RISC’s work with Colorado’s Adams 50 School District was featured in a February 10, 2009, article in The Christian Science Monitor. Among other changes, the district has replaced traditional age-based grade levels with multi-age levels. In “A Colorado School District Goes Away With Grade Levels,” staff writer Amanda Paulsen said:
School districts across the US are trying to improve student performance and low test scores. But few have taken as radical an approach as Adams 50. . . .”There was a sense of urgency to attend to what wasn’t happening for kids here,” says Roberta Selleck, district superintendent, explaining why she decided to go with a drastic approach. “When you see the stats for the whole school district over time, we realized we are disconnecting [from] our kids.”
While the idea of “standards-based education,” as it’s often known, has been around for a while, the only public district where it’s been tried for any length of time is in Alaska, where the Chugach district . . . went from the lowest performing district in the state to Alaska’s highest-performing quartile in five years in the 1990s, a shift the former superintendent, Richard DeLorenzo, attributes to the new philosophy.
Mr. DeLorenzo . . . is serving as a consultant to Adams 50 and is now the founder of the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, which is seeking to spread the model.
The [Adams 50] district, which has a 58 percent graduation rate, has been on an academic watch list for several years now, and has seen a drastically shifting student population in which percentages of minorities, non-English speakers, and low-income kids have shot up. . . .Selleck decided the district needed a massive transformation, and got the OK from the state.
