The public-interest group Center for Media and Democracy made a startling discovery:
The powerful KIPP charter chain asked the US Department of Education to shield certain crucial data from public view, and the Department agreed to do so. With about 150 schools, KIPP is the nation’s largest charter chain, with the possible exception of the Gulen charter chain.
CMD notes that every public school is required to make its data public, but KIPP does not. Since KIPP millions of dollars in federal, state,and local funding, this is an unusual arrangement.
CMD reports:
“KIPP touts itself as particularly successful at preparing students to succeed in school and college.
“Yet, it insisted that the U.S. Department of Education keep secret from the public the statistics about the percentage of its eighth graders who completed high school, entered college, and/or who completed a two-year or four-year degree.
“A few years ago, professor Gary Miron and his colleagues Jessica Urschel and Nicholas Saxton, found that “KIPP charter middle schools enroll a significantly higher proportion of African-American students than the local school districts they draw from but 40 percent of the black males they enroll leave between grades 6 and 8,” as reported by Mary Ann Zehr in Ed Week.
“Zehr noted: “‘The dropout rate for African-American males is really shocking,’ said Gary J. Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement, and research” at Western Michigan University, who conducted the national study.
“Miron’s analysis was attacked by KIPP and its allies, who said KIPP’s success was not due to the attrition of lower performing students who leave the school or move to other districts. One of its defenders was Mathematica Policy Research, whose subsequent study was used to try to rebut Miron’s analysis. (That name will be important momentarily.)
“The Department of Education has been provided with the data about what percentage of KIPP students graduate from high school and go on to college, but it is helping KIPP keep that secret—despite the public tax dollars going to these schools and despite KIPP’s claim to be operating what are public schools.
Real public schools would never be allowed to claim that high school graduation rates or college matriculation rates are “proprietary” or “privileged” or “confidential.”
“Why does the Education Department’s Charter School Program “Office of Innovation and Improvement” defer to KIPP’s demand to keep that information secret from the public?
“Meanwhile, the KIPP Foundation regularly spends nearly a half million dollars a year ($467,594 at last count) on advertising to convince the public how great its public charters are using figures it selects to promote. No public school district in the nation has that kind of money to drop on ads promoting its successes.”
But that’s not all that is undisclosed.
“Even as KIPP was seeking more than $22 million from the federal government to expand its charter school network, it insisted that the U.S. Department of Education redact from its application a chart about how much money would be spent on personnel, facilities, transportation, and “other uses” under the proposed grant. KIPP also sought to redact the amount of private funding it was projecting.
“The agency’s compliant Office of Innovation and Improvement obliged KIPP.”
However, CMD found some of this information on IRS reports. What they discovered were large expenditures on travel, executive salaries, and advertising. Trips included lavish expenditures at Disney World.
“Not only did KIPP seek to keep the public in the dark about how it spends tax-exempt funding and how many KIPP students make it to high school graduation or college, it also sought to redact information “KIPP Student Attrition” by region and “by subgroup” and “KIPP Student Performance” on state exams on “Math and Reading.”
“The Office of Innovation and Improvement did as KIPP requested.”
Why would the Department acquiesce to KIPP’s request to treat this information secret? If charters are public schools, how can their data on costs and attrition be treated as “proprietary”?
KIPP was a favorite of Arne Duncan. He awarded $50 million of Race to the Top funding to KIPP, and another $50 million to Teach for America. In case you didn’t know, Richard Barth, the executive director of KIPP, is married to Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s All About The KIPPs …
“KIPP (an acronym for the phrase “knowledge is power program”)
I would swear that the KIPP acronym stands for “kids in perpetual prison”. At least that’s what KIPP’s students tell us.
“Knowledge is Power” is exactly what those folks believe, Duane Swacker.
That’s why they are so desperate to hide the knowledge that would allow the public to evaluate their schools in a logical way.
As I understand it, coined by some KIPP students:
“KidsInPrisonProgram.”
😎
Kopp is Power Program?
The dark secret is…you can’t prove that there isn’t a dark secret. That’s like saying you can’t prove Santa Clause isn’t real so therefor he is. Come on. If KIPP collects it’s OWN data on middle school college outcomes that is THEIR data, not public. Since when do we hold middle schools accountable for college outcomes? Also, if KIPP wants to reward hard working students with prizes why do we care, as long as it is paid for by philanthropic money. Keep fishing. This is just sad.
“Even as KIPP was seeking more than $22 million from the federal government to expand its charter school network, it insisted that the U.S. Department of Education redact from its application a chart about how much money would be spent on personnel, facilities, transportation, and “other uses” under the proposed grant. KIPP also sought to redact the amount of private funding it was projecting.”
“Not only did KIPP seek to keep the public in the dark about how it spends tax-exempt funding and how many KIPP students make it to high school graduation or college, it also sought to redact information “KIPP Student Attrition” by region and “by subgroup” and “KIPP Student Performance” on state exams on “Math and Reading.””
What’s sad is how people like you defend this crap.
So KIPP schools are PUBLIC charters but its THEIR data not public DATA?
Its not fishing – its called CATCHING. And boy what a whopper.
Just another charter SCANDAL in the making.
“Keep fishing” because if you expect a charter school to tell you how many of the kids they put on got to go lists you are surely living in a world in which billions doesn’t buy you whatever results you want.
Casey says: it doesn’t matter if those nasty kids leave because they deserve to leave. All that matters is that the charter schools that get billions understand HOW to get those nasty kids to leave without anyone knowing about it.
Because Casey doesn’t care about the kids that leave — that is the bottom line for all charter supporters. He wants them to be invisible because he despises them and believes they are unworthy of a decent education. No wonder Trump is winning when Casey represents the new America and its values. It’s about the winners, and if lots of young kids are losers, it is because they ARE losers who deserve it.
“This is just sad.”
Yes, it is!
‘This’ being your comment.
“Since when do we hold middle schools accountable for college outcomes?”
Good question. I thought it was kindergartens.
No, Casey. No.
KIPP is either a public school that meets all layers of transparency, or it is a private school and can keep their data secret – but they must forego any public money to run their schools.
Actually all charters claim to be private contractors when sued by teachers or parents.
Like Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
All the money is public, but the contractor is private
Casey, in many states post-secondary data mapped back to districts and schools is public record due to state statutes enacted as part of the push to implement statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS). Whether it is readily available depends on what kind of reporting products states and districts publish as a matter of standard practice, but it would be subject to an information request as long as small group summary data were redacted to protect student privacy.
Should middle schools be held “accountable” for college outcomes? No. There are many factors that affect who goes on to post-secondary education, who persists from their first to second year in post-secondary education, and who completes a degree by the 4, 5, and 6 year benchmarks. There is also the matter of lag. We don’t hold our middle school accountable for post-secondary data, but we certainly share the summary post-secondary outcomes of their former students.
Well, it seems to me, as a taxpayer, that if KIPP takes money from the public, then it is accountable to the public. Call me crazy, but it KIPP is using public money to produce shabby or non-existent results, then the public certainly has a right to know that.
Are you sure you know what you’re talking about, Casey? Because it really doesn’t sound like it….
Casey ” If KIPP collects it’s OWN data on middle school college outcomes that is THEIR data, not public.”
Often, owning something is an illusion, and in many cases, such as this one, exclusive ownership is highly questionable.
The funny thing about secrets: once you try to hide something from the public, people want to know why you are hiding it, and if they don’t get answers, chances are your secret becomes a dark secret.
In other words, you are the one who made your stuff a dark secret by hiding it.
We don’t think, middle schools are responsible for what kids will do in college. But KIPP does think, they are responsible. On their webpage, http://www.kipp.org/our-approach/kipp-through-college this is their headline
KIPP students are on the path to college from day one
So if KIPP decides to hide their data on their students’ college careers, people want to know why they are hiding the data.
It seems that people in business and government consistently ignore history (because they think only the near future matters), and then they get into trouble not learning about basic human nature.
This is what happened to RSD in New Orleans when they tried to hide the ACT scores of their students (many of the schools there are KIPP schools).
You just show yourself an example of persons blindsided by the facade of public-private partnership.
People should file a “Freedom of Information” act to find out why Kipp’s attrition rates were redacted in the report. Information about Kipp is not a matter of national security. Since Kipp is paid for in part from public tax dollars, all information should be a matter of public record. It is not the government’s job to help Kipp cover up legitimate information.
Paging VirginiaSGP
The hiding of attrition rates for at-risk students at high-performing charter schools is the dirty little secret. It is REQUIRED.
I have posted this before, but the NYC IBO did the exact same thing when it issued an IBO report in July 2015. The IBO studied how many of the Kindergarten students who were randomly selected in a lottery remained until 5th grade. But the IBO (intentionally?) hid the separate attrition rates of individual charter schools or even charter networks. Instead, it reported on the aggregate attrition rates of 53 charters in total so that it was impossible to learn if some of the charters lost huge cohorts of students and some lost very few.
Perhaps that would have made sense if the IBO had done the same when it came to the academic achievement of the kids in that charter school and only report on aggregate totals. But they intentionally pulled out the results of the “high performing” charter schools and reported on their stellar results separately.
In other words, hide attrition rates at the top-performing charters because hey, people might start questioning why so many kids leave a high performing charter! And that would open the door to all the got to go lists, high suspension rates, and just the everyday humiliations that the model teachers make sure their struggling students experience in order to get them out of their school before testing grades.
It’s shocking that they get away with this, but the education press has been embarrassingly bad. The worst of the bunch is WNYC reporter Beth Fertig, who twice “examined” attrition rates in exactly the way that those charter schools insist that it be done. Instead of asking the IBO for the data that would show how many Kindergarten kids left each of those charter schools before 5th grade, she chose to look at a school of students whose older grades had already been culled of their unwanted students and only look at attrition rate from September to June of the entire school. Meaningless to everyone except the billionaire funders who demand that the research be done in this way only and that long term attrition rates of entering students always be hidden. Thanks to a compliant press, the charter industry has gotten away with this.
Attrition rates are not allowed to be mentioned ever. And if forced to do so, you must hide the numbers in large averages and limit your timeframe.
I think other rich charter folks plan to pay another so-called “think tank” to do similar research to what KIPP paid for. Those “think tanks” know that they need to limit their research only to the numbers that please their high paying clients.
This is no surprise, but still disturbing!
retired teacher and NYC public school parent:
Like the heavyweights of self-styled “education reform” are wont to do, they not only massage and torture the numbers & stats, they do so in a manner that is so shamefully & desperately clumsy that it is obvious that they are trying to hide something.
This is what is known in rheephorm circles as cage busting achievement gap crushing 21st century best practices.
If one is all in for monetizing children and ROI aka $tudent $ucce$$, that is.
Thank you both for your comments.
😎
Thank you. This is good information to have.
Looks like KIPP and charter schools will be trying to make inroads into Iowa, which, while not perfect, overall already has a decent public school system. Mark Jacobs, former board chair for KIPP Huston schools, has amassed a powerful board of directors relatively quickly for his growing “Reaching Higher Iowa” organization. http://reachinghigheriowa.org/board-of-directors.php
Reaching Higher Iowa already has state lobbyists lined up. See http://coolice.legis.iowa.gov/Cool-ICE/default.asp?Category=Matt&Service=Lobby
According to its website as of today, this organization wants to “Bring Teach for America Corps to Iowa” and “modify charter laws so that funding follows the child.”
Public money=guaranteed corruption.
J. H. Underhill
Public money *in private hands* = guaranteed corruption.
Social Security administrative costs, at approx. 5%, are far less than the cost for administration of private retirement plans.
The problem is not “public money”, it’s lack of oversight.
That applies to private money as well as public.
If you hand out money without accountability, it will disappear without a trace. No doubt about it.
We lost untold billions of dollars in Iraq that way.
Thank you. Please go through their education section with a fine tooth comb. They have foillowed the money, the connections to Tea Party Reps, the kickbacks for months now. There is soooo much info you can use…and publicize.
🙂
The people in charge of the charter school grants that aided KIPP in hiding data from the public are Brian Martin, Kathryn Meeley, and Erin Pfeltz
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Ave. SW
Washington, DC 20202
(202) 205-9085
(800) USA-LEARN
Thank you Laura. It’s important to put a face on and, contact information for public employees, who are responsible for but, failing to govern, by the compact, “Of the people, by the people and for the people”.
Will email them and then follow-up with a call. This should be fun.
The conference, planned, for later this month, by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, i.e Dr. Reville, has a KIPP official speaking to the assemblage of politicians.
It is a seesaw – sometimes they are public and sometimes they are private – it all depends on what works for them. But it is your very public tax dollars that they are spending…do you want to know how they spend it ? Because they do not want you to know nor do they want you to know their results.
I think KIPP does some good things, but it infuriates me that they aren’t honest about how they achieve what they achieve. Comparing them to regular public schools is apples to oranges, and they must come out and say this unequivocally.
In NYC, KIPP seems to have gone out of its way to stop suspending the heck out of little kids in order to get them out of the school. So their charter school seems to have a very low attrition rate, especially when compared to the charter schools notorious for suspending extraordinarily high numbers of 6 year old children.
With that change, KIPP also has mediocre test scores with huge numbers of their students not meeting standards. They look like a failing school. Especially when compared to other NYC charter schools with far superior teaching and administrators who have achieved results that make KIPP look like it should be closed down immediately. I am hoping the KIPP administrators will realize it is in their best interest to call out the dishonest of the “better” charter schools and how they are still embracing the “get rid of lots of low-performing kids” strategies that helped KIPP improve their test scores.
But more likely, KIPP will simply realize that running a charter school is an honest way is not helping their bottom line and their ability to expand and pay their administrators high salaries. So they will simply abandon honesty and start returning to their “high attrition” days when they were able to call themselves a success! After all, in a choice between actually doing good and pretending you are doing good to promote yourselves, the desire to promote yourself usually wins in the charter industry.
Fantastic investigative reporting. I wish somebody wrote a similar one on higher ed.
Why would a federal department allow KIPP to do something no public school could get away with? That’s an easy answer. KIPP has fraudulent wealthy and powerful friends from the White House to Bill Gates who worship at the alter of avarice who are paving the way with power and money.
The Seventy Four (Walton Funding) is associated with the Gen Next Foundation.
Julian Assange exposes the “dark secrets” of that organization in his book chapter, “Google is Not What It Seems To Be”, available on-line. Gen Next is featured in the about the 30th paragraph.
Interesting where this PDF landed.http://www.state.nj.us/education/sboe/meetings/pubtest/2016/May/RoomA/Denise%20Cole.pdf
Charter School Over$ight above PDF. Curious as to why it’s on a NJ govt. website?
Disgusting. Thanks for exposing!
It meant to me kids in private prison
Wrote to those in charge at Ed. Never heard back. TY for the recent post. Jogged my memory.
And least we forget…from the most “transparent” administration ever. Thanks to Obama and crew they’ve set the bar so low as to be non-existent and set the table up for the Orangutan.