TM
S.O.C.R.A.T.E.S.TM
Students Of Color Reaching Academic Achievement Through Enhanced Support TM
I remember it as if it were yesterday… I am sitting in “U.S. History to 1877” at Davidson College in the fall of 1993. The discussion began with a topic concerning how slaves felt in the antebellum South and the entire class looked at me. Ordinarily, this would not be an issue; however, Davidson College, with a student body of approximately 1500, was only four (4) percent African-American and I was the only minority student in the class. Moreover, I thought to myself, I wished there was one more minority in the class so that I could look at him/her while he/she looked at me and start laughing. When looking at Orange County Schools’ district, one would find similar disparities and a considerable achievement gap. When I polled some minority seniors as to why they did not register for an AP course, the overwhelming answer was, “I do not want to be the only one there in the class.”
If students were in the correct courses, then teachers will potentially have a reduced achievement gap in the classroom, thus having the potential of a reduced achievement gap for the entire school and the district.
The Raising the Achievement and Closing the Gap (RACG) Committee believes that in order for Orange County Schools to help all children perform to their fullest potential, we must expand our efforts to close the achievement gap by:
· Supporting achievement at high levels for all students
· Having high expectations for all students
· Having clearly defined goals for student achievement
· Continuing to stress high performance, expectations and accountability of our administrators, teachers, and staff
· Encourage parents and community stakeholders to become more involved
· Aligning the district’s procedures, programs and practices with raising achievement and closing the gap goals
· Intensifying our efforts to be results oriented
In response, a group of assistant principals, along with the director of secondary instruction, came together to brainstorm ideas of how to accomplish the RACG goals. Steven Weber, Director of Secondary Instruction, suggested that the district come up with a universal name that would involve and acknowledge minority recruitment without isolating. Quanda Turner, assistant principal of C.W. Stanford Middle School, started with Shades of Color… From that, this author began to brainstorm on ways to make the name both easy to remember and express the overall initiative, while not isolating anyone who wanted to be a part of an academically achieving organization. Wanting to keep the Shades of Color theme, this author finally came to Students Of Color Reaching Academic Achievement Through Enhanced Support (SOCRATES).
To make this initiative a more meaningful experience for parents and students, I created personal invitations for students to become a part of an official membership to the SOCRATES Summit. As official members of SOCRATES, students would be key advisors that would reduce the disproportionate number of students of color in honors and advanced placement courses while preparing for post-secondary education. Each inductee received personalized invitation letters in the mail on official SOCRATES letterhead explaining the program’s mission and vision. Inductees later received AlertNow[ii] phone calls as a friendly reminder to attend an induction ceremony.
During the induction ceremony, students, parents, faculty and I shared the importance and advantages of taking AP courses. We discussed the following:
· Why a student was selected to be a member,
· What AP courses Orange High School has to offer, and
· The systems in place to make sure that a student can achieve his/her highest potential and be both academically and socially successful.
Advanced Placement courses have pre-requisites, which are primarily honors level courses. The SOCRATES administrator chose only students that scored a Level IV on their End of Course[iii] (EOC) exams. By scoring Level IV, which is mastery, a student should have the ability to become successful in an advanced placement course, with the proper support. Furthermore, by choosing students that scored a Level IV, advanced placement teachers would not have to water-down the curriculum, which would be disastrous for all students.
To add meaning to the induction, students were given the following:
· Personalized certificate of membership
· Personalized pen, engraved with the SOCRATES: Students Of Color Reaching Academic Achievement Through Enhanced Support
· Thirty-minute questions and answers session involving guidance counselors and advanced placement teachers, which helped relieve some of the apprehensions that students of color sometimes endure
· Catered food and drinks
· Live jazz music
At Orange High School, we have “Advisory” and “Panther” periods. These are thirty-minute blocks of time each day for students to receive remediation/acceleration (Panther Period), and character education or tutoring (Advisory Period). To provide our SOCRATES members the Enhanced Support, first we place them in Advisory cohorts based on grade-levels. The overall goal here is to maintain that bond, which helps them stay focused and encouraged in Reaching Academic Achievement.
The next step is a little tricky and requires full support and commitment from the guidance department. One of the concerns was that very few minorities take advanced courses, so there is a feeling of isolation. There are seventy-four members in SOCRATES. Our guidance department has agreed to the challenge of making sure that we cluster the SOCRATES members together in advanced courses. This is the backbone of the SOCRATES initiative. Therefore, during the scheduling process, Exceptional Children students are hand-scheduled in courses that require inclusion first, locked into place, and then SOCRATES members are hand-scheduled in advanced courses and locked into place. Afterwards, the rest of the school is automatically scheduled.
Now that the faculty, staff and parents are on board, the next major obstacle is attrition. Not all the support structures, parent meetings, and preferential scheduling can prevent students who enter academically rigorous courses wanting to drop down a level because of the reduced amount of work that their non-SOCRATES peers have in lower classes. Until SOCRATES is institutionalized, this will be a reoccurring problem within the program.
The core members of SOCRATES received personal invitations to become members from the assistant principal/director. The additional members came to the assistant principal/director wanting the enhanced support to part of an organization of academic excellence. Therefore, in order for any SOCRATES member to drop in academic rigor, there MUST be face-to-face meetings with the parents, teachers (advanced placement or honors teacher and advisory teacher), guidance, and assistant principal/director.
We must remember that the mission of SOCRATES is to create an academically rigorous educational environment where all students have equal access and are willing to participate. The vision of the program is to make sure that the diversity population percentages in the overall student body are minimally represented in all of our academically rigorous courses, which include but not limited to honors, advanced placement, UNCGi[iv], Learn and Earn[v], etc. Nonetheless, because we are the Students Of Color Reaching Academic Achievement Through Enhanced Support, any student can join the effort to receive the information.
We as educators must instill in today’s youth that Hope is the given capacity to wait and work patiently for what is real but currently invisible. Hesitation is the graveyard of hope.
[i][i]As of October 2009, there were three hundred ninety-two (392) students taking AP courses. Thirty-five (35) or Twenty-five and thirty-nine hundredths (25.39) percent were African-American and eleven (11) or two and eight-one (2.81) percent were Hispanic.
[ii] In today’s climate, school administrators are under mounting pressure to increase attendance, build community relations, improve parental involvement, and ensure campus safety. AlertNow is an elite, industry-leading rapid communication service, designed specifically for the K-12 community that addresses all of these needs.
[iii] The North Carolina End-of-Course Tests are used to sample a student’s knowledge of subject-related concepts as specified in the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and to provide a global estimate of the student’s mastery of the material in a particular content area. The North Carolina End-of-Course tests were initiated in response to legislation passed by the North Carolina General Assembly – the North Carolina Elementary and Secondary Reform Act of 1984. Currently, students enrolled in the following courses are required to take the North Carolina EOC tests: Algebra I, Algebra II, Biology, Chemistry, English I, Physical Science, and Physics.
[iv] UNCG iSchool is a program developed by UNCG through which you can enroll in selected online college courses offered on your high school campus during the regular school day. (http://web.uncg.edu/dcl/web/ischool/index.php)
[v] Students can now earn an associate degree or two years of college credit by taking free online college classes from ANY high school in the state! (http://www.nclearnandearn.gov/)
I remember it as if it were yesterday… I am sitting in “U.S. History to 1877” at Davidson College in the fall of 1993. The discussion began with a topic concerning how slaves felt in the antebellum South and the entire class looked at me. Ordinarily, this would not be an issue; however, Davidson College, with a student body of approximately 1500, was only four (4) percent African-American and I was the only minority student in the class. Moreover, I thought to myself, I wished there was one more minority in the class so that I could look at him/her while he/she looked at me and start laughing. When looking at Orange County Schools’ district, one would find similar disparities and a considerable achievement gap. When I polled some minority seniors as to why they did not register for an AP course, the overwhelming answer was, “I do not want to be the only one there in the class.”
If students were in the correct courses, then teachers will potentially have a reduced achievement gap in the classroom, thus having the potential of a reduced achievement gap for the entire school and the district.
The Raising the Achievement and Closing the Gap (RACG) Committee believes that in order for Orange County Schools to help all children perform to their fullest potential, we must expand our efforts to close the achievement gap by:
· Supporting achievement at high levels for all students
· Having high expectations for all students
· Having clearly defined goals for student achievement
· Continuing to stress high performance, expectations and accountability of our administrators, teachers, and staff
· Encourage parents and community stakeholders to become more involved
· Aligning the district’s procedures, programs and practices with raising achievement and closing the gap goals
· Intensifying our efforts to be results oriented
In response, a group of assistant principals, along with the director of secondary instruction, came together to brainstorm ideas of how to accomplish the RACG goals. Steven Weber, Director of Secondary Instruction, suggested that the district come up with a universal name that would involve and acknowledge minority recruitment without isolating. Quanda Turner, assistant principal of C.W. Stanford Middle School, started with Shades of Color… From that, this author began to brainstorm on ways to make the name both easy to remember and express the overall initiative, while not isolating anyone who wanted to be a part of an academically achieving organization. Wanting to keep the Shades of Color theme, this author finally came to Students Of Color Reaching Academic Achievement Through Enhanced Support (SOCRATES).
To make this initiative a more meaningful experience for parents and students, I created personal invitations for students to become a part of an official membership to the SOCRATES Summit. As official members of SOCRATES, students would be key advisors that would reduce the disproportionate number of students of color in honors and advanced placement courses while preparing for post-secondary education. Each inductee received personalized invitation letters in the mail on official SOCRATES letterhead explaining the program’s mission and vision. Inductees later received AlertNow[ii] phone calls as a friendly reminder to attend an induction ceremony.
During the induction ceremony, students, parents, faculty and I shared the importance and advantages of taking AP courses. We discussed the following:
· Why a student was selected to be a member,
· What AP courses Orange High School has to offer, and
· The systems in place to make sure that a student can achieve his/her highest potential and be both academically and socially successful.
Advanced Placement courses have pre-requisites, which are primarily honors level courses. The SOCRATES administrator chose only students that scored a Level IV on their End of Course[iii] (EOC) exams. By scoring Level IV, which is mastery, a student should have the ability to become successful in an advanced placement course, with the proper support. Furthermore, by choosing students that scored a Level IV, advanced placement teachers would not have to water-down the curriculum, which would be disastrous for all students.
To add meaning to the induction, students were given the following:
· Personalized certificate of membership
· Personalized pen, engraved with the SOCRATES: Students Of Color Reaching Academic Achievement Through Enhanced Support
· Thirty-minute questions and answers session involving guidance counselors and advanced placement teachers, which helped relieve some of the apprehensions that students of color sometimes endure
· Catered food and drinks
· Live jazz music
At Orange High School, we have “Advisory” and “Panther” periods. These are thirty-minute blocks of time each day for students to receive remediation/acceleration (Panther Period), and character education or tutoring (Advisory Period). To provide our SOCRATES members the Enhanced Support, first we place them in Advisory cohorts based on grade-levels. The overall goal here is to maintain that bond, which helps them stay focused and encouraged in Reaching Academic Achievement.
The next step is a little tricky and requires full support and commitment from the guidance department. One of the concerns was that very few minorities take advanced courses, so there is a feeling of isolation. There are seventy-four members in SOCRATES. Our guidance department has agreed to the challenge of making sure that we cluster the SOCRATES members together in advanced courses. This is the backbone of the SOCRATES initiative. Therefore, during the scheduling process, Exceptional Children students are hand-scheduled in courses that require inclusion first, locked into place, and then SOCRATES members are hand-scheduled in advanced courses and locked into place. Afterwards, the rest of the school is automatically scheduled.
Now that the faculty, staff and parents are on board, the next major obstacle is attrition. Not all the support structures, parent meetings, and preferential scheduling can prevent students who enter academically rigorous courses wanting to drop down a level because of the reduced amount of work that their non-SOCRATES peers have in lower classes. Until SOCRATES is institutionalized, this will be a reoccurring problem within the program.
The core members of SOCRATES received personal invitations to become members from the assistant principal/director. The additional members came to the assistant principal/director wanting the enhanced support to part of an organization of academic excellence. Therefore, in order for any SOCRATES member to drop in academic rigor, there MUST be face-to-face meetings with the parents, teachers (advanced placement or honors teacher and advisory teacher), guidance, and assistant principal/director.
We must remember that the mission of SOCRATES is to create an academically rigorous educational environment where all students have equal access and are willing to participate. The vision of the program is to make sure that the diversity population percentages in the overall student body are minimally represented in all of our academically rigorous courses, which include but not limited to honors, advanced placement, UNCGi[iv], Learn and Earn[v], etc. Nonetheless, because we are the Students Of Color Reaching Academic Achievement Through Enhanced Support, any student can join the effort to receive the information.
We as educators must instill in today’s youth that Hope is the given capacity to wait and work patiently for what is real but currently invisible. Hesitation is the graveyard of hope.
[i][i]As of October 2009, there were three hundred ninety-two (392) students taking AP courses. Thirty-five (35) or Twenty-five and thirty-nine hundredths (25.39) percent were African-American and eleven (11) or two and eight-one (2.81) percent were Hispanic.
[ii] In today’s climate, school administrators are under mounting pressure to increase attendance, build community relations, improve parental involvement, and ensure campus safety. AlertNow is an elite, industry-leading rapid communication service, designed specifically for the K-12 community that addresses all of these needs.
[iii] The North Carolina End-of-Course Tests are used to sample a student’s knowledge of subject-related concepts as specified in the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and to provide a global estimate of the student’s mastery of the material in a particular content area. The North Carolina End-of-Course tests were initiated in response to legislation passed by the North Carolina General Assembly – the North Carolina Elementary and Secondary Reform Act of 1984. Currently, students enrolled in the following courses are required to take the North Carolina EOC tests: Algebra I, Algebra II, Biology, Chemistry, English I, Physical Science, and Physics.
[iv] UNCG iSchool is a program developed by UNCG through which you can enroll in selected online college courses offered on your high school campus during the regular school day. (http://web.uncg.edu/dcl/web/ischool/index.php)
[v] Students can now earn an associate degree or two years of college credit by taking free online college classes from ANY high school in the state! (http://www.nclearnandearn.gov/)