Think Forward New England: Profiles of Innovation (CRPE)
By: the Center on Reinventing Public Education
Excerpt, read full article
Introduction
Even for the best educators, meeting every student’s needs can prove elusive. Most schools operate a rigid system of teacher-led, whole-class instruction that moves at a single pace and is designed for order and efficiency, not adaptability. This system works well enough for students whose lives and way of learning happen to conform to its expectations. But some students don’t fit well into the boxes of conventional schooling. And despite the concern and dedication of educators, those students all too often slip through the cracks.
For a student named Virginia conventional schooling initially worked. She put in the effort to show up on time, follow instructions, complete her assignments, and earned As and Bs in her classes. But when she was 15, her father took his own life, and the grief and trauma understandably affected every aspect of her life. At first, she tried to forge on with school, but she found herself making regular trips to the school nurse’s office in tears. Virginia’s schooling stalled. After receiving treatment at a behavioral health hospital, she was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, anxiety, and depression. Yet when her emotions overwhelmed her at school, teachers would often handle the situation by sending her to a detention room to calm down. The next school year, Virginia tried her best to rally but unanticipated challenges struck again: two major surgeries caused her to miss a significant amount of class time. With two consecutive years of setbacks, she opted to drop out of school and look for work.
At the age of 22, Virginia supported herself by working at Dunkin’ Donuts. The dream of earning a high school diploma seemed to have passed her by. Yet one day at work, she was excited to see two familiar faces come into the store: Rachel Babcock and Josh Charpentier, who had both previously worked for the local school district helping students like Virginia catch up on credits. They had come to invite her to finish her high school diploma at Map Academy, a new charter school they had created for students who were not on track to graduate. As soon as she clocked out of her shift at work that day, Virginia completed the paperwork to enroll in Map Academy. She felt newly optimistic, like her life was about the change.
A school where students progress in spite of life’s hurdles
Virginia’s story epitomizes a common shortcoming across K–12 schooling. Students are not uniform inputs into the K–12 education system—yet the system too often treats them that way. Each student comes with distinct assets but also unique obstacles to overcome. Conventional schooling becomes a problem when it marginalizes students whose profiles do not conform to its standard operations. The result of this breakdown is clearly documented: roughly 2.1 million US students drop out of high school each year.
This case study tells the story of a school that confronts that statistic head-on by reversing the dominant relationship between a school and its students. Rather than offering learning experiences that require students to conform their lives to the school, Map Academy offers an education that adapts to the needs and circumstances of its students while maintaining high expectations. Nearly a decade ago, Babcock and Charpentier led the alternative education program for Plymouth Public Schools. Their charge was clear: make sure students who struggled to succeed in the district’s conventional high schools did not slip through the cracks.
Babcock and Charpentier posted a map of their district on a wall in their office and placed a dot at the home address of every student who: 1) identified as at risk of dropping out according to the Massachusetts Early Warning Indicator System, 2) was already enrolled in an alternative education program, or 3) had dropped out of the system. By the time they were done, the map had 398 dots—each representing a real student who had struggled to conform to the rigid norms of the existing system.That map was a revelation to the pair. In spite of their passion and dedication—and that of many colleagues—the system was still failing an inordinate number of Plymouth’s students. Of the 398 dots, approximately half represented students who had already dropped out. Another quarter were enrolled in alternative programs that might help them clear the minimum bar to a diploma but were not well-equipped to set them up for post-secondary success. They had been following the conventional playbook for supporting at-risk students: enhancing the curriculum, improving staff development, revising student discipline policies. But those efforts weren’t working.
Whether it’s being off track because you don’t have anywhere to live, or because you’re working 50 or 60 hours a week to support yourself and your family, or because you have a child of your own, or because you have mental health or substance abuse issues, or you have crazy anxiety every time you set foot in school, or you have a history of trauma. . . . When those things happen, you can only go so long sticking Band-Aids on. You have to actually push pause and say, ‘What are we doing here?’ and put the kid at the center of the decision-making, which was really hard to do in a district where they’re always trying to apply the same policies to every student.
RACHEL BABCOCK
For many students, conforming to the system just wasn’t compatible with their life circumstances. As Babcock explained, “Whether it’s being off track because you don’t have anywhere to live, or because you’re working 50 or 60 hours a week to support yourself and your family, or because you have a child of your own, or because you have mental health or substance abuse issues, or you have crazy anxiety every time you set foot in school, or you have a history of trauma. . . . When those things happen, you can only go so long sticking Band-Aids on. You have to actually push pause and say, ‘What are we doing here?’ and put the kid at the center of the decision-making, which was really hard to do in a district where they’re always trying to apply the same policies to every student.”
Babcock and Charpentier realized that if they really wanted to change the trajectory of students on the margins, they needed a new approach that rethought nearly all the assumptions of conventional schooling. After studying the problem and visiting nontraditional schools across the country, they envisioned a school that would be competency-based, asynchronous, and blended. This instructional model would, in turn, enable teachers to adapt the mode and timing of instruction to students’ needs and dedicate more of their attention to building supportive relationships with each of their students. As Charpentier explained, “We know that life is going to get in the way for some of our students. So instead of trying to fight against that, we created a system that allows for that to happen.” Born from that vision, Map Academy—named after the
map on Babcock and Charpentier’s wall—opened its doors to students in fall 2018. One student, Mari, said Map functions “like a small family. . . . It’s a really, really, really welcoming place to be.”
For Virginia, Map Academy was a model of schooling that worked where others had failed. The school’s adaptable approach to instruction enabled the school’s staff to give her the support she needed. She described how “when you feel accepted and understood by teachers, it’s easier to talk to them. . . They make us feel like we’re all equal . . . In regular school, I would never raise my hand because I just felt like I was such an outcast. But here, they don’t let anyone feel like an outcast.”