KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) and eugenics

The Knowledge is Power Program is a network of intensive . . . schools for inner-city kids started up in 1994 by two idealistic young teachers, David Levin and Michael Feinberg , in Houston . There are now 52 of these schools nationwide…. It is the same patronizing do-gooderism that bound together both scientific and religious progressives, as well as conservatives and liberals, a hundred years ago in embracing EUGENICS as the way to engineer a society dominated by healthy, prosperous, and moral white Christan elites. (John Derbyshire in the New English Review: http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/2009/02/kipp-reprise-from-2006-why-is-everyone.html)

In the words of Howard Berlak (as sent to EDDRA):

I’ve spent many years in schools. This one [KIPP] felt like a humane, low security prison or something resembling a locked-down drug rehab program for adolescents run on reward and punishments by well-meaning people. Maybe a case can be made for such places, but I cannot imagine anyone (including the Times reporter) sending their kids there unless they have no other acceptable options. What is most disturbing is the apparent universal belief by KIPP staff and partisans that standardized tests scores are the singular and most important measure of a truly good education. The Times reporter appears to buy into this.

Allow me to take issue with John Derbyshire for a moment: negative eugenics has been much maligned thanks to liberal reactionary thinking, putting all eugenics – both positive and negative — under the category of “Hitleresque” thinking and moving social engineering all the way to the extreme of ethnic cleansing and racism. Granted, eugenics has been used improperly before, but we should not be “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” on this one.

The beneficial practice of negative eugenics can be found in preventing individuals who are two closely related (incest) from breeding, which we do with great regularity in all states. Another would be screening prospective parents for potential blood-type reactions (RH factors). Another would be genetically screening individuals who carry or are symptomatic of genetic/inherited deformities, illnesses or abnormalities that threaten the life, health and physical and mental capacity of any prospective children. Why would someone want to pass on a terminal genetic illness to their offspring if it could be avoided? There is a difference between parenting and procreating. Only a real narcissist would insist on passing on his genetic illness or abnormality to his offspring just because…. People who want to parent can always adopt. The last prospective positive use of negative eugenics could be manifest in using gene therapy to prevent such illnesses (when it becomes available).

The beneficial practice of positive eugenics in humans – so long as it is not mandatory – is using gene-mapping and genetic information to predict the appearance of any children (gender, eye color, hair color, etc.). Hitler used this to create his Aryan superhuman, but the reason it is objectionable is because it was mandatory and used for political purposes and ethnic cleansing.

We have been practicing positive eugenics in animal husbandry for centuries now and to mixed results. Breeding programs using positive eugneics have produced food livestock that is bigger, better, healthier and more resistant to disease. Examples of how the use of positive eugenics in entertainment (racing, purebred shows and competitions) animal husbandry combined with human greed and the desire to win produces a Barbaro, with legs too delicate to withstand the physical stress of a thoroughbred race. Or there is the example of how breeding purebred showdogs and show cats with “smushed in” faces, like bulldogs and Persian cats, resulting in the need for Caesarian section births (heads too large) and chronic upper respiratory and breathing issues because of the “accordian” trachea. But they win in the show ring every time….

However, eugenics — positive or negative — has nothing to do with the KIPP program.

Howard Berlak’s opinion of discipline that uses both positive and negative reinforcement and peer pressure is somewhat skewed. His statement describing the “end game” for KIPP as being “standardized tests scores are the singular and most important measure of a truly good education…” is somewhat inaccurate in its assumption that test scores are the only measurement of academic success, but, in reality, they are the easiest means of comparing the success of the KIPP program with other teaching methods. Second, the idea that discipline and correction are somehow “bad” for kids is ridiculous: “[KIPP is] a locked-down drug rehab program for adolescents run on reward and punishments by well-meaning people.” Carrots and sticks are a staple of behavior modification, practiced from parents to diplomats. The alternative is rewarding bad behavior by ignoring it, at the very least, or by disincentives to practice good behavior, at worst, and this notion is ridiculous. Our society’s obsession that school must always be fun and entertaining and that only positive reinforcement can or should be used is a delusional fantasy that is harming our children. It results in the “dumbing down” of America. Why? Because it creates a mentality of “entitlement” and teaches them to expect success without work, winning without risk or effort, reward inequal to the minimal investment they make, and, perhaps the most damaging lesson, that life and learning must always be fair and easy; that everyone must always win, regardless of their effort. The truth is that life is not easy; it is hard. And only those who are strong enough, determined enough and disciplined enough will win or succeed consistently.

When Bertak’s vision of the KIPP school is juxtaposed with the typical inner city school — where police are permanently stationed in every building, the doors locked to outside vicitors, lockers checked for drugs and weapons regularly, and students are routinely frisked for weapons or drugs — the picture Bertak paints of the KIPP school is almost laughable. What is imprisoning are children is not discipline — rules, boundaries and limitations, or rewarding good behavior and correcting bad behavior; it is the chaos bred by a lack of discipline and the resulting bad behavior that is a real trap — a true social prison.

The idea that teaching children to “think success” and teaching these lessons using postive and negative reinforcement as needed in order to empower the child to behave in a successful manner is not so sinister as some of the ultraliberals would like you to think. To do otherwise is to program poor children to the acceptance of generational poverty and dependence on public assistance, to kill ambition and place limits on a child’s thinking of what is possible and realistic for his life and ambitions. It is reinforcing the soociological lie that responsibility, accountability, ambition, achievement and the desire for excellence are only requirements for the majority/mainstream, not for the minority, and there can be no greater disservice to our children than that.

Hard-core socialists like to promote their ideology as being the opposite of racism and prejudice, but their condemning KIPP as a method of teaching that is racist is beyond ridiculous and is counterproductive to lifting minority and indigent students up. Real racism is encouraging a minority child to believe that he is either incapable of doing better because of his race and circumstances (“the soft bigotry of low expectations”) or is encrouaging this child to adopt a misplaced sense of entitlement that teaches, because he was not born in perfect circumstances, society somehow “owes” him a free ride, or at least an easy ride. This is how we came to see the “dumbing down” of America, because it was assumed that minority children could not compete with white children, therefore, we lowered our academic standards in order not to exclude minority students from competing — and this, if anything, is real racism.

The lower academic standards effectively punished bright students who could “win” without a rigged competition. It also spurned the abandonment of public schools by middle class and upper middle class families who desired to see schools strive for high standards of performance and evaluation. This further damaged the public school by removing many positive peer role models from the population.

For as long as I can remember (and I was born in 1953), the bright and gifted children in the standard classroom was the most neglected of all students, since academic standards were geared to the “norm,” also called “median” or “mediocre.” Slow learners and mentally challenged, after mainstreaming, consumed what little time and energy a teacher had left. The bright and gifted were pretty much “on their own,” which is why I believe that programs like KIPP can be useful if run properly.

Punishing someone for their poverty or their race or ethnic origin is not the goal of KIPP. Correcting their bad behavior and poor mindset via peer pressure is. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t become it.

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also knows why will always be his boss. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And most of the inner city schools that cater to the rap/hip-hop culture program their students to be angry, antisocial and downright criminal in their mindset. The only way to combat this is with a positive influence that is reinforced with discipline that has “teeth.” Making excuses for poor children with poor ways and bad behavior does not free them from their poverty, it condemns them to it.

This liberal article promotes the idea that it is OK for us to continue programming our poor children to continue a lifestyle choice of generational poverty, crime and failed thinking that traps them in their circumstance of poverty for a lifetime. In fact, it is even worse; it promotes the idea that it is WRONG to teach kids how to think and live successfully through peer pressure. That is a far harsher penalty than using peer pressure to reward and correct kids for their bad/antisocial/unsuccessful mindset, attitude and behavior.

We need to quit making excuses and start making progress. The first step in that process is to evaluate tools based on results, not ideology. And, to this end, a quote in an e-mail I received this morning on another equally controversial subject applies:

Deviate a fraction of a moral millimeter from the prevailing orthodoxy and you are either not listened to or you are jeered at and abused, your reading of history trashed, your humanity itself called into question. I don’t say that self-pityingly. As always with dictatorships of the mind, the worst harmed are not the ones not listened to, but the ones not listening.

The Suleman octuplets and encouraging responsible parenting

We really need to take a look at how this society encourages irresopnsible parenting.

Nadya Suleman (b. 1975) (also known as Natalie Suleman; Nadya or Natalie Suleman-Gutierrez while married; and Nadya or Natalie Doud) was born in Fullerton, California. She was raised in La Puente, Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights, all cities in Los Angeles County. She is the only child of Ed and Angela Suleman, who married in Las Vegas in 1974 and divorced in 1999. Nadya Suleman mentioned that she is a half Arabic, half Lithuanian Protestant.[1][2][3][4][5][6][6][7][8]

Suleman graduated from Nogales High School in La Puente, California in 1993[8] and studied to be a psychiatric technician at Mt. San Antonio College. She held a mental health technician license and worked as a psychiatric technician at Metropolitan State Hospital[9] where her back was injured while at work.[10] She filed a worker’s compensation claim in 1999 against the hospital, later filing another claim in 2001 against the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board.[9] She received more than $165,000 in disability payments.[11][12] She attended Cal State Fullerton and received a Bachelor of Science degree in child and adolescent development in 2006[13]. Suleman returned to Cal State to pursue a master’s degree in counseling, leaving the program in 2008.[13]

Suleman married Marcos Gutierrez, a produce manager, in 1996. The couple separated in 2000 and divorced in 2008.[14] Suleman moved back in with her parents started out on her effort to become a mother in 2001. Initially, she had three miscarriages. She told a psychiatrist that she suffered deep depression and had suicidal thoughts while starting a family. Suleman used an in vitro procedure, using a single sperm donor named David Solomon to father her first six children (as well as the octuplets) using the services of West Coast IVF Clinic run by Dr. Michael Kamrava.[15]In 2001, Suleman attempted to change her legal name to Nadya Solomon.[14][16] Several embryos had been implanted during each of her previous IVF procedures, resulting in four single births and one twin birth. As of 2009, her other six children are Elijah, age 7; Amerah, age 6; Joshua, age 5; Aidan, age 3; and 2-year-old twins Calyssa and Caleb. One of Suleman’s sons, Aidan, has autism. Suleman is receiving $490 a month in food stamps along with disability payments for three of her six previous children.[17][18] (Wiki)

It is not humanly possible to take care of 14 children under the age of 7 — including 8 infants (even healthy ones) all the same age — at the same time and give them the individual attention they deserve. If you have to have an army of nurses and daycare workers to parent for you, then you are not being a real parent, are you? Likewise, it is an avoiable and unnecessary health risk, both for the mother and the children, to implant 8 embryos at the same time.

In an interview on the Today Show today, that she was receiving monthly workers’ comp check and that four of her six existing children (prior to the birth of the octuplets) receive over $2800/month from SSI (Social Security disability for indigents) or $700/month each, which also entitles them to Medicaid. I don’t know if the other three existing children were on Medicaid, but if she herself is disabled on workers’ comp for her back injury and unemployed, it would seem likely that they are also on Medicaid and that she is as well (for all other than her back injury treatment). She also admitted to receiving almost $500/month in food stamps for her six existing children and herself. She also admitted in an earlier interview that she was and planned to continue living off of federally insured student loans.

So, to recap: an indigent single mother on disability herself (supposedly she injured her back, so how is it that she cannot work but can carry 8 babies?) who has six children under the age of 7, four of whom are disabled, receiving government assistance in the form of SSI, Medicaid and food stamps, who has a history of mental instability (depression and suicidal thoughts – great criteria for motherhood), and is living and planning to live on government assistance through federally insured student loans, decides that she can have not just ONE more baby, but has implanted SIX embryos (I assume two of the embryos split and became twins….) using a supposedly experimental procedure. And now, because the number of fetuses caused the babies to be so small and born so early, the taxpayers will be footing the ENORMOUS bill for their healthcare, which is already over $1M and is likely to be considerably more before they leave the hospital as infants, not to mention whatever disabilities they may have because of being born too early and which will entitle them to SSI, Medicaid, food stamps or other government assistance, etc.

But she maintains she is not on “welfare  She is, however, very much on public assistance.”, since SSI is basically a welfare program for the disabled who are indigent, which also brings Medicaid healthcare benefits with it (hospitalization, major medical and prescription assistance). And she is on food stamps, which she does not believe is welfare because she doesn’t get a check every month. And she is on Medicaid, which is also not welfare in her eyes because she does not get a check every month.  But all these benefits are forms of public assistance funded by the taxpayers.

Suleman should be forced to undergo a full hysterectomy and prevented from future adoption of any more children. I personally would like to see all her children removed from the home until she undergoes a mental health examination to determine if she is mentally ill and incompetent to raise these children.  My initial response is that she should have all her children taken from her and put up for adoption, especially the last 8, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and allow an independent professional to review her case. If we were talking about cats or dogs instead of children, the SPCA would have labelled her a “hoarder,” charged her with animal cruelty and immediately removed the animals from her home pending trial  She appears to be obsessed with bearing children and possessing human property called children, not being a real parent.  She needs psychiatric care, as do her crazy parents for supporting this obsession by not requiring her to support at least herself. I read that her mother has spoken out, saying that her daughter is not capable of raising this many children by herself. Who is? The sad part is that Suleman is a selfish woman who is dumping the real responsibility of raising all these kids on her parents — in fact, she planned it that way by her own admission, never considering the tremendous financial, physical and emotional burden and sacrifice she was asking of her parents, not to mention her own children, in order to fulfill her obsession.

And the doctor didn’t think that it would be unethical to do this operation?  The doctor should have his license to practice jerked. If it is not considered so already, implanting that many embryos knowing that it dramatically increased the risk of an early birth and potential damage to the fetuses should be considered an unacceptable standard of care and deemed medical malpractice. Certainly, if the babies end up being damaged due to the early birth or the number of fetuses implanted in the womb at one time, they will have standing to sue the doctor, or should. At any rate, any woman who undergoes this procedure should be required to undergo an mental health exam first. Likewise, since this mother has a history of mental illness and displays OCD tendencies, it is possible that based on her mental health history she could be considered as incapable of giving INFORMED CONSENT to this procedure, especially the number of fetuses implanted. The number of fetuses implanted should be limited to two, since this is the largest number of infants that can be delivered without a Caesarian section (naturally, in other words).

And, finally, I’m not against the CHILDREN, I’m against the irresponsibility of the parent and the doctor. These children will experience a lifetime of AVOIDABLE and UNNECESSARY deformities and chronic impairments, including possibly mental retardation, because, by necessity, they were born early and there were too many fetuses. Many of them may never experience a full life with a normal education, job, independent living, a spouse and a family of their own because of their mother’s selfishness and irresponsibility. To me this is a crime against humanity. Had there only been two fetuses, they might have been born perfectly healthy. Even three. But any responsible doctor would tell you that implanting 8 fetuses at a time was an unnecessary and avoidable risk for the mother and the children.

And now the children are the ones who suffer a lifetime for their mother’s selfishness and irresponsibility and a doctor’s greed and unethical professional behavior.

Further proof that requiring parents to undergo parenting classes (much as many states require a gun ownership course or a drivers test) and obtain a license before attempting conception is a good, responsible way of preventing irresponsible idiots from producing offspring. In order to get the license, there should be a committed couple (two parents of either gender) with a civil union or marriage license, means testing (including the future ability to maintain a current standard of living that exceeds the poverty level or better), academic testing (for literacy and competency), and mental health screening (including testing for genetic/autochemical deficiency illnesses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, etc.).

Mentally retarded and mentally ill individuals should not be allowed to procreate. Nor should anyone under the age of 21. Nor should anyone who does not have the ability to provide financial support above the poverty level and understand that their financial commitment could reasonably extend for at least 21 years at the time of conception (which is the length of commitment based on the usual age for a young person graduating from college, which is now required if you are to maintain a standard of living anywhere near what your middle class parents had). 

And, most certainly, anyone currently on ANY FORM OF PUBLIC ASSISTANCE — welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, SSI (which is social security disability for indigents), federally insured student loans or grants or ANY OTHER government provided or insured program — should not be allowed to make more children if they can’t take care of the ones they already have — BY THEMSELVES. 

Any parent who becomes pregnant or impregnates his partner while on welfare or while behind on child support payments should be denied a procreation license and even required to undergo mandatory sterilization. If you can’t take care of the ones who have, you have not earned the PRIVILEGE to make more.

People with genetic illnesses or who carry genetic illnesses in their genes should not be allowed to procreate. And, yes, I believe is a form of NEGATIVE EUGENICS based on preventing genetic illnesses and deformities. If they are not ill and the doctor projects they can physically perform their duties as a parent and a provider, then they can adopt.

And, as for genetic engineering, we already engage in that by legally preventing closely related family members from breeding — we call it incest.  If you know you have a genetic deformity or serious (meaning chronic or fatal) genetic illness, is it really responsible to pass that same burden on to generation upon generation of children? Why not become a parent by adoption? If parenting is what is important, not procreating, then HOW you become a parent should not matter. Procreating is an event. Parenting is a lifestyle choice.

I’m not talking about instituting a Hitleresque breeding program to produce a “perfect” human being (POSITIVE EUGENICS), I’m talking about common sense rules that would prevent genetic illnesses from continuing from generation to generation that create individuals that can never be competent enough to enjoy a full life and which could easily be avoided. We already do something like this with RH factor and by preventing close relatives from marrying, and therefore inbreeding.  And we have genetic testing for Downs Syndrome babies. Are we really so egotistical that we believe we must pass our genes on, even if they are seriously flawed, causing untold harm and anguish to our children?  Becoming a parent has nothing to do with procreating. You can become a parent through adoption.

Notice that I agree that anyone can experience temporary setbacks or illnesses. I was NOT saying that parents should lose their children if they become disabled or ill.  I was saying that parents should not be allowed to conceive and bring children into the world KNOWING they are unable to properly care for them — that is the distinction with a difference here.  

I also believe we must be more responsible regarding the overpopulation of the earth. We are already seeing problems arise from fights over resources like water and not just in China and India, but here in the U.S. as well. After two children, ALL individuals should be required to undergo mandatory sterilization.  The choice of two children replaces the two parents and results in, at best, no population growth.  This world is overpopulated already.  If a couple wants more children and can afford them and pass the criteria for legal adoption, let them adopt. With all the children in foster homes and orphanages that have no parents and need them, this should be a “non-brainer.”

I reiterate: I did NOT say that parents were restricted to PARENT only two children, just PROCREATE no more than two. If they want more children, there are millions of children of virtually any age group, sex, racial background, disability, etc., that desperately need homes that can be adopted.

It is time that our society take responsibility for its children and the conditions under which they are brought into this world and continue to live in this world.  It is not merely enough to guarantee their survival until birth, we must be able to reasonably ensure that they thrive. 

It is a moral imperative to examine how our society, through whatever legislation and enforcement means necessary, can support and encourage better parenting and prevent irresponsible parenting, which is, after all, a form of child abuse that is also causing the taxpayers to assume a terrific financial burden that is avoidable — not only in public assistance, but in the resulting crime, conviction and imprisonment of many kids born into poverty and neglect.

Having a child is not a RIGHT, it is a PRIVILEGE.  It is a sacred gift from God that requires parents to fulfill that sacred trust. And there is a huge difference between being able to give birth to a child and being a parent. Our society must relearn this lesson.