Education Week

For years, Wells Community Academy High School was the kind of high school families tried to avoid if they could. Its high dropout rate and low academic performance were morale-killers for students and teachers. Its rates of poverty and minority student enrollment would typically be predictors of school failure. In the last five years, however, Wells has improved significantly in nearly every major measure of school success, from attendance to graduation to college enrollment. One of these measures is Freshman OnTrack (FOT), a key predictor of senior-year graduation, which has increased 30 percent in the last five years. A student is considered OnTrack if she has accumulated five full credits (ten semester credits) and has no more than one semester F in a core subject (English, math, science, or social science) by the end of the first year in high school.

Increasing FOT at Wells was no easy task. The hardest part was addressing both the adult and the student mindset of what students are capable of achieving. Among other research-based texts, one that we rely on heavily at Wells to have conversations around this topic is the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) report, Foundations for Young Adult Success: A Developmental Framework. Ensuring that both teachers and students subscribe to a growth mindset that allows for flexibility in demonstration of mastery is essential for student motivation. At Wells, we challenge the type of belief system that says when a student fails a math test, that means she is not "cut out" for math. Instead, we believe that if she aced a math test, it is because she applied herself and studied — not because she is innately smart. If we don't learn to examine our belief systems, then no set of practices will help move student outcomes in the right direction...