Ewing Marion Kauffman Charter School Evaluation

In fall 2011 the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation opened the Kauffman School, a public, tuition-free charter school serving students in Kansas City, Missouri. In the 2019–20 school year, the school enrolled 1,186 students in grades 5 through 12. Most (88 percent) of the students were from low-income households, and 89 percent were Black or Hispanic.

The hallmarks of the Kauffman School include ambitious academic goals, high attendance and character expectations, an extended school year, increased mathematics and reading instructional time, intensive data-driven decision making, extensive teacher professional development, and well-established cultural norms.

The Kauffman Foundation commissioned Mathematica to conduct a nine-year study of the Kauffman School. In the latest report, Mathematica’s analysis of data from the school’s first nine years of operation showed that the school had a positive and statistically significant impact on enrollment in four-year colleges, with Kauffman students 19 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year college than if they had attended another Kansas City public district or charter school (Figure 1). The magnitude of the Kauffman School’s impact is substantial; it is large enough to close the gap in enrollment rates in four-year colleges for Black high school seniors in Missouri.

Test scores were not evaluated in the latest report because the COVID-19 pandemic caused Missouri to cancel its state standardized tests in spring 2020. However, our previous report consistently showed that the Kauffman School had sustained positive impacts on student achievement growth in mathematics, English language arts, and science, beyond the growth achieved by students in other Kansas City public schools (Figure 2). One of the goals stated in the Kauffman School’s charter is that its students, on average, will achieve at least 1.25 years of learning growth for each year they are enrolled in the school. Kauffman students achieved this goal in each subject for nearly all enrollment durations.

In addition to the report on the Kauffman School’s impacts, an issue brief on the school’s hallmarks is available, as is a journal article describing how these hallmarks may be related to the school’s positive impacts on student outcomes.