Carl Petersen: Failing Charter School Will Continue To Operate

Carl Petersen tells the story of a KIPP charter in Los Angeles and how it has managed to survive failure. 

Going into the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) Board meeting on April 1, 2025, the KIPP chain of publicly funded private schools already had three strikes in its attempt to renew the charter of KIPP Sol. First, the Charter School Division of the LAUSD had looked at the school’s declining results and recommended that it be closed. In January, the LAUSD Board voted to approve this recommendation. The chain quickly appealed to the County and, upon review of the data, concluded that “KIPP Sol failed to meet or make sufficient progress toward meeting standards that provide a benefit to pupils of the school.”

Before the LACOE Board voted on KIPP’s appeal, I sent the following comments to its members detailing some of the issues at KIPP Sol:

Today, you will consider overturning the LAUSD’s decision to deny the renewal of KIPP Sol. After a thorough evaluation of this school’s performance, the District’s elected School Board followed the law and decided that keeping the school open was not in the best interest of its students. Your staff reached the same conclusion. Hopefully, this Board has learned the lessons from the North Valley Military Institute and will listen to these findings.

KIPP is going to tell you that closing this school will “disrupt [the] educational journeys” of its students.Did they consider this when they decided to shut down three of their schools last year? If closing schools traumatizes children, why did KIPP not find a way to continue serving the 653 students of Pueblo Unido, Generations, and Ponder?

KIPP is going to tell you that Sol’s test scores went down only because of the high turnover of its staff. Somehow, the massive charter school chain thinks this argument helps its case, but it actually strengthens the argument to close them down. Why was the chain’s management so inept that they allowed a struggling school to begin the 2022-23 school year with “every member of [its] leadership team…new to their role” and having “more than 50% of classroom positions …either vacant or held by teachers in their first year of teaching”?

KIPP is going to tell you that last year’s academic results were a one-year setback. At best, this means that the charter chain does not understand the data and has no place running a school. The California Dashboard data clearly shows that the school’s performance has steadily declined since it was named a California Distinguished School in 2022:

: