Laura Williams's Library tagged Outliers →  View Popular

In bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell's latest tribute to the obvious made endlessly obvious, Outliers, Gladwell offers up the KIPP phenomenon as an entirely ridiculous example for an entirely sensible observation.  I mean, who can argue with Gladwell’s main premise that most people achieve success with hard work and the help of others, rather than from a personal advantage or special gift. But who, on the other hand, believes that urban poverty and all its attendant horrors is the responsibility of the poor, which Gladwell also argues in order to rationalize the “helping-hand” solution that people like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and lesser stars in the social entrepreneurial firmament offer via TFA and KIPP to the poor as shabby, abusive, and self-serving substitutes for doing something about poverty - which is the problem that is at the heart of all the gaps between the haves and have nots.

Now if success in life were achieved with the help of others and some good luck, as Gladwell argues convincingly, would it not also make sense that failure follows a similar pattern?  Can we really believe in the self-made failure when we can no longer believe in the simplistic explanation of the self-made success?  Apparently Gladwell can, as he attributes the educational testing disadvantages of the poor to the failure of the poor who constitute the communities they live in.  As sad evidence, Gladwell offers us the example of 12 year-old Marita, whose “community does not give her what she needs,” and, thus, is placed into the KIPP crucible so that she may be melted down and molded into a ghettoized version of the middle class child: