KIPP charter schools are on demand
April 21, 2008 by libertyisforme
Education columnist Jay Matthews highlights KIPP’s success:
The report reveals that Barth [CEO of KIPP] has set a goal of expanding KIPP’s network to 100 schools serving 24,000 students by the year 2011, slightly ahead of the KIPP average of nine new schools a year since it began to expand in 2001 from Feinberg’s and Levin’s first two schools. In an interview, Barth said much of this growth will still be middle schools, which make up more than 80 percent of the KIPP total, but a shift is under way toward more elementary and high schools.
The need for high schools has been obvious for some time. The two original KIPP schools in Houston and New York placed their graduating eighth-graders in private schools–including some famous ones like St.Mark’s–and public magnet schools that could be counted on to demand the same high standards. But since 2005, many more KIPP eighth-graders produced by the Fisher-financed expansion have been seeking high-school placements, and there is not enough room in good high schools to serve them all. Jim O’Connor, principal of the KIPP Ascend middle school in Chicago, told me this month that five students from his last year’s eighth grade who are in regular public high schools are having the most difficult time, because their schools lack the focus on strong academic results they found at KIPP.
There are five KIPP high schools now, two more expected to open this summer and at least three more planned by 2010. Yet that growth is not as impressive as the rise of KIPP elementary schools. By this summer, there will be eight of them, a number that Barth said could easily double by 2010. Barth told me that the elementary school leaders are finding that KIPP’s focus on imaginative and demanding teaching and longer school days is raising disadvantaged pre-kindergartners and kindergartners to normal suburban achievement levels very quickly. Given that success, he said, it makes no sense to limit his organization to opening middle schools that have to struggle to rescue fifth-graders who start two or three years below grade level. It will take several years, but KIPP leaders envision a day when most KIPP students will start at age 4 or 5 (depending on when state funds for charter schools kick in). By high school, those leaders assert, their students will be learning at a level just as sophisticated as the children of affluent American families who attend schools like St. Mark’s.
Parents want choice in education, otherwise KIPP wouldn’t be growing at such a rapid pace.
