The GOOD 100: KIPP Schools
- Posted by: GOOD
- on October 8, 2009 at 8:00 am
A Case Study
Fewer than one in five students in the nation’s low-income areas will attend college. But at KIPP charter schools, the inverse is true: Better than 80 percent of students who complete eighth grade at a KIPP school continue on to higher learning.
MISSION “To provide high quality public education for all children.”
VITALS Founded as a downtown-Houston fifth-grade charter-school program in 1994 by Teach for America alumni Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin; 82 tuition-free charter schools in 19 states (and D.C.) now serve 20,000 mostly black and Latino kids nationwide; KIPP students (the name stands for “knowledge is power program”) regularly outperform those in neighboring schools by wide margins.
ACCOLADES As if a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t speak loudly enough, Gates himself offered praise for KIPP during his 2009 TED talk; other fans include Oprah Winfrey, the president of the World Bank, and just about every news outlet in the country.
WHY IT WORKS “The only reason we get better results is great teaching and more of it. There’s really nothing going on that’s magical or special,” says co-founder Feinberg, adding: “We make a commitment to excellence and a promise to our children, and a promise to children is a sacred thing.”
PLANS FOR THE FUTURE More schools, better teacher training and support, and more kids getting the opportunity to go to college.
Average test score growth over four years at KIPP middle schools:
DISCUSSION: 2 Comments
There’s a lot of controversy about KIPP schools. Check out http://schoolsmatter.blogspot.com/
After reading the piece on KIPP I thought that some of the approaches could work in specific kinds of educational environments. The idea that public education should be static is not good thinking for future generations of students or teachers. The problem is that we tend to not get out of our comfort zone to try different kinds of approaches to teaching children how to learn, which is the most fundamental part of this whole issue. Teaching children how to learn. They will learn if they know how…so its’ up to us to do the hard work of showing them the “how.”If KIPP can continue to show results in the number of kids moving on to college and getting degrees and becoming productive individuals then we must take the approach seriously. The proof as my mother would say is in the pudding. It is critical that imperative data be the norm in judging whether KIPP has the right approach. Period.