SUMMIT PREP NAMED #118 ON NEWSWEEK’S TOP PUBLIC SCHOOLS RANKING

Summit Preparatory High School in Redwood City has been named number 118 in Newsweek’s survey of the country’s top public high schools.  That puts the six-year-old charter high school in the top 0.1 percent of the nation’s public high schools. Using the “Equity and Excellence” rankings that consider how many students take and pass AP exams, Summit ranks 36th among the nation’s nearly 23,000 public schools.
The Newsweek rankings are based on the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all the students at a public school divided by the number of graduating seniors, according to Newsweek, which released the rankings on June 8. The latest rankings are for 2008.
Summit Prep’s students take and pass Advanced Placement tests at a pace that puts Summit near the top of the “Equity and Excellence” rankings. That index highlights the schools that have the highest percentage of students taking and passing AP exams. In most large public high schools, roughly a quarter of the students – or fewer – take AP courses and exams. At Summit, every junior and senior takes an AP exam and last year, 83 percent of Summit students passed an exam with a score of three or higher. Summit students take two or three AP courses as juniors and four or five AP courses senior year. They are only required to take one AP exam each year, although some students take more. Summit doesn’t encourage all students to take more AP exams because teachers don’t want to overwork the students and the cost to the school is prohibitive. Summit provides AP exams free of charge to students who are on scholarship due to low family incomes, about 32% of the student population.
“We believe that every student can achieve at the highest academic level if given the opportunity and the right support,” says Summit Prep executive director Todd Dickson. “It’s exciting to watch our students successfully rise to the challenge of college level coursework, especially considering that about 75 percent of our students would not be in the AP track at a traditional comprehensive high school.”
Many of the top-performing high schools in the Newsweek poll have demanding entrance criteria or are in affluent areas. Students at Summit are selected by lottery every spring and many will be the first in their families to attend college. Among those schools that don’t have entrance requirements and have at least a quarter of students receiving free or reduced lunches, Summit Prep ranks in the top 10 in the nation on the Equity and Excellence Newsweek measure.
            At Summit, 32 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. About 44 percent of Summit students have parents who did not attend college.
“We’re really doing things that very few high schools in the country are doing and that’s exciting,” Dickson says.
Only 10 California high schools ranked above Summit, including Gunn High School in Palo Alto at 114, Lowell High School in San Francisco at 68 and Pacific Collegiate in Santa Cruz at 39. About 31 percent of Lowell’s students, who are admitted based on their grade point averages and standardized tests, qualify for free or reduced lunches, while just 4 percent of Gunn students do. The lunch statistic was not available for Pacific Collegiate in 2008, but it was less than 1% in 2007.
Summit’s goal is to have every student attend a four-year college or university. Over the past three years, 96 percent of the school’s graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges.
About 44 percent of Summit’s students come from Redwood City, while a few come from more affluent communities, such as Portola Valley, Atherton and Woodside. Students come to Summit from 45 different middle schools, stretching from Pacifica to San Jose. Some of the more distant students joined Summit in the days when the freshman classes didn’t fill up with district students. This year, 470 students applied for the 110 spots in the 2009 freshman class. About 9 percent of Summit’s freshman class includes students from “founding families,” the parents who invested at least 30 hours – and sometimes thousands of hours – to get Summit off the ground six years ago. Those students, many of whom come from higher-performing middle schools, certainly help Summit’s statistics, Dickson says, but students from every middle school in the district are scoring threes, fours and fives on the AP exams.
            Every student at Summit takes exactly the same courses, without any tracking, except in Spanish. In the classroom, that means higher performing students help teach their classmates during the team study that dominates Summit classrooms, a process that helps all involved learn the material better.
High school students who get a three or better on AP exams may qualify for college credit, which can save them money and time when they get to college. For the students who take AP exams and don’t pass, there’s still a benefit, Dickson says. “There’s research that shows that even if a student gets a one or a two on an AP exam, they’re much more likely to be successful and graduate from a four year college, just by being exposed to higher level thinking and a more rigorous curriculum,” he says. “For Hispanic students, they have about a 22 percent better chance of graduating from college if they pass an AP exam. For Hispanic students who don’t pass, they still have an 18 percent better chance of being successful in college.”
Critics have charged that Summit’s success relies on the school somehow admitting only the most prepared students, but Dickson says California Star Testing data from middle schools shows that Summit students start at the same preparation levels as students at the large public high schools in the area. Dickson believes it’s the in-depth, very focused education they get that makes the difference – along with the creative, hard-working teachers. For example, during the school year, Summit students take only five classes: English, Math, Science, History and Spanish. There are no electives during the school year. (Instead, students take a month-long elective – with no other academics – in January and late May and early June. Those times were chosen because research shows that those months are when students’ energy and academic accomplishments flag. During the so-called “Intersession,” students who have fallen behind get extra academic coaching in addition to their elective.)
Dickson says the extra time with teachers – at “office hours” after school, on field trips and during intersession – helps kids keep up with the challenging curriculum. By senior year, students are taking AP Environmental Science and AP Calculus or Statistics. Nearly all of Summit’s teachers come from the Stanford School of Education, Harvard University or Columbia Teachers College and are experts at differentiation – making the same material interesting and accessible to students of many different ability levels.
“Kids want to learn. You just have to figure out ways to motivate them,” Dickson says. “Summit teachers say, “There’s no teaching without learning.” That means the adults take responsibility. Instead of setting up a system to support teaching, Summit focuses completely on supporting student learning. We’re all working together – teachers and students – to make it happen.”
Summit gives intensive support to students who need it, including extra help from teachers every day of the week, extra tutoring and support during the elective intersession and, when needed, summer school. Summer school has not been required in recent years at Summit, but Dickson is organizing an academic boot camp for Summit students who need extra help before sophomore and junior year.
“We’re starting a summer program, as well as a supplemental academic intersession course, this year for freshmen before 10th grade for kids that need more support in math and English. We’ll do it again between 10th and 11th grade. Our goal is to give them enough support to be ready (for AP courses) by junior year,” Dickson says. “There’s no real magic to do that, other than to give them lots of extra time, give them great teachers and put them in a system that makes it very difficult for them to fail.”
Dickson puts the credit for Summit students’ impressive results on the teachers’ shoulders.
 “They’re really willing to do whatever it takes to make sure kids are successful,” he says. “I think they’re successful at Summit because of the structures here and how the school allows them to be great teachers. They only teach one course. They teach it only four times a day, so they have two periods to plan. They have 40 days of professional development to plan courses … Most teachers around the country get two to four days.”
The teachers are constantly working to improve themselves, too. During Intersession, when students are taking electives taught by other teachers, Summit teachers study best practices from other schools, teach each other new techniques and focus on areas where they need to improve. For example, during the last Intersession, teachers spent two days learning how to help students who aren’t fluent in English. About 28 percent of Summit’s freshmen are designated English language learners.
For Summit students, especially those who come from under-performing middle schools, their years at Summit are a revelation, Dickson says. “I think they feel very proud by the time they are seniors and graduating,” he says. “Many of their friends at other schools have dropped out of high school or are taking minimal course loads in their senior year and these Summit students are taking AP Environmental Science and AP Statistics. They’re really proud that they’re able to be academic scholars.”
This is Summit’s first year in the Newsweek rankings because schools need to have three graduating classes before being considered.
“We’re thrilled to be included,” Dickson said. “While no single measurement can evaluate the quality of a school, we believe that the Equity and Excellence measure, in particular, is a good reflection of how well a school challenges all of its students.”

Links:
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12558397?source=rss
 
http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_12556299
 
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=111540
 
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=111542