Inputs and Impacts in Charter Schools: KIPP Lynn
The charter school landscape includes a variety of organizational models and a few national franchises. The nation’s largest network of charter schools is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), with 80 schools operating or slated to open soon. KIPP schools target low income and minority studen...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
American Economic Association
2011
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61732 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6992-8956 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8621-3864 |
| Summary: | The charter school landscape includes a variety
of organizational models and a few national
franchises. The nation’s largest network of charter
schools is the Knowledge is Power Program
(KIPP), with 80 schools operating or slated to open
soon. KIPP schools target low income and minority
students and subscribe to an approach some
have called No Excuses (Abigail Thernstrom and
Stephen Thernstrom 2003). No Excuses schools
feature a long school day and year, selective
teacher hiring, strict behavior norms, and encourage
a strong student work ethic.
KIPP schools have often been central in the
debate over whether schools alone can substantially
reduce racial achievement gaps.
Descriptive accounts of KIPP suggest positive
achievement effects (see, e.g., Jay Mathews
2009), but critics argue that the apparent KIPP
advantage reflects differences between students
who attend traditional public schools and
students that choose to attend KIPP schools
(see, e.g., Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen,
Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein 2005).
There are few well-controlled studies of KIPP
schools that might help sort out these competing
claims, and none that focus on KIPP.1
This paper reports on a quasi-experimental
evaluation of the only KIPP school in New
England, KIPP Academy Lynn. KIPP Lynn
opened in the fall of 2004 and is the only charter
school in Lynn, Mass., a low income city north of Boston. KIPP Lynn is a middle school that serves
about 300 students in grades 5–8. Like most other
Massachusetts charter schools, KIPP Lynn is
funded primarily through tuition paid by students’
home districts. Tuition is typically set to match
sending districts’ average per pupil expenditure,
though this is offset by state subsidies to the sending
district when a student first transfers. |
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