BUSIER BEES, FULLER HONEYCOMBS
Born to Know’s learning model and curricula have powerfully engaged students, who have, in turn, produced stunning standardized test outcomes...to the delight of our curriculum designers’ principals.​
"I am writing this letter to acknowledge and celebrate your contribution to the Class of 2016’s growth and academic successes. Your class had the highest ACT English average scaled score and the highest percentage of students who met the college readiness benchmark score in KIPP past and present."
Lara Wheatley
Principal, KIPP Houston High School
"Our Comp teacher has been
able to drive students’ English scores on the ACT in a way I have never seen."
Lara Wheatley
Principal, KIPP Houston High School
"Travis’s students led the national KIPP network in performance and also led the way for us in growth, year after year. It is difficult to exaggerate the efficacy of Travis’s instruction; at a school and charter network that prides itself on defying expectations, Travis surpassed our own."
Terry Lin
Assistant Principal of KHHS,
now of KIPP Austin
​In fact, Travis’s principal, Mohamad Maarouf, hired him two full time assistants so that he could teach all 185 juniors last year. Based on student-satisfaction and ACT English performance & growth, the pilot was an extraordinary success, demonstrating the scalability of our model.
Let’s assume students are honeybees and that their performance is the honey they produce.
The following figures will help us measure production before looking into the KIPP Houston beehive. KIPP students usually take the ACT, which is out of 36. The national average on the English test is a 20.4. With a strong GPA, students are “auto-admitted” to the University of Houston, the city’s flagship public university if they score a 21. (Fig 1)
Given the significance of scoring a 21, where are Travis’s students compared to those of his KIPP counterparts’ using this performance metric?
We’ve just looked at performance; now let’s consider growth.
The ACT is comprised of 4 tests, each of which is worth 36 pts. A student’s score is the average of these 4 tests.
If, on the English test, a student began with a score of 15 and improved to 20, his or her score would have, thus, improved by 33%.​
So what does Travis’s students growth look like compared to the growth of his KIPP peers?
Since 2016, KHHS 11th grade students have taken a diagnostic ACT test at the beginning of the year. (Fig. 2)
Whereas his colleagues’ students have averaged 21% English and Reading growth, Travis’s students’ standardized test scores improved 33%, far more than the growth of what KIPP Houston as a region has achieved over Houston-Metro district schools with similar student populations.
For Travis’s principal Mrs. Wheatley, and many others in KIPP leadership, these results have been unprecedented. Students, too, have appreciated this growth. KIPP Houston’s 2017 valedictorian even noted in her commencement speech,
"Could everyone give him a hand please? This man was instrumental in raising ACT scores by numbers that defied probability."
Chinwendu Owhochukwu
Valedictorian’s Speech at KIPP Houston
High School’s Graduation
June 4, 2017
OUR APPROACH IS EVIDENCE-BASED.
Our pedagogical method is based on our own path-breaking classroom success.
FIGURE 1
*Data represents 3 yr avg. for KIPP Houston ACT English performance.
**All honeycombs out of 100%
*** Colored in cells = college ready students.
****The darker the honey, the higher the students performance levels.
FIGURE 2
