299 A MATTER OF FRIENDSHIP: EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTIONS INTO CULTURE AND POVERTY Amy B. Shuffelton School of Education Loyola University Chicago Abstract. Contemporary educational reformers have claimed that research on social class differences in child raising justifies programs that aim to lift children out of poverty by means of cultural interventions. Focusing on the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Ruby Payne’s ‘‘aha! Process,’’ and the Harlem Children’s Zone as examples, Amy Shuffelton argues that such programs, besides overstepping the social science research, are ethically illegitimate insofar as they undermine the equitable development of civic agency. Shuffelton invokes Aristotelian civic friendship, particularly as interpreted by Danielle Allen and Sibyl Schwarzenbach, as key to a politics that avoids relations of domination and subordination. She concludes that social justice requires that educators involved with culturally interventionist programs recognize the workings of power within schooling and society, that they accept the limits of their own perspectives, and that they remain open to what is of value in child-raising practices other than those associated with the contemporary middle class. Friendship seems also to hold cities together, and lawgivers to care more about it than about justice; for concord seems to be something like friendship, and this is what they aim at most of all, while taking special pains to eliminate civil conflict as something hostile. And when people are friends, they have no need of justice, while when they are just, they need friendship as well; and the highest form of justice seems to be a matter of friendship. 1 In the past decade, educational programs that take a new approach to disrupting the negative effects of generational poverty have gained prominence in policy conversations. Based on the perception that impoverished students face cultural, rather than only structural, impediments, these programs intervene in poor families’ practices of child raising and in the habits and attitudes that poor children are believed to exhibit in schools as a result of these practices. Examples of such programs include Ruby Payne’s ‘‘aha! Process,’’ which offers teachers and administrators ‘‘instructional strategies’’ to address the ‘‘mindset’’ of poverty; the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, which focus on ‘‘character’’ as well as academics and teach impoverished students a package of habits believed to assist in academic achievement; and Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), whose programs include ‘‘Baby College,’’ which aims to change the way poor parents care for infants. 2 What these programs 1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 144. The passage is in book 8, 1155a. 2. On ‘‘aha! Process,’’ see www.ahaprocess.com; and Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty (Highlands, Texas: aha! Process, 2005). On KIPP, see www.kipp.org; and Erin Macey, Janet Decker, and Suzanne Eckes, ‘‘The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP): An Analysis of One Model’s Efforts to Promote Achievement in Underserved Communities,’’ Journal of School Choice 3, no. 3 (2009): 212–241.On Harlem Children’s Zone, see www.hcz.org; and Paul Tough, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 63 Number 3 2013  2013 Board of Trustees University of Illinois