impact
report
2025
We are…FUTURE READY
Our students are part of a generation destined to make a difference. That means our job is to deliver an excellent education that helps them see their worth, realize their potential, and be ready to embrace the future.
KIPP schools are best-in-class, college-prep public schools in neighborhoods that deserve high-quality options. Most of our students will be the first in their families to attend and graduate from college, and we are proud to provide free, public school options in the communities where they live.
We are…READY FOR LEARNING
This fall, we launched KIPP Stockton High School, opened two newly built campuses in Stockton, and welcomed over 7,100 KIPPsters across Northern California—the most students we’ve ever served in a single year. Our growing network is made up of 23 schools in 7 cities, educating elementary, middle, and high school students across Northern California, and intensively supporting almost 1000 alumni.
Our students reflect the vibrancy and diversity of the communities in which our schools are located.
Our Teachers
Excellent classrooms start with excellent educators. That’s why we invest in training, coaching, and benefits that support teachers and leaders to stay and grow at KIPP.
Teachers share that school leadership provides a clear instructional vision and expectations for effective teaching, as well as a strong commitment to improving instructional practice. Research shows these are the most significant factors that lead to educator retention and strong student achievement. (TNTP, 2025)
Our talent development programs serve as leadership launchpads. The KIPP Teacher Residency recruits, trains, and supports new teachers by matching them with a mentor teacher in a one-year program that combines coursework and applied classroom practice, resulting in a teaching credential and master’s degree.
Nurturing School Communities
Our schools are places where students thrive and belong. Decades of research supports what we know firsthand—joyful and positive school culture has a direct impact on a student’s academic success, mental health, and overall well-being. We know that to do well, students must be well, so we provide wrap-around services and interventions through our Coordination of Services Teams (COST). Through the COST structure, students and families are connected with extra services they may need, such as housing, food, and legal support; targeted academic intervention; or mental health counseling.
We believe every child deserves a safe school, and we believe that strong mental health services on our campuses help contribute to joyful and academically excellent learning environments. At KIPP, this means cultivating a largely preventative mental health model that meets the behavioral health & social emotional needs of all students. In practice, this looks like mental health clinicians on all campuses, the incorporation of a universal screener to identify at-risk students early, and strong systems to monitor student progress throughout intervention services.
We are…READY FOR LITERACY
Every child deserves to become a confident, joyful reader and critical thinker; that starts with strong literacy instruction.
Through evidence-based Science of Reading curriculum and assessments, expert coaching for teachers, and targeted student support, we’re seeing enormous growth in our students’ early literacy skills, setting them up for long-term academic success. Our data shows that while KIPP students start the year behind the national average, their reading ability grows at a faster rate than students nationally.
Despite less than a quarter of kindergarteners coming in with the baseline skills expected for school readiness, 78% of KIPP NorCal kindergarteners ended last year reading at grade level with 69% of kindergarteners making above average growth.
As importantly, the number of kindergarteners testing well below grade level dropped by three-quarters from the beginning of the year to the end.
These gains compound over time. On average, our cohorts are starting each new grade level more proficient than the year before, meaning the longer elementary students attend KIPP, the better readers they become.
We are…READY FOR ALGEBRAIC THINKING
All students deserve access to engaging and challenging math instruction. We’ve invested in a new data-backed math curriculum (Eureka Math²) and teacher coaching that empower students to approach problem-solving from different angles, fostering a deep and flexible conceptual understanding of mathematics, and enabling them to clearly explain their reasoning.
Our goal is that they not only master specific problems but also develop the adaptive thinking required to find solutions to a wide array of scenarios. Students are also provided with timely feedback, so they can see the solutions, ask questions, and correct errors. By the time our students get to 11th grade, they are reaching math proficiency at twice the rate of their peers across California.
California’s Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is the statewide assessment designed to measure proficiency toward national academic standards. It is one important measure that contributes to a holistic view of student achievement.
The most recent SBAC results show that KIPP NorCal continues to outperform the state of California in both Math and English Language Arts, as well as the vast majority of our host districts.
KIPP Northern California students gain the equivalent of about 80 extra days of learning in math and 70 extra days in reading in a single school year compared to their peers in traditional public schools. (CREDO, 2023)
We are…READY FOR COLLEGE
At KIPP, being college-ready is about a lot more than crossing a high school graduation stage. College-ready means that every student, no matter their starting point when they joined KIPP, graduates high school with the knowledge, skills, confidence, and support to succeed in college, as well as a post-secondary plan aligned to their passions.
To this end, our students and recent alumni receive personalized and data-informed college and career counseling through our best-in-class KIPP Forward model.
In California, the average college counselor to student ratio is nearly 500:1. At KIPP high schools, it’s about 100:1.
We align our high school graduation requirements to college expectations so every student has the coursework required for UC & CSU system. Even with this higher bar, our students are earning their high school diplomas at significantly higher rates than the state average.
Our students matriculate to 4-year colleges at three times the California rate for socioeconomically disadvantaged students.
We are…READY FOR LIFE
Even after students graduate from high school, they receive 1:1 postsecondary advising on financial literacy, social-emotional and career-readiness support, and access to a robust alumni network of professionals from our KIPP Forward advisors.
A recent third-party study found that the impact of a KIPP education, if extrapolated nationwide, would completely close the degree completion gap for Black students and nearly close the degree completion gap for Latinx students in America. (Mathematica, 2023)
This is critically important because a bachelor’s degree is still by far the most reliable path for low-income students to experience financial freedom. In addition to significantly greater earning potential, research shows that college graduates experience substantially lower unemployment rates, improved health outcomes, and higher levels of civic engagement over their lifetime. In fact, nearly 8 in 10 Californians with a bachelor’s degree enjoy a positive return on that investment within just 10 years.
Today, thousands of KIPP alumni are making their mark in college, in the workplace, and in the world. KIPP NorCal alumni attend and graduate from colleges and universities across the state and country, including UC Berkeley, Harvard, Santa Clara, San José State, Howard, Duke, UC Davis, and so many more. The Class of 2025 received acceptance letters to over 170 colleges and universities. We’re proud they are embarking on diverse and impactful careers in fields like engineering, teaching, emergency services, finance, medicine, computer programming, music, and public health.
Because when a young person believes they can do anything, they will go even further than imagined.
Meet some of the all-stars in the KIPP NorCal community!
Click on theIR photos to learn more
“I don’t just believe in the power of KIPP as an educator—I believe in it as a parent. My daughter is now a KIPP student, and I’ve seen firsthand the care and excellence she receives at our school.”
“In addition to helping me find my career path, KIPP also helped me build a very strong community and the confidence to find resources on my own.”
“KIPP invested in me, both inside and beyond the classroom. It gave me a sense of possibility and community that still shapes me today.”
We are…THANKFUL FOR YOUR SUPPORT!
With your investments, we have grown with quality, continued to innovate, and emerged as a proof point for what is still possible in public education. And we are not resting on our laurels. We are working hard to position our schools and students for the future. We’re evolving our school model to make teaching more sustainable and more impactful.
Your support enables us to:
- Invest in a suite of new, research-backed math and reading curricula for all grade levels,
- Increase and strengthen our teacher training and leadership development programs,
- Pilot AI innovations that save teachers time so they can focus on fostering student engagement and critical thinking,
- Continue to offer one-of-a-kind, personalized college and career counseling to both our current high schoolers and our adult alumni.
