The KIPP Foundation has won many accolades for its network of 52 schools in cities around the country. KIPP stands for "Knowledge is Power Program," and its reputation for helping underprivileged, inner-city kids catch up to and even exceed America's higher achieving students is growing.
Helen Williams: Seeing is really believing. I visited the KIPP school last March, the second school that was founded by KIPP in South Bronx.
That's Helen Williams, Program Director for the Cleveland Foundation.
Helen Williams: You walk into the second floor of a middle school in the middle of a tough neighborhood, and you see 250 kids actively engaged in learning. Paying attention, raising their hands, talking with each other, and you see teachers dedicated to these students' learning. And you see kids who know if they work hard they're going to college.
And that's the kind of educational setting Williams and others associated with a new report by the Ohio Grantmakers Forum's Education Task Force would like to see at schools across Ohio. The program, says Steve Mancini, spokesman for the San Francisco-based KIPP Foundation, is far more rigorous than traditional public schools - for teachers and students.
Steve Mancini: We spend more time in school. We have an extended day, week and year, which means about 60% more time learning than in a traditional public school. Teachers are not only creative in the classroom but are also available after school hours with cell phones for homework help. We also are rigorously focused on preparing young children, starting in 5th grade, for college.
KIPP's main goal, Mancini says, is to erase the achievement gap between minority students and better-performing white students, in line with President Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative. KIPP schools are predominantly charter schools, which mean they operate as public schools using taxpayer dollars, but with considerably less oversight than traditional public schools. That will be the case for a school slated to open in 2008 in Columbus, to be sponsored by the Fordham Foundation.
Steve Mancini: And in Columbus we anticipate starting with a middle school because that's our original model, starting with the 5th grade, growing one grade at a time until you're a 5-8 middle school. We also, once a middle school is up and running, we add elementary schools before them and high schools after them depending on the educational options in that community. But it's our middle schools model that is the heart and soul of what KIPP is doing.
Mancini says longer school hours, intensive instruction, and a constant drumbeat of high achievement and aspirations for college all comprise an attractive option for low income parents. The Cleveland Foundation's Helen Williams says she hopes to see KIPP's approach adopted here in Northeast Ohio, with its concentration of low income urban families and an achievement gap that's growing, not shrinking.
Helen Williams: The KIPP model shows how you close that achievement gap. And if you don't start duplicating many of those elements that we know work, it's working in 49 schools across the country, and so we have to figure out how to duplicate that at scale.
And, says Williams, Ohio would do well to incorporate many of KIPP's principles of more rigor and higher achievement standards into all of its schools. The report released today by the Ohio Grantmaker's Forum sounds an alarm that Ohio and the nation are not living up to the educational needs of students in today's world. Williams says most people haven't heard that message.
Helen Williams: I think people think the better schools in Ohio are competitive, and they're not. Even those students aren't meeting international standards.
Many acknowledge KIPP's success at improving student performance, but some believe that as a model for change, its promise is overblown. Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, argues that parents of students at KIPP schools may be low income, but they're highly motivated - enough so to make the move to get their kids into the program - and may be more the exception than the norm. Others worry that such successes are used to deflect calls to do more to alleviate abject poverty.
Even KIPP Foundation officials concede their approach isn't a cure-all, but Steve Mancini says they're unphased. Their interest, he says, is in developing a method that helps kids succeed, and they'll leave the political fights to others. Bill Rice, 90.3.