MR. KIPPS (via Kevin Whited:

Signing up a few young men for new KIPP school (LISA GRAY, 5/12/07, Houston Chronicle)

In January, when Shawn Hardnett started recruiting boys for his new school, he wore a suit and tie.

Hardnett, 39, is from Rochester, N.Y., and in the Northeast, low-income parents respond well to an African-American teacher or principal wearing a suit. But in northeast Houston, his suit, combined with his pamphlets and true-believer zeal, flustered people.

Since then, Hardnett has refined his technique. Now when he's trolling apartment complexes or the YMCA, or handing out fliers at the Discount Food, he wears something casual but neat — maybe a linen shirt and loose jeans. His locks hang to the middle of his back, and a soul patch clings to his lower lip.

The revised look is more jazz deejay than missionary, but Hardnett hasn't toned down his message: Give me your son. I want to change his life.

In July, he'll open KIPP Polaris Academy, an all-male charter school, to its first class, somewhere between 60 and 70 fifth-graders; year by year, the middle school will grow to cover eighth grade. Hardnett expects that his boys will reflect their North Forest neighborhood: about 90 percent African-American, 10 percent Hispanic and almost entirely low-income.

Almost by definition, those boys are at risk, and no one argues that they're already well-served. References to the area's public school system, North Forest ISD, are often preceded by the word "troubled."

Hardnett brings the area KIPP, the Knowledge is Power Program, generally hailed as the country's most successful experiment in educating low-income minority youths. In 1994, the first KIPP school, in southwest Houston, began honing a formula that includes high goals, measurable results, long school hours, a long school year and, most of all, a white-hot commitment from students, teachers, principals and parents. That school created a culture strong enough to counteract the forces arrayed against its students — an immersive, education-is-important ethos so powerful that, like boot camp or a religious conversion, it could radically change lives.

Since then, the question has become not Does KIPP work? but Can KIPP work on a broader scale? Can that zeal be replicated? Its network has grown to more than 50 schools across the country. Over the next 10 years, KIPP plans to open more than 40 in Houston alone.