If KIPP were a geographic school district, it would roughly be the nation’s sixty-fifth largest, somewhere between Boston and El Paso. With 162 schools and nearly sixty-thousand students, it’s also growing like kudzu, courtesy of a five-year, $50 million scale-up grant awarded in 2010 through the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (i3) program. At that time, KIPP’s stated goal was to double in size while maintaining its positive impact on kids.
Taxpayers seem to be getting a solid return on that investment. A new report from Mathematica, which contracted with the KIPP Foundation under the terms of the i3 grant, finds that “network-wide, KIPP schools have positive, statistically significant, and educationally meaningful impacts on student achievement, particularly at the elementary and middle school grades.” The picture is murkier at the high school level, where KIPP had “educationally meaningful impacts” on students who were new to the network. No statistically significant effects were found among students continuing from KIPP middle schools, however. Still, the high schools have positive effects on “several aspects of college preparation, including discussions about college, applying to college, and course taking.”
The study is based on both lottery-based and quasi-experimental designs in eight KIPP elementary schools, forty-three middle schools, and eighteen high schools across twenty cities. It looks at outcomes in math, ELA, science, and social studies up to four years after students enter a KIPP school, as well as student and parent surveys.
No single study is conclusive, and KIPP continues to support a cottage industry of detractors who question its results and its approach. On the other hand, KIPP parents—particularly those of elementary and middle school children—were found to be pleased with their kids’ schooling, especially at the elementary and middle school levels.
While the Mathematica report is largely positive, the KIPP “brand” might have taken a hit with one surprising finding: The research team generally found “no impacts of KIPP schools on measures of students’ motivation, engagement, educational aspirations, or behavior.” It’s much easier to measure performance character traits than to alter or grow them. But KIPP has long worshipped at the altar of “grit.” Paul Tough wrote an entire book about it. Clearly, much is going right at KIPP; just as clearly, grit is not.
In addressing the question of whether KIPP could double in size while maintaining quality—short answer: “yes”—the report raises a second question: Can they do it again? KIPP’s i3 scale-up grant was specifically aimed at building its leadership pipeline. Does the supply of talent impose a speed limit on growth at some point? One veteran KIPP official I spoke with believes that a growth rate of 15–20 percent each year is possible without diminishing quality—if the network continues to invest in recruiting and training would-be school leaders. If it doubles in size over the next five years, as is planned, KIPP might be large enough to crack the list of the nation’s twenty largest school districts. That’s a tantalizing proposition, so long as quality isn’t made secondary to quantity.
SOURCE: Christina Clark Tuttle et al., “Understanding the Effect of KIPP as it Scales: Volume I, Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes,” Mathematica (September 2015).
