Caroline Grannan demonstrates what a parent activist can accomplish by diligence. Here she writes about her research on KIPP:
I did the first known research on KIPP attrition in 2007 as an unpaid amateur blogger. I looked at attrition in all the then-nine California KIPP schools based on California Department of Education data. KIPP’s Oakland school had even more astronomical attrition than the other KIPP schools, and when broken down by demographics, the Oakland attrition was even more startling. By the beginning of 8th grade (which was the publicly available figure), almost every African-American boy who has been there in grades 5 or 6 had left the school.
The Oakland Tribune should have been doing this research, but hmm … its education reporter left to take a job with KIPP. Funny how that happens.
KIPP’s usual response to the attrition issue is that comparable public schools have comparable attrition. But that’s a lie. I checked a number of comparable Oakland middle schools, and they have no pattern of attrition at all. They have turnover, as low-income families tend to have unstable housing and move a lot, but students cycle in to replace those who cycle out. KIPP, on the other hand, doesn’t replace the students who leave. A study by SRI International that was released the following year (coincidentally) confirmed my findings, showing that the Bay Area KIPP schools “lost” 60% of their students and didn’t replace them. The SRI study added the information that the students who leave are consistently the less successful ones.
After a happy KIPP parent posted on our local San Francisco Schools listserve that his daughter had “tested into” KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy, I also started the application process at that school for my then-7th-grader, to confirm whether it required a test, which it did.
KIPP says the test is used to determine the applicant’s academic grade level, not to determine who gets in. But even if that’s true, the test requirement clearly selects for students who are compliant enough to sit for a test (at grades 5 and up, kids are quite capable of refusing); for families and students who aren’t traumatized by tests and feel capable enough to take one; and for families who are motivated enough to go through that multi-step application process. And, of course, the happy KIPP parent clearly felt that his child was admitted based on her test results.
By the way, when an organization pays a research firm to study it, there is a negotiation process regarding how the results will be reported. (When RAND did a much-ballyhooed study of Edison Schools in the early 2000s, the results were released more than two years behind schedule for that reason.) The client has a fair amount of leverage as the research firm struggles to maintain its integrity. We have no way of knowing what those negotiations between KIPP and Mathematica looked like, but I would bet they got interesting.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I also heard that they had very high attrition because of the long school day and Saturday school which left no time for family activities. Plus they were very regimented and also had high attrition for the teachers, who were not.
On a related subject there was a charter in Ascension Parish Louisiana that a parent wanted to enroll her child in but he was told he would be put back a grade, even though he had passed the standardized testing adequately the previous spring, due to the school’s own testing. The mother sent the child back to public school because he saw no reason to repeat the 4th grade. I think the school was Ascension Christian. If he passed, he passed because Ascension is a well run system and in the top three in the state. They are notorious for going by the book. The kid was black. Ascension, particularly East Ascension where he lived, is a predominantly white system . This is Louisiana and it crossed my mind that could have had something to do with it.
There have been some studies that show that black boys who are held back in school are more likely to drop out as well as to go to prison than boys who are not.
Thanks for the praise, Diane! … Jonathan Schorr pointed out that I was incorrect regarding the timing of his career move from journalism into the charter sector. He had already made that move by the time the Oakland KIPP school was started. In the big picture, I think that a trend of education reporters moving into the charter sector has the collateral effect of leading to overly passive reporting, but I was wrong about Schorr and the Oakland KIPP school.
@Twinkie1cat, I’ve also heard that a lot of families are deterred from enrolling in a school if their child is likely to be held back, and the purpose of the tests KIPP gives to applicants is to determine what grade to put the student in. So you can see that might discourage some families.