Buy this book, save a boy…
Ok, that’s a little dramatic, but the more I make my way around schools the more convinced I am that high performing charters offer the best option for saving inner city boys. They just work. I saw it in the KIPP Key charter in Washington. I saw it again in Excellence Charter School in New York. That’s a single-sex school for boys, but to be honest I’m not sure which factor is more important, that it’s a boys school or it’s part of the Uncommon Schools network, which has successful inner-city schools regardless of whether they are single sex.
The book, Work Hard, Be Nice, is by Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews, perhaps the best in the business. What’s great about Jay’s book is that it’s a true narrative. No wonky stuff to be found. You really want to root for those those nice young fellas’ who started KIPP in Houston and then expanded it into a national group of high performing charters, succeeding in neighborhoods where success is a seldom heard word. You can feel every setback, every triumph, and yet know you’re safely behind that book jacket and not fully exposed to those classrooms.
They should make a movie out of the book and cast Jay. Wait, he’s not tall 
enough to play them.
Btw: If you want to hear what those founders, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, have to say about what Obama should do regarding education, read this op-ed in today’s WPost. Here’s the promo from the book. I’d quote directly from it but I lost my copy when I moved out of my USA Today office. Oh well…
When Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin signed up for Teach for America right after college and found themselves utter failures in the classroom, they vowed to remake themselves into superior educators. They did that-and more. In their early twenties, by sheer force of talent and determination never to take no for an answer, they created a wildly successful fifth-grade experience that would grow into the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which today includes sixty-six schools in nineteen states and the District of Columbia.
KIPP schools incorporate what Feinberg and Levin learned from America’s best, most charismatic teachers: lessons need to be lively; school days need to be longer (the KIPP day is nine and a half hours); the completion of homework has to be sacrosanct (KIPP teachers are available by telephone day and night). Chants, songs, and slogans such as “Work hard, be nice” energize the program. Illuminating the ups and downs of the KIPP founders and their students, Mathews gives us something quite rare: a hopeful book about education.
