New Study Shows Positive Performance Results for KIPP Middle Schools

The Impact of KIPP Middle Schools on Student Performance

How to Interpret the KIPP Middle School Effect Sizes?

The study examines the characteristics of students attending KIPP middle schools and finds little evidence that KIPP schools cream students based on performance, poverty, or race. And similar to results from the KIPP study on attrition, this study finds that attrition rates for KIPP schools are the same as comparison traditional public schools.

While the study shows positive impacts for KIPP schools, it also points to the need for further research. KIPP schools are demonstrating significant academic performance outcomes, but it is still an open question as to what operational factors make KIPP schools high performing, whether the substantial positive impacts can be sustained as KIPP schools expand, and whether the performance results will equate to long-term impacts for students as they enter college. Mathematica will continue to examine KIPP schools and address some of these issues in future reports. It is heartening to see an organization like KIPP invest in extensive and transparent research to better understand how the schools function and serve students. Knowing that KIPP schools outperform comparison traditional public schools is one thing. Understanding why KIPP schools outperform is critical to determining whether the model can lead to improvements throughout the public education system.

CREDO Releases New Study Finding Positive Performance of New York City Charter Schools

CREDO released an updated study of public charter schools in New York City today. The new study adds two years of performance data to the study released in 2010, and finds that on average public charter schools in NYC continue to outperform traditional public schools (TPS).  The study presents data for all public charter schools in NYC, and then a separate set of analyses for public charter schools in Harlem where 23 percent of charter school students attend school. According to the study:

    Based on the findings presented here, the typical student in New York City charter schools gains more learning in a year than his TPS counterparts, amounting to one month of additional gains in reading and five months in math. The learning advantage in Harlem equates to less than a full month of additional learning in reading but an additional seven months of progress in math.

The research on the performance of charter schools by CREDO has been on a roll of late, with a new and largely positive study being released nearly every month. These latest findings for NYC are consistent with positive overall results reported in Indiana, New Jersey, Michigan, and for charter school management organizations.

The figure below presents math and reading results from the NYC study for some of the relevant school breakouts. In general, the effect sizes for math are larger than effect sizes for reading in each of the categories. Compared with traditional public schools, students in public charter schools experience larger effect sizes in nearly every category, except for reading in the first year of a charter school and charter schools with multi-level grade configurations.

Source: CREDO. (2013). Charter school performance in New York City. Stanford, CA: Author.

While the overall results in NYC are promising, the study found that the distribution of public charter schools that perform better than traditional public schools looks better in math than in reading, as demonstrated in the figure below. Over 60 percent of NYC charter schools perform significantly better in math than matched traditional public schools, whereas only 20 percent of charter schools perform better in reading. Over 50 percent of charter schools perform as well as traditional public schools in reading, but there is room for improvement in these schools.

Research Suggests that Public Charter Schools Do Not Push Out Low-Performing Students

There is an argument propagated by charter school critics that public charter schools systematically push out low-performing students. While critics do not provide evidence of specific examples of charter school policies that explicitly push out students, the hypothesis underlying the argument is that there are subtle policies—such as strict discipline and attendance rules, retention if students are not performing at grade-level, or expectations for parent involvement—that effectively counsel out hard-to-educate students. Moreover, critics contend that charter schools are under intense pressure to perform well, which may provide incentives to find ways to attract high performing students and to discourage low-performing students from staying. (However, traditional public schools face similar accountability pressures and may theoretically advise low-performing students to transfer to schools of choice in the district.)

A recent study of KIPP charter schools challenged the notion that there is more student attrition out of KIPP schools or that attrition explains higher levels of academic performance in the schools. Now, a new working paper by Ron Zimmer and Cassandra Guarino provides additional evidence that public charter schools are not pushing out low-performing students. The study examined patterns of student transfers in an anonymous school district with over 60 charter schools. A larger percentage of charter schools in the district met AYP compared with traditional public schools, making the district a good case study for examining whether charter schools were pushing out low-performing students in order to meet federal accountability standards.

The study finds no evidence that public charter schools were more likely to push out low-performing students. Conversely, the study finds that below-average students were five percent more likely to leave traditional public schools than below-average students in charter schools. The authors write, “In looking at different groups of charter schools (i.e., charter schools near AYP proficiency thresholds, low- and high-performing schools, primary and secondary schools), we generally find no evidence consistent with the claim of pushing out low-performing students.”

Even though the study provides evidence for only one school district, it is a good example of the empirical research needed to determine whether the persistent critiques of public charter schools are accurate.


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