effort to help more disadvantaged students get college degrees.

The signed pledges, unusual in the competitive world of college admissions, set recruiting targets and establish a detailed framework for cooperation, seeking to create a pipeline to college for KIPP’s mostly black and Latino students. There are no admissions guarantees or enrollment quotas for KIPP alumni, but the pacts suggest one path colleges could use to diversify at a time when racial affirmative action has come under question in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The latest are Georgetown and Trinity Washington universities in the District. On Tuesday, they plan to announce partnerships with the charter network called the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, in an effort to help more disadvantaged students get college degrees. [emphasis mine]

I find this really disturbing, on a number of different levels:

- If the "old boys network" is wrong for prep schools, why is it OK for some charter schools? Why should college admissions be based on whether the KIPPsters have squeezed enough juice to get their kids into high-powered schools? Don't kids who attend other, less-influential charters deserve the same chance to get their graduates into the Ivy-plus colleges? And what about all the gifted public school kids who don't attend KIPP schools? Why shouldn't they be recruited as energetically as KIPP alumni?

- KIPP may serve poor and minority students, but there is substantial evidence it engages in patterns of attrition, and those patterns are linked to race. It's almost as if KIPP is skimming the cream for the colleges before the kids even apply. Contracting out to KIPP to serve as a gatekeeper to these universities is not an encouraging policy when KIPP's own admissions results are in question.

- While KIPP may attempt to recreate the trappings and influence of private schools and affluent suburban public high schools, there is good reason to believe they have failed to replicate the curricula and culture of the feeders into elite colleges. The "no excuses" paradigm may be attractive to conservatives who love the idea of compliant minority children marching, chanting, and filling in bubbles on a Scantron sheet. But is it a school experience that prepares students for the top colleges and universities? Do the Ivy-pluses really want students who have been trained to be convergent thinkers?

If there is a silver lining in all this, maybe it's that KIPP will forced to finally confront this question when its graduates encounter the free-wheeling, creativity-driven world of the Top Fifty colleges. When KIPP-educated students have to think critically, account for themselves, and navigate the complexity of academic life, we'll see whether all that marching and chanting paid off. Maybe KIPP will be forced to compare themselves to the current feeders into elite colleges and take a long, hard look at their own behavioristic pedagogy.

Maybe.