Study shows the benefit conferred on minorities who attend KIPP charter schools.
They graduate college at comparatively high rates
Conservatives like to say that education is the civil rights issue of our time. But education can only be the civil rights issue of our time if there is a path to significantly improving the education of blacks through educational reforms.
In my view, the success of the KIPP charter school network suggests that there might be such a path. An indication of that success and the promise it holds comes from a study by the research group Mathematica.
The study found that students who attended a KIPP middle school and a KIPP high school are nearly twice as likely to complete a four-year college as students from a similar socio-economic background who do not attend a KIPP school.
Blacks and Hispanics make up 94 percent of KIPP students and 88 percent of its students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies. The Mathematica study found out that the college graduation rate for KIPP students is large enough, if extrapolated, to erase the difference between white and black college rates and nearly large enough to erase the gap between the rate for white and Hispanic students.
Based on my (admittedly limited and dated) experience with KIPP, these findings don’t surprise me. Twelve years ago, I visited a KIPP school in West Helena, Arkansas just across the river from the state of Mississippi. Most KIPP schools are located in cities (or were at the time), but this school was in an impoverished rural area.
West Helena itself resembled a ghost town. Much of it was shuttered and the school was the town’s largest employer. Driving around nearby Mississippi the day before my visit to the school, I observed poverty more pronounced than any I had witnessed since the last time I was in that state, 35 years earlier.
The student body, drawn from this area, was almost exclusively black.
I sat in on KIPP school classes at the grade school, middle school, and high school levels. The unrelenting emphasis was on preparing students for college, intellectually and psychologically.
In the kindergarten class, the teacher asked the class a question and invited students to “raise those college bound hands.” Every student raised his or her hand. I doubt that all of them knew the answer, but all of them saw themselves as college bound (with some justification, as we will see).
Middle school has been described as “a staple of the American system where little is demanded of preteen students.” But plenty was demanded in the middle school class I observed. The teacher fired questions at nearly every student and the students, with only a few exceptions, had the answers.
The advanced calculus class I watched featured tough love from the teacher, a young black man from the area who had attended an Ivy League college. He offered no encouragement, only a look of mild disapproval, for getting the answer partially right.
In every class I attended at all three levels of the school, student discipline and attention to the teacher was impeccable. I learned that it’s KIPP policy to isolate students who misbehave until they apologize. (I guess the U.S. Department of Education can’t complain because there are too few white students to perform a disparate impact study.)
Finally, in no class did I hear any discussion of race, white privilege, or anything vaguely woke or touchy-feely. It was all bread and butter education.
How was this working out? Earlier in the year, the school had graduated its first batch of students. Every grad had been accepted by a four-year college. The colleges ranged from Ouachita Baptist University (Mike Huckabee’s alma mater) to one of the service academies (Annapolis, I think), but every graduate was college bound if he or she wanted to be.
On my way out, I picked up a booklet full of data comparing the standardized test performances of students at every KIPP school in America with those of students in the corresponding locality and the state. The KIPP student scores were invariably higher, and often much higher.*
Subsequent analyses that show the same thing can be found here (for the District of Columbia), here (as of 2013), and here (as of 2019). **
The missing piece was how KIPP graduates fare once they get to college. Now we know, per the Mathematica study, that they remain in college and graduate at rates much higher than students from a similar background and, it seems, about as high as white students.
So maybe there is a path to significantly improving the education of blacks through educational reforms. The reforms would focus on generous funding for charter schools that follow the KIPP model or have been shown to yield KIPP-like results. They would also include widespread use of vouchers to enable parents to send their students to private schools where serious education takes place, with the results to prove it, and where discipline is maintained.
Ideally, these steps would put pressure on public schools to be more like their KIPP-like counterparts. But I hold out no hope that public schools will respond positively to such pressure. Instead, we can expect them to keep doing what they’ve been doing and to produce the same awful outcomes. The path to improving the education of blacks through educational reform lies in ending the grip public schools have on education.
Finally, I want to address the objection that focusing energy on improving the college admission and graduation rates of poor blacks and Hispanics is misguided because (1) college isn’t for everyone and (2) contemporary college education is something of a joke. Both points are valid.
Yet, for poor black kids in the Mississippi Delta or in the slums of New York City, a college degree isn’t a joke. It’s often the ticket to a better life. And even for those who don’t complete, or even attend, college, the bread and butter learning that happens at KIPP schools and the structured, discipline environment with good role models are likely to be extremely valuable.
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*To be clear, I want to note that the KIPP school results, though excellent comparatively speaking, weren’t great in absolute terms.
**Critics don’t deny that KIPP students outperform their counterparts in local public schools, but some attribute this to differences in attrition patterns, arguing that whereas struggling students come and go at regular schools, at KIPP, struggling students leave but very few new students enter. That argument is refuted here.
Others say that KIPP gets students who are more motivated than average because their parents tend to be more focused on education than the parents of public school kids. If this is true, it means that parents who focus on the education of their children have figured out that KIPP schools provide better education than neighborhood public schools do.
It is the tragedy of the last half century in this country that we know exactly what is needed to help impoverished black children but for reasons of ideology and politics, the solution is a non starter. It's been over FIFTY YEARS since the end of legalized segregation and for so many African Americans the nightmare persists because those who purport to care about then are liars and those with real solutions are dismissed as racists.