As of fall 2017, charter management organization Summit Public Schools (SPS), founded in 2003, serves 3,000 students across 100 schools in 30 states.
In August 2017, Summit released “The Science of Summit,” a report it describes as “15 years in the making.” The report shares Summit’s beliefs about youth, public education, and principles for school design rooted in the science of learning.Summit aims to answer the question everyone in education is asking: What is the evidence that personalized learning works?
The group describes the work of the initial 19 partner schools from across the country who became part of the Summit Learning Program and started to implement the charter’s pedagogical model. Now, Summit reports that those schools accomplished their most important goal—building a strong culture that fosters personalized learning and allows it to flourish. Some points from participants:
- Teachers recommend personalized learning.
- They believe their students improved at setting goals and making plans to achieve them. Teachers say students become more self-directed learners.
- Students reported feeling more connected to their own success.
- Parents believe their children become more self-directed learners capable of teaching themselves.
Other questions Summit has asked and answered:
- What are the schools’ performance results? What results should schools consider beyond test scores, such as cognitive skills and habits of mind?
- How have the students who were furthest behind when they begin at Summit fared?
- Does Summit work for all students, regardless of background or prior achievement?
- How is Summit Learning evolving? What are lessons learned? How is that learning being integrated?
Summit announced in June 2017 that of the charter network’s graduates in its five San Francisco area schools, 99 percent were accepted into one or more four-year colleges.
