Chinese Mothers and KIPP

The other day, I posted an article by a Chinese-American Yale Professor describing the way she brought up her kids. In it, she speaks of no play dates, hours of practice at the piano and the violin, drills and drills on homework, an endless desire to get As and harsh language when the lone B arrives on a report card.

The commenters on the WSJ site were, as might be imagined, SHOCKED that such behavior wasn't considered child abuse, that the woman was mistreating her children and that there was something terribly wrong with her parenting skills. All of those commenters would be SHOCKED if their little darlings were subject to that regimen.

It occurred to me that this is pretty much what KIPP does. Drill, drill, and more drill, extremely high demands on time, teachers driven nearly crazy in their enthusiasm for success and the need to produce, more drill, Saturday classes, no sports, summer school, more drill, and lots of test preparation.

All of those commenters would be THRILLED if there were more KIPP schools.
All of those commenters would be SHOCKED if their little darlings were subject to that regimen.

Gee, is American Thinker Conservative?

Read this American Thinker article on paying students to work and go to school.

Here's my response, lost amoung all of the ditto-heads who are condemning these kids as shameful losers:

This sounds fishy to me. The writer can't write clean, grammatically correct sentences - this is a teacher? I'd have to see corroboration before I believe it.

It reads like he is mentioning only the extreme cases that feed his own pretentious ego. "Look at all those losers. I, the great and mighty know-it-all white boy, would never do something so stupid."

Dude. The first time ANY kid gets $600, they're going to blow it on stupid things, and any group of kids will have some with alcohol and drug problems. If the deal is made - do this and we'll pay you - then the "teacher" should get off his high moral ground and let them make mistakes and learn from them. If he can't do that, he shouldn't be in that position.

Also, they were scheduled to clean for five hours and school for three. How about we find out whether they worked well for that time and earned the right to "waste" their money? You know, by buying a computer and wasting all their time reading American Thinker and making snarky comments.