In his Orlando Sentinel op-ed last week, Acceleration Academies Founder Joseph Wise argued that we should take advantage of the COVID-19 crisis “to inspire a long-term transformation of public schooling” built around technology that he says would serve all students – from the struggling to the gifted.
But an examination of the courses that are actually taught in Florida’s Acceleration Academies reveals that Wise’s schools do not serve students across the whole range of achievement levels equally well (the data are taken from the Florida Department of Education website). At the high school level, the Acceleration Academies mostly offer only a basic education that denies their gifted students the chance to access some of our society’s most challenging, important and financially robust careers – those in engineering, science, computing and the health professions. Wise actually has a dystopian vision for the future of Florida’s public K-12 schools that denies the power of strong educators to help students reach the limits of their potential. And giving every student the chance to reach her or his potential should be the overarching mission of our state’s public schools.
It is important to understand what Acceleration Academies are, and what they are not. They are places to complete a high school diploma. They are not places that prepare students well for college STEM majors (that is probably just as true for most other college majors). They are not good places for gifted students – and particularly not for gifted students from underserved populations that Wise says he serves.
There are eight Acceleration Academy schools serving high school students in Florida – three in Miami-Dade County, one in Martin County, two in Orange County, one in St. Lucie County, and one in Sarasota County. The only two that offer Precalculus are those in Orange County. At the others, the highest level math course is “Math for College Readiness”, which focuses on preparation for two-year colleges.
None of the Acceleration Academy schools offer physics, of course. Only four of the eight offer Chemistry 1, and only one – Acceleration East in Orange County – offers Honors Chemistry 1.
The Acceleration Academies may be fine institutions for students who have given up on school and simply want the shortest path to a high school diploma. But no one with a conscience should consider the Acceleration Academies models for “long-term transformation of public schooling”, particularly with the emphasis on technology-centered instruction that Wise described in his piece. Human beings are designed to learn via in-person social interactions with peers and with mentors. And the skill and empathy of those mentors – our K-12 educators – provide the foundation for great schools where students fulfill their potential in math, science, language arts, the arts and other disciplines. Quality social interactions and mentoring by great educators are even more important for the underserved students that Wise says his schools focus on than they are for more advantaged groups. The disruption of Florida’s K-12 system (and everybody else’s) by the COVID-19 pandemic will certainly provide a brutal illustration of this truth.
With the emphasis on lowest-common-denominator education that Wise describes, I fear that students from disadvantaged backgrounds who could potentially become engineers, scientists, or health professionals and who enter Acceleration Academies are never coaxed into challenging themselves in math and science. Those students lose the opportunities for careers in STEM fields that could lift them out of poverty.
For years, Florida has been sliding toward a K-12 model in which lowest-common-denominator student achievement is the norm. Some of the state’s school districts are resisting that slide, but overall that is where the state is heading. I hope that Wise’s vision for Florida’s K-12 future does not come to pass. I fear that it will.
Bridge to Tomorrow 