 To understand more about what the California Academy Foundation is doing to improve public education, please read our white paper below.
The crisis in California’s public schools is by now old news – three decades old. Ever since Proposition 13 shook the state to its financial foundations in 1978, the school system that was once the envy of the nation has steadily deteriorated.
Some blame battered state budgets; others look to the state funding model that was intended to create a high funding “floor” for all schools but resulted in a low “ceiling.” Others zero in on complex demographics, and still others site a shortage of qualified teachers.
The causes are many, but one thing is sure: Today’s public schools are battered, broken, and fundamentally incapable of preparing our children to compete in today’s rapidly evolving technology-based global economy.
High schools, especially, are in trouble.
Only one-third of students graduate from high school ready for college, and roughly one in three children entering the ninth grade don’t even complete high school. Our high-school students score near the bottom of the nation on standardized tests. According to a Rand Corporation study published in 2005, just over one-third of California’s public high school students rank above the 50th percentile in reading, and only 40 to 50 percent reach the 50th percentile in math.
Our kids are behind the curve because our schools are behind the times.
The nonprofit California Academy Foundation, based in Santa Barbara, California, has been established to change that by taking community action to support a powerful model of education that addresses the obsolescence lying at the heart of our educational ills.
“America’s high schools are obsolete,” Bill Gates told the nation’s governors in a 2005 speech. “Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.”
California State Superintendent of Schools Jack O’Connell echoed those sentiments in his February 2006 State of Education address. “The pace and degree of technological change over the past few decades have increased exponentially,” he said, “while the way we educate students has not changed much over the past century.”
The California Academy Foundation was established with a mission: “to deliver a better and more relevant high school experience for students through the creation and support of Partnership Academies built upon the academy model of learning.” Its first initiative is the Multimedia Arts &Design Academy (MAD) at Santa Barbara High School.
California Partnership Academies (CPAs) are structured to reflect the growing consensus among education experts that students achieve at higher levels when they learn in smaller, more intimate groups and when curriculum is made meaningful by connections to the real world. Partnership Academies are closely knit learning communities made up of 10th, 11th and 12th-graders and characterized by a rigorous and practical curriculum, stimulating classes, dedicated instructors, innovative teaching techniques, engaged students and involved parents.
Operating as “schools within schools,” CPAs combine solid academics with a career focus, and partner with local businesses to build bridges to industries relevant to a given academy’s location. Content and practicality are intricately linked. Students take four academy courses per day, one of them career focused. Major projects provide practical extensions of traditional academic subject matter while requiring technical skills relevant to real-world career opportunities. Each Academy partners with local employers who help oversee the program, develop the career technical curriculum, provide speakers for classes and mentors for eleventh-graders, and host field trips that give students firsthand experience in the workplace.
To enter an Academy, interested ninth-graders must apply, write a trio of essays and receive the recommendations of three teachers. At least half the members of each new class must meet three of four criteria used to determine whether a student is considered “at risk”: irregular attendance, a record of underachievement resulting in the student being a year or more behind in his or her coursework, low motivation or disinterest in the regular academic program, and economic disadvantage.
Academies have high standards, demand accountability and incorporate meaningful evaluative measures to ensure it. State funding is performance based, and only those students who have 80-percent attendance and are on track with 90 percent of their credit requirements qualify for funding. The unique funding model calls for the state to provide up to $81,000 per year, but only if it is matched twice -- once by the local school district and again by the community through fund-raising efforts.
“It’s an incredible model,” says California Academy Foundation member Pam Lopker, president and founder of QAD, a leading maker of global enterprise software solutions and a MAD Academy sponsor. “We can wait around for the government to fix the high schools someday, or we can do something about them ourselves right now.”
Founded in 1996 as the first Partnership Academy in Santa Barbara, the MAD Academy is a shining example among the roughly 200 CPAs currently operating at high schools throughout California. Each year 50 to 60 sophomores enter the Academy to take part in a curriculum that prepares them for a future in the field of media arts and technology. The MAD Academy is one of the few Partnership Academies in California dedicated to media arts and technology, a focus that makes sense both because many professionals from film and television live in the Santa Barbara area and one of the world’s largest media centers is located just 90 miles away in Los Angeles.
 Technical courses in the Academy are taught by adjunct college instructors who work professionally in their areas of expertise, providing the most current information available. Students receive both high school and college credit for the courses, and many graduate with 18 to 21 college credits. They must also meet the University of California requirements in academic classes – American and world history, chemistry, biology, physics and English – which have been integrated with media, art and art appreciation.
“The U.S. has been a world leader because it is a society that praises individualism, creativity, inventiveness and ‘outside the box’ thinking,” said Dan Williams, director at the MAD Academy. “But schools teach the opposite. We put everyone into the same box. Everyone follows the same model and is supposed to learn the same way. The curriculum lacks relevancy, and top-down administration creates a lack of flexibility in every aspect of education. In the current outdated model, we try so hard to make everything quantifiable, and we end up measuring the lowest common denominator.”
At the MAD Academy, however, individual expression and initiative arises through hand’s-on learning and personal projects that underscore the entire Academy effort. Sophomores create a magazine during their first semester, incorporating content from their English and history courses while attending computer art courses that enable them to complete their projects and develop valuable career skills in layout, design, and digital imaging and manipulation. In the second semester they create a cultural-history Web site, requiring them to study a culture, find people to interview people from that culture and produce a Web site based on their experiences.
“They study world culture for the first part of semester and then find their own story to make it real,” says Williams. “Because they’re creating something, they see the point of learning. Because they have something to say, they see the value of being better writers. For bright students who aren’t doing well in the traditional school, the projects provide relevancy that engages and interests them.
“Kids are constantly asking in regard to their education, ‘Where’s the real world? Why should I care?’ The academy connects subject matter to the world.”
Students in 12th grade take part in internships with local businesses.
“The state wants us to address low graduation rates, low attendance rates, inadequate parental involvement, smart students who are underachieving, at-risk students who are getting lost and dropping out, and students in general who are unfocused, disinterested, disengaged and/or lack the credits to graduate,” Williams says. “At MAD we only receive funding if we succeed – and we do. One hundred percent of our students graduate. One hundred percent are accepted into college. They are invested. They feel that the program is theirs, and they’re proud to be part of it.”
While many schools bemoan the lack of parental involvement, the MAD Academy requires – and receives – extensive support from parents.
“MAD is founded on the concept that everyone has a unique and equal contribution to make,” says veteran television producer and California Academy Foundation executive vice president Michael Jaffe. “The key is to find a way for every parent to make a contribution that they feel good about and the school can use, whether it’s chaperoning a field trip, cooking lasagna for a group lunch or helping at the student store. The more involved people are in a community-valued process, the happier the community is and the more valuable the experience will be.
“The best schools are small ones where you have a core of teachers who are there a long time, have esprit de corps and care about students,” Jaffe continues. “These are all additional benefits that derive directly from a small-school environment in which the principal value is community and everybody knows and supports everyone else. It’s the right model if self-respect and giving back to community are as important to your educational experience as academics are, and it results in a school that produces students who are also responsible and concerned citizens. MAD has been able to achieve small-school attributes in a large school environment, and that’s an amazing accomplishment”
As good as it is, MAD is constantly evolving in response to expert input. “We’re always looking at what our kids need to know and what areas we should be focusing on,” says Williams, “and our business partners give us lots of direction. For instance, we were hearing from a couple of them that our students needed to work better as teams. So now, every year we do a team-building retreat, and we’re building more team projects into the curriculum.”
Backed by the California Academy Foundation, the MAD Academy has the opportunity to raise enough money to ensure that it will never fall victim to radical state budget cuts made to address a momentary fiscal crisis. The Foundation has already signed an agreement with Santa Barbara High School that will allow the academy to continue to operate there provided it has the money. And that, says Jaffe, “gives you the single most important thing for a quality school: site permanence.”
As a dynamic, innovative, successful and overwhelmingly positive model of what the future of education can look like today, MAD is exactly the kind of success story that led Superintendent O’Connell to urge legislation “increasing the number of California Partnership Academies.”
The MAD Academy is everything experts say schools should be but too many people are resigned that they can’t achieve. The future of public high school education is here. The California Academy Foundation intends to ensure that it lasts.
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