KIPP Receives $15 Million Grant To Boost The Number Of Educationally Underserved Students Succeeding In High School, College And Career

New York, NY – January 3, 2020 – The KIPP Foundation has been awarded a $15 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to significantly increase the number of Black, Latinx, and students from low-income families who succeed in high school, enroll in a postsecondary institution and pursue the paths they choose – college, career, and beyond.

KIPP is one of 30 organizations chosen to participate in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Networks for School Improvement (NSI) program, which includes more than 700 schools in 20 different states.

At KIPP, the largest nonprofit public charter school network in the nation, 95 percent of students are African American or Latinx and 88 percent are eligible for federal free or reduced-price lunch. KIPP students complete their bachelor’s degree at a rate of 35 percent, comparable to the national average for all students and approximately three times higher than the average for students from low-income families. Despite these results, KIPP wants to improve high school and post-secondary success.

“We are honored and grateful to be among the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation NSI partner organizations,” said Richard Barth, KIPP Foundation CEO. “At KIPP, we are and will remain committed to supporting greater numbers of our students to be prepared for and to achieve college and career success.”

The grant will enable KIPP to strengthen their high school academic and post-secondary counseling outcomes, working with 35 KIPP high schools across 16 states, through a mix of professional development, sharing and learning convenings, continuous improvement capacity building and school-based implementation support. The work will launch in 2020.

The NSI program fosters partnerships between networks of schools and school support organizations so they can work together to solve common problems by using evidence-based interventions that best fit their needs. These networks develop learning approaches—where schools use data to identify a problem, select a strategy to address the problem, set a target for improvement, and iterate to make the approach more effective and improve student achievement.

About KIPP

KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, is a national network of 242 public charter schools dedicated to preparing students in educationally underserved communities for success in college and life. KIPP schools are part of the free public school system and enrollment is open to all students. Started in 1994 as a middle school program, KIPP has since expanded to enroll 100,000 students in all grades from Pre-K through high school. Nationwide, KIPP students complete their bachelor’s degree at a rate of 35 percent, comparable to the national average for all students and approximately three times higher than the average for students from low-income families.