Reply to Replicating ATS success — what are exact differences

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think that ATS has some good things going for it. But a HUGE part of their success is that it’s a self selecting group that starts in K and stays through 5th.

Neighborhood schools have way more transient students that move around often. So you have kids (and often it’s low income kids) who are at their 3rd school in two years.

Also in neighborhood schools class sizes fluctuate and because of that staffing fluctuates. (A lot more teacher turn over and teacher teaching different grades).

These are things you just can’t replicate in a neighborhood school. [/quote]

All of that matters . But so do things like properly teaching kids to read,  regular updates to parents on kids,  and giving kids 1-1 tutoring when they are in danger of falling behind.

In fact so many families want a school like ATS that APS could try an experiment at a neighborhood school by adopting more of ATS’s practices and see what happens.

[/quote]
Science focus used to be a mini- ATS.  No tucking in shirts but mostly everything else was present— daily homework starting in kindergarten, encouraging reading, emphasizing writing and having daily writing homework in fourth and fifth grade, extremely encouraging playing an instrument (if you didn’t, you had to do sol tutoring during band/orchestra so most kids did an instrument).  It ended when they became a neighborhood school— it was part Covid relaxing standards, part that not enough parents wanted that type of school anymore so they couldn’t force it.  I think you need buy in for something like that.[/quote]

So it was an option school before?[/quote]
Yes— you could transfer in from either Taylor or Jamestown (they were part of a “team”)— roughly 30-50% of the school were transfers.  It became a neighborhood school in 2018, though there were still transfers in the upper grades.  [/quote]

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