Closely related to the teacher who ranted about the failures of parents in the last post, David Brooks recently wrote about the lasting damage to people who suffer from childhood traumas.

He writes about a recent study that found that people who suffered from childhood abuse, had incareated or mentally ill parents or whose parents were divorced were more likely to become alchoholics, try suicide, have sex before 15, and get cancer. The childhood abuse variable makes sense, because I watch Dr. Drew when I'm at the gym, but I was surprised that divorce had that big of an impact on people. 

He said that the 3/4rds of the kids who attend the KIPP schools drop out of college. 

Schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, are among the best college prep academies for disadvantaged kids. But, in its first survey a few years ago, KIPP discovered that three-quarters of its graduates were not making it through college. It wasn’t the students with the lower high school grades that were dropping out most. It was the ones with the weakest resilience and social skills. It was the pessimists.

I am fascinated with the KIPP schools which help to override the parental and community pressures through massive educational intervention. A friend teaches at a charter school in Newark with a similar philosophy. 

My guess is that the KIPP kids are having problems in college, not because of the inevitability of their childhood experiences, but because they need the same massive oversight in college that they receive in high school. But colleges don't do that.