Note: This is a guest post by Richard Barth, CEO and President of the KIPP Foundation
In his inaugural post for this blog, Robert Slavin wrote, “We did not manage our way to the moon, we invented our way to the moon.” I hear echoes of this statement throughout my work. Like other national charter school leaders, I am committed to making sure innovation can blossom and spread, throughout our own network and public schools nationwide.
But along with innovation we must insist on research and results. Across the 31 KIPP regions nationally, for example, we give schools autonomy to innovate as they see fit, as long as they can demonstrate that they are producing results for our students.
So how does a charter network like ours make sure schools are producing results? Not only do we assess our own schools on a regular basis, with publications like our yearly Report Card, but we also make a practice of inviting independent researchers to evaluate our results.
By building a solid body of evidence for what works--including independent reports about student achievement in our schools--we are able to set and maintain a high bar for achievement in our schools. The evidence then helps us build on what is working and to make adjustments where the
research has identified areas where we need to improve. For example, a study by Mathematica found that KIPP middle schools students make statistically significant gains in math and reading, even though students enter KIPP with lower average test scores than their neighboring peers in district schools. The same Mathematica report also found that KIPP schools are serving fewer special-education and Limited English Proficient (LEP), students than the average for neighboring district schools. This is a challenge for many charter schools and something we are making a priority throughout our network. So where we find we are doing well in both numbers of students served and their results -like the KIPP Academy Lynn near Boston, Mass., which is highlighted in a 2010 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research--we have an opportunity to zero in on what’s working and spread this news to our network and charter schools nationwide.
As more of our students move on to college, research can also help us keep tabs on how they are faring. We are just starting to examine the college completion rates of our students. In April we released our first-ever College Completion Report, which looked at the college graduation rates of KIPP’s earliest graduates from the mid-1990’s. Thirty-three percent of these KIPP students had finished college by their mid-twenties which is above the national average and four times the rate of their peers from low-income communities. This is far short of our goal of 75 percent, which is the average college completion rate for kids from affluent families.
By sharing these results we hope to encourage a national dialogue about how to improve college completion rates in America, especially among low income students. But we need school districts and charter school to start publicly reporting college completion rates fully--including those of eighth grade graduates, not just high school graduates or college freshmen, a practice that fails to give us a true picture.
This process of improvement is hard work; there’s no question. But by committing to research and accountability, we can set off a more vigorous and transparent conversation among public educators across the country about what we need to do to ensure success for all of our schools and students.
-Richard Barth
KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, is a national network of free, open-enrollment, college-preparatory public charter schools. There are currently 109 KIPP schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia serving more than 32,000 students.