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Evaluation of Bay Area KIPP Schools

KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, is an unusual attempt to create schools for historically underserved students that dramatically increases the amount of instructional time and the efficiency of learning during that time. KIPP schools thus provide an opportunity to test the notion that spending substantially more time on high-quality instructional activities can raise the achievement of underserved students. If KIPP schools demonstrably increase student performance, the program will provide a model from which others can learn. With support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SRI International is conducting a 3-year evaluation of five KIPP schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary goals of the evaluation are to describe how the KIPP model works on the ground and how it affects teachers and students, and to understand KIPP student achievement relative to the achievement of similar students in traditional or other school settings.

KIPP schools serve fifth to eighth graders in autonomous, open-enrollment public schools that are generally established as charter schools within a local school district. The key tenets (or "pillars") of the KIPP model—high expectations, choice and commitment, more time, power to lead, and focus on results—draw in part from familiar business principles. The model calls for establishing cultural norms that support hard work, respect, and self-sufficiency, and significantly extending the school day and year to provide historically underserved students more opportunities for learning, including academic resources and cultural experiences they seldom have access to at home, such as art, music, and travel.

To understand implementation of the KIPP approach in the Bay Area, SRI researchers relied on multiple sources of data over the course of the study, including extensive interviews with school leaders, teachers, and KIPP Foundation and KIPP Bay Area Schools staff; focus groups with students and parents; observations of a range of activities and events; and teacher and student surveys. For three of the five schools, analyses of student achievement included the use of student-level California Standards Test data to determine who among district students goes to the KIPP schools in the districts and to construct a comparison group, using propensity score matching, against which we could assess KIPP student achievement.

(William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2004-2008)

Key Staff

Principal Investigator: Katrina Woodworth

Staff: Katherine Baisden, Roneeta Guha, Paul Hu, Alejandra Lopez-Torkos, Haiwen Wang