It's largely propaganda designed to promote Bill Gates' version of white supremacy dressed up as school reform. They're not advocating that Exeter replace its curriculum with KIPP, what they're advocating is for low-income minorities only. And the curriculum isn't designed based on the best practices from educational research, but rather it's designed to change the culture of minorities (to quote the NYT).[1]

The fact is that poor kids learn just as much or more in school as wealthy kids, they just start several years behind because of bad parenting.[2] And over the summers when wealthy kids are learning and going forward, the poor kids are actually going backwards.[3] Which is why the average 13 year old white kid has the same standardized test scores as the average 17 year old black kid.[4]

In addition, one of the most famous findings from all of education research is that within-school effects are greater than between-school effects.[3] That means that school tracking has a much greater impact on how much your child learns than whether they go to a good school or a bad school. (The movie touches on tracking but doesn't really explain it.) Especially since kids are sorted into tracks based more on their race and looks than on their ability. [5]

Anyway all the problems the movie mentions are completely true, and they need to be solved, but spreading good parenting best-practices and the changing systemic design of school itself are much better solutions than implementing KIPP, which as far as I can tell (after reading a bunch of articles and a book on it) is a huge step in the wrong direction. There is zero evidence that the program works at all in the long term, especially since it conflicts with all of the research on intrinsic motivation. These kids might make some academic gains in the short term, but in the long term it's hard to believe that they'll be anywhere near as well off as even middle class Americans. The fact that these programs produce decent test results in the short term has basically zero predictive value for determining the long term outcomes. Maybe they'll be better than I think, who knows, but advocating replacing our current school system with this for only low-income minorities without having the longterm data is a huge scam.

It's a shame because the Harlem Children Zone actually has a great baby college program for parents, but the movie just mentions this in passing. In reality programs like would be an excellent use of tax dollars because they are actually consistent (for the most part) with the current research on best practices for parenting, unlike KIPP which is just completely pulled out of some guy's ass. (Although most of these programs don't yet show good longterm results, so more tweaking is needed.)

It says a lot about America that our most popular school reform movie is targeted at people who don't read books.

/rant

[1] "Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/magazine/26tough.html

[2] C.f. What It Takes To Make A Student

[3] C.f. Equality And Achievement

[4] It Take A City

[5] http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2009/02/index.html