About 15 years ago, charter school leaders decided to up the ante from seeing students through high school graduation and into a four-year college to seeing them all the way through college graduation. Data shows that their efforts have paid off. Now charter school students are graduating from college at a rate of 3-5 times the national average, which in recent years has been at a rate of 59% for first-time, full-time undergraduate students. To put this into further context for charter schools, historically only about 9% of students from low-income, minority families (which also describes the demographics of most students in the charter school network), graduate from college. This rate pales in comparison to the 77% of students from high-income families graduating college.
This radical change has been credited to the KIPP network of charter schools after realizing that their graduates were struggling to finish college. They changed the name of their college success program from “KIPP To College” to “KIPP Through College.” Read the full article from The 74 to see what other schools are doing to achieve the same goal.
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