High Scores Fail to Clear Obstacles to KIPP Growth
Program Has Struggled to Find Space for Expansion

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Susan Schaeffler turned a small program in an Anacostia church basement into the District's highest-achieving public middle school, but she is having trouble opening more schools with the same successful formula.

It is a crucial moment for one of the most closely watched educational models, the Knowledge Is Power Program, a way of teaching fifth- through eighth-graders that has produced some of the best math and reading scores in low-income neighborhoods across the country. Despite its impressive record, administrators and policymakers are responding slowly to KIPP's desire for more space and support.

Students on average are at the 28th percentile in reading and math on national standardized tests when they enter KIPP. The first five KIPP schools in the country, including Schaeffler's KIPP DC: KEY Academy, show students rising to the 74th percentile by the end of eighth grade, according to figures supplied by the San Francisco-based KIPP Foundation.

Schaeffler's first class of D.C. students, all black and 84 percent from low-income households, had average math scores that went from the 34th percentile when the students entered fifth grade in 2001 to the 92nd percentile when they completed eighth grade last year, and were the highest in the city last year at the school, now run by Schaeffler's successor, Sarah Hayes.

And yet two of Schaeffler's teachers who have tried to start new KIPP public charter schools in the District have run into problems. One could not find a building until two months before her school was scheduled to open, and the other is looking for space six months before its July start date. Even Schaeffler, executive director of KIPP schools in the District, isn't certain where she might house two elementary schools and a high school using some KIPP practices.

Given the shortage of space for all independently run charter schools in the city, Schaeffler is seeking a radical approach, sharing space with regular D.C. schools. School officials in the city have been encouraging, but there have been no results yet.

It will be some time, experts say, before anyone can be sure that KIPP is as good as it seems. The original schools in Houston and New York City are doing well after more than 10 years, and KIPP founders Mike Feinberg, 37, and Dave Levin, 35, are supervising new schools in those cities with impressive initial results. But other highly praised education programs have lost steam over time, and some KIPP critics wonder whether the 320-student middle schools can influence the general low performance of big-city systems.

Craig Jerald, a D.C.-based school achievement consultant who has watched KIPP's growth, said much of the response to the program has been tepid at best. He said Feinberg once told him that "opening a KIPP school in every big city would embarrass or inspire urban districts to do better for their kids.

"I think we all underestimated how dismissive these systems can be."

Feinberg and Levin created KIPP in 1994 when they were struggling elementary school teachers in Houston and, they admit, making it up as they went along. They had no foundation support, no well-known advisers and only two years of teaching experience each, and they were often at odds with their principals.

They did, however, have a mentor, Harriett Ball, a teacher who had grown up in inner-city Houston and whose classes were high-achieving and well-behaved. From that example and their own discoveries of what worked, they fashioned a system of nine-hour school days with extra pay for teachers, an emphasis on character, behavior and students' future in college, and Saturday classes. The program included teacher visits to student homes, mandatory summer school, a requirement for students to call teachers at night if they had homework questions and an elaborate system of student sanctions and rewards, including a year-end trip to some other part of the country. All of this helped produce the highest test scores among middle schools in the Houston and South Bronx areas.

More than 80 percent of the students in the 47 KIPP schools in 15 states and the District are from low-income families, and 95 percent are black or Hispanic. Almost all schools show significant gains in test scores, but there are some exceptions, such as drops last year in reading score percentiles for sixth-graders at schools in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago.

In some instances, KIPP teachers whose students were performing poorly and did not work to improve have been fired in the middle of the year. Principals have also been removed, and the KIPP name has been withdrawn from some schools that did not respond to suggestions for improving lagging achievement. "We will be looking to achieve a greater level of consistency in delivering on the promises we make to the children we serve," said Richard Barth, chief executive of the KIPP Foundation.

KIPP principals, whose average age is 32, go through a year-long training program that emphasizes quick response to problems. Jason Botel's KIPP Ujima Village Academy's reading scores on state tests are well above those at many other Baltimore public schools, but his seventh-grade scores dropped last year on a standardized reading test many KIPP schools give to track annual progress. "We have made some significant staff changes, and [those students] are receiving much better instruction this year," Botel said.

Graduating KIPP eighth-graders are placed in private schools or high-achieving public schools so they won't lose their academic edge. J.R. Gonzalez, one of the first KIPP students in Houston, graduated from the Episcopal High School in Alexandria last year and is a freshman at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. KIPP "showed me that nothing is impossible," Gonzalez said.

Some educators grumble that the 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. KIPP days are too long and that the discipline -- such as forbidding a student who hasn't done his homework to speak with other students -- is too tough. Some have called it the "Kids In Prison Program." More commonly, KIPP's energies and intentions are praised while its results are dismissed as affecting too few students and mostly helping those with involved parents.

Looking at four KIPP schools, Columbia University Teachers College researchers Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen concluded that students starting the program in fifth grade had more motivated parents and better test scores than their community averages. KIPP officials said their data showed no significant difference in academic skills between their entering students and other nearby children.

KIPP schools continue to open in the poorest neighborhoods. Khala Johnson said she resolved to start a KIPP school in the District after she saw parents weeping when there was not enough room for their children at the original KIPP DC: KEY Academy, moved from an Anacostia church to a bright blue commercial building at 770 M St. SE. Johnson has become principal of the KIPP DC: AIM Academy, which opened over the summer and has 85 fifth-graders in a renovated church in Anacostia.

Schaeffler said she has met several times with D.C. School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey and hopes he will find a way to provide space for a third KIPP school -- the WILL Academy -- to be opened by Principal Jessica Cunningham in July. KIPP recently won a $175,000 award from the D.C. government for its success, and Schaeffler said she thinks a partnership between KIPP and the city would benefit both.

"I get really frustrated when I hear organizations say, 'Well, at least we're better than the D.C. school system,' " Schaeffler said. "That is so not the attitude that I think we should have."

She said she wants to see how KIPP can "fit into public education in the District and how we can actually make an impact not only on 320 kids but an impact on the system in a positive way."