City charter school shines

Kudos to KIPP Ujima Village Academy in Baltimore!

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.

 

And some important findings from this study -- while it "did not attempt to quantify any differences in parental support or the parents' educational backgrounds", it showed that:

 

1) Students who spent even one or two years at KIPP and then left for  other middle schools continued to do better than the students who hadn't been  to KIPP, indicating that the training they received stayed with them.,  and

 

2) In general,  the KIPP students were not from wealthier homes; neither did they have higher  test scores in fourth grade before leaving their elementary schools to go to  KIPP. Their attendance also was about the same as those in the control  group.

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City charter school shines

Study shows KIPP Ujima students leading in math, reading

 

By Liz Bowie

Baltimore Sun reporter

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-md.middle24jun24,0,2020294.story?coll=bal-education-k12

 

June 24, 2007

 

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.