Gary Rubinstein: Will KIPP NYC Be Disqualified (Again) From U.S. News & World Report Best High School Rankings?
In New York City, KIPP charter schools have come up with an extraordinary way to game the US News high school ranking system. But Gary Rubinstein has caught them. Again.
Now for KIPP, there are some notable things just based on this abbreviated view of their results on the U.S. News site. For one thing, the name of the KIPP high school is not ‘KIPP Academy Charter School’ but ‘KIPP NYC College Prep.’ The other thing is that their Enrollment is listed as 276 instead of the 1000 students they actually have. And, yes, they have the all important College Readiness score of 100 which means that all of their seniors take and get a 3 on at least one AP exam.
The mystery gets stranger when you search for KIPP high schools in New York and two schools come up, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity.
So there is the other KIPP high school in NYC according to U.S. News and that school has 4 times the number of students and in that under performing sibling of the 20th ranked school they don’t have any students passing the AP test. How can this be?
The answer is that there are not two KIPP high schools but only one. These schools, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity are actually middle schools. Even in the New York State data, there is not an official KIPP NYC College Prep school but these middle schools have as part of their enrollment the high school students. I don’t know why New York State allows them to do this and why they can assign all the students and only the students who pass an AP exam to KIPP Academy middle school and the students who don’t pass an AP to KIPP Academy Infinity middle school.
According to the KIPP website, over 90% of the over 1000 students at the (one and only) KIPP High School take an A.P. course.
If 90% of the students take the test but only 25% of those get a 3 and are put into the KIPP Academy middle school numbers, that means that 75% of those students (which is about 70% of the students at the actual KIPP high school) take an A.P. but don’t get a 3 on it. So if the two schools were accurately listed as one school in the U.S. News rankings, the combined college readiness score would be around a 25 which would put them not at #20 in New York State but more like #300.
Rubinstein caught them at this six years ago, and soon after they were disqualified from the list. What about now? .