KIPP

Based on Wikipedia: KIPP

In 1994, two young teachers fresh out of Teach For America had a radical idea: what if the problem with American education wasn't the students, but the clock?

Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg had just spent two years teaching in some of the country's most challenging classrooms. They'd seen bright kids fall behind not because they lacked ability, but because they lacked time—time to catch up, time to practice, time to get the extra help that wealthier families simply purchased on the open market. So they decided to give students more of it.

What started as a single fifth-grade class in Houston, Texas became the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP. Today, it's the largest network of public charter schools in the United States, with 270 schools serving communities that traditional public education has long underserved. The story of KIPP is a story about ambition, controversy, and the thorny question of whether there's a formula for educational success—and if so, what we're willing to pay for it.

The Basic Bargain

KIPP schools operate on what might be called a simple bargain, though "simple" undersells how demanding it actually is.

Students apply through a lottery. If they win a spot, a teacher or principal visits their home. This isn't just a friendly meet-and-greet. It's a negotiation. The school explains exactly what it expects: longer days, summer sessions, homework that actually gets done. Then everyone signs what KIPP calls a "commitment to excellence"—student, parents, and teachers alike.

The extended day is the backbone of the model. Most KIPP schools run from 7:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon. Some add three extra weeks in July. Students spend up to fifty percent more time in school than their peers in traditional public schools. That time goes toward academics, but also toward activities that many low-income families can't otherwise afford: sports, performing arts, visual arts. The chess club. The debate team. The things that round out a transcript and, perhaps more importantly, round out a childhood.

This is expensive, both in money and in human energy. Teachers work significantly longer hours than their counterparts in traditional schools. For years, this created tension with teachers' unions, who argued that extended hours without commensurate pay amounted to exploitation. In 2011, KIPP reached a ten-year agreement with the Baltimore Teachers Union after contentious negotiations that had seen the charter network threaten to close schools rather than accept standard work rules. More recently, teachers at KIPP schools in New York, St. Louis, and Columbus, Ohio have voted to unionize—a sign that even within KIPP's high-commitment culture, workers want a collective voice.

The Intellectual Lineage

Levin and Feinberg didn't invent the extended school day from scratch. Their instructional model was shaped heavily by Harriett Ball, a Houston teacher known for her kinetic, musical approach to drilling basic skills into students. Ball created chants and songs that made multiplication tables and grammar rules stick. She was a master of what educators call "direct instruction"—teacher-led, fast-paced, relentlessly focused on measurable outcomes.

This matters because it places KIPP in a particular tradition within American education reform. On one side of the debate, you have progressives who believe education should be child-centered, exploratory, and focused on developing the whole person. On the other side, you have traditionalists who argue that disadvantaged students especially need explicit instruction in foundational skills before they can explore anything. KIPP sits firmly in the traditionalist camp, at least in its early years and in its core academic model.

The co-founders of Gap Inc., Doris and Donald Fisher, provided crucial early funding to help KIPP expand nationally. This partnership brought both money and a certain corporate sensibility. KIPP became one of the first charter networks to think systematically about replication—about how to take what worked in Houston and the South Bronx and make it work in San Francisco, Chicago, and eventually hundreds of other locations.

This replication effort helped spawn something larger: the charter management organization, or CMO. A CMO is essentially a nonprofit that operates multiple charter schools under a common brand and educational philosophy. KIPP was the pioneer, but others followed—Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, Success Academy. Together, they represent a theory of change: that the best way to improve American education is to build networks of high-performing schools that can serve as models and, eventually, as competitive pressure on traditional public schools.

What the Research Actually Shows

Does KIPP work? The answer depends on what you mean by "work" and how carefully you're willing to read the fine print.

In 2010, Mathematica Policy Research published the first major rigorous evaluation. Using a matched comparison group design—meaning they compared KIPP students to similar students who didn't attend KIPP—they found that "for the vast majority of KIPP schools in the evaluation, impacts on students' state assessment scores in math and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial."

That's strong language in the world of education research, where most interventions show modest effects at best.

But critics pointed to several complications.

First, there's the question of who applies. A 2005 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that KIPP students entered with substantially higher achievement than typical students at their neighborhood schools. Teachers reported referring their more able students to KIPP. The most motivated, educationally sophisticated parents were the ones who took the initiative to apply. In other words, KIPP's lottery isn't selecting randomly from the general population—it's selecting from a pool that's already filtered for motivation and family support.

Second, there's the question of who stays. A 2008 study by SRI International found that sixty percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools left before completing eighth grade. Students who entered with the lowest test scores showed the highest rates of attrition. The Mathematica study also noted that KIPP schools had "a lower concentration of special education and limited English proficiency students than the public schools from which they draw."

This is sometimes called "creaming"—the tendency of choice-based schools to attract and retain the easiest-to-educate students while the most challenging cases filter back to traditional public schools. KIPP's defenders argue that any school with high expectations will see some students leave, and that the question is whether the students who stay benefit. Critics counter that you can't compare KIPP's outcomes to traditional public school outcomes if the two systems aren't serving the same populations.

The College Question

KIPP's stated goal is ambitious: seventy-five percent of its students should graduate from a four-year college. This isn't just aspirational rhetoric. It's a specific, measurable target that KIPP tracks and publishes data on.

The numbers are illuminating.

For students who completed KIPP's first middle school programs in 1999 and 2000, the results as of 2011 looked like this: ninety-five percent completed high school, eighty-nine percent enrolled in college, and thirty-three percent earned a four-year degree. That last number is far short of the seventy-five percent goal.

But context matters. For students from similar economic backgrounds who didn't attend KIPP, only seventy percent complete high school, forty-one percent enroll in college, and just eight percent earn a four-year degree. KIPP's thirty-three percent graduation rate is four times better than the eight percent baseline.

Compared to the general American population, KIPP's numbers also look strong. Nationally, about eighty-three percent of students complete high school, sixty-two percent enroll in college, and thirty-one percent complete a four-year degree. KIPP students slightly outperform the national average on degree completion despite coming from significantly more disadvantaged backgrounds.

The seventy-five percent goal, by the way, is roughly the college graduation rate for students from the highest income quartile. KIPP is essentially trying to get low-income students to graduate from college at the same rate as wealthy ones. Whether this is realistic remains to be seen. Education researchers Jay Mathews and Kay Hymowitz have both described the goal as ambitious, which in academic-speak means they're not sure it's achievable.

The Scandals

No account of KIPP would be complete without acknowledging the darker chapters.

In February 2018, Mike Feinberg—the co-founder, the face of the organization for nearly a quarter century—was removed from his position due to sexual misconduct allegations. The accusations involved a KIPP middle school student in the late 1990s and two KIPP employees in the early 2000s. Feinberg denied the accusation by the student and reached a financial settlement with one of the employees. His departure was abrupt and complete. The man who had built one of the most influential organizations in American education was simply gone.

Other incidents have raised questions about oversight and accountability. In 2022, KIPP's director of technology was found to have embezzled $2.2 million intended for laptops and educational equipment. He spent the money on cars and sports memorabilia. When the investigation closed in, he killed himself. At a KIPP middle school in New York, a teacher was arrested for grooming and sexually abusing a student over a period of years. In Houston, KIPP charter schools were found charging parents fees that were supposed to be impermissible—extracting money from families who had been promised a free education.

KIPP's response to each scandal has been to describe it as an "isolated incident." Maybe that's true. Or maybe rapid growth and a culture of high expectations created blind spots. When everyone is focused on test scores and college acceptance rates, it may become easier to miss other warning signs.

The Bigger Picture

KIPP exists within a larger ecosystem of education reform that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. This movement believed that the fundamental problem with American public education was governance—that school systems were captured by unions and bureaucracies that prioritized adult interests over student outcomes. The solution was competition: create alternatives to traditional public schools, let parents choose, and let market forces sort out what works.

Charter schools were the primary mechanism. Unlike traditional public schools, which are run by elected school boards and staffed by unionized teachers, charter schools operate under contracts (charters) that give them autonomy in exchange for accountability. If they produce results, their charters get renewed. If they don't, they're supposed to close.

KIPP represents the nonprofit side of this movement. But there's also a for-profit side. Companies like Stride, Inc. (formerly K12 Inc.) and EdisonLearning operate as education management organizations, or EMOs. Some run brick-and-mortar schools; others focus on online curricula and services. The lines between nonprofit and for-profit, between mission-driven and shareholder-driven, have sometimes blurred.

The debate over charter schools remains fierce. Supporters point to KIPP and similar networks as proof that the achievement gap can be closed, that demography isn't destiny, that with enough time and support and high expectations, low-income students can compete with their wealthy peers. Critics argue that charter schools cherry-pick students, drain resources from traditional public schools, and have failed to deliver the systemic improvement they promised.

What KIPP Actually Tells Us

After thirty years, what can we actually conclude from the KIPP experiment?

First, more time matters. Students who spend significantly more hours on academics learn significantly more. This isn't surprising, but it is important. The American school day and school year are artifacts of an agricultural economy that no longer exists. If we wanted to, we could extend them. The question is whether we're willing to pay for it—and whether we're willing to ask that much of teachers and students.

Second, culture matters. KIPP schools are famous for their behavioral expectations, their emphasis on character and grit, their insistence that students track the speaker with their eyes and sit up straight. Critics find this authoritarian, even militaristic. Defenders argue that it creates an environment where learning can happen, especially for students whose home lives may be chaotic. Whatever you think of it, the culture is distinctive and intentional.

Third, selection matters. Even with a lottery, KIPP's student body isn't random. Families apply because they want something different. Students stay because the culture fits them, or leave if it doesn't. This isn't necessarily a problem—every school has a culture, and some students will fit better than others. But it does mean we should be cautious about generalizing from KIPP's results to what might happen if similar methods were applied to all students.

Fourth, college isn't everything. KIPP's focus on four-year college graduation is admirable, but thirty-three percent is still thirty-three percent. What happens to the other sixty-seven percent? Are they failures, or did they get something valuable from their KIPP education even if they didn't earn a bachelor's degree? The emphasis on a single metric can obscure other forms of success.

Finally, institutions are fragile. KIPP was built on the charisma and vision of its founders. When one of those founders fell to scandal, the organization continued—but something was lost. The movement that KIPP helped create has produced both genuine innovations and genuine abuses. It has improved some students' lives dramatically while leaving systemic problems largely untouched.

None of this is simple. The only honest conclusion is that education is hard, that there are no silver bullets, and that the work of helping young people learn is never quite done.