Last week, the annual KIPP School Summit (KSS) brought together “Team and Family” members from the nation’s largest public charter school network—141 KIPP schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia serve more than 50,000 students. In honor of KSS, let’s take a look back at what the data say about KIPP’s academic results.
A Mathematica study on KIPP middle schools was released in February 2013, building on previous research commissioned by KIPP and conducted by Mathematica (see the studies released in 2010 and 2012), and found positive and sizeable performance results in math, reading, science, and social studies (check out our blog to see graphs that translate study effect sizes into additional months of learning equivalencies). In addition to mathematics, the study looked at the characteristics of students attending KIPP middle schools and found little evidence that KIPP schools cream students based on performance, poverty, or race. And similar to results from the KIPP study on attrition, this study showed that attrition rates for KIPP schools are the same as comparison traditional public schools. Researchers from the University of California San Diego released a meta-analysis of studies on charter school achievement in October 2011. This “study of studies” strategy, popularized by the medical research field, pulls together the results from a body of research and analyzes the overall effect of the program. Given the large number of studies on KIPP charter schools, the authors were able to break out the findings, which revealed large, positive results for KIPP middle schools in reading and math. It should be noted that in addition to the stellar academic gains, KIPP schools deserve kudos for commissioning ongoing research that goes beyond academics and seeks to understand how their schools operationally function and serve students. This knowledge is critical to determining whether the KIPP model can lead to improvements throughout the public education system. Nora Kern is senior manager for research & analysis at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. KIPP School Summit 2013 Gala Video Learn more: The Charter Blog: New Study Shows Positive Performance Results for KIPP Middle Schools Our president & CEO Nina Rees attended KSS; see her tweets by searching @Ninacharters and #KSS2013.
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