Marc Mannella opened the first KIPP middle school in Philadelphia in 2003.
He started with 90 students in fifth grade.
KIPP promised that students who stuck with the “no-excuses” regimen would go to college.
Avi Wolfman-Arent of WHYY in Philadelphia tracked down 33 of those students to find out what happened to them.
The former KIPPsters are now about 25.
Of the 90, 25 dropped out in the first year of middle school.
The students entered a world of incentives and punishments, of strict rules administered strictly.
It wasn’t right for everyone.
Of the 90 students who enrolled in KIPP Philly’s first middle school class, about half were boys. By the time 8th grade graduation arrived, enrollment was whittled down to 34 students — and only 11 boys remained….
Almost none of the KIPP alumni we interviewed did four years at one high school followed by four years at one college. All of them seemed to flounder or grow restless or get sidetracked somewhere along the journey up that mountain.
KIPP propelled them to high school — usually a Catholic school or a private school or a magnet school — but they didn’t stick there. KIPP’s lessons didn’t always follow them out the door…
Here’s what the numbers say.
Six years after high school graduation, 35 percent of the original KIPP Philly class had an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. At the seven-year mark, that number was 44 percent.
What does that mean?
In Philadelphia, about a quarter of students who graduate high school earn a college degree by the six-year mark. That overall Philly number would be lower if you tracked students back to eighth grade, like KIPP does.
There’s a prominent nationwide study that tracked students starting in 10th grade.
It found that eight years after high school graduation, about 14 percent of students from the lowest income quartile had a degree.
KIPP Philly students almost all came from poor neighborhoods, and the results suggest that they earned degrees at much higher rates — rates that are about the same as middle-income students.
“And that feels like we did something that was real,” said Mannella, the school’s founder.
There are serious caveats, though.
KIPP’s number doesn’t count all the kids who left over those four years. Some of those kids did graduate college. Some didn’t. It’s quite possible that the 34 who made it through KIPP were more likely to have long-term academic success for a whole host of reasons, no matter what school they attended.
Frankly this project is incomplete, too.
We talked with 24 of the 34 alum from the original class — as well as nine students who attended KIPP Philadelphia but didn’t finish. The ten graduates who chose not to talk may have very different experiences than the 24 who did
The author wonders what is the best way to evaluate KIPP. Graduation rates? College entry? College persistence? Employment?
KIPP is now the largest charter chain in the nation.
One thing we learn from this piece is that its strict discipline code helps some students, turns off others.
Its methods are not a panacea. Most kids who enter do not persist. For some, it is a lifesaver.
Perhaps the same might be said of the public schools that were closed to make way for KIPP and the public schools that accepted the KIPP dropouts and pushouts.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What studies can’t show is what would have happened to those KIPP graduates had they remained in/gone back to public school. My guess, though, is that they would have gradated college at roughly the same rates. My guess is that KIPP is simply selecting the kids who were most likely to graduate college in any case.
And I even have to wonder if KIPP “no-excuses” style actually caused harm for at least some of their graduates once they entered college. It seems like someone who does well being told what to do every second of the day and following ridiculously detailed rules wouldn’t do very well in the world of college where you have to figure much more out for yourself. It seems like the sudden freedom might be overwhelming for those who adapted the best to the lack of freedom KIPP gives.
Dienne, exactly right. KIPP grads are not prepared to think critically or independently.
“It seems like the sudden freedom might be overwhelming for those who….”
Forty years ago I had a job working in the sewer. We traveled around from town to town, doing a specialized rehab to city sewer systems. Naturally, ours was a rather unsupervised life. I can recall a kid who got a job with us who had grown up sheltered and told what to do. He went hog mad wild. None of his perverse behavior is describable in polite company.
You are correct in every sense of the word. Kids directed by those who allow no independence will rarely prosper. It is worse than allowing kids to run about unchecked in some ways.
This is a valuable look. No researches done to vet the claims of the ‘choice’ schools.
Again, this blog is of great value to anyone who desires facts.
My anecdotal understanding is that many small liberal arts colleges have official or unofficial arrangements to recruit and admit KIPP graduates, perhaps in lieu of attempting to find high achieving minority candidates at public high schools. That KIPP is in effect their minority admissions recruitment partner.
That would benefit KIPP, since it lets them claim admissions to selective or elite colleges. The benefit to small colleges is the focused route, through just one national chain, to promising minority students.
I don’t begrudge the students. And I don’t think the colleges should avoid KIPP. But I do wonder what this does to the admissions chances of minority graduates of public high schools. Are they completely overlooked?
And is this really the secret behind KIPP’s claim to get students to college?
Actually, KIPP made a partnership with several prestigious 4-year liberal arts colleges to accept their graduates.
I wonder how many survived.
I was told by one of the college presidents that KIPP grads are poorly prepared for serious reading or thinking. Most of what they learned was by rote.
If you have any more information about that agreement, which colleges it’s with, or the terms, I would like to have it. I’m wondering, for instance, if it obligates colleges to admit a certain number of Kipp grads each year (like the TFA contracts with school districts), or if Kipp promises to provide a certain number of Kipp grads each year, or if Kipp grads will get preference over other equally qualified students (and especially over other equally qualified minority or low income/first gen, etc students). And if any money between Kipp and the college is involved in the agreement.
We’re ending up with an interesting parallel here in Indiana, with the new, and rapidly multiplying Purdue Polytechnic charter high school, so far chartered by the Mayor of Indianapolis. PPHS is promising parents that PPHS grads (none so far, since it’s just in its 3rd year) will get direct guaranteed admittance to Purdue University if the graduate from PPHS and meet Purdue’s admission requirements (test scores and GPA). There are many more in state students who apply and meet those requirements than Purdue has room for. So PPHS and Purdue are basically promising to give priority at a public state university to these students over all other equally qualified students at all other high schools in the state. Which is a powerful enrollment marketing tool for the charter school.
I’ve asked what would happen if Indiana University’s School of Music gave priority to the orchestra students from Bloomington South High School (located a mile from the university) over all
other schools in the state, or if Purdue’s Engineering School gave priority to math students at nearby West Lafayette High School (home of Rise Above the Mark).
I know the answer. The state would never stand for it.
I think the question we should be asking is Kipp worth the disruption and loss of funding to public schools? Unless it can be proven that Kipp provided a significant advantage, the answer should be “no.”
I recall reading a story about four excellent students that graduated with honors from high school in Galveston. Each young woman received a full scholarship to college, and each young woman was very poor. The article followed them along their college journey. Nobody made it in four years. Poor students face a daunting job of attending college as they do not have money, and their families suffer a greater level of dysfunction. These young women got sidelined by family crises, personal crises and working too many hours to pay for incidentals. One of the four young women managed to go the College of the Mainland in Texas City to get her RN degree, but she did this after dropping out of the four year college and returning home. The remaining three returned home to help their family out or address their own personal crisis. They all complained that they did not feel accepted by other students at their college. Poor young people have many more hurdles to cross in order to get a college degree.
This is so valid, and so many people (“reformers” and others) are SO clueless about it. My daughter-in-law came from a poor Eastern European country to attend a liberal-arts college frequented by rich kids — she attended an English-language high school where several U.S. colleges recruited. She’s a tough cookie, but the indignities and challenges are myriad. Even one of those Thanksgiving breaks where the campus dining and most of the businesses in town are closed, most of the students have jetted or driven their SUVs home, and just a few students remain on the cold, empty campus would do a lot of people in, and that’s just one tiny example.
Hollywood screenwriters: Here’s a B-movie elevator pitch for you: the evil headmaster arranges for a perfect graduation rate by putting all his failing students on a bus to . . .
The question to be asked is why the privatization movement avoid these kinds of longitudinal attrition studies like the plague.
If you want to know if charter schools are really working, you would want to track the original lottery winners over time to see if they even stay in your charter! If a charter is losing many students, you’d want to know why and what changes that charter needs to make to keep all the students who enroll. This is especially true when a charter claims it has discovered the magic formula that turns all students in failing schools into high performing scholars. If the truth is that they are only able to turn 20% of those students in failing schools into high performing scholars, that is important to know. Unless the goal is to mislead the public.
The attrition rates of charters is one of the most highly guarded secrets and is dismissed by the researchers subsidized by privatization money as absolutely unimportant. I can always tell how co-opted an education researcher is when they announce that attrition rates don’t matter because they just don’t. And then they insist that there is no need to look closely at the huge number of students leaving high performing charters because students also leave the worst failing public schools, too. Talk about comparing apples to oranges – something no legitimate researcher would do. And then they double down on this by saying that there should be no comparison of attrition rates between charters because it doesn’t matter if high performing charters also have high attrition rates and mediocre charters do not. It’s irrelevant, and the only thing that matters if that high performing charters have 99% success rates! It’s a miracle!
Can you imagine a scientific researcher saying “this cancer drug works miracles and we don’t care how many patients dropped out of the study and stopped using this miracle drug with 99% successful results, because we noticed that patients also dropped out of a study for another cancer drug that didn’t work at all and caused terrible side effects. We know that more patients dropped out of a study using this miracle cancer cure than dropped out of a study using a cancer drug that works on some patients and not others, but we insist that is because this miracle cancer drug study just happened to get a lot of patients who preferred to die. Why would we question it? It’s a miracle and works for 99% of patients! We “proved” it!
Those researchers would be drummed out of science. Luckily, they could go work for ed reform funded universities and do faux studies that ignore attrition and are never peer reviewed but get enormous publicity anyway because lazy education journalists love rewriting press releases.
One glaring red flag — in 3 years the number of boys went from 45 to 11. More than 75% of the boys were gone in 3 years? That is the kind of glaring red flag that privatizers are determined to keep hidden, insisting it totally irrelevant and has nothing to do with their 99% success rates!
Every single charter network that claims great success with almost 100% of their students should be subject to a close look at their attrition rates. The fact it has taken so long demonstrates that they do not want to know — or that they do know and they want to keep them quiet because it brings into question every claim they make to justify their existence.
I’m beginning to think that we are facing a crisis among our boys: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/are-we-failing-our-boys/
Thanks for the link. The statistics for black boys are even worse. I was just reading how the Democrats are trying to impress the black female voter. There was no mention of black men probably because they are a far less stable population that does not vote in large numbers.
This was a good article. Honestly, what it brought home to me was HOW HARD it is just to get ahead when you start so far back economically.
It’s really the best argument for why “ed reform” isn’t the magic cure-all we’ve been sold and how mistaken it was to blame everything under the sun on schools and ignore and neglect all the other pieces of the puzzle.
We won’t get away with that, and we didn’t. If they actually want something approaching a path towards equity they are going to have do more than charter schools. It’s a fantasy and what’s worse they are telling the students this fantasy. Some of these kids did everything “right” and they still struggled so much. “Secret sauce” is a lie.
Ed reformers like to talk about “protecting the status quo” but they’re protecting a much larger status quo than public schools. They’re insisting that no one and nothing has to change other than schools and what is that other than protecting the status quo?
At what point do people in the US admit that more than K-12 schools have to change to reach this promised land of “equity of opportunity”?
Schools are such a convenient scapegoat for all our problems. That occurs to no one in ed reform? That this story they tell where the “right” school is all that’s needed is itself an excuse for nothing else to change and that protects a very powerful status quo that is much larger than a school district?
Schools can’t fix your country. You’re all going to have to change other things, too. They were never intended to carry the entire societal advancement track and insisting they can just lets EVERYONE and EVERYTHING else off the hook.
I always think it’s interesting that ed reformers carefully avoid the role of the higher ed system in our “lack of opportunity”. What’s their responsibility? Other than scolding K-12 schools, I mean.
I can’t help but think this odd omission is because so many academics are ed reformers.
No team effort here! No sir. Everything that is wrong or broken is exclusively the fault of schools that serve K-12. Wow. That’s convenient!
When the KIPP principal blames his alumni’s failure on factors outside school.
“Life happens,” is his rationalization.
But wait, the school privatization industry’s one-time de facto spokesperson Michelle Rhee said that’s just lazy, status-quo, excuse-making.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/poverty-must-be-tackled-b_b_1857423
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MICHELLE RHEE:
“Our schools can’t fix all of society’s problems, but what happens in classrooms everyday can make a huge difference in the life outcomes of all children. As such, our schools can and should be held accountable for ensuring all students are learning.
“In my experience, schools can and must be an important part of that by providing educational opportunities to low-income kids that can help break cycles of generational poverty.
“Too often, what is keeping us from replicating such success isn’t a lack of know-how. It’s a lack of faith. We can do better by our kids, but first we must believe in all of them and in our ability to help. If we do that, we can fix so much of what is wrong with our education system and what is keeping all of our children from reaching their potential.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
But wait, Michelle. This KIPP principal Marc says that he and his KIPP organization should NOT be “held accountable” for “break(ing) cycles of generational poverty,” and that just “believing in all of them (students), and in (teachers’) ability to help” doesn’t work.
Why?
Because, as Marc says, “life happens.”
That hypocrisy has been a guiding philosophy of charters.
They criticize anyone who points out how disadvantaged the students in failing public schools are as “making excuses” for those schools failure.
But when charters lose huge cohorts of students, it is always because their (presumably ignorant) parents prefer to have their kid in a failing school. Or the students are violent and needed to be suspended frequently. Or they are lazy. Or they just aren’t trying hard enough. Or they just aren’t getting with the program. It’s never the charter’s fault for failure.
That’s one reason that the word “attrition” must never be mentioned and it can never be studied. There is no need because no matter how many students leave, it is always their parents’ fault for ignorantly spurning this guaranteed opportunity to give their children the best education ever and make their children into high performing scholars.
The reality is sometimes social, emotional, family problems as well as economic issues work against students, not only poor students. I don’t think it is an excuse, just a realization of the reality some students face.
A few points:
1) The KIPP brand is as TFA as it gets. Founded by TFAers, KIPP averts criticism w/ the mantra that they alone can save poor children of color.
2)’No excuses’ does not provide opportunity. It creates robots. Show me a wide array of curricular offerings—the Arts, languages, sports, etc.—and I’ll back off.
3) One of our great challenges is college completion. Things like blankets, deodorant, textbooks, lab fees, transportation become obstacles.
Students can succeed, esp. if they’re supported, not isolated.
‘averts criticism’ — yes, they are truly masters at this one
Back in 2007 or so, I was blogging about education and did some number-crunching on schools here in the San Francisco Bay Area. At the time, California Dept of Ed data were more detailed than they are now, so it was possible to break attrition rates down by gender and ethnicity. I found that Oakland’s KIPP Bridge school lost 79% of the African-American boys who started there by the beginning of 8th grade (figures are for the 10th day of the school year and I didn’t have the data to learn how many FINISHED 8th grade).
Not long afterward, the research firm SRI International did a study on Bay Area KIPP schools, commissioned and funded by KIPP — to be fair, KIPP DID pay a researcher to study its attrition, among other things. That study found that 60% of students who started at the then-five Bay Area KIPP schools left the schools, and that they were overwhelmingly the least academically successful. (That study didn’t include ethnicity.)
The SRI International report, since it was paid for by KIPP, buried that finding below many findings about KIPP achievement, and even seasoned education reporters fell for that ploy and similarly buried the attrition finding. But KIPP did have to own up to it at least somewhat.
Later, there was a New York-based study of KIPP schools that deliberately, dishonestly obfuscated the attrition rate by conflating it with mobility in comparisons to public schools. That is, in high-poverty schools, students tend to move a lot, but those who leave are rapidly replaced by those who arrive (and who will be at a cross-section of levels of capability, motivation, compliance etc.). At KIPP schools, those who leave are not replaced, leaving a smaller, higher-functioning student cohort. The New York-based study was a lie because of that.
Also, a tidbit — sometime around then, the neoliberal education-“reform”-promoting journalist Jonathan Alter wrote about KIPP and claimed that some staggering number of KIPP graduates had gone on to college. Actually, since KIPP was mostly running middle schools and was fairly new at the time, few KIPP alumni had reached college age, so that was false (probably boneheadedly and inadvertently) too. Just something to note when you read the KIPP gushing in the press.
I haven’t gone into the admissions hurdles KIPP uses to self-select for high-functioning, compliant, motivated students from compliant, supportive, high-functioning families — that’s another post. (I put my own daughter into the KIPP admission process to research them, years ago.0