New Education Plan: 'Work Hard. Be Nice. No Shortcuts'

ABC News did two great segments on KIPP earlier this week.  Below is an article, and to see the video clips click on the box in the upper right corner of the web page at: http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3731383&page=1

All too often in U.S. public education, ZIP code is destiny.  Kids from poor neighborhoods are six times less likely to graduate from high school than their middle-class peers, and attempts to close that gap have been the source of exhaustive research and expensive battles. But as politicians  argue over No Child Left Behind and school boards debate whole language versus phonics, a pair of teachers has quietly spent the past decade developing a magic formula that sends low-income kids to college at an astounding rate.  
 
Are you ready? Here it is ... (drum roll please).
 
Work hard. Be nice. No shortcuts.
 
It may be as quaint as the eat-right-and-exercise model of weight loss, but those are the very real pillars beneath the Knowledge Is Power Program, known as KIPP. It was developed in 1995 by two young,  idealistic fourth-grade teachers in Houston. As members of the Teach for  America corps, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg landed in a barrio school and  quickly had their grand aspirations beaten to a pulp by reality.
 
Despite their best efforts, an alarming number of their  students went on to middle school only to drop out, join gangs or become parents. "At first, it was very easy to go into the teacher's lounge in elementary school and point the finger," Feinberg told me. "Blame the other schools, blame the district, blame the kids, blame their parents, blame the  community. And we had an epiphany one night where we realized you know what, all this finger pointing is ... just adding to the problem. And it's not finding a solution."

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New Education Plan: 'Work Hard. Be Nice. No Shortcuts'
Knowledge Is Power Program Sends 80 percent of Its Students to College
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK By BILL WEIR, ABC News
http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3731383&page=1

All too often in U.S. public education, ZIP code is destiny. Kids from poor neighborhoods are six times less likely to graduate from high school than their middle-class peers, and attempts to close that gap have been the source of exhaustive research and expensive battles. But as politicians argue over No Child Left Behind and school boards debate whole language versus phonics, a pair of teachers has quietly spent the past decade developing a magic formula that sends low-income kids to college at an astounding rate.