A ‘SUPER SCHOOL’
Daly City school receives $10M, five-year grant to create prototype for a new kind of education
DALY CITY » The challenge — to craft a vehicle of paper plates, foam cups, plastic straws and tape, and power it with party balloons — seemed doable and enticing.
But planes, sleds and cars in teacher Andrew McCarty’s engineering class crashed or barely budged. Alex Intara’s group popped one balloon and pierced a hole in another. So much for their propellant. Were they defeated?
Not at all, Alex, 15, a sophomore at Summit Shasta high school said. “I think I learned more from failing,” he said. “If we succeed, then we don’t really know what we did right. It’s all about the balance of mass and force.”
Those observations, plus the design of and
enthusiasm in Wednesday’s engineering class, reveal mounds about Summit Shasta and offers a clue to why the school was chosen to receive a $10 million, five-year grant to create a prototype for an American “super school.”
The charter school, where all learning is rooted in doing projects, is in the forefront of a movement to improve or even recreate high school.
More folks will be talking about Summit and super schools, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, after a one-hour feature on them airs Friday night across the nation on all four major commercial broadcast networks. With high-profile stars like Jennifer Hudson, Tom Hanks, Justin Timberlake, U2 and Ringo Starr, the program is intended to inspire a sense of urgency about redesigning high school. Why is that so critical?
High school launches students into adulthood, noted Monica Martinez of Oakland- based XQ: The Super School Project, and yet it’s anachronistic. As project promoters often note, “We’ve gone from the Model T to the Tesla and from the switchboard to the smartphone. But high school remains frozen in time.”
It’s critical to modernize its foundations to prepare young people to take on the world, she said.
Think of XQ as the special sauce needed to succeed in education. Neither IQ nor EQ (emotional quotient) is enough these days, XQers are fond of saying. They’re on a quest for that “certain something” essential to success.
XQ’s 18 “super schools” and programs are developing ways to propel high school into the present with different ideas, from focusing on homeless youth to researching coastal erosion. Summit Shasta will seek ways to endow students with a sense of purpose.
That may sound simple, Martinez said, but it’s revolutionary.
The idea is rooted in Summit’s history. Founded in 2003 with one school in Redwood City, Summit aimed to get 100 percent of graduates accepted into a four-year college. It succeeded, but in 2011 found that only 55 percent of its first graduating class was on track to actually graduate college in six or fewer years. While that’s twice the national average, school officials were disappointed.
They found that the impediments were finances, the need to take remedial classes — both of which it set out to remedy — and the sudden loss in college of Summit’s strong support.
“This was a harder problem,” said Adam Carter, Summit’s chief academic officer.
That’s partly because what the school had so intensively focused on was, in a way hurting them. “We are constantly thinking of ways to better support students,” Summit Shasta Principal Wren Larson Maletsky said.
Starting with small groups this year, Summit Shasta will increase independent study, internships, mentoring and college-readiness courses. Seniors will create a portfolio and give an oral defense.
With those seeds, “we hope to be able to raise a forest of students who are very self-aware and have a deep understanding of the opportunities of the world around them,” Carter said.
At the same time, administrators don’t think every student will decide on a career even by their senior year. Carter said t’s more about helping students “think of different ways to move toward the self they want to be” and develop the skills and habits they need.
Already, Summit appears to be doing well with student engagement. Senior Isaac Gebreysus likes going in depth with topics, like an immigration project he’s working on in his AP Government class. At a previous parochial high school, he felt disinterested in class, bored by campus life and constantly judged by teachers. At Shasta, he said his mistakes are a way to learn. And four times a year in two-week stints, he gets to delve into other areas like psychology, art, music, careers and more.
With its student-focused operation, class sizes of 25 for juniors and seniors, and small community — just 340 students, about onesixth the size of a traditional comprehensive high school — can Shasta not only discover and perfect the secret sauce of student success, but also transmit that to traditional schools?
Maletsky thinks so. “It’s absolutely translatable,” she said.
Summit Public Schools already shares for free its online platform for teach- ing, doing coursework and tracking student progress, developed by Facebook engineers. The Summit Learning Program is used by 300 schools, serving more than 54,000 students in 40 states.
Does enabling students to discover a sense of purpose cost $10 million?
Perhaps. At Summit, the grant will pay for two fulltime R& D people, plus a portion of 20 to 30 people now supported by other philanthropic sources to design curriculum and testing, analyics, school support and teacher training.
With 11 high schools, including two each in Redwood City and San Jose, one in El Cerrito and one in Richmond, Summit Public Schools budget 2017-’ 18 budget is $83.8 million.
“I don’t think a sense of purpose alone is going to make a kid succeed at Harvard,” Carter said. “But there are a lot of kids at Harvard with no sense of purpose, trudging down a path they’ve been put on.”
“XQ Super School Live” will air at 8 p.m. Friday on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox network stations.