One thing you have to note about KIPP Ujima is that it appears that more than half of 5th graders don't make it through 8th grade at the school.

According to state data from 2009(http://mdreportcard.org/), KIPP Ujima had 126 5th graders and 58 8th graders.

KIPP Ujima and other KIPP schools deserve credit for doing a good job with certain kids, but this business of comparing them to other schools doesn't fly. KIPP Ujima needs the public schools to take certain other kids off its hands.

There could be some explanation other than attrition to explain KIPP Ujima's numbers. But what if it is attrition? A traditional high school with a 4-year completion rate like that would be called a "dropout factory."

I don't remember KIPP and skimming being an issue seeing how they recruit in one of the poorest neighborhoods. The question with KIPP is whether it is reproducable on a larger scale?

"which feature a strong school culture and about 50 percent more instructional time than traditional schools."

I think not.

There are so many questions about this report as there are about every report - who paid for it? What slant did the questions take? Did they look at attrition from 5th grade to 8th grade? Did they look at admissions policies? I know that the report didn't include Kipp Baltimore, but their Web site clearly states that anyone entering after 5th grade has to take an entrance exam and that beyond the stated policies, I wonder what un-official policies are. i also wonder what the long term impact is beyond 8th grade.

I don't knock their results - they do great work and get great results on tests. i just know that this isn't the type of school i want to work in nor is it the type of school i want my own children to go to.

as a student at Kipp king collegiate in San Lorenzo CA I have to say that everything is a lie. This school got rid of all the African American teachers in one year. As for the teachers that wernt strict some as well fired. The school is mostly based on the teachers having more authority over the students and making the teachers feel superior. I can't say the same about all Kipp schools but I'm pretty sure the authority issue might be the same in others as well. Yes the school is a very good school in terms of the education. But in terms of the times where we arnt being taught there is always and us vs them feeling.

My daughter, who has always done well in schools but failed to meet minimum requirements for KIPP's math admissions test, (where she got 70% correct -KIPP min is 80%) was "excluded from the admissions process for failing to meet KIPP admissions standards." Great school but why wouldn't you be if you were able to pick who you want and politley ask them to leave (please see grade 5 enrollment compared to grade 8 for cohort 2009)if they fail to meet requirements or if parents and families don't live up to their levels of committment to the school.

For starters, take a look at the "KIPP Committment to Excellence," which can be found on the KIPP website. It is a contract that must be signed by teachers, students, and parents. The final line of both the parent and the student sections notes that "failure to adhere to these committments can cause [the student] to lose various KIPP privileges and can lead to [the student] returning to his/her home school." The benefits to enforcing this contract are HUGE. First off, KIPP is able to remove students who are chronically apathetic, truant, and/or tardy, ensuring a student body with brains that are available for learning. The benefit of removing students who constantly create problems is that it frees teachers to actually teach instead of trying to teach in between disciplining and documenting. The combined effect of the first two benefits is the biggest benefit of all, in my book. The remaining students might be poor. Their home lives might be much less than ideal. They may have started the year with major academic deficits. However, they have the good fortune to be taught in a classroom that is free of constant disruption, by a teacher who is able to use the majority of her time and energy meeting her students' diverse academic needs, surrounded by peers who are respectful, supportive, and--most importantly--motivated to learn.

So, there you go. In REAL public schools, we have to produce results with ALL of the students assigned to us. We can't remove kids because they don't follow the rules.

I teach in the county. This past school year, many of my students came to school late--5 minutes, or a few hours--one or more days a week. Quite a few of them got picked up early (for the convenience of their parent, not for an appointment) several times a month. I had one child who was absent 30% of the year. He never came to school more than 5 school days in a row--and that happened only once. Three others missed more than 10% of the year--more than one day out of every ten. Some of my students neglected to do homework at least once a week--or did it so poorly, it was a wasted effort. Only a handful of my students who actually did their homework had a parent look at it to check for neatness and completeness. More than a handful of my students remained highly unmotivated, regardless of my daily efforts to engage them. They were very frequently inattentive, sleepy, or even fully asleep during instruction. Several of my students had chronic behavior problems which were not addressed adequately by their parents. Lessons in my classroom were constantly disrupted by these same 4 or 5 students. Their behavior--and dealing with their behavior--ate up enormous amounts of instructional, planning, and personal time. The rest of my class--students who were reasonably well-behaved, motivated, and present in class--had their education held hostage by those previously mentioned behavior problems.

I am thrilled that some students get the benefit of a KIPP education. But until the REAL public schools are allowed to exclude students for tardiness, truancy, disruptive behavior, or plain old lack of effort, please don't delude yourself into thinking that KIPP schools--or any other charter (faux public) schools have some kind of magic formula that makes them "better" schools. They just have the option to send "bad eggs" down the chute, like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. REAL public schools have to keep all of the eggs.

As a KIPP: Ujima teacher, let me start by pointing out how disappointing it is that when one school in Baltimore does well, everyone starts looking for some sort of subterfuge at play, or some devious way that they managed to get such good results. Based on the posts on here, it seems like people are willing to belittle our efforts based on false assumptions or made-up evidence . . . so are we completing ruling out the prospect that KIPP is just a good school?

What we do at Ujima proves that if you have a competent, united, hardworking staff, it is entirely possible to reduce or eliminate the achievement gap between high-poverty students and their more fortunate peers. Let me just clear up a few misconceptions that seem to be dominating this message board:

1. We don’t have admissions requirements. Fifth grade students enter a lottery and are chosen at random (unless they have older siblings at KIPP). Students who wish to transfer in as sixth graders need to take an entrance exam. This is because by sixth grade, our students are performing higher than other city schools students, and have also improved socially and behaviorally. It would be unfair to admit students who have both missed that critical first year AND are academically below the rest of their peers.
2. KIPP is a charter school, but we are a PUBLIC charter school. We cannot kick students out. Believe me, I wish we could, and have tried to do it before, but as a public school, we cannot force a student to leave. The fact that we have smaller seventh and eighth grades can be attributed to the fact that many parents feel the school is too demanding, and withdraw their children to place them at schools where they won’t be expected to do homework every night, or won’t be given assignments to do during school vacations. Some parents also feel that the school demands too much behaviorally, and will actually pull their children so they can attend schools where their student’s mediocre behavior will be the norm, and thus they won’t have to constantly be bothered with phone calls from teachers or requests to come in for conferences. I think it is UNBELIEVABLY depressing that so many parents withdraw their students to make their lives or their kids’ lives more convenient, and I hope that they will eventually realize that there is nothing more inconvenient than not having a good education.
3. The other reason a lot of students leave KIPP is because they move. Most schools in high-poverty have huge problems with student mobility. The only reason that this appears to be attrition at KIPP is that—with the exception of fifth grade—we don’t have other “mobile” students take the departed students’ place on the rosters, for the reasons I stated in point #1. Prior to teaching at KIPP, I looped with students for two years at another city middle school, and found that very few of my students at the end of my second year were in my class at the beginning of my first year. This would have appeared to be attrition if those students who left weren’t replaced by other students who moved into the neighborhood.
4. Taffy says that we are able to “exclude students for tardiness, truancy, disruptive behavior, or plain old lack of effort.” Those are all problems that we struggle with at KIPP, and they are not problems that we can exclude students for. In fact, I think (but definitely could not prove) that parents of students who are disruptive or difficult are MORE likely to keep their kids at KIPP because our extended hours mean that they get more of a respite from their kids. So, Taffy, while we deal with those problems in droves, in my opinion, we just do a much more diligent job of addressing those issues than many other schools do. As I stated earlier, the number one thing that sets KIPP apart is great teachers and administrators. That is not to say that any one teacher at another school who isn’t achieving our results is a bad teacher—but it is much easier for everyone if the entire staff is on the same page. Someone could be a great teacher at a bad school, but as soon as their students go to their next class, everything could revert to total chaos. Our methods are successful because they are constantly reinforced to the students every day by every staff member—the students don’t have that “next class” where high expectations aren’t communicated.
I hope this clears some things up. As a hard-working teacher at a high-performing school, it hurts me to put so much effort into my job, only to have people try to discredit my success with false assumptions and made up facts. The number one reason students in Baltimore don’t achieve the way they do at KIPP is because no one expects them to—a fact which your posts and comments only substantiate.

Liz Bowie, I hope that some of the comments from KIPP insiders enlightened you. It is a basic piece of logic that if you set a hurdle for people to jump, only those who are willing and able to jump the hurdle will succeed in jumping it. KIPP's admissions process self-selects for more-motivated, higher-functioning and COMPLIANT (this is key) students from families with those same characteristics.

In addition, the fact that KIPP doesn't replace the huge number of students who leave -- who, studies show, are consistently the less successful students -- is an enormous different and gives it a huge advantage over public schools. Again, this is evident to the naked eye and is basic logic.

Not to dis KIPP teachers, who have enough problems being on call 36 hours a day, but I object to the notion that KIPP's success is due to superior teachers. That attitude of smugness coming from a KIPP teacher is distasteful, to say the least. It's self-evident, except to the willfully resistant, that a good measure of KIPP's success is due to the self-selection and the "departure" of most of its students, consistently the least successful students (KIPP schools in my area have 60% attrition). It would be very valuable to learn how MUCH of KIPP's success is due to those factors and what other aspects of the KIPP program contribute to success. Unfortunately, we can't learn that when KIPP supporters aggressively lie about the selection/attrition situation and the press is willfully blind to it.

@ KIPP teacher - I'm sorry that you feel that your hard work is being denigrated. Part of the problem is that KIPP is constantly being hyped as a "model" by the media and others who attack teachers unions and traditional schools. But clearly, as you yourself point out, KIPP is not for everybody. It requires students willing to put in the effort and a parent to stand behind them and push them. Also, as you note, KIPP admits few after 5th grade in order to maintain its culture. This stability, and the fact that the weaker students select themselves out, is a HUGE advantage over traditional neighborhood schools. If the media and other boosters noted these caveats, there would far less antagonistic pushback.

I'm not a KIPP parent and I suspect that their charter would not mesh well with my special needs child, but I've got to ask if the recent commenters actually read the report (or even executive summary) linked in the original post. You can argue that the data collection had flaws or that the success isn't repeatable on a larger scale (as IO & OTT did in comment #2 & #3), but to state as fact the exact opposite of the report's finding is pretty obscure to me.

From the executive summary:
"Cumulative rates of attrition vary widely in different KIPP schools, but we did not find systematically higher (or lower) levels of attrition among these KIPP middle schools as compared with other schools within their districts"

"The prior achievement of students entering KIPP schools varies, but KIPP schools most often enroll students whose average fourth-grade achievement is lower than the districtwide average."

Specifically comments about how KIPP students have involved parents so they would succeed anywhere, or the attrition rates makes KIPP seem to perform better than it would if it had typical attrition are ignoring the findings of the report.