Public Schools in Public Spaces
Small, innovative schools located in unique spaces. Cultural institutions and community organizations infused with fresh faces. Powerful opportunities exist when public schools are embedded in public places.
Imagine a discussion of Civil Rights facilitated in front of the Rosa Parks Bus. Or conjure the smells, sounds and lessons of living history presentations minus modern conveniences at a real, working farm. Such experiences are incorporated in the day-to-day experiences of students at the Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, Michigan. When students learn in real-world situations, they experience their community differently and imagine new possibilities.
In 1916, Henry Ford uttered the phrase "History is more or less bunk" while testifying in a libel lawsuit against a major urban newspaper. Seizing on the opportunity, opposing counsel misconstrued this remark in newspapers around the world, suggesting that Ford did not see the importance of history, and opposed the teaching of history in school. In fact, Ford's statement was referring to history textbooks of the era, which were confined to a memorization of wars, treaties, and an endlessseries of dates. Henry Ford felt that the teaching of, and learning about, history had to include some understanding of the people, lifestyles, and values of the time, and that history should be experienced. To Ford, a true education could not take place behind schoolhouse walls, but must instead be hands-on and make a connection with the real world.
HFLI invested years of purposeful development behind a plan that will create a sustainable network of small high schools located in America's premier cultural institutions and community organizations. Public schools in public spaces provide the unique opportunities and visible learning that is lacking in traditional models of education. The design of the HFA model enables each community to leverage its own abundant resources and infuse its own distinctive culture and artifacts.
What We're Doing
Focused on urban communities where public schools have struggled to meet the needs of a majority of students, HFLI is developing a network of small high schools located in America's premier cultural institutions and community organizations based on the model developed by the acclaimed small high school, Henry Ford Academy.
We are excited to further develop and improve our model, share what we have learned with communities around the country, and establish the Henry Ford Academy Network of Schools to support the implementation of our model in host communities across the United States.
Need and Opportunity
The Urgent Need For High School Reform
Over the past few years, policymakers at the state and national level have been showing an increased interest in the high school experience. As these efforts move forward, a consensus is building that the high school experience is the "weak link" in the educational process. Consider the following statistics.
- For every 100 students entering ninth grade, 67 finish high school in four years. Of those 67, 38 enroll in college, 26 return the fall after their freshman year, and 18 complete degree within six years. This number drops to roughly 9% for Hispanic and African American students. 1
- One in three twelfth grade students scores below basic levels on national assessments. 2
- One in three college freshmen take at least one remedial reading, writing or math course. 3
- Reading and math achievement for 17-year-old African Americans and Hispanic students is the same as that of 13-year-old white students. 4
- The U.S. has 555,000 high school dropouts annually. This represents 3,000 dropouts every day. 5
- By 2020, U.S. employers will need 14 million more workers with some college education than U.S. institutions will have produced. 6
From both an education reform and workforce development standpoint, high school is a pivotal point in a young person's life. The academic and skill-based foundation that is formed - or, more commonly, not formed - for young people during this time in their lives impacts their successful transition to postsecondary education, job training, and the workplace. Ensuring that more students make this transition successfully is essential if our nation is to remain a global leader in the creation of high wage, high skill jobs and industries. Though the economic argument calling for high school reform is clear, for many the need for reform is simply a moral one. People inside and outside of education continue to ask, How is it just, that one's zip code has more to do with access to an excellent education than virtually any other factor? Others are equally concerned about the long-term economic impact of sustained educational inequity. Rarely have business and moral imperative been so aligned in support of a cause. In either case the call to action is unmistakable and change is long overdue.
Crisis Points
At the midway point of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly clear that high school education in this country is not up to the task. Bill Gates, in his address to state governors at the 2005 National Education Summit on High Schools, referred to both the moral and economic arguments for reform and definitively assessed the U.S. high school system as "obsolete." Mr. Gates went even further in stating that the main barrier to true reform is "political will." It is our hope that leaders at both the state and national levels will soon emerge to take up this challenge.
When they do, however, they will be faced with a series of crisis points that must be addressed in the very near future:
- The traditional high school experience works for an increasingly small group of students.
Our current K-12 education system was designed at a time when a high school diploma was the highest level of education that most students would ever need to attain. Our economy has changed considerably since that time, demanding new and higher-level skills.While education reform efforts over the past few decades have tinkered at the margins, the core of this system is still in place. The ultimate result is a system that, by design, does not work for more than half of its participants.
- Disadvantaged students are being left further and further behind.
By any measure (test scores, high school completion rates, post-secondary completion rates, employment rates, poverty measures, wage and skill gaps, etc.) disadvantaged students will not have the skills to participate in the new economy.
Critical employability skills - which can only be gained through tangible linkages with the real world - continue to be left out of most high school curricula. The standards movement is making important progress in addressing academic quality and outcome issues inherent in our current education system. Yet, employability skills continue to be left out of the discussion. This approach severely misreads current economic reality. Success in today's economy requires that all students be exposed to both high academic standards and a rigorous dose of employability skills. 7
- The current system does not engage enough students, teachers, or parents.
The National Academies recently published a groundbreaking study in 2004, titled Engaging Shools. It concluded that our current system of public education does not motivate or engage the majority of high school students, parents, and teachers. Most students are simply going through the motions in order to move to the next level. A big piece of this problem is a lack of connection between adult mentors, what is learned in the classroom, and its relevance in the real world.
Urban Challenges
Nowhere is the need for high school reform greater than in our nation's urban centers. They are ground zero for the majority of disadvantaged young people and dropouts captured in the crisis points listed above. And yet, in many of these cities, the public education system is under serious duress, if not in a state of near collapse. These centers are exactly the place where greater community cooperation and unity of purpose is needed to rally behind the creation of new high school models and innovative teaching and learning strategies. While the charter school movement is attempting to do just that, charter providers that focus on the high school are few and far between. Those who choose to launch charter high schools are frequently the target of virulent attacks from the media and the traditional public education system. Though the research on charter school effectiveness is young and incomplete, the press is trumpeting recent studies that suggest charter schools are making little, if any, educational difference. In Detroit, this antagonism came to a head in 2003 when the city, under intense pressure from the media, city council, and teachers' unions, turned down an offer from a local philanthropist to spend $200 million to build a network of small charter high schools to serve disadvantaged students. Small charter high schools can no longer be created as isolated islands of excellence, surrounded by a sinking public education system. Instead, members of the charter high school movement should bring together community stakeholders to support exciting, innovative new models of teaching and learning and then work aggressively to share what they have learned with the wider community. If successful, the public nature of these efforts can serve as a nexus for community development and education reform, helping cast a positive light on the charter school movement in local communities. The Henry Ford Learning Institute is prepared to meet this challenge and help fill this urgently needed role.
Emerging Opportunities
As HFLI scans the national education marketplace, we see a number of opportunities for the Henry Ford Academy model.
Increased Focus on the High School
Foundations and government policymakers have grasped the importance of high school as the critical link in the overall education and workforce development pipelines, and have taken steps to focus more attention and resources on the problem. More than a dozen states have major high school reform movements underway or under development, including Ohio, Virginia, Maine, Texas, Michigan, and Arizona. New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Chicago have all announced dramatic plans to reinvent the high school experience over the next decade. In the past five years the Gates Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in support of small high schools. And U.S. Department of Education officials have made it clear that the high school will be a major point of reform during the second Bush administration. Clearly, the time is ripe for new high school models to emerge.
Demonstrated Demand
When the Henry Ford Academy opened its doors in 1997, no one imagined the interest it would arouse from communities around the nation. Since then, hundreds of organizations and individuals have visited the Academy to learn more about the model and to seek assistance in starting up a similar effort in their local communities. Visitors have included national and state government officials, district superintendents, corporate executives, executive directors, heads foundations and cultural institutions, university presidents, researchers, teachers, and representatives from a wide range of community organizations.
A sampling of people and organizations that have expressed interest in the Academy model is described in Appendix 3,Visitors to the Henry Ford Academy.
Interest From the Cultural Community
In addition to the numerous cultural organizations that have directly reached out to us, HFLI has been in conversation with the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to discuss ways to help other cultural organizations around the nation adopt the Academy model. In August 2004, these conversations resulted in the first of what is hoped to be a series of national IMLS conferences that bring together leading cultural organizations to discuss the issue and promote the Academy model of a forma school within a cultural organization. Ford Motor Company has brokered a conversation between HFLI and the Smithsonian Institution to discuss ways we can work together to leverage the 138 Smithsonian Affiliate museums and cultural centers around the nation to promote the Academy model and help launch the national HFLI replication initiative. Like IMLS, Smithsonian is convinced that cultural organizations must embrace the Academy model of linking formal education and the cultural community.
Financial Stability
Part of the increased interest in the Academy model from the cultural community is due to the realization that it provides a better chance of financial stability than previously understood. When HFA first opened its doors in 1997, there were some who felt that replication would be difficult because of a concern that the school would be a financial drain on the host institution, and/or that sufficient start-up costs could not be raised in other communities. This view has largely faded over the years, replaced by a dawning recognition in the cultural community that the HFA model attracts a whole new level of interest and financial support from funders who traditionally do not give to cultural organizations, but that are interested in education reform. In addition, per pupil funding is roughly equivalent to per pupil spending at the original Academy. There is also a realization that implementing on-going and significant capital campaigns is a fact of life for cultural organizations. Tying in the relatively small additional cost of HFA start-up to a cultural institution's capital campaign is a small price to pay for opening up new avenues of fundraising, and in many cases is an insignificant increase to the average overall dollar level of a capital campaign. And, of course, there is growing philanthropic support for innovate school models that provide choice to typically undeserved populations. Further, over the past two years HFLI has seen increased interest from the real-estate development community in the HFA model as a potential value-enhancer for new development projects in urban centers. We are currently in discussions with two such projects at this time. According to some developers, few things enhance the value of an urban development project more than the inclusion of a quality school. These projects, which typically run in the tens- or hundreds-of-millions of dollars, have little trouble factoring in capital costs for a school. From a financial stability perspective, all of these factors enhance the potential success of launching and sustaining a Henry Ford Academy.
Conclusion
Clearly, there is a desperate need for high school reform. Given our experience with the original Henry Ford Academy and the strong interest in our model, we believe the necessary support for a network of schools based on the original Academy exists. HFLI, through its innovative approach to creating schools in community and forming deep and lasting connections with business and community partners, is now embarking on a plan to create a Henry Ford Academy in ten communities and to further catalyze reform in each site.
Notes
1. National Governors Association, Ready for Tomorrow: Helping All Students Achieve
Secondary and
Postsecondary Success,A Guide for Governors (Washington, DC: 2003), 4.
2. Harvey James and Naomi Housman, Crisis or Possibility? Conversations about the American
High School (Washington, DC:The National High School Alliance 2004), 10.
3. National Governors Association, Ready for Tomorrow, 4.
4. Harvey and Housman, Crisis or Possibility, 10.
5. Harvey and Housman, Crisis or Possibility, 10.
6. National Governors Association, Ready for Tomorrow, 4.
7. The term "employability skills" in this paper does not mean specific job skills. Rather, it
refers to general skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, public
presentation skills, and communication. These skills are necessary for success in both the
workplace and in higher education.
Theory of Change
The Henry Ford Learning Institute is carefully building its network of small schools and related education reform initiatives efforts in order to demonstrate, drive, and influence change across the education landscape. Our replication strategy is based upon creating a network of Henry Ford Academies and sharing innovative methods of teaching and learning in each community. By providing educational and community resources in partnership with other community, corporate, and cultural institutions HFLI seeks to create a nexus for educational and community transformation wherever a Henry Ford Academy exists.
While the Academy located in each community will be the most tangible element of our reform strategy, HFLI seeks to do much more than simply create an excellent high school for 450 students in each replication site. Our goal is to produce a nexus for change through the creation of successful, innovative small schools, physically located in the community, and supported by multiple partner organizations, in order to drive and influence further reforms in public education for all students.
Three Core Beliefs — How our Change Model Develops
HFLI's theory of change is centered on three core beliefs. These beliefs explain "how" an Academy goes about its work to become the nexus of reform we envision.
1. Public education is best accomplished when it is a truly public endeavor.
At the heart of the HFLI mission is the belief that public education is best accomplished when it is a truly public endeavor. This means welcoming and involving students in work places, retail environments, city centers, and cultural institutions — all places where students have been largely absent and where extraordinary yet underutilized educational resources often exist. It also means inviting adults, workers, visitors, government entities, companies, and other organizations into the "school place" — a place where students have historically been separated from the greater community and where education has, for decades, occurred in a format consciously designed to create barriers between student learning and the general public. Our plan, based on the success of the Henry Ford Academy charter school located in the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, calls for the creation of a closely governed network of small schools located in premier cultural and community institutions that deeply intertwine student learning with the local community. Our model goes beyond merely locating a school in a cultural institution; it seeks to create extensive involvement of the greater community in the education of all children. This does not mean our model ignores boundaries between a school, its host institution, and the greater public, but those boundaries are porous, often indistinguishable, and highly trafficked in all directions. In a public school that is truly public, it will be difficult to determine where the workplace ends and where the school place begins.
2. Existing community assets can be leveraged to benefit public education.
The Henry Ford Academy model begins with the assumption that significant untapped educational resources exist in every community. The traditional model of education frequently isolates high school students from their communities and therefore from these resources. This has served to alienate many students, parents, and community assets from the learning process, especially students in our urban centers. We see the result of this disengagement in unacceptably large dropout rates, anemic college-entrance and graduation rates, high college remediation rates, and a frustrating lack of progress in raising long-term high school achievement as measured by standardized tests. To reverse this, we must begin to create models of education that engage students and allow them opportunities to experience the relevance of what they are learning and prepare them for productive citizenship as skilled members of the 21st Century workforce. The Henry Ford Academy model addresses this challenge by engaging numerous community partners (major cultural institutions, businesses, universities, community-based organizations, etc.) in the learning process in meaningful ways.
In addition to providing access to resources and adult engagement in the educational process, Academy partners are living the change by engaging in a significant, whole-school reform model where students are going to school in the community, no longer trapped and isolated in the "900-square-foot box" — the prevailing template for the uninspiring, unconnected high school classroom. Similarly, when engaged with a Henry Ford Academy, a partner organization, and ultimately the entire community, no longer exist in the absence of schooling but deeply connecting within it and in support of it.
3. A sustaining nexus of change requires a diversity of partner organizations.
Each of HFLI's core beliefs is closely linked to and driven from the overriding belief that public education must be a truly public endeavor. To create a "public" public school, multiple partners and existing local resources — physical, financial, human, and organizational — must become part of the Academy design. Over time and as partnerships are deepened the Academy then becomes part of the community design.
But once these potential partners and community assets are identified, how are they coalesced into a change strategy positioned to produce broader impact? Part of the mission of the Henry Ford Academy model is to serve as a visible learning laboratory, where innovations in teaching and learning are shared with the wider community. For example, classrooms that sit on museum floors are used for community-wide education programs, nearby community resources such as gymnasiums or tutoring programs are made available to students through cooperative agreements, and every effort is made to share existing resources — including curriculum content. New models of learning, like the Senior Mastery Process, are developed and shared with other schools. Most importantly, the Academy provides a real educational venue for major community institutions to come together and think about education and learning in new ways. In Dearborn, the Academy has brought organizations together that may never have communicated in the past and how public education is directly linked to their ability to fulfill their respective missions. As this happens, innovations and ideas begin to occur that move beyond the walls of the Academy, as partners share ideas and programs that can be leveraged to drive change in new ways.
With the first Academy, this was done by partnering with a host cultural institution and working collaboratively with a corporate partner, the local school district, universities, businesses, and other community organizations. Bringing these parties together early in the planning provided opportunities for creative input and identification of additional resources, and developed a body of individual and organizational support for the launch of the school throughout the community. This broad base of support provided the momentum for overcoming the inevitable hurdles, for enriching the real-world opportunities for students, and for extending the reach of the school once it had been launched. It also led to the creation of new educational initiatives that, while not formally connected to the Academy, owe their inspiration to the Academy experience. We believe this multi-partner model is critical to the creation of a nexus of reform in each community.
Like the original Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, each new Academy school is expected to be more than simply an outstanding school for 400 students. Instead, each is to serve as the physical presence for a nexus of change in the local community. Rather than sitting as isolated islands of excellence, Academies are expected to prove their worth and long-term value to the wider community by playing four key roles:
Role 1: Relationship Builder/Idea Incubator
Each local Henry Ford Academy will be designed to provide a forum for a wide variety of local organizations to come together to discuss education reform in new ways. Community institutions that may never have worked together will share their own ideas and innovative approaches to education. New partnerships and programs that have no direct relationship to the local Academy effort will begin to emerge from this ongoing interaction, providing the truest measure of the success of the nexus. The Academy Model is designed to symbolize this by serving as a laboratory for developing innovative teaching and learning practices that are shared with the local community. Each Academy will also be a place where those ideas are hatched and grown and relationships are built.
Role 2: Research and Development Center
The Henry Ford Academy model is structured to create schools that are living laboratories for education reform, where educators are encouraged to develop new approaches to teaching and learning. Through the work of local Henry Ford Learning Partnerships that are formed to launch new Henry Ford Academies (see the Network Design section for more details), these innovations have a built-in cadre of local partners eager to serve as a dissemination network and advocate for the Academy model. Dissemination of best practices thereby takes place through a number of channels, not only in traditional public and charter high schools, but also in museums and cultural organizations, community based organizations, after-school programs, and businesses, and even private schools.
Role 3: Instructional Partner
Local Henry Ford Academies and the learning partnerships that form around them provide their communities with a wide range of innovative educational content enhanced through individualized, object-based learning and real world opportunities. This content will be of great value to local public education systems, but will be of particular value to local charter schools, which frequently lack the resources to develop or obtain high quality content. The American Institutes for Research (AIR), in its recent report to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on funded school district and network grants, analyzed 16 small schools funded by Gates to determine their strengths and challenges. While this study found many positive outcomes, the areas most needing improvement revolved around high quality instruction and appropriate content. Key findings illustrate that "schools struggle to implement instructional approaches that are effective for the diverse needs of their students." Teachers in these schools agree, "Curriculum content is an issue in need of greater attention." The report states, "staff at many of the start-up schools are struggling to find the right balance of teaching approaches and with establishing practices that ensure that their students learn essential content." (p. 3) Like the American Institutes for Research, HFLI believes that the next frontier of education reform will be content-based. Local Henry Ford Academies, through rigorous authentic instruction and 21st Century skills will be on the front lines of this effort, bringing real world learning environments and object-based learning opportunities to students in each replication community.
Examples of how an Academy can be an instructional partner with other schools in the community include:
Sharing Ford PAS
The Ford Challenge Grant provides funding for HFLI to offer the Ford Partnership for Advanced Studies (PAS), a separately managed program created by Ford, to local high schools and community colleges. PAS is an award winning curriculum of five courses based on the instructional methods used at the Academy. By providing PAS in each community, the local learning partnerships will be positioned as significant content and professional development providers. PAS, however, is merely the first stage of a much longer and more extensive process of professional development and curriculum sharing.
Providing Professional Development
Henry Ford Academy teachers will participate in highly structured and regularly scheduled development sessions. As centers of innovative teaching and learning, new Academies will offer sessions that are open to other teachers in the community, and are intended to support local student teachers looking for opportunities to explore authentic instructional methods. Arrangements to provide Continuing Education Units (CEUs) or their equivalent will be negotiated at the state level. We imagine that these sessions will draw considerable local interest and in the long-term has the potential to produce a modest stream of revenue for HFLI and each Academy.
Sharing elements of the Academy curriculum
In addition to PAS, Academies will have the Senior Mastery Process available to offer to local area high schools. Our goal is that local schools will adopt portions of the Academy's core curricula for use in their classrooms, thus formalizing and institutionalizing the use of community resources, adult mentors, and public performance assessment in curriculum enhancement.
Role 4: Policy Advocate
Because the HFLI model for creating a nexus of change in each community brings together significant community institutions and organizations, it is inevitable that the Academy and its local partners will eventually play a role as policy advocates on a range of issues related to local and statewide education reform. This activity could include advocacy for small high schools, community-based learning, and of course, for charter schools. Policy advocates are especially important to the charter movement at this time in its history. As it finds itself under increasing media scrutiny and attack from traditional public education, the charter school movement desperately needs positive models of successful schools. While quantity (i.e., market share) and access to capital are obviously critical issues for the long run, in many ways, public examples of charter school quality are of equal importance. If these examples can show themselves to be community based and of value to the educational system as a whole, we feel they will be much more effective at generating a hospitable policy environment for future reform endeavors, charter or otherwise.
Ultimately, our goal is for each Henry Ford Academy to serve as the physical manifestation of this nexus, the innovation engine that drives it forward, and the most visible symbol of HFLI's deep and lasting commitment to transforming public education in each community. Doing this effectively, however, requires the shared commitment of multiple organizations to work together for long-term change. HFLI's role in bringing so many organizations and individuals together to launch a school is exactly the relationship-building process that we believe will create the nexus of reform we envision, and will in turn sustain and nourish each new Academy.
Three Levels of Change — What our Change Model Produces
If our three core beliefs describe the "how," of our change model, then the three levels of change describe the "what" of our change model. Our theory of change is based upon each Academy demonstrating change locally, providing opportunities to drive change throughout the community, and influencing change at the state and national levels. By leveraging existing community resources and involving multiple partners in the school planning process, HFLI will create new Academies that are deeply "public" and positioned to set the stage for a nexus of reform able to produce chance on at least three levels.
Level One: Demonstrating Change
Each school in the network is expected to demonstrate change locally though its innovative design, multiple partnerships, and exemplary student outcomes. Successful standardized test performance is an obvious and necessary output, but it is an incomplete measure of the type of change we expect each Academy to demonstrate. Our goal is for each Academy to become so deeply integrated into the community that the traditional concept of what school is, and where and how schooling occurs is brought into question. As a relationship builder with an expanding concept of the power of education to transform communities, each Academy is to play a leadership role in demonstrating the value of involving school in community and community in school.
Level Two: Driving Change
HFLI, through its collaborative framework and efforts to share Academy methods, is positioned to drive changes in teaching, learning, and school governance throughout a given community. This is perhaps not as visible as a school, but tangible nonetheless. As an example, the Academy's curriculum development and implementation process has been adapted by a number of organizations, demonstrating its flexibility, adaptability, and universal application as well as the educational community's desire for new and innovative ways to teach. Plymouth Canton Community Schools in Michigan, as part of a $850,000 U.S. Department of Education Teaching American History grant, is working with Academy staff and teachers, as well as Museum curators, to adapt the Academy's curricular process in eight public high schools with a direct impact on 2,500 students and an indirect impact on 8,500 more students. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant brings the Academy's approach to curriculum development and implementation to schools across the country via the Internet. Other organizations working to adapt the Academy's core curriculum are Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan and The Learning Exchange in Kansas City, Missouri. More than seven districts in Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa have adapted the Academy's Senior Mastery Process for their students, and we expect each Academy to drive similar changes in its community.
Level Three: Influencing Change
As more schools begin to deliver results and the network grows, HFLI, academy representatives, and their multiple partners, are likely to play a significant role influencing policy on a state, national, or even global level. Again, this is a less visible impact than a physical school, but policy changes are critical if true reform is to spread. In Michigan, two members of the Academy's board of directors (Steve Hamp and Mike Schmidt) served on Governor Jennifer Granholm's Commission on Higher Education and Economic Growth (known as the Cherry Commission as it was led by Lt. Governor John D. Cherry). The Commission authored a set of recommendations that included converting the Michigan Educational Assessment Program's (MEAP) 11th grade exam to a version of the ACT. This recommendation was recently passed by the state legislature and will be implemented in 2006. It is our hope that leaders of their respective Academies will be similarly effective in influencing change at state and other levels
Conclusion
HFLI believes that new and successful models of schooling, when operated independently of the greater community, are missing a great opportunity to influence the future shape of public education.
Ten years ago many charter operators had little choice but to operate independently and with few allies, but perspectives are changing in many parts of the country and though hostility does remain, we believe there is a role an innovative school can play with respect to driving and influencing change beyond the boundaries of its physical address. Given our strategy of opening only one or two schools in each community we hope to be seen less as a competitor and more as a provider of choice and innovation around which an active reform environment can grow. Achieving this depends on the creation of a truly exemplary school that brings credibility to the range of work HFLI seeks to deliver to thousands of students in each community. We believe our commitment to launching schools in a deeply collaborative and carefully structured way with broad-based local backing bodes well for the students enrolled in each Academy and sets the stage for deeper, more expansive work throughout each replication community.
