KIPP Schools: A Reform Triumph, or Disappointment?

This from Time:

A new report ... will add to the debate about the Knowledge Is Power Program or KIPP schools — a highly influential non-profit network of public schools serving low-income students. The study is important because it's the first large-scale look at the college completion rate for students in schools at the leading edge of today's reform efforts. The results show that while KIPP graduates—who are 95 percent African-American and Latino and overwhelmingly low-income—far outpace the national averages for similar students, they also fall short of the network's own goals: 33 percent of students who completed a KIPP middle school at least 10 years ago have a bachelor's degree today. Among similar students nationwide, just 8 percent have graduated college.

The study has implications for the growing array of schools with missions and methods similar to KIPP because it begs the question: Is 33 percent an enormous achievement given the challenging environments that KIPP operates in? Or, conversely, should KIPP be achieving better results given the intensive support KIPP students receive?...

Kati Haycock, President of the Education Trust, a national advocacy group for low-income students says she, "can't help but be impressed by KIPP's focus on college and its willingness to hold itself to public account for the college graduation rates of its graduates. At best, most K-12 folks report how many of their graduates entered college, but many don't want even to be accountable for that." ...

KIPP's Tracy McDaniel Testifies before the Interim Joint Committee on Education

I finally found the time to process the video of the Oklahoma City KIPP School Leader's address to the joint committee.

Tracy McDaniel is credited with a successful school turnaround when he implemented the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) at his Oklahoma City middle school. Located in a predominantly poor, African American community, the middle school of approximately 250 students had some of the lowest test scores in the state. McDaniel's entire district was in trouble with the state. Since he learned and implemented the KIPP leadership program, the school’s test scores began to improve, even before it became a charter.

A couple of years later, his charter school received financial support from the founder of GAP Stores. That extra funding permits him to pay his teachers $10,000 more than other district staff. In return, his teachers work longer hours and must take phone calls from parents during the evening. Now white and Hispanic enrollment is on the rise and students from other neighborhoods routinely apply for admission.

“If I had to go back to [a traditional] public school I’d run the school just like KIPP," McDaniel told the panel of legislators.

The never-ending shell game of the left behind.

Over at Schools Matter Jim Horn reports what he learned from the new study of KIPP charter schools. It's kinda the same as what we know about the worst traditional public schools. The poorest public school students get passed around. The poorest charter schools students get tossed.

Since KIPP’s high test scores have been acknowledged even by its harshest critics, Horn wonders what the study tells us about the schools that didn't make the headlines.

We find out that KIPP schools have higher levels of grade repetition, i.e., failures, than the public schools. In the 22 fifth grade cohorts, for instance, the average failure rated was 9.5 percent, ranging from as low as 2% and as high as 18%. In public schools, repeaters in 5th grade ranged from 0% to 3%, with an average of 1.7 percent. In 6th grade KIPPs, these numbers were slightly lower but still much higher than their public counterparts.

We find out that KIPPs are more segregated than demographically matched public schools, ranging from 5 to 50 percent more segregated. Twenty of 22 of the KIPPs were significantly more segregated (pp. 2-3).

We find out that 12 of 22 schools had lower, significantly lower percentages of special education students, with only one significantly higher.

We find out that 13 of 17 schools had significantly lower percentages of English language learners, and only two with higher percentages (pp. 12-13)

The folks at Education in the Public Interest reported problems with the study's methodology.

...A key finding of the study is that attrition at KIPP schools is not much different from attrition at comparable conventional public schools. This finding is important because past research about KIPP suggests that selective attrition - struggling students disproportionately leaving, with more successful students staying and then scoring well on tests - may give KIPP a substantial boost.

However, an initial analysis of the report by Professor Gary Miron of Western Michigan University concludes that this initial study report misrepresents the attrition data. According to Miron, "While it may be true that attrition rates for KIPP schools and surrounding districts are similar, there is a big difference: KIPP does not generally fill empty places with the weaker students who are moving from school to school. Traditional public schools must receive all students who wish to attend, so the lower-performing students leaving KIPP schools receive a place in those schools."

In contrast, Miron explains, "The lower performing, transient students coming from traditional public schools are not given a place in KIPP, since those schools generally only take students in during the initial intake grade, whether this be 5th or 6th
grade."

The KIPP study's description of attrition only considers half the equation, when comparing KIPP schools to matched traditional public schools...

Big Surprise: KIPP Report finds that KIPP students outscore public school peers

Why is it that everybody is going out and buying themselves reports that say whatever they want them to say? Has scholarship been overtaken by the expedient politics of the news cycle?

This from the Washington Post:

Middle school students in the Knowledge Is Power Program, a charter school network with a major footprint in the District and other cities, significantly outperform their public school peers on reading and math tests, according to a new study.

But the report, from Mathematica Policy Research, to be made public Tuesday, is unlikely to resolve debate over what is behind the network's success. Skeptics say that the program benefits from highly motivated parents seeking alternatives to ineffective public schools and that KIPP often winnows out students who don't fit its program.

The study, which KIPP commissioned, comes as the Obama administration is promoting the spread of strong charter schools as a strategy to improve urban education.

Founded in Houston in 1994 by two young alumni of Teach for America, KIPP has grown into a national network of 82 schools -- including seven in the District -- that serve children from low-income backgrounds. KIPP students put in a longer day than most of their public school counterparts, attending class from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. on weekdays. Many are also in class every other Saturday and for three weeks over the summer. A rigorous incentive system penalizes students for poor behavior and missed assignments. "Work hard, be nice" is the credo.

KIPP schools routinely outscore many that serve middle-class students. Its three middle schools in the District -- KEY, WILL and AIM academies, with a combined enrollment of 960 -- are among the city's highest-performing on the DC-CAS tandardized tests.

Mathematica studied 22 KIPP middle schools, including AIM and KEY, comparing test scores of charter students to scores of selected students in regular public schools who matched their academic and demographic backgrounds.

Researchers examined test data starting in third grade. KIPP middle schools begin in fifth. By seventh grade, half of the KIPP schools studied showed growth in math scores equal to an additional 1.2 years of school. Reading gains for KIPP were not as dramatic but still significant, the researchers reported, reflecting an additional three-quarters of a year of growth.

Mathematica said it found no evidence that KIPP schools were systematically drawing students with more economic advantages from surrounding school systems.

But attrition rates at the KIPP schools, measuring the portion of students who failed to complete four years at the schools, varied widely. In a third of the schools studied, attrition was significantly higher than in other local public schools. In another third of the KIPP schools, the rate was lower.

Skeptics say that students who can't function in the rigorous school culture are often pushed out -- a claim that KIPP rejects...

What KIPP is Yet to Prove

Until KIPP tries to succeed within an entire, single community,

it is, for all its remarkable rise and deserved praise,

just another model program that has

yet to prove it can succeed with all

—or even most—disadvantaged children.

This from Sara Mosle in Slate:

The Educational Experiment We Really Need

What the Knowledge Is Power Program has yet to prove.

In his new book, Work Hard. Be Nice., Jay Mathews claims that the Knowledge Is Power Program is the "best" program serving severely disadvantaged, minority-group students in America today.

Let me begin—before I'm denounced as a traitor to the cause of educational reform—by saying that I'm inclined to agree. The improbable story of how KIPP was founded in 1994 by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two young Teach for America alumni in Houston, is thrilling and worthy reading. KIPP's mission has been akin to putting the first man on the moon: an all-out education race, requiring extraordinary, round-the-clock dedication from parents, students, and teachers alike.

But the program is not the proven, replicable model for eliminating the achievement gap in the inner city that Mathews imagines, and this distinction is crucial. KIPP may be something more important: a unique chance to test, once and for all, the alluring but suspect notion that there actually is an educational panacea for social inequality. As of yet, the evidence for such a thing doesn't exist.

There have always been model school programs that work. There have even been some that have been successfully replicated in different parts of the country. But no program has shown it can work for all, or even most, disadvantaged children within a single city or neighborhood.

Instead, as critics point out, such model programs tend to skim off those kids who are already better positioned (thanks to better home environments, greater natural gifts, savvier or better-educated parents, etc.) to escape the ghetto. Meanwhile, regular public schools are left with a more distilled population of struggling students...

Mathews insists that KIPP has solved this riddle.

It's true that perhaps no other model program has risen so far so fast, with such consistently strong test scores. KIPP now has 66 academies in 19 states. Still, 66 academies amount to just three schools, on average, per state. Houston has far and away the highest concentration with, currently, seven middle schools, three elementary schools, and one high school. But this is in a school system with 200,000 students, nearly 80 percent of whom qualify for reduced or free lunches.

At the moment, like every other model program before it, KIPP serves only a tiny fraction of disadvantaged students within any given district. And as education researcher Richard Rothstein has rightly noted, comparing students from different schools, even within the same disadvantaged neighborhoods, is very difficult to do in a rigorous, scientific way. Just because KIPP uses a lottery for admissions, for example, does not tell us anything about the self-selecting nature of the pool from which this lottery is drawn. (Rothstein's own research—here and here—has shown that KIPP students come from families that are better off, or better educated, than their regular public school or special-education counterparts.) ...

KIPP teachers typically work 65-hour weeks and a longer school year. Recognizing that students need more out-of-school aid to supplement their educations, the program also requires its staff to be available to students by phone after hours for homework help and moral support. For this overtime (which represents 60 percent more time in the classroom alone, on average, than in regular public schools), teachers receive just 20 percent more pay. Unsurprisingly, turnover is high. The program has relied heavily on the ever-renewing supply of very young (and thus less expensive) Teach for America alums, whose numbers, while growing, are decidedly finite...

KIPP Teachers in Bid to Expel Union

This from the New York Post:

Charter-school teachers to their union: Butt out.

The educators, at two city charter schools, have filed for permission from the state to cut their ties with the United Federation of Teachers.

The action, at KIPP Academy in The Bronx and KIPP Infinity in Manhattan, came after the UFT recently tried to meddle in the schools' business without consulting the staff first, teachers at both schools told The Post.

"The union was interested in a more active part of the way our school operates, and at KIPP Infinity we unanimously believe that what works for us best is 100 percent open communication lines between staff, administration, parents and students," said Rachel Heuisler, 30, who has taught at the school for three years.

KIPP, the Knowledge is Power Program network, operates 66 charter schools nationally, including four in New York City...

Bill Gates Praises Charter Models

This from Education Week (subscription):

In his first “annual letter” discussing his foundation’s work, Bill Gates last week elaborated on some of its priorities for education grantmaking.

The Jan. 26 letter from the former chairman of the Microsoft Corp. says the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s nearly $2 billion investment over nine years in creating smaller high schools “fell short” of reaching its goal of raising college-ready graduation rates.

“Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way,” Mr. Gates, the co-chairman of the Seattle-based philanthropy, writes. “These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.”

Mr. Gates pledged to continue to support school models that seem to be effective, praising the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, network of schools and High Tech High in San Diego. States should revise policies capping the number of charter schools, he says...

KIPP Success Cited, With Caveats

This from Ed Week:

"What Do We Know About the Outcomes of KIPP Schools?"

A review of research on the high-profile KIPP network finds promising academic results compared with traditional public schools, though it argues that “popular accounts” have at times overhyped the schools’ apparent success.

Students who enter and stay in the Knowledge Is Power Program schools tend to perform better than similar students in regular public schools, says the report by Jeffrey R. Henig, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. And, he writes, the difference “does not appear to be attributable to a selective admissions process.”

But Mr. Henig cautions that student attrition, where it has been monitored, is “high and seemingly selective,” with those who leave the schools tending to be lower performers than those who stay. Still, Mr. Henig, says “the evidence does not ... suggest that attrition fully accounts for the observed KIPP advantage.” ...

Bay Area KIPP "graduation rate" a dismal 60%

Highly acclaimed KIPP Charter Schools sustain student gains...but is it the result of high attrition? SF study raises doubt.

This from Ed Week:

KIPP Study Finds High Student Attrition Amid Big Learning Gains

The final report from a three-year study of a batch of KIPP charter schools in the San Francisco Bay Area probes key issues that have sparked debate about the national network of independently run public schools, including student achievement and attrition. The independent analysis, issued Sept. 16, comes amid wide acclaim for the KIPP network, along with charges that the schools “cream” the strongest students from low-income communities.

The study concludes that the middle schools run by KIPP, which stands for the Knowledge Is Power Program, have posted “strong achievement gains,” especially in the 5th and 6th grades, and points to signs that the schools are not simply drawing better students. “Bay Area KIPP schools do not appear to have attracted higher-scoring students over time, and the three schools for which we have comparison data have attracted lower-scoring and more minority students relative to the neighborhood population,” the study says.

At the same time, the report, by SRI International, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based research institute, finds high student attrition at the KIPP schools, and notes that lower-performing students leave most often. Of the cohort of entering 5th graders at four Bay Area campuses in 2003-04, a total of 60 percent had left before the end of 8th grade, the report says...

See also:

"KIPP Student-Attrition Patterns Eyed," June 13, 2007.

"New KIPP Schools Seen as Faithful to Model, Despite Variations," April 12, 2006.

Charter schools on the chopping block in Texas?

The Houston Chronicle reports:

On the day the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is set to announce its ambitious plan to open dozens of Houston-area charter schools in the next decade, state lawmakers will be considering a bill that would make it easier to shut down nearly 90 under-performing charter campuses. Seventeen of those struggling charter schools are in Houston.

According to an analysis of Senate Bill 4 by the Austin-based Charter School Policy Institute, 57 campuses would have been closed for low math scores on the 2005 and 2006 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. Thirty-two more would have been closed for carrying too much debt in 2005.

The proposed legislation also would reward consistently high-performing charter schools, such as KIPP, with extra money for facilities.