Wednesday, April 01, 2009

KIPP Reform Schools Come to Pre-K: The Classes of the 2020s

The reform schoolers and child fixers of the early 21st Century, the ones inspired rather than repulsed by the morally-challenged machismo of the Feinberg-Levin KIPP model, could be easily confused with the reform schoolers and eugenics enthusiasts of the early 20th Century, when the new science of efficiency determined that poor children, immmigrant children, and other social burdens needed a special educational treatment to make the white middle class adult world safe from the effects of the growing epidemic of poverty and from those with defective germ plasm.

Now with an Adminstratation that has ceded the U. S. Department of Education to the corporate oligarchs and the dystopian dopes like Marc Tucker who draw up plans whose breadth is a measurement of the empty spaces between their ears, the stage is set for the imposition of a cradle to workplace or cradle to prison education system of contract schools that will be capable of absorbing the growing throngs of the poor, as our country becomes third-worlded by the rapacious raptors of greed who are devouring the world's wealth and who are now in charge of the social control system that is the American School.

Our new version of apartheid schooling that is being rolled out and scaled up (you have to love the irony of this assembly line metaphor, yes?) is, of course, based the sado-masochistic cage schooling of KIPP, the test-til-you-puke direct instruction approach, and topped off with the "positive" psychology character building of former CIA consultant and abnormal psychology expert, Dr. Martin Seligman. With billions in federal dough available for new KIPP stores and their chains of imitators, the plan is coming together to convert poor children to future-focused corpuscular automatons. Perhaps one day they will not even notice the crack vials that crush under their tiny feet or the bullet whizzing by them on their way home from their "extended" work days. And yes, this new part of the miracle starts in Houston, too:
At KIPP Shine, the original primary campus that Brenner founded, students use the extended day to learn Spanish, reading and math. They play soccer, participate in the arts, and undergo character development.

Children are also taught the importance of preparing for college.

“It’s never too early to start climbing the mountain to college,” said Frank Cush, leader of the new East End campus. “We don’t call them kindergartners. We call them the Class of 2022.”

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