Month: March 2019

A Newark charter high school has landed at the top of a national ranking that measures how many students take rigorous, college-level Advanced Placement courses.

Uncommon Schools’ North Star Academy in Newark was ranked the top five in New Jersey in the Challenge Index, a national ranking based on the percentage of students who take Advanced Placement courses. The Challenge Index, which has been published in both The Washington Post and Newsweek since 1998, is the oldest ranking system in the nation. “It is the only list that does not rely on test scores, which are more a measure of student family income than school quality,” according to Jay Mathews, an author and long-time education columnist for the The Washington Post who compiles the ranking.

Click HERE for the full story from TAPinto Newark.

Dominique Lee made headlines as a 25-year-old when he and four other Teach for America alumni took over a failing Newark elementary school and turned it into BRICK Avon Academy, the acronym standing for Building Responsible Intelligent Creative Kids. As was widely reported, a frustrated Lee decided to launch his own school with fellow teachers after seeing ninth-graders at the city’s Malcolm X. Shabazz High School unable to name the seven continents or the state’s governor.

Now 33, Lee, and the nonprofit network that began with BRICK Avon and later came to include two other schools and the South Ward Children’s Alliance, are poised to increase their impact and reach. The alliance was one of the few minority-led organizations to receive a competitive $30 million Promise Neighborhood grant from the U.S. Department of Education in 2017.

Newark’s South Ward is the city’s most distressed neighborhood, where “children and families [are] exposed to significant adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress,” according to the BRICK Education Network. Its approach to alleviating that generational disadvantage is to offer a continuum of high-quality schools and wraparound services for children and families from birth through college and career.

Click HERE for the full story from The 74.