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

Oct. 15, 2007 — -- 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.

Bill Weir's piece on schools is an installment in our series "Key to Success" in which we show creative solutions to entrenched problems in this country. Have a solution to share? Post suggestions in the comment field at right.

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."

With U2's "Achtung Baby" playing on auto-repeat, the two pulled an all-nighter in front of their Apple Mac Classic and created a model for, as they say, "better teaching and more of it." Their ideal school day would run from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., with classes held every other Saturday and for three weeks during the summer. A "KIPPster" spends 60 percent more time in class than a peer in a typical public school. And KIPPsters leave their nine-hour school day with another two hours of homework. "There's no such thing as a middle-school kid who gets off at 3 and says, 'Boy, I'm beat. I need a nap.'" Feinberg said. "They're going to be somewhere, doing something. So the question is, can we give them something productive, constructive and fun to do, versus just hanging out on the streets."