In fall 2011, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation opened the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, a public, tuition-free charter school serving students in Kansas City, Missouri. In the 2021-22 school year, the school enrolled 1,089 students in grades 5 through 12. Most (82 percent) of the students were from low-income households, and 91 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 an 11-year study of the Kauffman School. In the final report of the evaluation, Mathematica’s analysis of data from the school’s first 11 years of operation showed that the school had a substantial positive impact on enrollment in four-year colleges. Kauffman School students from the graduating class of 2021-22 were 10 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). Although impacts on enrollment in four-year colleges were smaller in the most recent two years than in prior years, the Kauffman School’s impact on students’ college outcomes continued to be substantial; the 10-percentage point impact on enrollment in four-year colleges was large enough to close over 80 percent of the gap in rates of enrollment in four-year colleges for Black high school seniors in Missouri.

Figure 1. The Kauffman School had a substantial positive impact on enrollment in four-year colleges

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. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kauffman School had consistently achieved this goal with 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.

However, the Kauffman School’s cumulative impact on student achievement growth through 2020-21 was substantially smaller and indistinguishable from comparison schools in most grades and subjects. After full-year in-person learning resumed in 2021-22, achievement impacts were again positive and statistically significant in most grades and subjects, though in most cases the impacts did not return to pre-pandemic levels.

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.