Elephants Seem to Like It This Way

In an op-ed in today's New York Times titled "Teaching the Elephant," David Brooks makes this rather extraordinary statement: "Many of today's most effective antipoverty institutions are incredibly intrusive, even authoritarian."

Wow, I thought. Brooks, the conservative, might make a sensible argument for a change.

But then the other shoe dropped when Brooks concluded with this: "Up to a point, elephants seem to like it that way."

He cites the example of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools, and admits that KIPP is an authoritarian institution, citing the anecdote from Paul Tough's recent essay from The New York Times Magazine in which KIPP pupils were trained to nod along as people talked. Up to a point, according to Brooks, elephants seem to like it this way.

Up to a point? Which point exactly? The concept is familiar: those who are held captive long enough, effectively enough, seem to like it that way.

At what point does such authoritarianism become totalitarianism? The safest, most efficient forms of government in the world -- and throughout history for that matter -- have been totalitarian dictatorships that leave nothing to chance, that control every aspect of society, even reality.

Michel Foucault's chapter on discipline in Discipline and Punish keeps coming to mind, "the body as object and target of power" and the notion of "docile bodies" that are "subjected, used, transformed, and improved."

These docile bodies in KIPP schools are uniformly brown and black. No white body is subjected to this same kind of disciplined transformation. Indeed, the school motto is "Be nice, work hard." What white, suburban, middle-class parents would want this to be the goal of their child's education?

Yet according to Tough and Brooks, KIPP works because it brings a kind of suburban, middle-class milieu to an urban, working-poor milieu. But let's imagine the implications of this for a moment. KIPP students spend exponentially more time at school -- from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. during the week, four hours on Saturdays, and for a month during the summer. They put in roughly 70% more time in class than typical public school students. So KIPP is basically charged with raising these children. That in itself may or may not be a good thing, e.g., should a publicly-funded educational institution overseen by the state be charged with unofficially raising children? Maybe yes, maybe no. But if yes, what kinds of parents are these KIPP schools? And whose interests do they have in mind? Biological parents have an investment in the well-being of their children that differs on several different orders of magnitude from the interest that a state-controlled parent might have. In some instances, the KIPP parent might actually be better than the biological parent. But in other cases, the biological parent might do a better job inculcating in the child the values that are important to his/her family, race, religious tradition, and practices of ethnic origin.

If we leave it to KIPP to raise poor black children, how will they raise them? With what outcome in mind? As many social dominance theorists have suggested, the most stable societies are those in which historically oppressed groups accept the legitimacy of the hierarchical structure, thus internalizing their oppression by rationalizing to themselves their place in the order of things.

Up to a point, according to Brooks, elephants seem to like it this way.

Left to choose its own priorities, surely the state (through the mechanism of KIPP) will choose stability over something else. The effect and impact of this choice can only be guessed at, but I'd venture an educated guess and say that stability means more phonics and less Malcolm X. Again, this is by no means a consciously-constructed plan to exert racial dominance. It is, in a word, efficient. It raises test scores. And, according to the KIPP people, what these children need.

Elephants seem to like it this way.

This is all the more troubling given the way the KIPP origin story is told: two bright, highly-educated, white male crusaders who went out of their ways to save poor minority children from the ravages of the failed system of public education. The story too closely resembles tales of white missionaries, explorers, and anthropologists not to be noticeable. In darkest Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, white men descended into the jungles to convert, trade with, and study the savages they encountered. Implicit within all their encounters was the unquestioned axiom that defined these exchanges: the white people were civilized, the black people were uncivilized; the white people were advanced, the black people were behind. To this day, “Third World Debtor Nations” are looked down upon as drains upon the world economy, as incompetent at managing their own affairs, and in need of a good lesson or two.

The KIPP origin story is told with a great deal of pride, that the two young crusaders (both from Ivy League schools) displayed enormous courage and commitment to turn things around to produce “schools that work.” I'm reminded of Kenneth Saltman’s point from The Edison Schools:

"The two questions most asked about Edison by liberals and conservatives are whether it works to raise test scores and whether it works financially to decrease costs. Asking whether or not something “works” brackets out of consideration the broader goals, purposes, and underlying assumptions about what something works to do. The focus on test performance and finances has thoroughly eclipsed discussion of whether Edison facilitates democratic education and a democratic society. If one assumes that the democratic potential of public schools should be at the forefront of debate, then the question of whether or not Edison “works” may be the wrong way to approach the company and public schooling more generally." (p. 68)

So what do KIPP schools work at doing? What do they accomplish? What do they produce? Or, more precisely, who do they produce and by what means? And at what cost?

While the intentions of those early missionaries are now clear to us centuries later, and while we can now condemn their racist, elitist, ethnocentric project to "civilize" the non-Western planet and make it into its own image, we are quick to celebrate the project of these modern KIPP'ster missionaries. We find it quaint -- and maybe a trifle classist -- in My Fair Lady when Professor Henry Higgins sings, "Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?" and gives Eliza Doolittle elocution lessons so she can pass for royalty at a high-society gala. But we label similar approaches at KIPP schools as "efforts to close the achievement gap" and think nothing of the relationship between training children when and how to nod appropriately and Eliza pronouncing, "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plane."

Higgins abhors Eliza. It not that she cannot speak proper English. Rather, it is that she will not. She chooses not to participate in the mores, values, and language patterns of elite society, and it is this conscious act of rejection that Higgins detests. He knows full well that she can change, but her choice not to is loathsome. So too with the children that KIPP targets. Falling under the all-encompassing, seemingly innocuous mantra "All children can learn," KIPP treats all children as willful and loathsome that might prove them otherwise. To convert them to acceptable forms of social behavior, to give them the cultural capital that will allow them to pass in high society, is the gift of liberation that they have to give to these children. Who, they ask, would not want to be given this gift?

It's not that I wish to romanticize the "otherness" of black, low-income, urban culture. I'm not suggesting that "they" are really better than "us," that "those people" are more in tune with how things really are. But I do want to point out tow things: (1) the revulsion that so many people feel towards poor people, a disproportionate percentage of whom are black and Hispanic, and (2) the need to make our diverse culture of heterogeneous beliefs and practices into a single, efficient, monolithic culture that has a single objective: "success" in capitalist culture.

Until we look at the totality of education reform and stop insisting that education reform should be exclusively about school reform, we will never come close to closing the gap. Even a best case scenario with KIPP -- where KIPP schools flourish across the country -- can only hope to educate an extraordinarily small percentage of poor urban kids. The greater tragedy is the extent to which such a victory -- even if it were possible -- would signal the victory of monolithic capitalist conformity to an ideal of efficiency and productivity.

So in praising KIPP, we lose sight of the bigger issues and the bigger challenges. And, with KIPP, we say, "This is good enough for the elephants" while we send our kids to private schools or the best suburban schools, further sustaining the monolithic culture that got us there.