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What KIPP is most famous for is mathematics. In the South
Bronx, only about 16 percent of all middle school students are
performing at or above their grade level in math. But at KIPP, by
the end of fifth grade, many of the students call math their favorite
subject. In seventh grade, KIPP students start high school algebra. By
the end of eighth grade, 84 percent of the students are performing
at or above their grade level, which is to say that this motley group
of randomly chosen lower-income kids from dingy apartments in
one of the country's worst neighborhoods-whose parents, in an
overwhelming number of cases, never set foot in a college-do as well
in mathematics as the privileged eighth graders of America's wealthy
suburbs. "Our kids' reading is on point," said David Levin, who
founded KIPP with a fellow teacher, Michael Feinberg, in 1994. "They
struggle a little bit with writing skills. But when they leave here, they
rock in math."
There are now more than fifty KIPP schools across the United
States, with more on the way. The KIPP program represents one of the
most promising new educational philosophies in the United States.
But its success is best understood not in terms of its curriculum, its
30 teachers, its resources, or some kind of institutional innovation. KIPP
is, rather, an organization that has succeeded by taking the idea of
cultural legacies seriously.