Can a 'No Excuses' Charter Teach Students to Think for Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.
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Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?
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“There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”
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“One said, ‘In college you have to teach yourself more than half the content on your own,’” Ms. Toll said. That is very different from what is required in high school, she said, “and that sort of led to the whole concept of self-directed learning.”
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For much of the day, each classroom is split in two, with one teacher working more traditionally with half of the students while a second teacher supervises students wearing noise-cancelling headphones and working on their own on laptops.
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Mr. Cuban said he was particularly impressed with the way that Summit schools asked students to set goals for themselves.
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But he added that he thought the impact of online teaching tools depended on how they were implemented and that the ultimate test, for both Summit and for Achievement First, would be what happens to college graduation rates.
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Achievement First’s Greenfield model also emphasizes setting goals. Twice a week students meet with a teacher, referred to as a “goal coach,” to go over their progress in different areas and set goals for the week.
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the team came to believe that Achievement First students were not sufficiently engaged in school. The expeditions, also borrowed from Summit, are intended to spark passions and inspire long-term ambitions.
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Twice a week, students participate in what the network calls “circles” — a structure borrowed from the social-emotional curriculum of another charter network, Valor Collegiate Academies, in Nashville.
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Mr. Samouha said that one of the surprising discoveries in his team’s interviews with alumni who had dropped out of college was that, in some cases, their parents had actually encouraged them to drop out, because they didn’t like seeing them struggle and didn’t know that such difficulties were normal and surmountable. He said the Greenfield team traced that back to the network having not made the parents full partners in their children’s schooling.
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So in the Greenfield model, parent-teacher conferences are student-led, and attended by the members of a student’s “dream team,” which includes parents or other caregivers, as well as other mentors, like older siblings, pastors, coaches or family friends.
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“We’re not going to solve this through a weekly parent seminar on challenges your child will face in college,” Mr. Samouha said. “We’re going to solve it by literally building an experience where parents are at the table with teachers and students.”
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The network’s ultimate goal is to raise its college completion rate to 75 percent, and it says among its more recent classes about half of graduates are on track to finish college.