Dive Brief:
- The San Francisco Bay area's Summit Preperatory Charter High School network has seen success in supporting its low-income students with a holistic focus and with help from intensive mentoring programs, but half of the school's graduates headed to college don't finish.
- To address the problem, the school now focuses on "habits of success" that include self-awareness, self management, social awareness, interpersonal skills, decision-making, and responsible behavior.
- With backing from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, the school also recently incorporated a tech plan into its curriculum and has made personalized learning and individualized attention available to all students.
Dive Insight:
Across the U.S., efforts to shift from the industrialized education model of the past century to what has been dubbed "School 2.0" has played out in a variety of ways. At Summit Prep, thanks to an influx of funding, the shift has happened fairly quickly and in an immersive way. Yet for most districts with tight budgets, or no budget for tech, shifting to more innovative models is an uphill battle.
Last July, the topic was a central focus of the International Society for Technology in Education's annual conference. There, experts extolled the virtues of collaborative tech and talked about the nation's transition from an industrial to an informational economy and how best to prepare students.
When considering new ed tech and digital options, districts need to be careful. Panelists at ISTE warned that some tech companies were turning around ed-related products just to ride the profit wave. It's also important to weigh the cost benefits of any digital advances or new tech initiatives before committing to them.
