On a recent visit to the campus, there was not a child in sight on the outer grounds of the Knowledge Is Power Program Academy of Opportunity (KAO), a college-preparatory public charter school in South Los Angeles that serves grades 5 through 8.

And indoors there were very few roaming the halls. Laughter, noise and childish antics — the type of liveliness one would expect to see at a traditional public school — were noticeably absent.

But the hallways themselves were another story; they spoke volumes.

Entering the double doors, uniforms hang from tacks on a cork board. They are used as incentives for those moving up the educational ladder. Fifth-graders wear gray, sixth-graders wear navy-blue, seventh graders wear blue, eighth graders wear button-down shirts with ties, and can earn blazers later in the year. Small, rectangular bins are attached to the wall, and in them are sheets with critical thinking exercises that each student must grab upon arrival. On every wall and above every classroom door, is the name of a college — actually that of their teacher’s alma mater — or an inspirational speech dealing with higher education. They are being trained from an early age to go to college.

“This is the Western [University] Room,” said 10-year-old class ambassador Jelani Adams, who already has Western in his sights for college. “Every teacher names the class after the college they graduated from. Right now we are all learning how to make connections because we are going to be having a quiz soon. … I think this is the greatest school in the universe because everything is earned and the teachers don’t let you slack. … If you slack, they will hold you back because you may not have the materials for the next grade.”

By the time their KAO experience is over, students will have visited 20 to 30 colleges across the country, said school leader Ian Guidera. “They identify and already know what year they are going to college.”

Currently there are three KIPP LA schools — KIPP KAO, KIPP LA Prep and KIPP Raices Academy — in East and South Los Angeles that are under Los Angeles Unified School District’s Charter Division. In 2010, two new elementary schools, KIPP Empower Academy and KIPP Comienza Community Prep, will be launched. Another nine are slated to open between 2011-2015.

Taken on a campus tour by students Erin Chapman and Kaaleeq Sattaar E, a Wave reporter entered nearly every classroom. Teachers were enthusiastic about teaching, using various methods such as visuals, phonetics and hands-on approaches, resulting in their pupils being just as engaged. Upon tossing out questions, students grabbed at the chance to be the first to answer and if a child was struggling with an answer, his or her peer was not too far behind to give that additional push or hint. And while a few wrong answers were thrown out, the students did not mock or tease like in many schools, rather they and the teacher encouraged them to keep trying until they found the answer.

A normal school day for KAO’s approximately 365 students is not customary at all when compared to most public and private institutions. Instruction takes place from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., and every other Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Field trips take students throughout the country to various colleges, where they can get a better idea of which is best for the direction they plan to head, as do they participate in field trips that are focused on team building. Additionally, students attend school for two extra weeks over the summer. The latter goes beyond curriculum, requiring students to participate in community service and extracurricular activities, such as sports.

“It’s work, work, work — all day,” said Chapman, who wants to attend Harvard and become a forensic scientist. “But I look forward to going to school. … If you have difficulty learning one of the concepts, they don’t just move on, they stay on it and they work with you, they are available during recess and lunch, they give us their lunch hour just to help students, they are even available at night, you can call them and text them. Teachers at my other schools did not do that. If you didn’t get it, you didn’t get it.”

Lengthy days and extended weeks can be overwhelming, but at KAO, teacher, student, parent and administration are all committed to excellence; they are required to do so according to a verbal and written contract that must be signed by each. Sometimes they are broken, but often they are kept.

“I understand that this is a long-term commitment,” says the contract for students. “Regardless of how challenging my time at KIPP is, I will finish what I start.”

Maria Casillas, president of Families in Schools and member of KIPP LA’s advisory board, believes “parent involvement makes a difference even when you already suffer from good self-esteem,” she said. “One way or another, parents just need to be there, they are the third party in this equation of learning, they need to be supportive of the school and the environment of the school, they need to understand it and they need to make sure that their children fit in well and are comfortable in their learning environment and that they are being challenged.

“They do this by getting a relationship with teachers and in order for teachers to have a good relationship with the parents of their [students], the schools have to be very welcoming,” she added. “In low-income communities many of our parents don’t have the experience of schooling. They don’t understand the American system of schooling well enough to make that connection and also to feel confident enough to make schools accountable, so they shy away from that. Some of it is that they are humble, they lack the knowledge or it’s a combination of both. … Unless they are involved in their education, their children may not make it. … You can’t expect low-income families to achieve in school unless they are involved in their education. There is so much that they have to catch up on that without their family’s support, a strong learning support, the asset that families bring to the learning process, our children just don’t gain all of the benefits that they can.”

For 2009, the school’s API score was 780, which is 25 points above the state average and just 20 points below the state target. Compared to neighboring middle schools like Belvedere, Crozier, Hollenbeck, Stevenson, Muir and Mann, KIPP Academy of Opportunity is surpassing them by leaps and bounds, the lowest being the latter at 558. Still Guidera believes there is more to be done to close the achievement gap.  

“The majority of fifth-graders come in on a third grade level on average. We do baseline testing every year and it’s the same exact average coming in every year, somewhere right around the 25th percentile in the country as the whole group,” said Guidera. “Then by the time they get to 8th grade algebra, they are in the 75th to 80th percentile. This comes from the hard work, extended days, the college culture and everything you see here today. … We give them thinking skills during breakfast instead of giving them social problems by socializing, teachers have cell phones and they answer them until 9 o’clock at night to answer homework questions. There is no way of getting around doing your homework, you will do it or else your parents will hear about it at work. … Just that and the amount of mental engagement that happens is one huge piece as to why they grow so quickly, the teachers are super-skilled so I don’t have to hire from the LAUSD hiring pool, I hire from a national network of the best teachers we can find. … They get about three hours of language instruction every day, whereas in a traditional school they may get an hour.”

Even when the students’ experience is complete, KAO’s job is not.

“Now that we have kids all the way to juniors in high school, we work with 11th, 10th and ninth grade state standards, mapping backwards, so that we make sure that when they get to ninth grade next year, they should be in 10th grade honors class,” said Guidera. “The goal is that when they go off to great high schools they are competing with the best out there. We spend so much time with our alumni, not just to support them to make sure they go to college but to learn what we need to prepare them for so that they go off and do well.”