{"id":2902,"date":"2013-12-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-16T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/apex-academy-a-diploma-plus-school\/"},"modified":"2020-02-05T12:51:26","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T17:51:26","slug":"apex-academy-a-diploma-plus-school","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/apex-academy-a-diploma-plus-school\/","title":{"rendered":"APEX Academy: A Diploma Plus School"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"173339\"<\/a>Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit with Alfonzo Paz, Assistant Principal at \u00a0Academic Performance Excellence Academy<\/span>, better known as APEX Academy.<\/p>\n

APEX is co-located in a large high school in East Hollywood with 330 students from a mostly Latino community with pockets of Armenian, African-American and Asian families. APEX is a Diploma Plus<\/a> (DP) school, a model developed over 15 years ago. Interestingly, APEX, a charter school, started as a district-run school, but budget cuts began to impact the quality of their school — not so much because of reduced resources but because they ended up with teachers that didn\u2019t share the vision of competency education. The underlying issue was with union policy that gave teachers the right to teach the way they want. How could they have a competency-based school if teachers refused to be competency-based in their instruction, assessment and grading?<\/p>\n

I first learned about competency education when I was a program officer at the Mott Foundation during a site visit to one of the earlier DP schools (you can read more about Diploma Plus in Making Mastery Work<\/a>). So I was thrilled to learn about how Diploma Plus had advanced during my visit to APEX. \u00a0DP is designed to work in a variety of educational settings depending on the focus, mission and need of the school or program. I\u2019ve seen it mostly in alternative schools serving over-age and undercredit students.\u00a0 However, APEX is what I call an \u201cinclusive\u201d high school \u2013 it is set up as a regular four-year high school but enrolls students no matter what their educational experience, including re-enrolling after dropping out. Here are a few of the highlights of my visit:<\/p>\n

Structure<\/span>:<\/b> The DP model doesn\u2019t have age-based grades. Instead it has three phases –\u00a0 Foundation, Presentation, and, Plus. The Foundation phase is focused on getting students skills up to 10th<\/sup> grade level as many start with gaps in skills as far back as 4th<\/sup> or 5th<\/sup> grade. \u00a0Paz explained that APEX had split Presentation Phase into two sections as students were coming from so far behind and needed a sense of progress. Presentation is focused on helping students build up a portfolio of the work emphasizing performance tasks and assessments. Students in the Plus Phase participate in internships, college courses, and community action projects in order to support their successful transition to life after high school.<\/p>\n

Personalized, Individual Paths to Graduation<\/b><\/span>: APEX, like other DP schools, is a highly personalized model that takes into consideration where students are in terms of their skills and credits and creates individual plans to help them advance and graduate based on a pace that is meaningful to their lives. Some students take longer than 4 years (California provides funding but doesn\u2019t include extended graduation rates in their accountability system). Others take shorter amounts of time. Paz mentioned that each year several girls graduate in less than three years because they feel obligated to start working as soon as possible to support their family or from a desire to get out of situations that aren\u2019t safe for them.<\/p>\n

Four Essentials<\/b><\/span>:\u00a0 The DP model has \u2018four essentials\u201d that are woven together:<\/p>\n

Performance-Based System<\/i><\/strong>: At DP schools students learn at their own pace and are placed, promoted and graduate based on demonstrated learning rather than seat time. Paz explained that in designing APEX they selected DP because of the competency-based approach, \u201cIt allows me to have a dialogue with kids in a way that I have never had before.\u00a0 They can show me their knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n