Gary Rubinstein writes here about KIPP’s clever tactics to win a listing as one of the “best” high schools in New York State. He caught them playing similar games several years ago, and U.S. News heard about it and removed KIPP from its rankings.

He begins:

There is exactly one KIPP high school in New York City.

KIPP NYC College Prep High School was started in 2009 to serve students graduating from KIPP middle schools. In 2013 they moved into a new facility that was part of a $100 million project….

Gary figured out that KIPP gamed the system by placing its high-performing students in one middle school and its underperforming students in another middle school. But only one gets counted by U.S. News.

The mystery gets stranger when you search for KIPP high schools in New York and two schools come up, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity.

So there is the other KIPP high school in NYC according to U.S. News and that school has 4 times the number of students and in that under performing sibling of the 20th ranked school they don’t have any students passing the AP test. How can this be?

The answer is that there are not two KIPP high schools but only one. These schools, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity are actually middle schools. Even in the New York State data, there is not an official KIPP NYC College Prep school but these middle schools have as part of their enrollment the high school students. I don’t know why New York State allows them to do this and why they can assign all the students and only the students who pass an AP exam to KIPP Academy middle school and the students who don’t pass an AP to KIPP Academy Infinity middle school.

Please open the link to understand what a clever move this is. Why do they do it? Gary says it impresses their funders.