Educating Children, Revitalizing Neighborhoods
In Helena, Arkansas the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is once again proving there alternative teaching methods can succeed in poverty stricken areas. The students are excelling and the town itself is being revitalized because of this. [Emphasis Mine]
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Helena’s KIPP school is working in two ways. First, it’s educating the kids. An important task for a school, don’t you think? Before KIPP, Helena’s kids were getting scores around the 17th percentile in language and 18th percentile in math on the Stanford Achievement Test. Only a few years later, those same kids are averaging around 76th and 82nd, respectively. Last year, KIPP’s eighth-graders scored in the 91st percentile in math and the 84th in language on the SAT. As fifth-graders, those same kids scored in the 29th percentile in both math and language. |
With test scores like this, why are we continuing to throw money at the traditional government school system? Once again, the proof is available, if you want to actually educate the masses, you must fund the child and stop funding the bureaucracy. How many more examples like this will it take before Legislators, Governors, parents and local leaders step up and declare enough is enough? In Helena, that time has come:
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Led by local investors at Southern Bancorporation and Southern Financial Partners, the community is out to raise $20 million for a K-12 Delta College Prep campus. It’ll consume several blighted blocks of downtown, now home to broken liquor bottles, crumbling sidewalks and weeds — not to mention the abandoned buildings and long-abandoned businesses. KIPP has already secured the land through a grant from the Walton Family Foundation. Now it has to raise the rest of the money. In a state under a court order to fix its public schools, there aren’t many examples of educational excellence. But because KIPP schools are charter schools, they operate free of the bureaucratic baloney that chokes the creativity out of so many traditional public schools and their teachers. |
Here is another example of how alternative schools will benefit taxpayers. They are raising the money needed through grants and donations instead of forcing the taxpayers to pay an ever increasing burden without any results. I ask again, which is a better model, a government run bureaucracy that cannot consume enough money and fails the children or a school free of the government bureaucracy that can innovate and use proven methods of teaching that get results along with a side benefit of costing less for taxpayers? The answer is simple, fund the child and stop funding the government bureaucracy.
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Earlier this year, the school received a grant from the Delta Regional Authority, a federal-state partnership devoted to regional economic improvement. DRA money typically goes to water systems and rail spurs, not schools. But to quote Pete Johnson, federal co-chairman of the DRA: “As we travel the region, we’re holding up the KIPP school and Helena as examples of what children can accomplish when you go outside the restraints of the public-school system. . . . Unless you change the educational system in weak counties, you’re not going to change the counties.” |
Children can learn, no matter how poor they and the community are around them. They just have to be given the chance. This chance is not found under the current restraints of our government run schools. It will only be found in empowering parents to choose the school their child attends.
If you want to end poverty in this country, fix the education system instead of perpetuating the failed bureaucracy of a government run monopoly school system. We must break the chains of this system that is leaving children uneducated and in poverty. Money is not the answer to solve the education crisis, empowering parents is the answer.
