Gary Rubenstein is a blogger, a high school math teacher, and a relentless detective of inflated claims of “success” by schools that game the system.

In this post, he once again exposes a trick that KIPP in New York City pulled to get its high school onto the U.S. News list of the state’s “best high schools.” The list is weighted in favor of high schools where significant numbers of students get at least a 3 on AP exams.

Gary writes:

According to the latest US News & World Report high school rankings, a New York City KIPP High School is the 18th ranked high school in New York State.

Strangely, a different New York City KIPP High School is ranked 682nd.

How can there be such a discrepancy between the two KIPPs? How can one of their schools be so good while the other is so bad? It’s simple. I know because this is a scam that they have been pulling off and on for the past 8 years. And in 2017 they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for this meddling blogger. In 2023 they did get away with it despite this meddling blogger. Whether they get away with it this year, only time will tell.

Here’s the way it works: There is only one KIPP high school in New York City and it is called KIPP NYC College Prep. So what are these two schools, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity? Those are two middle schools. The main statistic US News uses to rank high schools is the percent of students at that school who passed at least one AP test with a 3. So what KIPP does is it takes all the students from KIPP College Prep who pass an AP test and say they are enrolled in the middle school called KIPP Academy. Then they take the majority of their students who don’t pass an AP test and say they are enrolled in KIPP Infinity. This way KIPP Academy middle school becomes a high school with 100% of their 50 students passing an AP while KIPP Infinity middle school becomes a high school where 0% of their 216 students passed an AP.

It’s actually pretty ingenious. As I mentioned, they got caught in 2017 and got disqualified that year. I haven’t checked every year but I also checked in 2023 and they were not disqualified that year. You can check out the links to those previous posts if you want more details.

Now I don’t know if KIPP is using this fraudulent data to get people to donate to them. I also don’t know if their teachers are even aware of this. But if anyone who works for KIPP NYC College Prep is aware of this (maybe by reading this right now) and you don’t speak up about this, you are teaching your students that it is OK to cheat and to lie, so try to think about that as you teach each day.

And if anyone knows of any way to report this fraud to US News & World Report, feel free to do so.