History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
KIPP responds to criticism on attrition rates
- 01-10-2011
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Guest blog by Jonathan Cowan and Steve Mancini/Washington Post
On Jan. 3, The Answer Sheet featured a guest post by Richard Kahlenberg that highlighted attrition in KIPP schools. We respect Mr. Kahlenberg’s right to question KIPP’s results, and we welcome healthy debate about the merits of KIPP’s philosophy and model. However, it is also important to clarify the fact base around the issues he raises. At KIPP, we have a long standing commitment to transparency, continuous learning, and improvement. As such, we are always improving our data collection and reporting processes in order to share our successes and challenges. We focus on understanding the "health" of our schools: Are we serving the students who need us? Are our students staying with us? Are our students making academic progress? Are we fulfilling our promise to get kids to and through college? Are we creating a sustainable model? Over the last few years, we have begun publicly reporting our performance as it relates to these questions. For instance, we publish our student mobility data in our annual Report Card, to illustrate whether our students are, in fact, staying with us. Our success depends on being held accountable for the results we produce for our kids. In order to address specific criticisms raised in the piece, we ’d like to clarify Mr. Kahlenberg’s conflation of KIPP’s attrition statistics and our policies on “backfilling” empty student spots. In fact, these are two entirely separate issues, and should be addressed individually: (more…)
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