KIPP charter schools receive more public and private dollars than other public schools, according to What Makes KIPP Work? A Study of Student Characteristics, Attrition and School Finance, (pdf) by Western Michigan Professor Gary Miron and colleagues. KIPP also has higher student attrition than other public schools, the study found.
KIPP officials say the numbers are inaccurate, notes the New York Times.
A network of 99 schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia, KIPP has been shown to raise the academic achievement of low-income students, especially blacks. Researchers said they wanted to see if that success could be replicated.
The KIPP network received $12,731 in taxpayer money per student, compared with $11,960 at the average traditional public school and $9,579, on average, at charter schools nationwide, the study found. In addition, KIPP generated $5,760 per student from private donors.
KIPP’s per student funding averages between $9,000 and $10,000, according to a KIPP financial official, Mike Wright. The study excluded KIPP’s California schools, which receive less public funding.
Donations for operating expenses in the 2007-8 year were about $2,500 per student, less than half the study’s estimate, Wright said.
The study mixed donations earmarked for school construction with money for operating expenses, Wright said. Schools usually count capital spending separately. A KIPP reporting error also inflated private revenues.
KIPP schools use a long school day, a longer school year and Saturday classes to give students more learning time. That costs an extra $1,200 to $1,600 per student. However, the charter network tends to hire young teachers, who cost less, and does not offer small classes.
“As wealthy donors have invested in KIPP, they have helped to demonstrate how a well-endowed, inspirationally run charter school can lift poor children,” (Berkeley Education Professor Bruce) Fuller said. “The question raised by this study is whether the model could be replicated if wealthy donors were to walk away.”
Brookings fellow Grover Whitehurst praised the financial analysis, but not the findings on student attrition, which he said, “use questionable data sources and analytic techniques to push a position that is antagonistic to KIPP.”
Another study of attrition carried out last year by Mathematica Policy Research, he said, used far more sophisticated research techniques to conclude that, on average, KIPP schools did not have significantly higher or lower numbers of students leaving before completion than nearby public schools.
A new Mathematica study on KIPP attrition will be out next week, notes the Hechinger Report.
Update: In response to comments, the 2010 Mathematica study looked at achievement over three years for all students who enrolled in 22 KIPP middle schools, including those who left after a year or two. If weaker students were more likely to leave, that would have no effect since the scores of those who left were counted. Three-year gains were very significant, even with this method.
Some KIPP schools replace students who leave with transfers. Others do not. The new study will look at that issue.
About Joanne
Joanne, do you know if the study’s authors looked at district-wide educational foundations? Since I’m here in CA (where ed foundations seem to be common) I tend to assume they are nation-wide (but may not be).
There’s a profound Matthew effect with the ed foundations too — Menlo Park and Woodside (for two k-8 district examples) raised far more per student and far more in absolute dollars than did the Redwood City Educational Foundation….
This could also be a side-effect of KIPP schools being in locations that spend more than average on the schools. I’ll note that KIPP is present in New York (state) and Washington, D.C., but is not present in Utah.
Does the study (which I didn’t read) have numbers for the spending on KIPP schools versus peer schools in the nearby school districts?
Mark Roulo beat me to the punch- how does KIPP funding compare with other schools in the same district? That’s the only relevant number.
I read the article in Ed Week. They compared to schools in the same district.
Attrition would be a hard thing to compare, it seems to me.
I’ll bet their results can be replicated under the same conditions — but not under the conditions placed on public schools. Maybe the best approach *is* to cream off the best students, but then we need to decide how to teach the rest — accept that it will cost more because of their intense needs — and find an approach that gets results with a far different population. I don’t know if that’s possible. But it seems to me a more fruitful conversation to have.
Regarding KIPP attrition: Mathematica’s response is dishonest. The point is that KIPP does not replace students who leave. (That is, KIPP may replace some individual students who leave, but KIPP schools’ overall numbers plummet — most students who leave are not replaced.)
Public schools replace high-mobility students who leave with similar, incoming high-mobility students.
For anyone who finds this concept too complicated, here’s a hypothetical example. A public school has 100 kids in the 5th grade. 60 of them move away, because they lead unstable lives and for various reasons, they change schools. But 60 new students with similarly unstable lives arrive and enroll to fill their seats.
A KIPP school has 100 kids in the 5th grade. 60 of them leave for whatever reason (according to SRi International, they just happen to be the lowest academic achievers). No new students arrive to fill their spots, so the class is reduced to the highest-achieving 40 students out of the 100 who originally enrolled. Achievement soars. It’s a miracle!
Back to the Mathematica study: A close relative of mine is a medical researcher for RAND and tells me that a normal part of the process of producing a research report is negotiating (sometimes at great length and with great heat) with the funder about how the findings will be presented. It seems likely that similar negotiations took place between KIPP and Mathematica, which is now in the unfortunate position of having to make a false and misleading claim about its own findings.
And by the way, KIPP responded to previous research into attrition by me and subsequently by SRI International, finding very high attrition at California and Bay Area KIPP schools, with a non sequitur. KIPP’s claim was that “the San Francisco KIPP schools are outliers.” But actually, I researched all of California’s KIPP schools, and SRI International researched all of the Bay Area’s KIPP schools, so in neither case were the findings limited to the San Francisco KIPP schools (which didn’t have the highest attrition anyway). KIPP’s response did not address the findings about attrition.
one must also look at cap ex and op ex: capital and operations. Charters often spend $ on facilities that are bond-supplied in a district.
I agree with Lightly Seasoned…excellent point and yes, it is the “elephant” in the room that very few, if any, in education are willing to touch…
Mathematica’s response is dishonest. The point is that KIPP does not replace students who leave
This narrative seems wrong. You seem to suggest that everyone was talking about replacement rates, and Mathematica put out a study that dishonestly talked about attrition in and of itself. But this sequence seems entirely backwards to me. Everyone was talking about attrition. Mathematica put out a study that found KIPP attrition to be roughly the same as district schools, and (painful as this must have been for some people to read) found that KIPP had HUGE effects in benefiting students, even the students who left KIPP after a year or two.
After that finding, the only thing that anyone could come up with in response was that maybe KIPP schools didn’t replace students who left, and maybe this was somehow the magic key to KIPP success.