KIPP and the Charter School Lottery
Kevin Drum casts a more skeptical eye on the new study of KIPP charter schools I linked to yesterday:
This is obviously good news, though, as usual, there are reasons to be cautious. For one thing, the sample size of this study is extremely small: one school. For another, although the math results seem to be very good and very robust, the reading scores are much less certain. As the chart on the right shows, the 2005 cohort of kids actually shows a negative reading result at every grade level, and the more recent cohorts show positive but modest results with the exception of a single data point (the 2006 cohort’s fourth year). Still, the results overall are generally positive and they confirms other studies that have also found good results from KIPP schools. What’s more, KIPP’s effectiveness, if anything, seems to be higher for low-income kids than for higher-income kids.
Kevin goes on to point out that the only way to really study charter school success is to compare apples to apples by studying kids who entered the lottery and won with kids who entered the lottery and lost:
But ever since seeing Waiting for Superman, I’ve had