| Founded | 1994 |
|---|---|
| Location | San Francisco, CA |
| Key people |
Mike Feinberg, Co-Founder Dave Levin, Co-Founder, Richard Barth, CEO |
| Focus | College-preparatory public schools |
| Motto | Work hard. Be nice. |
| Website | www.kipp.org |
KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, is a nationwide network of free open-enrollment college-preparatory schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. KIPP schools are usually established under state charter school laws and KIPP is America’s largest network of charter schools.[1] Its headquarters are in Suite 1700 of the 135 Main Street building in Financial District, San Francisco.[2]
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KIPP began in 1994 when teachers Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg completed their Teach For America commitment and launched a program for fifth graders in a public school in inner-city Houston, Texas. Feinberg developed KIPP Academy Houston into a charter school, while Levin went on to establish KIPP Academy New York in the South Bronx. The original KIPP Academies have a sustained record of high student achievement. The Texas Education Agency has recognized KIPP Academy Houston as an "Exemplary School" for almost every year of its existence. KIPP alumni have earned over $21 million in scholarships for college-preparatory high schools.
The schools operate on the principle that there are no shortcuts: outstanding educators, more time in school, a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum, and a strong culture of achievement and support will help educationally underserved students develop the knowledge, skills, and character needed to succeed in top quality high schools, colleges, and in the competitive world beyond.
More than 95% of KIPP students are African American or Latino / Hispanic; more than 75% are eligible for the federally-subsidized meal program. Students are accepted regardless of prior academic record, conduct, or socioeconomic background. However KIPP schools typically have lower concentrations of special education and limited English proficiency (LEP) students, than the public schools from which they draw.[3]
Doris and Donald Fisher, co-founders of Gap Inc., formed a unique partnership with Feinberg and Levin to replicate KIPP’s success nationwide. Established in 2000 with a $15 million grant from the Fishers, the nonprofit KIPP Foundation recruits, trains, and supports outstanding teachers in opening and leading high-performing college-preparatory public schools in educationally underserved communities. The foundation helps secure facilities and operating contracts while training school leaders through a yearlong KIPP School Leadership Program (KSLP) that includes an intensive program of coursework held at New York University, residencies at other KIPP Schools, and support from KIPP staff.
Most KIPP schools run from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on select Saturdays (usually twice a month), and middle school students also participate in a two- to three-week mandatory summer school, which includes extracurricular activities after school and on Saturdays. As a result, KIPP students spend approximately 60 percent more time in class than their peers.[4]
Each middle school student receives a paycheck at the end of the week of KIPP dollars they have earned based on academic merit, conduct, and overall behavior.
End-of-year trips are also earned. They vary from school to school. KIPP Academy Middle School in Houston, Texas, for example, sends fifth graders to Washington, D.C., sixth graders to Utah, seventh graders to the East coast (New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts) to see a Broadway play, go sightseeing or visit colleges, and eighth graders go to the west coast (California) to visit attractions like Yosemite National Park, Disneyland, and other tourist attractions, as well as colleges.
When a student decides that he or she would like to attend a KIPP school, a home visit is set up with a teacher or the principal of the school, who meets with the family and student(s) to discuss what is required of the students, the teachers and the parents in KIPP. They all sign a KIPP contract promising that they will do everything in their power to help the student succeed and go to college. Once the contract is signed, the student is a KIPPster for life. KIPP follows the student's progress during KIPP and even after. The purpose of KIPP is for students to gain a college education; so even after they have finished KIPP, students maintain contact with their college counselor at KIPP. KIPP helps them go to private or boarding schools on full or mostly full scholarship, aids them in finding internships and/or summer programs, and even helps students prepare resumes, seek jobs and choose careers.
KIPP is in the process of developing new high schools throughout the nation. Students from well-established KIPP middle schools will have the opportunity to attend these high schools. While KIPP high schools will maintain KIPP's principles, they are focused on providing a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum that encourages increasing degrees of independent responsibility for learning.
In June 2010, Mathematica Policy Research produced the first findings[5] from a multi-year evaluation of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)
Using a matched comparison group design, results show that for the vast majority of KIPP schools in the evaluation, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in math and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.
A February 2007 strategy paper[6] for the think tank the Brookings Institution commented favorably on the accomplishment of KIPP.
At the vanguard of experimentation with educational methods and techniques are charter schools: public schools that operate outside the normal governance structure of the public school system. In recent years, charter schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and Achievement First have upended the way Americans think about educating disadvantaged children, eliminating the sense of impossibility and hopelessness and suggesting a set of highly promising methods.
A research report published in March 2005 by the Economic Policy Institute in book form as "The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement,"[7] however, described the degree to which KIPP's admission process selects for likely high achievers:
KIPP students, as a group, enter KIPP with substantially higher achievement than the typical achievement of schools from which they came. ...[T]eachers told us either that they referred students who were more able than their peers, or that the most motivated and educationally sophisticated parents were those likely to take the initiative to pull children out of the public school and enroll in KIPP at the end of fourth grade. Today, KIPP Schools have added Pre-K through 12th grade schools. A clear pattern to emerge from these interviews was that almost always it was students with unusually supportive parents or intact families who were referred to KIPP and completed the enrollment process.
Some observers, such as the authors of The Charter School Dust-Up,[7] say that KIPP's admission process self-screens for students who are both motivated and compliant, from similarly motivated and compliant—and supportive—families. Parents must commit to a required level of involvement, which rules out badly dysfunctional families. Reports of KIPP's discipline policy, which involves shunning the miscreant student, and other KIPP policies such as teaching students how to "walk briskly down the hall" (according to one admiring description of KIPP practices),[8] might further tend to discourage willful, defiant or simply independent-minded students from applying.
In addition, some KIPP schools show high attrition, especially for those students entering the schools with the lowest test scores. A 2008 study by SRI International found that although KIPP fifth-grade students who enter with below-average scores significantly outperform peers in public schools by the end of year one, "... 60 percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools in 2003-04 left before completing eighth grade."[9] The report also discusses student mobility due to changing economic situations for student's families, but does not directly link this factor into student attrition. Six of California's nine KIPP schools, researched in 2007, showed similar attrition patterns. Figures for schools in other states are not always as readily available. On the other hand, recent research casts doubt on whether observed attrition rates are atypical for students who have applied to KIPP school, as opposed to all students in general. [10]
Kay S. Hymowitz has written for City Journal that the "question remains whether KIPP wasn’t overambitious from the start". While the KIPP founders planned on around seventy-five percent of their students graduating from a four-year college, Hymowitz wrote that only a third actually earned a bachelor’s degree.[11]