Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance - U.S. Department of ...

Draft
KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program)
KIPP started as a middle school model in low-income communities developed by Teach for America alumni
Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin. After establishing many successful middle schools, they eventually expanded to
elementary and high schools as well. Overall, their students are 59% African American and 36%
Latino/Hispanic; 87% receive free or reduced-price meals.
KIPP made national news in 1999 when KIPP Academy middle school’s first graduating eighth-graders had the
five highest test scores in all of New York City. However, years later, data on the students graduating from KIPP
middle schools would reveal that many struggled academically in non-KIPP high schools and college. According
to their website, “As of fall 2011, 36 percent of KIPP students who completed eighth grade at KIPP ten or more
years ago have graduated from a four-year college.” Their high rate of student entry into 4-year colleges (84%)
and low rate of college graduation (36%) spurred KIPP leadership to evaluate what was missing in their schools.
They began to hypothesize that their alumni who succeeded could be characterized as having the intangible
skills consistent with important noncognitive factors. KIPP then became strongly influenced by the work of
Positive Psychology researchers, such as Duckworth and Seligman, as the field was beginning to show that
long-term success was just as contingent on noncognitive abilities as intellectual abilities.
For the last several years, KIPP has been developing and implementing a character education model to foster
key noncognitive abilities, with a particular emphasis on grit. They teach these qualities as skills that can be
worked on and improved, and strive to create school-wide discourse around character. They emphasize many
of the contextual factors and psychological resources in our model. For example, KIPP focuses heavily on goalsetting
as a key motivating factor. Mitch Brenner, KIPP New York’s administrative lead on character
development, runs teacher professional development focused on goal-setting, with a special emphasis on giving
students agency in creating their own goals. Importantly, KIPP also provides critical supports for students’
striving to achieve their goals. For example, around mindsets, Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset” has been taught
in KIPP schools for many years, and its messaging resembles the way that KIPP educators talk to students
about the malleability of their character skills. Effortful control skills are taught as part of a weekly character
class, through dual-purpose lessons with both academic and character objectives, and reinforced by public
reminders. For example, students walk around school wearing shirts that read, “Don’t eat the marshmallow,” a
reference to the classic self-control study in which children needed to abstain from eating a marshmallow in
order to earn a reward (which we discuss in Chapter 2 in the section on Effortful Control). The Character Report
Cards (see Chapter 3 for an example) are used as formative assessments to help students gauge and work on
their own progress with the noncognitive factors.
Evaluation data are not yet available about growth of noncognitive factors. However, data on achievement has
been strong and positive. A study by Mathematica in 2010 matched KIPP students with similar peers at local
schools and measured their achievement longitudinally. The study found that students attending a KIPP middle
school had higher math achievement by .48 standard deviations, the equivalent of 1.2 years of learning or half
the black/white achievement gap. The study also found reading achievement in KIPP schools was higher by .28
standard deviations, the equivalent of .9 years of learning and a third of the black/white achievement gap.
Project-based learning and design thinking models. These models include schools with
intensive focus on learning strategies for accomplishing long-term goals and an emphasis on
feedback and iteration. In project-based learning (PBL), students take on real-world problems in
any discipline and develop long-term projects around these problems. Connections to the real
world provide a motivating context, and long-term projects provide opportunities to develop
21st-century skills such as problem-solving, collaboration, researching, and communication. In
particular, students learn important learning strategies and self-regulation skills necessary for
perseverance over the long term to achieve the goals of a given project. They may learn skills
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