Knowledge Is Power Program Research Articles

Choices: Rational or Otherwise?

MY TEACHER friends tell me that throughout the school year most teachers will resort to the anything-that-works strategy after finding that their best-laid plans just don't over with some students. This perennial jousting between teacher and recalcitrant learner is part and parcel of teaching. When it comes to education policy, students also seem to be experts at eluding the expectations of their elders. Headlines over the summer told one story after another of failed interventions or programs. Some were peripheral, but others were crucial pieces of current policy making. Here are some examples. * Among the lesser items, there is the 10-year attempt by the federal government to promote abstinence education. This effort is costing the public $176 million a year, but a nine-year study by Mathematica Policy Research, one of the government's favorite research groups, found that abstinence-only programs did not delay the age at which teenagers started sexual activity. Even before the release of the study, several state legislatures and even more state health departments had turned down federal funding for abstinence-only programs, preferring instead to offer more comprehensive sex education programs. * According to the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, only one-fifth of eligible students are taking advantage of the supplementary education services that are intended to be one of the chief interventions of the No Child Left Behind Act. Research on the effectiveness of these after-school tutoring programs is sparse, but in the three states that are collecting some kind of data, only small or negligible gains were seen in reading and math. Yet we are spending almost $3 billion a year on the program. * Then there are the much ballyhooed character education programs, aimed at making students more drug-free, or more community-minded, or less angry. Of 41 programs with data available to study, only two were rated as having positive outcomes by the federal What Works Clearinghouse. * From the District of Columbia comes a finding that the city's heralded voucher program has not yielded the higher achievement in basic skills that was among its main goals. Parents of students in the program are more satisfied, but is that the goal of publicly funded vouchers? * Recently, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) academies, cited by a New York Times Magazine article as a potential panacea for low-performing students, has been criticized for its high dropout rate. In San Francisco, for example, half of those who entered KIPP academies in fifth grade were gone by eighth grade. Some of these disillusioning stories might be attributed to the lack of data, or to the newness of the interventions, or to too-stringent research criteria. The output from the What Works Clearinghouse, for example, was initially so paltry that it was dubbed the nothing works clearinghouse. The U.S. Department of Education has now doubled the grant for the clearinghouse and moved it from the American Institutes of Research (AIR) to Mathematica Policy Research. The AIR experience, however, is not unlike that of the research center at Rutgers University, which has looked into the efficacy of a bundle of comprehensive school reforms. Of the several dozen elementary and secondary programs it studied, only two or three were found to have positive effects on achievement. …

Achievement and Climate Outcomes for the Knowledge is Power Program in an Inner-City Middle School

This study was designed to examine the effects of a whole school reform, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), specifically designed to raise academic achievement of at-risk urban middle school students by establishing an extended school day and year, a rigorous curriculum, after-school access to teachers, and increased family-school connections. In our mixed-methods design, qualitative (interview and observation) and quantitative (survey and achievement test) measures are employed to determine first-year program implementation and student outcomes for the KIPP:DIAMOND (Daring Individual Achievers Making Outstanding New Dreams) Academy (KIPP:DA), an inner-city school in a large, high-poverty urban district. For the achievement analyses, 49 KIPP:DA students were individually matched to highly comparable control students of the same ethnicity, socioeconmic status, gender, and ability, who attended different district schools in the same neighborhood. Statistically significant and educationally meaningful advantages for KIPP:DA students were found on 4 out of 6 standardized tests. The achievement results are interpreted in relation to the key program elements, the positive school climate established, and the quality of the 1st-year implementation.

School Choice: How an Abstract Idea Became a Political Reality

When Diane Ravitch mentioned that she was putting together a collection of Brookings papers on hopeful developments in American education, I told her that it would probably be the shortest volume in the series. I was then reminded of an essay we had written together for the Public Interest in 1996 that began on a similarly upbeat note, declaring, "Yes, there is hope."1 Encouraged by the varied initiatives that were already taking hold around the country, we envisioned a transformation in the basic character of schooling, one that would replace the existing bureaucratic system that prizes compliance with a deregulated system focused on performance. Parents would be able to choose from a range of educational options, delivered by an array of educational providers beyond public schools run by local school districts. At the time we were pleased to observe that Wisconsin and Ohio had passed far-reaching voucher laws and that nineteen states had enacted charter school legislation. The Edison Project (later, Edison Schools) and Educational Alternatives offered living examples of how private companies could manage public schools; and it was already apparent that whereas the former was well on its way toward developing an innovative model that could reshape the institutional structure of schooling in some places, the latter was quick on the path to self-destruction. As I write today, school voucher laws have been enacted in Florida, Colorado (halted by litigation), and the District of Columbia. In 2004 similar proposals came under serious consideration in Arizona, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Vermont. Only nine states do not have charter school laws. Privately financed scholarship programs sponsored by groups such as Children First America and the Children's [End Page 137] Scholarship Fund now operate in nearly every state. Brand-name schools like the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) academies have sprung up all over the map. Fifty-one for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) currently operate 463 public schools in twenty-eight states, compared with thirteen operating 135 schools in fifteen states just five years ago.2 At the urging of President George W. Bush, the Congress passed legislation that has engaged the states in a dialogue on accountability that is unprecedented in American education. Change has not occurred overnight, but it has occurred in a big way. This paper takes a retrospective and prospective look at the phenomenon of school choice to measure the distance we have come and to assess what needs to be done to advance choice further. It is a case study of how an idea was converted into policy through the political process. Some pessimists might claim that the process of political compromise has denuded the idea of its power to exert real change. Optimists, to the contrary, might argue that the idea of choice has become an unstoppable force that can only gain strength with the passage of time. In accord with the spirit of the present symposium, I take the latter position. Because politics is the apparatus that converts ideas into policy, my analysis is very much a tale—not too tall a tale, I hope—of how an abstract notion came to be translated into a plausible and appealing proposal for improving American education. When contemplating the phenomenon of choice, scholars tend to focus on research; pundits, especially in a presidential election year, are taken with the national political scene. In the end, research and national politics will prove to be peripheral in determining the future of school choice. If we can learn anything from the experience thus far, the real story of school choice will be written at the level of local politics. The Market Concept The choice idea is commonly traced to a fifty-year-old essay by the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, who advocated a market approach to education.3 Friedman wanted to give all parents a voucher so that they could...