A small charter school serving poor children in Northwest Baltimore has transformed students' academic careers, turning low-performers into some of the city's highest scorers on reading and math tests, while their peers in neighboring schools have continued to lag behind, according to a new study.
Of students who started at KIPP Ujima Village Academy in fifth grade in 2002 and stayed for four years, 100 percent passed the state's eighth-grade math test, compared with 19 percent in the control group, a Johns Hopkins University education researcher found.
But translating the methods and successes of KIPP to other middle schools in the city probably would be challenging and costly, lead author Martha Mac Iver concluded.
"Having a small learning environment, with less chaos, with more time on task, with more highly qualified teachers, is the issue," Mac Iver said. "How do you deliver that to as many students as possible?"
Five years after the school opened, it has become a star among city schools. KIPP Ujima had scores on this year's Maryland State Assessments that were the highest of any city middle school, surpassing even high-performing Roland Park, and were among the top 50 in the state, according to an analysis by The Sun.
KIPP Ujima is part of a loosely connected group of Knowledge Is Power Program schools that have generally been able to break the cycle of poor achievement in urban schools across the country, apparently by demanding a lot from students and giving them extra time for learning after school, on Saturdays and during August.
There are more than 50 KIPP schools in 16 states. A two-year-old KIPP school in Anne Arundel County announced last week that it is closing after struggling to find a big enough building.
In Baltimore, skeptics have continually questioned whether KIPP's results were skewed in some way. Was the school skimming the best students from public schools in surrounding neighborhoods? Did KIPP take students from households with higher incomes? And what about the fairly high number of students who left the school?
The study, commissioned by the Abell Foundation, attempted to answer some of those questions. As a privately run charter school, KIPP is publicly funded but receives additional funding, some of it from Abell.
"KIPP appears to be a tremendous success in educating students in the grades that the school system is having the most trouble," said Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation.
