Charter School gets $65 Million for Houston Expansion

Parents Forum
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<p>Source:
<a href=“http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=173400064[/url]”>http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=173400064&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>KIPP Charter School Program Receives $65 Million for Houston Expansion</p>

<p>The charter school movement has become a mainstream player in American education, as evidenced by a successful campaign that has raised $65 million from some of the country’s foremost donors to create forty-two schools in Houston, the Washington Post reports.</p>

<p>Houston KIPP announced the grants and pledges from local and national philanthropists as part of its $100 million campaign to expand the local branch of the Knowledge Is Power Program, which is quickly becoming the country’s largest charter school organization. The funds will support efforts to replicate KIPP’s elementary and secondary school educational model throughout the city’s underserved communities. There are currently eight KIPP public charter schools in Houston serving more than 1,700 students, including those in a school for New Orleans evacuees.</p>

<p>Funding for the expansion includes gifts of $10 million each from the Houston Endowment, the Hines Interests Limited Partnership, and philanthropists Laura and John Arnold. Pledges include $10 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $8.7 million from the Walton Family Foundation, and $5.3 million from GAP clothing stores founders Doris and Don Fisher. In addition, the Mercury Foundation of New York contributed $2 million to the costs of building a campus for KIPP SHINE Prep, the first early-childhood/elementary school in the KIPP network, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation in Austin, Texas, has provided $1.8 million to support sustainability at the existing KIPP schools in Houston.</p>

<p>Advocates for charter schools, which represent only about 5 percent of public schools, have long argued that their primary role is to force regular public schools to improve because of the competition for students. However, national studies suggest that students on average do not perform any better in charter schools than they do in traditional public schools, but that has not diminished the popularity of programs such as KIPP, which has made significant gains in the math and reading achievements of low-income students in most of its fifty-two schools nationwide.</p>

<p>Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said he thought the most important aspect of the announcement was that so much of the funding was raised from Houston sources. “In the final analysis,” he said, “charter schools will be sustained by state and local efforts that include private as well as public funding.”</p>

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<p>KIPP schools which I have been observing for some years now, in general, do a marvelous job with low income/underprivileged/hard to educate kids. This will be interesting to watch as they grow. How will they combat the tendency to become a bureaucratic entity like school districts of similar size. How will they control quality as they grow? These schools are not comprehensive (ie no sports) so will the regular public schools have all the athletes and none of the college going ones? Interesting times in the field of charter schools - especially in Texas</p>