KIPP Foundation
April 2007
In case you need more reasons to clamber upon the KIPP bandwagon, this report should do the trick. Every year KIPP (aka, the "Knowledge is Power Program") presents demographic profiles and student achievement results for each of its schools that have been around long enough to release reliable data (this year 44 of 52 schools). The 2006 results are quite commendable. At the state level, 59 percent of KIPP fifth-graders outperformed their local districts in reading, and 74 percent did so in math. (Keep in mind: KIPP starts in the fifth grade, typically with students several grade levels behind.) In eighth grade, 100 percent of KIPP students outperformed their district counterparts in both subjects. KIPP also administers nationally norm-referenced exams (usually the Stanford Achievement Test) to measure student growth over time. Because most KIPP schools are still quite young, long-term longitudinal data are available for just 27 of them, but students in those institutions have on average gained 24 percentile points in reading and 39 percentile points in math over three years. If you look carefully, though, you'll also see the rare KIPP school that fails to live up to its billing. Data for KIPP Sankofa Charter School, in Buffalo, New York, for instance, show that its students have made limited gains and have in some cases lost ground. (KIPP recently revoked Sankofa's affiliation with the program; see here.) Fortunately, such bad apples are rare in the pages of this report. Order a copy here.
